"Some weeks ago, we interviewed President Ryan twice in one day. The first interview in the morning was taped, and the second one was done live. The questions were a little different. There's a reason for that. Between the first interview and the second, we were called over to see someone. I will not say who that was right now. I will later. That person gave us information. It was sensitive information aimed at hurting the President, and it looked like a good story at the time. It wasn't, but we didn't know that then. At the time, it seemed as though we had asked the wrong questions. We wanted to ask better ones.
"And so we lied. We lied to the President's chief of staff, Arnold van Damm. We told him that the tape had been damaged somehow. In doing that, we also lied to the President. But worst of all, we lied to you. I have the tapes in my possession. They are not damaged in any way.
"No law was broken. The First Amendment allows us to do almost anything we want, and that's all right, because you people out there are the final judge of what we do and who we are. But one thing we may not do is to break faith with you.
"I have no brief for President Ryan. Speaking personally, I disagree with him on many policy issues. If he should run for reelection, I will probably vote for someone else. But I was part of that lie, and I cannot live with it. Whatever his faults, John Patrick Ryan is an honorable man, and I am not supposed to allow my personal animus for or against anyone or anything to affect my work.
"In this case, I did. I was wrong. I owe an apology to the President, and I owe an apology to you. This might well be the end of my career as a broadcast journalist. If so, I want to leave it as I entered it, telling the truth as best I can.
"Good night, from NBC News." Plumber took a very deep breath as he stared at the camera.
"What the hell was that all about?"
Plumber stood before he answered. "If you have to ask that question, Tom—"
The phone on his desk rang—actually, it had a blinking light. Plumber decided not to answer it, and instead walked to his dressing room. Tom Donner would have to figure it out all by himself.
TWO THOUSAND MILES away, over Rocky Mountain National Park, Arnold van Damm stopped the machine, ejected the tape, and carried it down the circular stairs to the President's compartment in the nose. He saw Ryan going over his next and final speech of the day.
"Jack, I think you will want to see this," the chief of staff told him, with a broad grin.
THERE HAS TO be a first one of everything. This time it happened in Chicago. She'd seen her physician on Saturday afternoon and been told the same as everyone else. Flu. Aspirin. Liquids. Bed rest. But looking in the mirror, she saw some discoloration on her fair skin, and that frightened her even more than the other symptoms she'd had to that point. She called her doctor, but she got only an answering machine, and those blotches could not wait, and so she got in her car and drove to the University of Chicago Medical Center, one of America's finest. She waited in the emergency room for about forty minutes, and when her name was called, she stood and walked toward the desk, but she didn't make it, instead falling to the tile floor in sight of the administrative people. That caused some instant reactions, and a minute later, two orderlies had her on a gurney and were wheeling her back to the treatment area, her paperwork carried behind by one of the admissions people.
The first physician to see her was a young resident most of the way through his first year of postgraduate study in internal medicine, doing his ER rotation and liking it.
"What's the problem?" he asked, as the nursing staff went to work, checking pulse, blood pressure, and respiration.
"Here," the woman from admissions said, handing over the paper forms. The physician scanned them.
"Flu symptoms, looks like, but what's this?"
"Heart rate is one twenty, BP is—wait a minute." The nurse ran it again. "Blood pressure is ninety over fifty?" She looked much too normal for that. The doctor was unbuttoning the woman's blouse. And there it was. The clarity of the moment made passages from his textbooks leap into his mind. The young resident held up his hands.
"Everybody, stop what you're doing. We may have a major problem here. I want everybody regloved, everybody masked, right now."
"Temp is one-oh-four-point-four," another nurse said, stepping back from the patient.
"This isn't flu. We have a major internal bleed, and those are petechiae." The resident got a mask and changed gloves as he spoke. "Get Dr. Quinn over here." A nurse trotted out, while the resident looked again at the admission papers. Might be vomiting blood, darkened stool. Depressed blood pressure, high fever, and subcutaneous bleeding. But this was Chicago, his mind protested. He got a needle. "Everybody stay clear, okay, nobody get close to my hands and arms," he said, slipping the needle into the vein, then drawing four 5cc tubes.
"What gives?" Dr. Joe Quinn asked.
The resident recited the symptoms, and posed his own question as he moved the blood tubes onto a table. "What do you think, Joe?"
"If we were somewhere else…"
"Yeah. Hemorrhagic fever, if that's possible."
"Anybody ask her where she's been?" Quinn asked.
"No, Doctor," the admissions clerk replied.
"Cold packs," the head nurse said, handing over an armload of them. These went under the armpits, under the neck, and elsewhere to bleed off the body's potentially lethal heat.
"Dilantin?" Quinn wondered. "She's not convulsing yet. Hell." The chief resident took out his surgical scissors and cut off the patient's bra. There were more petechiae forming on her torso. "We have a very sick lady here. Nurse, call Dr. Klein in infectious disease. He'll be at home now. Tell him we need him here at once. We have to get her temp down, wake her up, and find out where the hell she's been."
47 INDEX CASE
MARK KLEIN WAS A FULL professor at the medical school, and therefore a man accustomed to regular working hours. Getting called in at almost nine in the evening wasn't the usual thing for him, but he was a physician, and when called, he went. It was a twenty-minute drive on this Monday night to his reserved parking space. He walked through the security staff with a nod, changed into scrubs, came into the emergency room from the back, and asked the charge nurse where Quinn was.
"Isolation Two, Doctor."
He was there in twenty seconds, and stopped cold when he saw the warning signs posted on the door. Okay, he thought, donning a mask and gloves, then walking in.
"Hi, Joe."
"I don't want to make this call without you, Professor," Quinn said quietly, handing the chart over. Klein scanned it, then his brain stopped cold, and he started from the beginning, looking up to compare the patient with the data. Female Caucasian, yes, age forty-one, about right, divorced, that was her business, apartment about two miles away, fine, temperature on admission 104.4, pretty damn high, BP, that was awfully low. Petechiae?
"Let me take a look here," Klein said. The patient was coming around. The head was moving a little, and she was making some noise. "What's her temp now?"
"One-oh-two-two, coming down nicely," the admitting resident replied, as Klein pulled the green sheet back. The patient was nude now, and the marks could hardly have been more plain on her otherwise very fair skin. Klein looked at the other doctors.
"Where's she been?"
"We don't know," Quinn admitted. "We looked through her purse. It seems she's an executive with Sears, office over in the tower."
"Have you examined her?"
"Yes, Doctor," Quinn and the younger resident said together.
"Animal bites?" Klein asked.
"None. No evidence of needles, nothing unusual at all. She's clean."
"I'm calling it possible hemorrhagic fever, method of transmission unknown for now. I want her upstairs, total isolation, full precautions. I want this room scrubbed— everything she touched."