“We treat it like its contagious,” I said, reaching for the phone. “Your wife isn’t going anywhere, Ranjay. No one in town is. We need to quarantine this place, now.”
TEN
“Oh, pshaw! It won’t be rabies,” the distinguished-looking doctor on my computer screen said.
It was ninety minutes after we’d made our discovery, the amount of time it had taken General Wayne Homza to gather up the five faces looking back from the split screen. I’d alerted D.C. from the Quonset hut, not the lab, because of the crappy security. Just over the past few days Eddie and I had overheard detectives interviewing people in other labs through the vent system, a veritable highway for talk.
Bruce Friday telling Merlin, “Where was I on August second, when the Harmons had the lab fire? Hmm! Oh! Anchorage. At the Cook Hotel conference on polar bears. Here’s the photo.”
Anthropologist Candida McDougal, Alan’s wife, saying, “Leon Kavik was yelling at Ted about Kelley, just furious that he couldn’t see her more.”
I’d been quite rational in my step-by-step presentation. I’d told the men and women on-screen that something terrible and inexplicable had infected five so far, but we must anticipate more. I’d listed possibilities, that the rabies might be man-made or a natural mutation. I’d suggested the investigation split into two paths: tracking the infection backward, and considering that the Harmons had been targets from the first. That’s when Homza, incredulous, had sneered, “Targets? The algae people?”
The CDC, in the U.S., has the authority to call a national medical emergency. And its chief, Dr. Rudolph Gaines, looked like one of those M.D.s on old 1970s medical TV programs, when doctors were godlike, a status to which he seemed to feel he belonged. Silver hair. Pale blue eyes. Smooth movements. White coat. He radiated soothing.
“Rabies simply does not present this way,” he lectured. “We’ll send up a couple of epidemiologists. They’ll repeat the test. False positives! It happens all the time. You’re a warrior, Colonel. You believe intent exists where there’s merely understandable error. You’re simply not a rabies expert, sir. No shame in that, my friend.”
“How long will this confirmation take?”
“Hmm. Our plane is in Haiti, on the cholera now, so our people will use commercial flights… back and forth to Barrow… we’ll want the bodies back here. Retest, all total, electron microscopy, antibody tests, antigen, amplicon tests, oh, I’d say six or seven days at the most.”
“Six days? The whole town could be sick by then.”
“I very much doubt that.”
He gave me — and the four other faces on screen — a sincere, sympathetic doctor look.
“Colonel, please understand. Two years ago we had a similar panic in Braxton, Missouri. False positive! One hundred people vaccinated and then we find out that the preliminary was wrong!”
“We tested four people, sir. Four tests!”
“But the same equipment, same lab, same testers. I admire your zeal and dedication. Let’s begin from scratch. Tell me, what would you have us do right now?”
I answered immediately. “Protocol four.”
The faces seemed shocked. Protocol four was one of those secret plans, hopefully never to be used, to attempt to impose rules on danger. It called for an executive order to seal off a small town, in the event of a contagious outbreak. Protocols one to three involved similar measures in a major city, military base, harbor, or airport.
I said, “To be safe. Nothing leaves or enters until we track down the source. Hold any planes out of Barrow on the runway, and get more serum up here…”
In disaster films, it looks relatively easy to seal off a populated area. The president makes the call. The troops move in. The fences go up. Voilà!
But in the lawsuit-crazy U.S., protocol four took a lot more into consideration, involved coordination of multiple moving parts. Governors secretly notified, health officials secretly on board, judges secretly signing papers, a whole set of contingencies designed to cover the asses of the decision makers later, after the emergency was over, when the lawsuits and finger-pointing began. Protocol four was as much an act of political preservation as it was an attempt to control a deadly outbreak or attack.
Now the man in Atlanta listened, as if he was considering it, but he wasn’t.
“Premature.”
“Would you say that if the disease had broken out in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut? Or Beverly Hills?”
“If you’re implying that I regard life differently for a native population, or a poorer one, that’s offensive.”
“Really? Beverly Hills stops funding candidates if garbage collection gets held up for more than forty-eight hours.”
“Colonel, you can’t test for rabies until symptoms appear, and you know it. You want passengers to sit in planes for days? And have the news get out? Panic! And shots? There’s no stockpile of vaccine for this disease. It is not a mass threat. At summer’s end, what few supplies exist have been diminished. How many people in that town? Five thousand? We don’t have enough vaccine in the entire country to treat a quarter of that amount.”
“Then perhaps we need a crash program.”
I heard a groan from the speaker on my laptop. It came from General Wayne Homza, whose bristling visage stared out from the top left box. The general looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. He was undoubtedly envisioning the cost of mass manufacturing a drug instead of spending the money on weapons or troops.
Dr. Rudolph Gaines sighed. “Phhhhpt! Because of five presumptive positives? Only two companies make the stuff and they’re in Europe. And even if they started a batch, it would be a year before they had any supply for the FDA to check. So let’s come back to Earth, Doctor.”
“In the meantime, what if more people die?”
“No need for theatrics,” he said unpleasantly. “I’m not saying ignore your problem. I’m saying this will turn out to be something else. We want to get it right, sir. Of course, I’ll be grateful if General Homza allows you to stay on, you know, to liaise with the locals. Calm them.”
Homza smiled with his lips only. His eyes wanted me out of there. He radiated force. “Yes, he will assist,” he said. It was like watching a piece of wood talk.
One by one the faces before me signed off, and other ones grew larger as their space expanded on screen. Gone was the Alaska state epidemiologist, state department of health, a timid political appointee Merlin had called, now grateful to be relieved of responsibility. Gone was the Federal Aviation Administration deputy administrator, who’d listened in about the part concerning quarantining an airplane. Gone was the White House rep, who had been silent the entire time, taking copious notes.
Homza’s face filled the screen. I flashed to a story I’d heard about him once at a hotel bar, at a conference on biowarfare. The source had been a colonel who’d attended West Point with Homza. The story was that Homza’s father had been a violent drunk who routinely beat his mother, and killed her with a garden rake when Homza was eleven, at school. Previously, the father had been released early from prison after agreeing to participate in a University of Chicago study on domestic-violence causes. The story was that eleven-year-old Homza had been restrained in court, trying to attack a testifying psychologist. “You studied him? You should have shot him,” the boy screamed over and over as guards dragged him from the room.
Now Homza’s brows drew in. From thousands of miles away, he watched me.
“You are a troublesome man,” he said.