“I’m just trying to complete my mission, sir.”
“If we find proof that you’ve shared security secrets with enviro-agitators, I will prosecute you.”
“There’s no proof because I didn’t do it.”
Close up, Homza’s lips were thick, his jaw powerful, a nut cracker, his eyes blunt and deep blue, and I could see the swell of muscle beneath his taut shirt and crisp tie. He’d trained to be a weight lifter, I’d read somewhere. He was legendary at the Pentagon gym.
“Perhaps, Colonel, you believe that because you will be retiring in a few months that you have more latitude than others to do whatever you want.”
This was true, actually, but I said, “No, sir.”
“If you do think that, I suggest you reconsider. You are in until we say you are out. I can and will bury you, Colonel.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve checked you out. In the past you’ve had the protection of powerful people. “Then, in front of the president, you asked that a key policy, a necessary policy, be changed. Well, one word about contagious rabies and you go down. We sell a story up there until we know more. You will be our mouthpiece.”
“Sir, what exactly do you want me to do when the CDC gets here?”
“I admire loyalty. I reward loyalty.”
He was gone.
I felt the air go out of me. I looked out the window and saw Mikael Grandy trudging away from our hut, glancing back. I had not heard the door close. Shocked, I turned. Karen was in the doorway, snow still dusting the shoulders of her parka, stocking hat over her hair. Her beautiful mouth moved, but no sound came out. How much had she heard?
She said, “Don’t worry. I sent him away before we got inside.”
And then, in a very quiet voice, “Rabies?”
I slumped. “Yes. But they won’t believe it yet.”
She took a step into the room, which seemed smaller suddenly. “Infectious? Is that possible?”
“We don’t know.”
She nodded. “You said you wanted them to seal the town, quarantine everyone.”
“Yes, until we know for sure, because…” My mouth snapped shut and we stared at each other in bald understanding. I’d forgotten about her, forgotten, in the urgent moment, that I was talking not only about shutting in myself and strangers with death, but her, too. I felt sick. I’d seen my friends dead, heard the agony in the way they died — the pain, the terror. Then I’d asked… no, demanded that my superiors order the woman I loved shut in with a possible killer, intentional or accidental, either way.
I felt my face go hot, my mouth dry up.
“Got to take precautions,” she said. She was a scientist. She understood. She meant it. But it wasn’t the point just now. The point was, I’d forgotten her.
“I know.”
“Can’t have the thing spread, if you’re right.”
I could have said, You weren’t here, Karen. I could have said, I planned to tell you, or, There was no time to call. But there had been time. I’d had over an hour to call. She’d been within phone reach all day.
I just said, “No.”
“Want some tea? Mikael got a package from his boys at HBO, from Zabar’s,” she said. “Russian tea. New York sesame bagels, chorizo sausages, and cheese, air-dropped supply.”
Tea! I suppose that every couple have their trigger words, which, when said, raise the alert level to DEFCON two. My first wife used to say, take a nap when something bothered her. My mother preferred, bake pies. My father opted for, couple of cold ones. I glanced at the thermostat, set at sixty-seven. But the room had gone chillier.
“Sure,” I said, hoping that what had just happened would have limited consequences. Joe Rush, great at professional problems. There’s nothing like ignoring personal ones, hoping they’ll go away.
Why do I screw up every relationship?
The tea tasted odd, metallic, wrong, but I attributed that to the acid surging out of my stomach. The bitter taste went down and came back as harsh bile. She cut up the chorizo. We sat snacking silently on Mikael’s gift. The TV went on — I wanted sound — and an announcer out of Anchorage said something about a dispute in the Bering Strait between Russia and America, the Russians wanting to move the border — which has never been nailed down — to give them more space. “Sources inside the State Department confirmed that the Russians offered a trade, they will back off on the Ukraine if Washington agrees to a small shift in the Arctic.”
“Everybody wants a bigger piece,” Karen said at length, chewing. So we were both going to ignore it.
Ignore threats and they come back.
But it was easy to ignore this particular threat that night because an hour later my phone rang and Merlin told me that a sixth case had shown up at the hospital. It was a child this time, a six-year-old, the son of one of the Cambodian taxi drivers. The boy had been complaining of a headache for two days. Now he was vomiting, running a high fever, and he was losing feeling in his right hand.
Seven hours later, he died.
Eddie, Ranjay, and I sat in the mayor’s office with Merlin, in borough Hall, a new comfortable building built with oil tax money. Exhibits — artifacts and photos of Eskimo dances, or bowheads — were displayed on walls or in glass cases inside the bright atrium. I’d been ordered to downplay rabies. I’d been threatened with arrest if I disobeyed. My intestines burned as Ranjay filled his bosses in on the medical situation.
Ranjay seemed relieved that the CDC believed that our tests had been flawed. He wanted to believe that the rabies was a false alarm. When the mayor asked me if I agreed with the CDC opinion, my words came out in my normal voice, but I was surprised that my throat didn’t cut them off.
“CDC has a pretty good record,” I said.
Sengupta nodded, admirably devoid of ego. “If the CDC believes we made an error, that is good enough for me.”
At least the mayor followed our recommendations to cut down on panic or illness. Schools closed due to flu. Pets that have not been vaccinated to be inoculated at the vets for standard diseases: distemper, animal flu, rabies. Wash your hands more. Cover your mouths when coughing. There is illness in Barrow, the mayor told the North Slope’s eight villages, over the radio that night.
And we waited.
Sixteen hours later, two CDC experts got off the morning 737 from Anchorage, looking young and concerned, advising Eddie and I to steer clear of the labs as they worked. They seemed certain before they started that their tests for rabies would turn out negative.
Another day passed before they knew they were wrong.
“You seem to have been correct, Colonel,” Dr. Rudolph Gaines told us, stiffly, on the next conference call. “I am now suggesting, one and all, that we recommend to the president that he proclaim Barrow the nation’s first protocol four.”
ELEVEN
Thirty-six hundred miles from Barrow, Alaska, the angry man sat in the second-floor study of his luxurious, log-sided country home, on a forested three-thousand-acre mountain property, watching Quonset hut one in Alaska via satellite. It was a crystal-clear view right down to magnified fresh polar bear tracks crossing the base; stars out, new snow reflecting prisms of light between huts. He saw the curving roof beneath which his two operatives sat, their voices encrypted and distorted so that any listener — if they’d managed to break in — would not know if men or women spoke.
The first voice, even modified, came across as tentative, fearful, tailing into a soft wooooo. “If it wasn’t for Rush, they would have called the first deaths a shooting. They wouldn’t have found rabies. It’s not fair!”