“Yeah, I’m getting that impression.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, turning to go.
“Hey,” he said. I paused in the doorway and looked back over my shoulder. “If you can really get the money to do this right, we should sample a couple of different places. And we should do it several days apart, maybe even a week or more. There’s no reason to assume the rate at which this virus becomes fatal is constant. Right? It could easily be changing, for some reason.”
“That makes sense,” I said. He held my gaze for an uncomfortably long time, until he was persuaded that I was not going to say anything more.
“Do you know why I do this?” he asked.
“Well, I asked you…”
“No, this,” he said, motioning around him to indicate the broader job.
“You like statistics, data,” I offered. I knew my answer was just filling space. He was going to answer his question for me.
“I like what the data can tell us, you know? Do police officers disproportionately target black motorists? Let’s ask the numbers. They won’t lie.”
“There is the whole lying-with-statistics thing,” I said foolishly.
“People lie with statistics,” he said. “The data scream out for us to pay attention.”
“Right,” I acknowledged. I realized in that moment that we could not keep a lid on this thing forever. There is only so long you can ask smart people to drop everything before they sense a crisis.
And information starts to leak, on purpose or even by accident. So if I had not messed up, someone else would have.
20.
I WAS DUE AT THE WHITE HOUSE AT SEVEN-THIRTY A.M. THE security process takes a while at that hour, as employees and visitors queue up at the gate. I did not want to be late, and as a result I was ridiculously early. To kill some time, I bought a cup of coffee and a Washington Post–USA Today at a kiosk on Dupont Circle. I perused the front page in one glance (a benefit of a real newspaper, as opposed to the online version that I usually read): flooding in Alabama; more evidence the Russians were violating their treaty obligations in the Arctic; a bad harvest in West Africa, probably caused by climate change; the new Afghan president vowing to expel the last American troops within two years; D.C. transit workers threatening to strike. Those are all the President’s other fifteen-minute meetings, I thought. I may have said it out loud, because a woman drinking coffee nearby looked over at me. This was what the President was going to be dealing with today, even the stupid transit strike, since funding for the system was federal and a strike would effectively shut down the capital. I wanted to tell that woman, who was still looking at me, “This is just the stuff that is public. It’s even worse than you know!”
Those first White House meetings had settled into a pattern. The President, usually preoccupied with something else, would say, “What do we know?” The rest of us would report out on our designated tasks, usually prompting the Strategist to declare that we had fallen short in some way, or that we failed to understand something, or that we were not asking the right questions—all usually valid points, but exasperating nonetheless because he seldom had any assigned responsibility himself. It was like the Strategist showed up to these meetings with a pin, relentlessly popping the balloons that the rest of us had spent the previous twenty-four hours working to inflate. Pop, pop, pop. Then the President would say, “He’s right,” and we would be left with even more difficult tasks before the next morning meeting.
The Acting Secretary of Health and Human Services had joined us. He had the least formal power of anyone in the room but often projected the largest presence. His boss, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, owned stock in some company that supposedly got preferential treatment in the drug approval process, or something like that. It had none of the allure of a good sex scandal. The HHS Secretary owned only a hundred shares of the stock in question, meaning that if the sordid accusations were true, she made at most $642 in illicit profits, before taxes. No matter. Once the blowhards in the House began using the phrase “principle of the matter,” she might as well have started packing up her office. The President hung her out to dry, like some kind of human sacrifice to placate his most rabid political opponents on the right. When the scandal reached its apex (among the three hundred people inside the Beltway who were following it), the President released a statement: “I am grateful for the service that the Secretary of Health and Human Services has provided to my administration and to the people of the United States.” There was no mention of “confidence” or “continued service” and she resigned almost immediately—tossed out of the boat. As any Washington insider might have warned, the effect was not to placate the President’s critics, but rather to encourage them with blood in the water.
The President appointed one of her deputies to take over as Acting Secretary. He had been briefed on the Capellaviridae situation. The Acting Secretary was a black man, probably sixty-five or so, with an infectious laugh. He weighed about 250 pounds, with the build of the former football player that he was. The Acting Secretary was strikingly impervious to politics—not oblivious, just mentally resistant, as if the sordidness of Washington rained down around him but he somehow stayed dry. He just did not care, or he managed to project that impression. The Senate was not going to confirm him as Secretary—for reasons that had nothing to do with his qualifications and everything to do with a small group of Tea Party senators who were in an ongoing pissing match with the President. The Acting Secretary’s wife—not him, but his wife—had run a state chapter of Planned Parenthood, twenty or thirty years ago, and apparently that was enough to make the whole family toxic to the political right forever. A group of five senators had vowed to use every procedural tool in the Senate rule book to prevent a confirmation hearing.
“I can’t help you on this one,” the Majority Leader told the President. Of course, he could help him. He could go to bat for the nomination. He could use the tools at his disposal to wreck those five intransigent senators politically. The President did not call him “Lyndon” for nothing. But it would not be a wise move in the long run, and the Majority Leader always played the long game. The President, too, played political chess, and he knew well enough not to press for this favor, so the Acting Secretary was bound to remain “Acting” for the foreseeable future. What did he tell the Washington Post–USA Today? He said, “It won’t affect my pension.” That’s it. That was the only thing he said for attribution. The cub journalist writing the story thought it was a great quote, but almost certainly for the wrong reason. Anyone outside the Beltway reading that story would think the Acting Secretary was some kind of bureaucratic functionary, watching the clock every day and counting down the years—including a bonus for accrued vacation—until he could retire at a small ceremony (on government time) and move to a sad little condo in Florida. In fact, the pension quip to the Washington Post–USA Today was a rifle shot at the political establishment. This was a guy who spent forty years working in many ways to make people’s lives better; whether you called him “Secretary” or “Acting Secretary” did not make a whit of difference to him.
The beautiful thing about the Acting Secretary was that the political types could not bully him. Even the President did not intimidate him. The Acting Secretary was respectful of the President, even deferential, but never cowed. He was fond of saying, “I have six grandchildren, a pension [always the pension], and a decent set of golf clubs. What do I need this nonsense for?” Every time he said that I got a little thrill because it was really a polite way of saying, “Fuck you.” Do you remember in middle school when some jackass would make fun of you for something, and your parents would say, “Don’t let him get to you”? The logic is that no one can make fun of you—for anything, really—if you have no respect for his or her opinion. They cannot injure you by not inviting you to the party if you genuinely have no interest in going to it.