“How are you holding up, Mr. President?” Representative Steans asked when the President called her on the way to a town hall meeting in her home state of Maryland.
“I’ve had better stretches.”
“You wanted the job,” she said. This was a statement of the obvious and could pass for small talk, but there was a slight edge in the remark, as if to remind him that others in his seat had faced worse. “What’s the latest?” she asked. The President walked her through the situation: the amount of Dormigen left, the fatality projections, and so on.
“First thing,” Steans said, “you need to get yourself back to D.C. This whole flying west stunt has played itself out.”
“We’ll be wheels-up right after I give my address,” the President replied. He had met with the Australian Prime Minister and other Asian leaders while on the ground in Canberra. They had recommitted themselves to the South China Sea Agreement before posing for a group photo, fourteen heads of state effectively facing down Chinese hegemony in the region. The President did not land on an aircraft carrier—it felt wrong in light of developments stateside—but the group photo had been taken on one of the disputed South China Sea islands, which broadcast the same message to Beijing.
“Why don’t you speak from Air Force One in flight?” Representative Steans asked. “That will give you some extra drama. Very presidential.” Her tone was not facetious. Rather, she acknowledged the effectiveness of these political gestures even as she wished they were unnecessary.
“We had some problems with the broadcasting technology, but yes, I think I can do that now,” the President said. “What’s the tenor on the Hill?”
“A lot of noise, mostly. The Tea Party jackasses are talking about impeachment.”
“On what grounds?”
“Who knows, who cares?” Steans said dismissively.
“They all voted against any public funding for Dormigen in the first place,” the President complained.
“Of course they did. Government is the problem for those morons until they call 911 and no one answers. Ignore them. That’s a sideshow.”
“And elsewhere?”
“I think you’ve got decent support on Capitol Hill in the places where you need it,” Representative Steans said thoughtfully. “Other than the Speaker and her minions, I don’t think anybody thinks we should kowtow to the Chinese. We’ll see how that sentiment holds up when people start dying… Is there no better deal to be struck there?”
“We’ve been working that one hard,” the President answered. “They’ve come back with some better offers, but they all involve walking away from the South China Sea Agreement. I just don’t see them dropping that condition.”
“What about postponing it? President Xing could save face and we’d still get the agreement.”
“We tried that. No go.”
“What a waste,” Representative Steans said, sighing audibly. “People are going to start dying here and they’ll have warehouses full of Dormigen there.”
“World War I was a waste, too,” the President said. “If you think about the big picture, we need to push China toward becoming a more responsible global power. That’s why the South China Sea Agreement is so important. It’s like Germany and Japan after World War II. We need China as a force for good.”
“Hmm, I suppose that’s right.”
“We do have one more potential diplomatic option,” the President offered.
“Yes?”
“I can’t say anything more, but I’m cautiously optimistic.” Representative Steans knew better than to pry; the President was not one to play coy. After a brief silence, he offered, “We may have a breakthrough on the virus front, too.”
“What’s that?”
“The NIH folks can brief you better than I. My understanding is that they have some new insight into why the virus turns virulent.”[23]
“I wouldn’t expect too much on that front,” Representative Steans warned.
“Why is that?”
“We have, what, a handful of days until the Dormigen supplies run out?”
“My understanding is the scientists may be able to come up with some kind of antidote.”
“I’m skeptical,” Representative Steans said. “Scientific breakthroughs don’t happen in days. I certainly would not say anything about that in your remarks. What you need to be doing now is setting expectations for how bad it could be.”
“Cecelia Dodds is helping us with that,” the President said.
“What a needless tragedy,” Representative Steans said. “There’s nothing you can do?”
“I’ve tried.”
Representative Steans exhaled audibly. “That’s what we’re facing on a massive scale,” she said. “You don’t want to create panic, but complacency might be just as dangerous.”
“I understand.”
The President took her advice (reiterated by many others) that he should address the nation from Air Force One on his way back to D.C. The technology on board had been fixed and double-checked (and triple-checked after the President growled at the Chief of Staff, “It better fucking work”). The word went out that Air Force One would be departing shortly. As the last supplies were loaded on board and the doors were closed, the Strategist had not boarded. The Secretary of State had gone missing as well.
67.
THE NIH WORKING GROUPS WERE ENERGIZED BY MY THEORY of how lurking viruses might work, but the response was still less robust than one might think. The working hypothesis was that proximity to the dust mite was somehow protective against the virulent form of Capellaviridae. To stick with the earlier analogy, the dust mite is the extortionist; humans are the hostages; and somehow Capellaviridae is the weapon the dust mite uses to advance its own interests. One can imagine the dust mite holding the Capellaviridae “gun” to the head of its human host, saying, “As long as I stay fed and comfortable, nobody gets hurt.” If humans start to wipe out the pesky dust mite, however, things would turn ugly. (My hypothesis was that moving away from an area with dust mites to one without them somehow sent the signal that the dust mite was under siege, kind of like the protagonist in a western saying, “If I’m not back safely in an hour, kill them all.”)
“I understand all that,” the NIH Director told me, “but I need you to understand that it takes time to test a hypothesis that is still only half-baked.”
“Half-baked?” I asked incredulously. “Have we got any ideas that are fully baked?”
“I’m sorry, that was a poor choice of words,” she said. “I’ve been talking to people at the FDA all morning. A clinical trial typically takes months, if not years. You’re asking me to do something in days that usually takes years, and to be honest, it’s not even clear what we’re testing.”
I paused for a moment before responding. For most people, that involves some kind of cooling-off process. Unfortunately, I was heating up. “First of all,” I began, trying to project anger and seriousness without any hint of hysteria, “I’m not asking you to do anything. The people who are likely to die from Capellaviridae are asking you to do something. Second of all, what we’re testing here is really simple. Just expose people who’ve become sick to the North American dust mite. The hypothesis is that somehow repeated exposure to the dust mite protects against Capellaviridae turning virulent. I can’t tell you how or why that will work, and frankly we shouldn’t care at this point. We can figure that out five years from now and we’ll all share the Nobel Prize. We just need to try this very simple fix because we have nothing else.”