The Secretary of State was scheduled to meet with the Prime Minister at ten in the morning Delhi time. The Strategist would not attend the meeting; even his presence in India was secret for the reasons I alluded to above. Over breakfast, he coached the Secretary on strategy for dealing with the Prime Minister. “I’ve dealt with him on many occasions,” the Secretary said, peeved by the suggestion that the Strategist’s dark arts somehow trumped her deep knowledge of foreign affairs and diplomacy.
“You need to downplay this breakthrough on the virus,” he continued, ignoring—or, more likely, oblivious to—the Secretary’s vague hostility to his briefing.
“That’s the only leverage we have,” she said.
“No, no, no,” the Strategist insisted. “No.” He paused, like a professor who realized his student had not done the reading. “Look, the PM is a guy who’s always worried he’s getting played, because that’s what he’s always doing to other people. He’s always got an angle, so he assumes everyone else does, too.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“If you walk into the room and declare that American scientists have figured out Capellaviridae, he’s not going to believe you. If you tell him that we probably won’t need extra Dormigen, he’s going to ask why the hell you are sitting in New Delhi asking for it, right?”
The Strategist had captured the Secretary’s attention, if only by the convoluted nature of what he was arguing. And he had been right so far. The California Pizza Kitchen Summit was brilliantly choreographed, she had to admit. (Upon hearing the recap, the Strategist had yelled, “Mango fucking ice cream! I love it!”) The Secretary asked, “Our only leverage here is that we may develop some kind of vaccine in the eleventh hour—and I’m supposed to downplay that possibility?”
“Play possum,” the Strategist instructed her. “Tell him you really don’t think there’s time to develop a vaccine. Scientists are working on it around the clock, but they’re pessimistic… blah, blah, blah. That kind of thing.”
“Okay,” the Secretary said, still not sure where the strategy was headed.
“This is a guy who’s always wondering if he’s paranoid enough. If you tell him we’re on the brink of developing a vaccine, he’ll know you’re bluffing. But if you downplay that possibility, then he’s going to worry about the opposite: ‘Oh, shit, what if they pull off the vaccine right as I’m about to ride my white horse down Fifth Avenue?’”
“You really think he’s that callow?” the Secretary asked.
“What’s so callow about that? We all want to be the hero. We’ve set him up to think there’s a huge political payoff—which, by the way, there may well be. Just because we made up the poll numbers—”
“Stop,” the Secretary said sharply. “I don’t want to hear anything about that.”
“Anyway, I think he’s like anyone else. He doesn’t want a lot of people to die unnecessarily in the U.S., but if someone is going to prevent that, he wants it to be him.”
“You think this is going to work?” the Secretary of State asked.
“I have no idea, but I do know that if you’re holding a pair of twos, you don’t try and persuade people around the table that you’ve got four aces. You try to make them think that you’re trying to make them think that you have a pair of twos.”
“I don’t play poker.”
“Yes, that’s apparent.”
They were holding their discussion in a small, secure conference room at the U.S. Embassy (a curious building with offices arrayed around a large indoor fountain and pool that had allegedly inspired Jackie Kennedy to hire the same architect to design the Kennedy Center in Washington). The U.S. Ambassador knocked and then entered. “Your meeting has been pushed back to eleven,” he told the Secretary. “There was some shooting across the border in Kashmir and the PM is dealing with that.”
“Anything serious?” the Secretary asked.
“No, just the usual,” the Ambassador assured her.
The Secretary of State used the time to check in with the Chief of Staff, who pointed out a logistical reality that had not been top-of-mind. The U.S. was now, by our most recent estimate, three days from the point at which the existing Dormigen supply would have to be rationed. “Maybe a little sooner,” the Chief of Staff warned. “Doctors haven’t been as strict with Dormigen prescriptions as we had hoped.” She walked through the realities of the globe: Delhi was an eighteen-hour flight from New York. It would take additional time to distribute Dormigen across the U.S., particularly to rural areas. The Chief of Staff connected the dots for them: “If the Indian Prime Minister is going to save the day, that Dormigen is going to have to be on a plane sooner rather than later.”
79.
IN WASHINGTON, THE NIH SCIENTISTS WERE HOPING TO REPLICATE the success of the Manhattan Project in a fraction of the time, albeit with the benefit of the Internet. The technical details of the most recent Capellaviridae breakthrough—the difference in the protein structure between the virulent and indolent viruses—were posted publicly with an invitation for teams of scientists anywhere in the world to explore the crucial questions: What caused the difference in the two forms of the virus? And how might the virulent form of the virus be rendered indolent? The hope was that “parallel science” might replicate the success of parallel computing, in which millions of personal computers linked together by the Internet had proved more powerful than even the largest supercomputer. The Scopes Foundation, a previously obscure philanthropy, offered a $1 million prize for a definitive answer to either Capellaviridae question, though the prize was quickly canceled at the behest of the Acting HHS Secretary, who feared that it would promote secrecy at a time when “massive openness” offered the only hope of a breakthrough in the little time available.
One bottleneck to this massive scientific effort was bizarrely low-tech: access to dust mites. The North American dust mite was not endemic to most of Europe, Asia, or South America (as the name would suggest). Even in the U.S., there was no ready supplier of dust mites for laboratory work as there was for mice or rats. A cottage industry grew up almost immediately, with the people who had been previously afflicted by the small, itchy bites suddenly able to cash in on the nuisance. (Despite the very clear description of the North American dust mite on the NIH website, eager entrepreneurs showed up at regional laboratories bearing everything from red ants to cockroaches.) The Midwest turned out to be the place where dust mites could be gathered most easily for research purposes. As a result, we leaned heavily on teams at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and several of the other Midwest universities.
We set up a “war room” in the NIH headquarters to be the central repository for the myriad decentralized research efforts. Almost immediately we realized that we were lacking even the most basic tools for sharing the information that was being generated. The normal scientific process involves peer review, publication in journals, and presentations at scientific conferences—all things that take months or years. Now we had hours. “We need a place where everyone working on pieces of this challenge can post their progress,” I explained to the Director. The NIH had internal sites where we posted this kind of information, but there was no way to grant security clearance to outsiders in a short amount of time (nor did we necessarily want teams of foreign scientists to have access to these sites).