“And what is your personal profit, sir?”
He snorted. “The profit! What are you saying? That it’s wrong to earn profit and help people at the same time? I didn’t think you were that liberal, Joe. Why do you think that people like me go back and forth between private industry and government? It’s a system that keeps both sides honest. Good policy is good profit. Good profit encourages good policy. This system is old, practical and moral both.”
“A class of rulers, you mean. A class.”
“I saved your life. Why do you think that Chinese captain warned you? Eh? Or would you rather we played amateur hour with the fate of our country? Yes. A class. Tell me a single great benefit that humanity has enjoyed, that’s made lives easier, and that didn’t make someone a profit. Polio vaccine? Building codes? Flight? Heart transplants? I challenge you. One!”
“And that was your goal, the good of all.”
“Soon three hundred million people will be protected against the very danger that you’ve warned against, which would not have happened if we’d rushed the drug up, given it to the crew, and hushed the whole thing up. Yes, we’d have saved a few dozen people, but then what? The drug goes back into hibernation. The company gets nothing for hard work. There’s no supply when the disease does reassert itself. And meanwhile, people like you take it for granted that you’re owed anything you need at any given moment. I’m sick. You owe me. Well, Joe? We don’t owe you. People owe us something and it is called thanks.”
I turned to leave and heard him call me back.
“Oh, stop it! You’re angry.”
I reached the door.
“Cool down, man. Sit a bit. I said sit! For Christ’s sake, sit down!”
I opened the door.
“Joe! There’s more!”
I stopped.
“Thank you. Now sit. Sit if you want to hear. Good. Very good. Take a breath, Joe. Joe? Focus! Look, I couldn’t tell you earlier, but with my position vacant, the White House is looking for a replacement, and your name is in the mix. I know that at the moment you’re steaming. I’d be mad, too, if I were you. No one likes to find things out this way. I understand. I do. I sympathize. Another drink? I’m not an ogre. No? No drink?”
I said nothing.
“Joe, when you can think clearly, you’ll see that you can continue your good work by taking the job.”
I said, stunned, “You’re trying to buy me?”
He shook his head, sitting on the arm of my chair now. “No, I’m offering you what you always wanted, a chance to be one of the people who decide things. And, Joe, I don’t have to buy you. I just threaten you. Ten minutes ago when your theory was conjecture, and you had no evidence, you might have made a weak case for sharing your theories with a reporter, a blog. But now that you know facts, your oath binds you to secrecy. Any violation will be met with an immediate response. Joe, listen to me carefully. I have your best interests at heart. Immediate response means something legal to most people, arrest, trial, Leavenworth, but to others, to more radical elements, immediate response can be… well… think of it as triage. Sacrificing a few to save the many. You do know what I mean, right?”
There are many powerful drugs but sometimes I think that words are the strongest. They bind you, paralyze you, spread through your bloodstream faster than an antibiotic. A man sits in a chair, stunned, unmoving, just from words.
“I… we… we’d be killed?”
“Do you really think that you’d be allowed to reveal that the worst outbreak of disease in history, the deadliest plague to ever hit mankind, fifty to eighty million killed… in allied nations, our friends, our great-grandparents, that a starting point for modern flus that have killed thousands was an accident that came from a U.S. Army laboratory? Do you have any idea of the damage? The lawsuits? People are still dying every year. International Court. UN. Justification for any terrorist revenge attack… The utter destruction of our credibility when it comes to situations involving chemical or biological weapons overseas. Joe? Are you seeing it? The damage you would do? And the people who did it in 1918 aren’t even around anymore, so what is the point?”
“Once you know you can make secrets, you make more,” I said.
“So what? Look, maybe it’s for the best that you figured things out. In fact, that is exactly the case. I’m glad! Now you can stop poking around. And I’d advise you to stop your friends also. Me? I’m safe, whatever you do. You’re the one — they’re the ones — who are not.”
On the way out, I heard him say, “The truth is overrated, Joe. You should know that by now. Come back and let’s have dinner when you calm down. And take the job when they call!”
The elevator doors opened and the guards let me pass. I was in the lobby. And then I was outside, on the plaza, beneath the bronze statues of Salk and Pasteur and Jennings, surrounded by thousands of New Yorkers going about their daily business, perhaps already making appointments with their doctors to arrange vaccinations — when the drug became available — against the Spanish flu.
My friends had been waiting and they crowded around me: Sachs and Karen, Eddie and Clinton, Marietta, Pettit, DeBlieu. Their voices were a far-off chorus. The cacophony seemed to merge into one word, the director’s word: triage.
They asked, Did you tell him? Did he admit it?
I told them that we had been wrong and he had shown me conclusive proof that the drug had been made in China. I said that our guess about the Spanish flu being a hundred-year-old bioweapon was wrong, too. The first cases had not been at Fort Riley, but somewhere else, it turned out. I said that the director’s move to Pacific-North had been planned for a long time, predating the emergency, and was not a result of anything that had happened in the Arctic. I said it had been a privilege to serve with them.
I turned and walked away.
There really was nothing to be gained by telling the story, I thought sometime later, sitting on the last stool in the ground floor bar of the Three Mark Hotel on Fifty-ninth Street, downing a third glass of Svedka. And there was plenty to gain by accepting a job as new director, and continuing the work I had been doing at a higher level, having input, as the director would say, at the top.
Maybe I’d find myself at meetings in the future, with the director as an equal. Maybe I’d be the one planning triage next time, to a town, a city, a ship. It’s what I’d wanted. It’s what I’d lost my first wife over. It’s what I’d cut myself off from people for. It’s what I’d chosen, and so, I told the bartender morosely, “He was right. I’ll go along. He was right.”
“Who was right?” the bartender asked.
“No,” I said loudly as he stared. “He wasn’t right.”
I didn’t want to use my cell phone and there didn’t seem to be any land phones anymore in New York City. I walked for blocks before I found one of those antique phones which now took credit cards instead of coins, and cost more for one call than a monthly charge for my iPhone.
But no one, I knew, was listening when I punched in the number on the card I extracted from my wallet. And no one stopped me after I made the phone call, as I walked over to the Forty-first Street, headquarters of the New York Times.
The truth is overrated, the director had said, and I wondered how you could assign it a numerical value. Maybe it was a line in the dirt. Maybe it was the ultimate gift that God gave to Adam and Eve. Maybe it was simply a case-by-case choice.