“Yeah, I did, Gus. Ralph tells me you’re starting a new look at the Ebola structure–from that mini-break in Zaire, right?”
“Well, I would be, except somebody stole my monkeys,” the director of CDC reported sourly. “The replacement shipment is due in here in a day or two, so they tell me.”
“You have a break-in?” Alexandre asked. One of the troublesome developments for labs that had experimental animals was that animal-rights fanatics occasionally tried to bust in and “liberate” the animals. Someday, if everyone wasn’t careful, some screwball would walk out with a monkey under his arm and discover it had Lassa fever–or worse. How the hell were physicians supposed to study the goddamned bug without animals–and who’d ever said that a monkey was more important than a human being? The answer to that was simple: in America there were people who believed in damned near anything, and there was a constitutional right to be an ass. Because of that, CDC, Hopkins, and other research labs had armed guards, protecting monkey cages. And even rat cages, which really made Alex roll his eyes to the ceiling.
“No, they were highjacked in Africa. Somebody else is
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playing with them now. Anyway, so it kicks me back a week. What the hell. I’ve been looking at this little bastard for fifteen years.”
“How fresh is the sample?”
“It’s off the Index Patient. Positive identification, Ebola Zaire, the Mayinga strain. We have another sample from the only other patient. That one disappeared–”
“What?” Alexandre asked in immediate alarm.
“Lost at sea in a plane crash. They were evidently flying her to Paris to see Rousseau. No further cases, Alex. We dodged the bullet this time for a change,” Lorenz assured his younger colleague.
Better, Alexandre thought, to crunch in a plane crash than bleed out from that little fucker. He still thought like a soldier, profanity and all. “Okay.”
“So, why did you call?”
“Polynomials,” Lorenz heard.
“What do you mean?” the doctor asked in Atlanta.
“When you map this one out, let’s think about doing a mathematical analysis of the structure.”
“I’ve been playing with that idea for a while. Right now, though, I want to examine the reproduction cycle and–”
“Exactly, Gus, the mathematical nature of the interaction. I was talking to a colleague up here–eye cutter, you believe? She said something interesting. If the amino acids have a quantifiable mathematical value, and they should, then how they interact with other codon strings may tell us something.” Alexandre paused and heard a match striking. Gus was smoking his pipe in the office again.
“Keep going.”
“Still reaching for this one, Gus. What if it’s like you’ve been thinking, it’s all an equation? The trick is cracking it, right? How do we do that? Okay, Ralph told me about your time-cycle study. I think you’re onto something. If we have the virus RNA mapped, and we have the host DNA mapped, then–”
“Gotcha! The interactions will tell us something about the values of the elements in the polynomial–”
“And that will tell us a lot about how the little fuck replicates, and just maybe–”
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“How to attack it.” A pause, and a loud puff came over the phone line. “Alex, that’s pretty good.”
“You’re the best guy for the job, Gus, and you’re setting up the experiment anyway.”
“Something’s missing, though.”
“Always is.”
“Let me think about that one for a day or so and get back to you. Good one, Alex.”
“Thank you, sir.” Professor Alexandre replaced the phone and figured he’d done his duty of the day for medical science. It wasn’t much, and there was an element missing from the suggestion.
23
EXPERIMENTS
IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS TO get everything in place. President Ryan had to meet with yet another class of new senators–some of the states were a little slow in getting things done, mainly because some of the governors established something akin to search committees to evaluate a list of candidates. That was a surprise to a lot of Washington insiders who’d expected the state executives to do things as they’d always been done to appoint replacements to the upper house just as soon as the bodies were cold–but it turned out that Ryan’s speech had mattered a little bit. Eight governors had realized that this situation was unique, and had therefore acted in a different way, earning, on reflection, the praise of their local papers, if not the complete approval of the establishment press.
Jack’s first political trip was an experimental one. He rose early, kissed his wife and kids on the way out the door, and boarded the helicopter on the South Lawn just before seven in the morning. Ten minutes later, he left the aircraft to trot up the stairs onto Air Force One, technically known to the Pentagon as a VC-25A, a 747 expensively modified to be the President’s personal conveyance. He boarded just as the pilot, a very senior colonel, was making his airline-like preflight announcements. Looking aft, Ryan could see eighty or so reporters belting into their better-than-first-class leather seats–actually some didn’t strap in, because Air Force One generally rode more smoothly than an ocean liner on calm seas–and when he turned to head forward, he heard, “And this is a nonsmoking flight!”
“Who said that?” the President asked.
“One of the TV pukes,” Andrea replied. “He thinks it’s his airplane.”
“In a way, it is,” Arnie pointed out. “Remember that.”
“That’s Tom Donner,” Callie Weston added. “The
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NBC anchor. His personal feces are not odorific, and he uses more hair spray than I do. But part of it’s glued on.”
“This way, Mr. President.” Andrea pointed forward. The President’s cabin in Air Force One is in the extreme nose on the main deck, where there are regular, if very plush, seats, plus a pair of couches that fold out into beds for long trips. As the principal agent watched, her principal strapped in. Passengers could get away with breaking the rules–the USSS wasn’t all that concerned with journalists–but not POTUS. When that was done, she waved to an Air Force crewman, who lifted a phone and told the pilot that he could go now. With that, the engines started up. Jack had mostly lost his fear of flying, but this was the part of the flight where he closed his eyes and thought (earlier in his life he’d whispered) a prayer for the collective safety of the people aboard–in the belief that praying merely for yourself might appear selfish to God. About the time that was finished, the takeoff roll began, rather more quickly than was normal on a 747. Lightly loaded, it felt like an airplane instead of a train pulling out of a station.
“Okay,” Arnie said, as the nose lifted off. The President studiously did not grip the armrests as he usually did. “This is going to be an easy one. Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, and back home for dinner. The crowds will be friendly, and about as reactionary as you are,” he added with a twinkle. “So you don’t really have anything to worry about.”
Special Agent Price, sitting in the same compartment for the takeoff, hated it when anybody said that. Chief of Staff van Damm–CARPENTER to the Secret Service; Cal-lie Weston was CALLIOPE–was one of the staffers who never quite appreciated the headaches the Service went through. He thought of danger as a political hazard, even after the 747 crash. Remarkable, she thought. A few feet aft, Agent Raman was in an aft-facing seat watching access forward, in case a reporter showed up with a gun instead of a pencil. There were six more agents aboard to keep an eye on everyone, even the uniformed crewmen, and a platoon of them standing by in each of the two destination cities, along with a huge collection of local cops.
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At Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, the fuel truck was already under USSS guard, lesf someone contaminate the JP to go into the presidential aircraft; it would remain so until well after the 747 returned to Andrews. A C-5B Galaxy transport was already in Indianapolis, having ferried the presidential automobiles there. Moving the President around was rather like transporting the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus, except people generally didn’t worry about people trying to assassinate the man on the flying trapeze.
Ryan, Agent Price saw, was going over his speech. That was one of his few normal acts. They were almost always nervous about speeches–generally not so much stage fright as concern for the content spin. The thought made Price smile. Ryan wasn’t worried about the content, but was worried about blowing the delivery. Well, he’d learn, and his good fortune was that Gallic Weston, administrative pain in the ass that she was, wrote one hell of a speech.
“Breakfast?” a steward asked now that the aircraft was leveled off. The President shook his head.
“Not hungry, thanks.”
“Get him ham and eggs, toast, and decaf,” van Damm ordered.