He held up his hand. “I know. I still have a security clearance because I still drive up to Fort Detrick once in a while.”
“It isn’t like the movies. You don’t do stuff like that and have a drink, kiss the girl, and drive away. He used to
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have nightmares and I–well, I’d hug him in his sleep and usually that calmed him down, then when he wakes up, he pretends it never happened at all. I know some of it, not all. When we were in Moscow last year, a Russian comes up and says that he had a gun to Jack’s head once”–Alt-man’s head turned at that one –“but he said it like a joke or something, then he said the gun wasn’t loaded. Then we had dinner together, like we were pals or something, and I met his wife–pediatrician, would you believe it? She’s a doc and her husband is the head Russian spy and–”
“It does sound a little far-fetched,” Dr. Alexandra agreed with a judiciously raised eyebrow, and then a real laugh happened on the other side of the table.
“It’s all so crazy,” she concluded.
“You want crazy? We have two Ebola cases reported in Sudan.” Now that her mood had changed, he could talk about his problems.
“Funny place for that virus to turn up. Did they come in from Zaire?”
“Gus Lorenz is checking that out. I’m waiting for him to get back to me,” Professor Alexandra reported. “It can’t be a local outbreak.”
“Why’s that?” Altman asked.
“Worst possible environment,” Cathy explained, finally picking at her lunch. “Hot, dry, lots of direct sun. The UV from the sunlight kills it.”
“Like a flamethrower,” Alex agreed. “And no jungle for a host animal to live in.”
“Only two cases?” Cathy asked with a mouthful of salad. At least, Alexandre thought, he’d gotten her to eat. Yep, he still had a good bedside manner, even in a cafeteria.
He nodded. “Adult male and a little girl, that’s all I know right now. Gus is supposed to run the tests today, probably already has.”
“Damn, that’s a nasty little bug. And you still don’t know the host.”
“Twenty years of looking,” Alex confirmed. “Never found one sick animal–well, the host wouldn’t be sick, but you know what I mean.”
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“Like a criminal case, eh?” Altman asked. “Poking around for physical evidence?”
“Pretty much,” Alex agreed. “Just we’re trying to search a whole country, and we’ve ne\er figured exactly what we’re looking for.”
DON RUSSELL WATCHED as the cots went out. After lunch–today it was ham-and-cheese sandwiches on wheat bread, glass of milk, and an apple–the kids all went down for their afternoon nap. An altogether good idea, all the adults thought. Mrs. Daggett was a superb organizer, and the kids all knew the routine. The beds came out of the storage room, and the kids knew their spaces. SANDBOX was getting along well with young Megan O’Day. Both usually dressed in Oshkosh B’gosh outfits decorated with flowers or bunnies–at least a third of the kids had them; it was a popular label. The only hard part was parading the children into the bathrooms so that no “accidents” happened during the naps–some happened anyway, but that was kids for you. It took fifteen minutes, less than before because two of his agents helped. Then the kids were all down in their cots, with their blankets and bears, and the lights went down. Mrs. Daggett and her helpers found chairs to sit in and books to read.
“SANDBOX is sleeping,” Russell said, stepping outside for some fresh air.
“Sounds like a winner,” the mobile team thought, sitting in the den of the house across the street. Their Chevy Suburban was parked in the family garage. There were three agents there, two of whom were always on watch, seated close to the window which faced Giant Steps. Probably playing cards, ever a good way to pass dead time. Every fifteen minutes–not quite regularly in case someone was watching–Russell or another of the crew would walk around the grounds. TV cameras kept track of traffic on Ritchie Highway. One of the inside people was always positioned to cover the doors in and out of the center. At the moment it was Marcella Hilton; young and pretty, she always had her purse with her. A special purse
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of a type made for female cops, it had a side pocket she could just reach into for her SigSauer 9mm automatic, and two spare magazines. She was letting her hair grow to something approaching hippie length (he’d had to tell her what a hippie was) to accentuate her “disguise.”
He still didn’t like it. The place was too easy to approach, too close to the highway with its heavy volume of traffic, and there was a parking lot within plain sight, a perfect spot for notional bad guys to do surveillance.’At least reporters had been shooed away. On that one SURGEON had been ruthlessly direct. After an initial spate of stories about Katie Ryan and her friends, the foot had come down hard. Now visiting journalists who called were told, firmly but politely, to stay away. Those who came anyway had to talk to Russell, whose grandfatherly demeanor was saved for the children at Giant Steps. With adults he was simply intimidating, usually donning his Secret Service sunglasses, the better to appear like Schwarzenegger, who was shorter than he by a good three inches.
But his sub-detail had been cut down to six. Three directly on site, and three across the street. The latter trio had shoulder weapons, Uzi submachine guns and a scoped M-16. In another location, six would have been plenty, but not this one, he judged. Unfortunately, any more than that would have made this day-care center appear to be an armed camp, and President Ryan was having trouble enough.
“WHAT’S TH E WORD, Gus?” Alexandra asked, back in his office before starting afternoon rounds. One of his AIDS patients had taken a bad turn, and Alex was trying to figure what to do about it.
“ID is confirmed. Ebola Mayinga, same as the two Zairean cases. The male patient isn’t going to make it, but the child is reportedly recovering nicely.”
“Oh? Good. What’s the difference in the cases?” “Not sure, Alex,” Lorenz replied. “I don’t have much patient information, just first names, Saleh for the male and Sohaila for the child, ages and such.”
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“Arabic names, right?” But Sudan was an Islamic country.
“I think so.”
“It would help to know what’s different about the cases.”
“I made that point. The attending physician is an lan MacGregor, sounds pretty good, University of Edinburgh, I think he said. Anyway, he doesn’t know any differences between them. Neither has any idea how they were exposed. They appeared at the hospital at roughly the same time, in roughly the same shape. Initial presentation was as flu and/or jet lag, he said–”
“Travel from where, then?” Alexandre interrupted.
“I asked. He said he couldn’t say.”
“How come?”
“1 asked that, too. He said he couldn’t say that, either, but that it had no apparent connection with the cases.” Lorenz’s tone indicated what he thought of that. Both men knew it had to be local politics, a real problem in Africa, especially with AIDS.
“Nothing more in Zaire?”
“Nothing,” Gus confirmed. “That one’s over. It’s a head-scratcher, Alex. Same disease turned up in two different places, two thousand miles apart, two cases each, two dead, one dying, one apparently recovering. MacGregor has initiated proper containment procedures at his hospital, and it sounds as though he knows his business.” You could almost hear the shrug over the phone.
What the Secret Service guy had said over lunch was right on target, Alexandre thought. It was more detective work than medicine, and this one didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, like some sort of serial-murder case with no clues. Entertaining in book form, maybe, but not in reality.
“Okay, what do we know?”
“We know that Mayinga strain is alive and kicking. Visual inspection is identical. We’re running some analysis on the proteins and sequences, but my gut says it’s a one-to-one match.”
“God damn, what’s the host, Gus? If we could only find that!”
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“Thank you for that observation, Doctor.'” Gus was annoyed–enraged–in the same way and for the same reason. But it was an old story for both of them. Well, the older man thought, it had taken a few thousand years to figure malaria out. They’d been playing with Ebola for only twenty-five or so. The bug had been around, probably, for at least that long, appearing and disappearing, just like a fictional serial killer. But Ebola didn’t have a brain, didn’t have a strategy, didn’t even move of its own accord. It was super-adapted to something very limited and exceedingly narrow. But they didn’t know what. “It’s enough to drive a man to drink, isn’t it?”