“Anything special happening?”
“A possible Ebola case in Zaire, African male, age eight. The e-mail came through this morning.”
Cathy’s eyes narrowed at that. Though she was in a completely different field of medicine, like all physicians she got Morbidity and Mortality Report, and she kept current on everything she could. Medicine is a field in which education never stops. “Just one?”
“Yep.” Alexandre nodded. “Seems the kid had a monkey bite on his arm. I’ve been over there. I deployed out of Detrick for the last mini-outbreak in 1990.”
“With Gus Lorenz?” Dean James asked. Alexandre shook his head.
“No, Gus was doing something else then. The team leader was George Westphal.”
“Oh, yeah, he–”
“Died,” Alex confirmed. “We, uh, kept it quiet, but he got it. I attended him. It wasn’t real great to watch.”
“What did he do wrong? I didn’t know him well,” James said, “but Gus told me he was a rising star. UCLA, as I recall.”
“George was brilliant, best man on structures I ever met, and he was as careful as any of us, but he got it anyway, and we never figured out how that happened. Anyway, that mini-outbreak killed sixteen people. We had two survivors, both females, both in their early twenties, and nothing remarkable about them that we could ever find. Maybe they were just lucky,” Alexandre said, not really believing it. Things like this happened for some reason or other. It was just that he hadn’t found it, though it was his job to find it. “In any case, only eighteen total victims, and that was lucky. We were over there for six or seven weeks. I took a shotgun into the woods and blew up
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about a hundred monkeys, trying to find a carrier. No dice. That strain is called Ebola Zaire Mayinga. I imagine right now they’re comparing it to what this little kid contracted. Ebola’s a slippery little bastard.”
“Just one?” Cathy asked.
“That’s the word. Method of exposure unknown, as usual.”
“Monkey bite?”
“Yeah, but we’ll never find the monkey. We never do.”
“It’s that deadly?” Altman asked, unable to hold back from joining the conversation.
“Sir, the official guess is eighty percent mortality. Put it this way. If you pull your pistol out and shoot me in the chest, right here, right now, my odds are better than beating this little bug.” Alexandre buttered his roll and remembered visiting Westphal’s widow. It was bad for the appetite. “Probably a lot better, what with the surgeons we have working over in Halstead. You have much better odds with leukemia, much better odds with lymphoma. Somewhat worse odds with AIDS, but that agent gives you ten years. Ebola gives you maybe ten days. That’s about as deadly as it gets.”
11
MONKEYS
RYAN HAD DONE ALL OF his own writing. He’d published two books on naval history–that now seemed like a previous lifetime summoned to memory on a hypnotist’s couch–and uncounted papers for CIA. Each of these he had done himself, once on a typewriter and later on a series of personal computers. He had never enjoyed the writing–it was ever difficult work–but he had enjoyed the solitude of it, alone in his own little intellectual world and safe from any sort of interruption as he formed his thoughts and adjusted their method of presentation until they were as close to perfect as he could achieve. In that way, they were always his thoughts, and there was integrity in the process.
No longer.
The chief speech writer was Gallic Weston, short, petite, dirty blond, and a wizard with words who, like many of the enormous White House staff, had come aboard with President Fowler and never managed to leave.
“You didn’t like my speech for the church?” She was also irreverent.
“Honestly, I just decided that I had to say something else.” Then Jack realized he was defending himself to someone he scarcely knew.
“I cried.” She paused for effect, staring into his eyes with the unblinking gaze of a poisonous snake for several seconds, manifestly sizing him up. “You’re different.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean–you have to understand, Mr. President. President Fowler kept me around because I made him sound compassionate–he’s rather a cold fish in most things, poor guy. President Durling kept me around because he didn’t have anybody better. I bump heads all the time with staffers across the street. They like to edit my work. I don’t like being edited by drones. We fight. Arnie protects me a lot because I went to school with his favorite
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niece–and I’m the best around at what I do–but I’m probably the biggest pain in the ass on your staff. You need to know that.” It was a good explanation, but not to the point.
“Why am I different?” Jack asked.
“You say what you really think instead of saying what you think people think they want to hear. It’s going to be hard writing for you. I can’t dip into the usual well. I have to learn to write the way I used to like to write, not the way I’m paid to write, and I have to learn to write like you talk. It’s going to be tough,” she told him, already girding herself for the challenge.
“I see.” Since Ms. Weston was not an inner-circle staff member, Andrea Price was leaning against the wall (it would have been in a corner, except the Oval Office didn’t have one) and observing everything with a poker face– or trying to. Ryan was learning to read her body language. Clearly Price didn’t much care for Weston. He wondered why. “Well, what can you turn out in a couple of hours?”
“Sir, that depends on what you want to say,” the speechwriter pointed out. Ryan told her in a few brief sentences. She didn’t take notes. She merely absorbed it, smiled, and spoke again.
“They’re going to destroy you. You know that. Maybe Arnie hasn’t told you yet, maybe nobody on the staff has, or ever will, but it’s going to happen.” That remark jolted Agent Price from her spot on the wall, just enough that her body was standing instead of leaning.
“What makes you think I want to stay here?”
She blinked. “Excuse me. I’m not really used to this.”
“This could be an interesting conversation, but I–”
“I read one of your books day before yesterday. You’re not very good with words–not very elegant, that’s a technical judgment–but you do say things clearly. So I have to dial back my rhetoric style to make it sound like you. Short sentences. Your grammar is good. Catholic schools, I guess. You don’t bullshit people. You say it straight.” She smiled. “How long for the speech?”
“Call it fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll be back in three hours,” Weston promised, and
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stood. Ryan nodded, and she walked out of the room. Then the President looked at Agent Price.
“Spit it out,” he ordered.
“She’s the biggest pain in the ass over there. Last year she attacked some junior staffer over something. A guard had to pull her off him.”
“Over what?”
“The staffer said some nasty things about one of her speeches, and speculated that her family background was irregular. He left the next day. No loss,” Price concluded. “But she’s an arrogant prima donna. She shouldn’t have said what she did.”
“What if she’s right?”
“Sir, that’s not my business, but any–”
“Is she right?”
“You are different, Mr. President.” Price didn’t say whether she thought that was a good or bad thing, and Ryan didn’t ask.
The President had other things to do in any case. He lifted his desk phone, and a secretary answered.
“Could you get me George Winston at the Columbus Group?”
“Yes, Mr. President, I’ll get him for you.” She didn’t have that number immediately to mind, and so she lifted another phone for the Signals Office. Down there a Navy petty officer had the number on a Post-It note, and read it off. A moment later he handed the Post-It to the Marine in the next chair over. The Marine fished in her purse, found four quarters, and handed them over to the smirking squid.
“Mr. President, I have Mr. Winston,” the intercom phone said.
“George?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How fast can you get down here?”
“Jack–Mr. President, I’m trying to put my business back together and–”
“How fast?” Ryan asked more pointedly.
Winston had to think for a second. His Gulfstream crew wasn’t standing by for anything today. Getting to Newark Airport… “I can catch the next train.”
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“Let me know which-one you’re on. I’ll have someone waiting for you.”
“Okay, but you need to know that I can’t–”
“Yes, you can. See you in a few hours.” Ryan hung up, then looked up to Price. “Andrea, have an agent and a car meet him at the station.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Ryan decided that it was nice to give orders and have them carried out. A man could get used to this.