“Explain,” Mary Pat commanded.
“I was born in Cuba. Once my dad told me about the night Batista bugged out. The senior generals had a little meeting and started boarding airplanes, quick and quiet,
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off to where their bank accounts were, and left everybody else holding the bag.” Vasco was one of the State Department people who enjoyed working with CIA, probably as a result of his Cuban birth. He understood that diplomacy and intelligence each worked better when working together. Not everyone at Foggy Bottom agreed. That was their problem. They’d never been chased out of their homelands.
“You think that’s what’s happening here?” Mary Pat asked, beating Ed by half a second.
“That’s the morning line from where I sit.”
“You feel confident enough to tell the President that?” Ed Foley asked.
“Which one?” Vasco asked. “You should hear what they’re saying over at the office. The FBI just took over the seventh floor. That has things a little shook up. Anyway, yes. It’s just a guess, but it’s a good guess. What we need to know is, who, if anyone, has been talking to them. Nobody on the ground, eh?”
The Foleys both looked down, which answered the question.
“MR. RYAN’S ALLEGATIONS show that he’s learned the shabby part of politics faster than the proper ones,” Kealty said, in a voice more hurt than angry. “I had honestly expected better of him.”
“So, you deny the allegations?” ABC asked.
“Of course I do. It’s no secret that I once had an alcohol problem, but I overcame it. And it’s no secret that my personal conduct has at times been questionable, but I’ve changed that, too, with help from my church, and the love of my wife,” he added, squeezing her hand as she looked on with soft compassion and ironclad support. “That really has nothing to do with the issue here. We have to place the interests of our country first. Personal animosity has no place in this, Sam. We’re supposed to rise above that.”
“You bastard,” Ryan breathed.
“This is not going to be pleasant,” van Damm said.
“How can he win, Arnie?”
“Depends. I’m not sure what game he’s playing.”
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“–could say things about Mr. Ryan, too, but that isn’t the sort of thing we need to do now. The country needs stability, not discord. The American people are looking for leadership–experienced, seasoned leadership.”
“Arnie, how much has this–”
“I remember when he’d fuck a snake, if somebody held it straight for him. Jack, we can’t think about that sort of thing. Remember what Alien Drury said, this is a town in which we deal with people not as they are, but as they are reputed to be. The press likes Ed, always has. They like him. They like his family. They like his social conscience–”
“My ass!” Ryan nearly shouted.
“You listen to me right now. You want to be the President? You’re not allowed to have a temper. You hold on to that thought, Jack. When the President loses his temper, people die. You’ve seen how that happens, and the people out there want to know that you are calm and cool and collected at all times, got it?”
Ryan swallowed and nodded. Every so often it was good to lose one’s temper, and Presidents were allowed. But you had to know when, and that was a lesson as yet unlearned. “So what are you telling me?”
“You are the President. Act like it. Do your job. Look presidential. What you said at the press conference was okay. Realty’s claim is groundless. You’re having the FBI check out his claim, but the claim doesn’t matter. You swore the oath, you live here, and that’s that. Make him irrelevant and he’ll go away. Focus on this thing and you give him legitimacy.”
“And the media?”
“Give them a chance, and they’ll get things right.”
“FLYING HOME TODAY, Ralph?”
Augustus Lorenz and Ralph Forster were of an age, and a profession. Both men had begun their medical careers in the United States Army, one a general surgeon, the other an internist. Assigned to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MAC-V), in the time of President Kennedy, long before the war had heated up, both men
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had at the same time discovered things in the real world that they’d studied and passed over in Principles of Internal Medicine. There were diseases out in the remote sections of the world that killed people. Brought up in urban America, they were old enough to remember the conquest of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and poliomyelitis. Like most men of their generation, they’d thought that infectious diseases were a defeated enemy. In the jungles of a relatively peaceful Vietnam, they’d learned different, occasionally seeing healthy, fit young men, American and Vietnamese soldiers, die before their eyes from bugs they had never learned about and which they could not combat. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, they both had decided one night in the Caravelle Bar, and like the idealists and scientists they were, both went back to school and started relearning their profession, and in that process beginning yet another process that would not end in their lifetimes. Forster had wound up at Johns Hopkins, Lorenz at Atlanta, head of the Special Pathogens Branch of the Centers for Disease Control. Along the way they’d flown more miles than some airline captains, and to more exotic places than any photographer for National Geographic, almost always in pursuit of something too small to see, and too deadly to ignore.
“I’d better, before the new kid takes my department over.”
The Nobel candidate chuckled. “Alex is pretty good. I’m glad he got out of the Army. We did some fishing together down in Brazil, back when they had the …” In the hot lab, a technician made a final adjustment on the electron microscope. “There,” Lorenz said. “There’s our friend.”
Some called it the Shepherd’s Crook. Lorenz thought it more like an ankh, but that wasn’t right, either. It was in any case not a thing of beauty. To both men it was evil incarnate. The vertical, curved strand was called RNA, ri-bonucleic acid. That contained the genetic code of the virus. At the top was a series of curled protein structures whose function wasn’t yet understood, but which probably, both thought, determined how the disease acted.
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Probably. They didn’t know, despite fully twenty years of intensive study.
The damned thing wasn’t even alive, but it killed even so. A true living organism had both RNA and DNA, but a virus had only one or the other. It lived, somehow, in a dormant state until it came in contact with a living cell. Once there, it came to murderous life, like some sort of alien monster waiting its chance, able to live and grow and reproduce only with the help of something else, which it would destroy, and from which it would try to escape, then to find another victim.
Ebola was elegantly simple and microscopically tiny. A hundred thousand of them, lined up head to tail, would scarcely fill out an inch on a ruler. Theoretically one could kill and grow and migrate and kill again. And again. And again.
Medicine’s collective memory wasn’t as long as either physician would have liked. In 1918, the “Spanish flu,” probably a form of pneumonia, had swept the globe in nine months, killing at least twenty million people–probably quite a few more–and some so rapidly that there had been victims who went to sleep healthy and failed to wake up the next day. But while the symptoms of the disease had been fully documented, the state of medical science hadn’t yet progressed to the point of understanding the disease itself, as a result of which nobody knew what that outbreak had actually been about–to the point that in the 1970s suspected victims buried in permafrost in Alaska had been exhumed in the hope of finding samples of the organism for study; a good idea that hadn’t worked. For the medical community, that disease was largely forgotten, and most assumed that should it reappear, it would be defeated with modern treatment.
Specialists in infectious disease weren’t so sure. That disease, like AIDS, like Ebola, was probably a virus, and medicine’s success in dealing with viral disease was precisely–
Zero.
Viral diseases could be prevented with vaccines, but once infected, a patient’s immune system either won or
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lost, with the best of physicians standing by and watching. Doctors, as with any other profession, frequently preferred to ignore that which they didn’t see and didn’t understand. That was the only explanation for the medical community’s inexplicably slow recognition of AIDS and its lethal implications. AIDS was another exotic pathogen which Lorenz and Forster studied, and another gift from the jungles of Africa.
“Gus, sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever figure these bastards out.”
“Sooner or later, Ralph.” Lorenz backed away from the microscope–it was, actually, a computer monitor– and wished he could smoke his pipe, a vice he didn’t really want to break, though working in a government building made it hard for him to indulge. He thought better with a pipe, Gus told himself. Both men stared at the screen, looking at the curlicue protein structures. “This one is from the kid.”