They walked in the footsteps of a handful of giants. Lorenz had written a paper on Walter Reed and William Gorgas, the two Army doctors who had defeated Yellow fever with a combination of systematic investigation and ruthless application of what they had learned. But learning in this business came so slow and so dear.
“Put up the other one, Kenny.”
“Yes, Doctor,” the intercom replied. A moment later, a second image came up alongside the first.
“Yep,” Forster said. “Looks pretty much the same.”
“That’s from the nurse. Watch this.” Lorenz hit the button on the phone. “Okay, Kenny, now hit the computer.” Before their eyes a computer image of both examples appeared. The computer rotated one to match the other, then overlaid them. They matched exactly.
“At least it hasn’t mutated.”
“Hasn’t had much of a chance. Two patients. They’ve done a good job of isolating. Maybe we were lucky. The kid’s parents have been tested. They seem to be clean, or so the telex says. Nothing else from his neighborhood. The WHO team is checking around the area. The usual, monkeys, bats, bugs. So far, nothing. Could just be an anomaly.” It was as much a hope as a judgment.
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“I’m going to play with this one a little. I’ve ordered some monkeys. I want to grow this one, get it into some cells, and then, Ralph, I’m going to examine what it does on a minute-by-minute basis. Get the infected cells, and pull a sample out every minute, slice it down, burn it with UV, freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and put it under the scope. I want to look at how the virus RNA gets going. There’s a sequencing issue here… can’t quite say what I’m thinking. The thought’s kind of lurking out there on me. Damn.” Gus opened his desk drawer, pulled out his pipe, and lit it with a kitchen match. It was his office, after all, and he did think better with a pipe in his mouth. In the field he said that the smoke kept the bugs away, and besides, he didn’t inhale. Out of politeness, he cracked open the window.
The idea for which he had just received funding was more complicated than his brief expression, and both men knew it. The same experimental procedure would have to be repeated a thousand times or more to get a correct read on how the process took place, and that was just the baseline data. Every single sample would have to be examined and mapped. It could take years, but if Lorenz were right, at the end of it, for the first time, would be a blueprint of what a virus did, how its RNA chain affected a living cell. – “We’re playing with a similar idea up in Baltimore.”
“Oh?”
“Part of the genome project. We’re trying to read the complex interactions. The process–how this little bastard attacks the cells down at the molecular level. How Ebola replicates without a proper editing function in the genome. There’s something to be learned there. But the complexity of the issue is a killer. We have to figure out the questions to ask before we can start looking for answers. And then we need a computer genius to tell a machine how to analyze it.”
Lorenz’s eyebrows went up. “How far along are you?”
Forster shrugged. “Chalk on a blackboard.”
“Well, when I get my monkeys, I’ll let you know what we develop here. If nothing else, the tissue samples ought to shed a little light.”
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THE FUNERAL WAS epic, with a ready cast of thousands, howling their loyalty to a dead man and concealing their real thoughts; you could almost feel them looking around and wondering what came next. There was the gun carriage, the soldiers with reversed rifles, the riderless horse, the marching soldiers, all captured off Iraqi TV by STORM TRACK and uplinked to Washington.
“I wish we could see more faces,” Vasco said quietly.
“Yeah,” the President agreed. Ryan didn’t smile but wanted to. He’d never really stop being an intelligence officer. Jack was sure of that. He wanted the data fresh, not massaged and presented to him by others. In this case he got to watch it live, with his color commentators at his side.
In America, a generation earlier, it would have been called a happening. People showed up and acted out because it was an expected thing. A literal sea of people filled the square–it had a name, but nobody seemed to know it–and even those who couldn’t see … oh, a new camera gave the answer to the question. Big-screen TVs showed everyone what was happening. Jack wondered if they’d do an instant replay. Two lines of generals marched behind the gun carriage, and were keeping step, Ryan saw.
“How much farther you think they’ll walk?”
“Hard to say, Mr. President.”
“It’s Bert, right?” the President asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Bert, I can call in one of my NIOs to tell me he doesn’t know.”
Vasco blinked, as expected. Then he decided, what the hell? “Eight out often, they bug out.”
“Those are betting odds. Tell me why.”
“Iraq has nothing to fall back on. You don’t run a dictatorship by committee, at least not for long. Not one of those people has the stones to take over on his own. If they stay put and the government changes, it won’t change into something nice for them. They’ll end up like the Shah’s general staff did, backs to a wall, looking at guns. Maybe they’ll try to fight it out, but I doubt it. They must have
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money salted away somewhere. Drinking daiquiris on a beach may not be as much fun as being a general, but it beats the hell out of looking at flowers from the wrong side. They have families to worry about, too.”
“So we should plan on a completely new regime in Iraq?” Jack asked.
Vasco nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Iran?”
“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Vasco answered, “but we just don’t have good enough information to make any kind of prediction. I wish I could tell you more, sir, but you don’t pay me to speculate.”
“That’s good enough for now.” Actually it wasn’t, but Vasco had given Ryan the best he had. “There’s not a thing we can do, is there?” This one was for the Foleys.
“Not really,” Ed replied. “I suppose we could get someone over there, maybe fly one of our people up from the Kingdom, but the problem then is, whom does he try to meet? We have no way of knowing who’s in command there.”
“If anyone,” Mary Pat added, looking at the marching men. None of them took the lead.
“WHAT DO YOU mean?” the buyer asked.
“You didn’t pay me on time,” the dealer explained with a belch after draining his first beer. “I had another buyer.”
“I was only two days late,” the buyer protested. “There was an administrative problem getting the funds transferred.”
“You have the money now?”
“Yes!”
“Then I will find you some monkeys.” The dealer lifted his hand, snapped his fingers, and caught the attention of the bar boy. An English planter could not have done it better, in this same bar, fifty years earlier. “It isn’t all that hard, you know. A week? Less?”
“But CDC wants them at once. The aircraft is already on the way.”
“I will do my best. Please explain to your client that if they want their consignment on time, then they should pay
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their bills on time as well. Thank you,” he added for the bar boy. “One for my friend, too, if you please.” He could afford that, what with the payment he’d just accepted.
“How long?”
“I told you. A week. Perhaps less.” Why was the chap so excited over a few days?
The buyer had no choice, at least not in Kenya. He decided to drink his beer down and speak of other things. Then he’d make a telephone call to Tanzania. After all, the African green monkey was “abundant” throughout Africa. It wasn’t as though there were a shortage of the things, he told himself. Two hours later, he learned something different. There was a shortage, though it would last only a few days, as long as it took for the trappers to find a few more troops of the long-tailed pests.
VASCO HANDLED THE translation in addition to his commentary duties. ” ‘Our wise and beloved leader who has given our country so much …’ ”
“Like population control the hard way,” Ed Foley snorted.
The soldiers, all guardsmen, moved the coffin into the prepared tomb, and with that, two decades of Iraqi history passed into the books. More likely a loose-leaf binder, Ryan thought. The big question was, who would write the next chapter?
15
DELIVERIES
SO?” PRESIDENT RYAN asked, after dismissing his latest set of guests.
“The letter, if there ever was one, is missing, sir,” Inspector O’Day replied. “The most important bit of information developed to the moment is that Secretary Hanson wasn’t all that scrupulous in his document-security procedures. That comes from the State’s security chief. He says he counseled the Secretary on several occasions. The people I took over with me are interviewing various people to determine who went in and out of the office. It will go on from there.”