Pandemic

by Robin Cook

  “Whatever,” Jack said. It sounded good to him. He had no idea why it was necessary, but he thought he could worry about that later.

  The man quickly bent down to slide the crowbar between the door and the floor, but there wasn’t enough room. He stood back up, with his expression registering disappointment.

  “There is a grate twenty to thirty feet down to my left,” Jack said. He pointed. “It would be easy to pass it through the bars.”

  “Okay, perfect,” the man said. In Mandarin he directed the other man to shine one of the lights in that direction. A moment later he and Jack met up at the heavy grate. The man passed the crowbar between the bars with ease, and Jack took it.

  Without wasting any time, Jack hurried back to the embedded door. Using the straight end of the crowbar, he inserted the claw teeth between the door and the jamb, just above the strike plate. He had to use considerable force and wiggle the tool back and forth a few times to get the teeth to sink in deeply enough. Using the length of the crowbar as a lever arm, Jack was able to bend the door enough to pop the latch out of the strike plate. The door swung open, and in the next instant Jack was out of the cage.

  “Drop the crowbar!” the man ordered. “The idea is that you found it in the cage and used it to break out.”

  Jack did as he was told, although he didn’t drop it but rather put it on the composite floor to avoid the clatter it would have invariably made.

  “All right, let’s go!” the man urged. He took one of the flashlights from the slender fellow, and Jack got a quick glimpse at the second man’s face. To his surprise, it was Kang-Dae, Wei’s man Friday.

  As a group they half walked, half ran back along the slaughterhouse floor to the office. Then, after quickly traversing the office, they held up at the door to the outside.

  “Kang-Dae will go out and make sure we are good to go,” the younger man said. “We’ll wait here.”

  “Fine by me,” Jack said, even though he wanted to get the hell out of the slaughterhouse as soon as possible.

  The silent Kang-Dae turned off his flashlight, cracked the door, and slipped through. He moved like an apparition. One minute he was there, the next he was gone.

  “I appreciate you coming to get me,” Jack whispered. “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome,” the man said.

  “What is your name?” Jack asked.

  “Call me David,” the man said.

  “David it is,” Jack said.

  A moment later there was a furtive knock on the door. David cracked it open. It was Kang-Dae. As usual, the man didn’t speak but rather merely nodded to indicate the coast was clear. In response, David turned off his flashlight, pushed the door fully open, and gestured for Jack to exit.

  Outside, there was a single light over the door. Otherwise it was intimidatingly dark as the Farm Institute was completely encompassed by forest and there was no moon visible. The three men ran a short distance across the macadam parking area to a black Range Rover parked alongside one of the semi-trailers.

  While Kang-Dae climbed into the driver’s seat, David went directly to the rear of the vehicle and opened the back. He motioned for Jack to climb into the storage area. “Sorry, but you have to ride back here until we get through security. It’s not far.”

  Jack hesitated for a brief moment. Having been just sprung out of one situation of confinement, he wasn’t joyous about climbing into another. But he understood the rationale. With some reluctance, he clambered in, rolling onto his back in the process. David activated the hatchback closing mechanism. A moment later, Jack again found himself in absolute darkness.

  The car’s motor started, and the vehicle backed up and then pulled forward. Jack sought something to hold on to in the darkness as he bounced around, but he couldn’t find anything to grasp. Fortunately, it wasn’t a big problem, since the roadway was reasonably smooth. It was only the turns that were mildly difficult to manage. Presently, Jack felt the SUV slow down and stop. There was some conversation in what he assumed was Mandarin, and a moment later they recommenced moving. They didn’t go far before they stopped again. On this occasion, Jack could hear one of the vehicle’s doors open. A moment later the hatchback lifted and the tailgate dropped down.

  “Okay, Dr. Stapleton,” David said. “My car is right here behind me. It’s a black Lexus. I’d like you to get out of the Range Rover and get right in my car. The least amount of time you are exposed, the better it will be. I don’t think anyone is watching us, but one never knows. Are you ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” Jack said. He then inched his way to the lip of the opened trunk, got to his feet, and then hurried to climb into the black coupe only a few feet from the Range Rover. In the short time he was outside, he could tell that they were parked off in the far end of the Dover Valley Hospital parking area. The brightly illuminated hospital looked like a jewel in the darkness.

  A second later, David jumped into the driver’s seat, pulled his door shut, and started the car. Outside, Jack noticed Kang-Dae had already begun driving away. Jack’s escape had been pulled off with commendable efficiency.

  “I assume you want to go back to the city,” David said, putting his car in gear and heading after Kang-Dae.

  “No, I’d rather go back to the slaughterhouse,” Jack said, already recovered enough to indulge in a bit of sarcasm. “I was just getting comfortable.”

  David chuckled. “You are a trip, Dr. Stapleton. I have to say that much about you. Will we be going to your home or the OCME?”

  “Home,” Jack said, wondering how he was going to be received.

  42

  THURSDAY, 9:15 P.M.

  Jack turned to catch one more glimpse of GeneRx and then the Dover Valley Hospital before David pulled out onto the county road and gunned the Lexus. Ahead they could see Kang-Dae and the Range Rover. Both vehicles were heading north.

  “Okay,” Jack said, facing toward his liberator and beginning to calm down. “This has been one strange day. I suppose I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but I can’t help it. I need to start by asking exactly who you are, David.”

  “That is entirely reasonable,” David said. “My name is actually Zhao Daquan.”

  “Zhao, like Wei Zhao?” Jack asked.

  “Exactly,” David said. “Wei Zhao is my father.”

  “Interesting,” Jack said. The catchword had never felt more appropriate. This whole affair, starting with the call from Bart Arnold about the first subway death, had been full of continual surprises. The idea that Jack had been rescued from a potentially calamitous situation by the son of his major antagonist seemed a kind of poetic justice.

  “I suppose you want to know what is going on here,” David said.

  “Oh, no!” Jack responded. “I love being totally in the dark. It makes life so much more unpredictable.”

  David laughed again, this time with true hilarity. “I have to say, I like your humor, Dr. Stapleton. The background check my father had done on you characterized you as someone who liked to pun and use sarcasm. It certainly was on the mark.”

  “So you had access to my infamous dossier,” Jack said. “That gives you an unfair advantage.”

  “I am happy to tell you whatever you would like to know about me,” David said.

  Ahead, Jack noticed that they were rapidly approaching the entrance to Interstate 80 East that would take them back to New York City, if that was their destination. Jack could see that the Range Rover had continued straight, going under the highway, presumably en route to Wei’s home. For a few seconds Jack held his breath, but then at the appropriate moment David steered onto the entrance ramp. Jack secretly breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Well?” David questioned. “What do you want to ask me?”

  “Were you born here in the USA?”

  “No, I was born in Shanghai,” David sa
id.

  “You speak flawless American English,” Jack said.

  “Thank you for the compliment,” David said. “I came here nine years ago to go to MIT to study biotechnology and microbiology. Now I am finishing my Ph.D. in genetics and bioinformatics at Columbia University’s Systems Biology Center.”

  “So your plan is to follow in your father’s footsteps?” Jack asked.

  “In general, yes,” David said. “In specific, no. My goal is to run my father’s biotech and pharmaceutical companies in China, not here in the USA.”

  “From my conversation with your father, I get the feeling he’s interested in pulling out of China and concentrating his efforts here.”

  “Unfortunately, that is the case,” David said. “I am afraid my own father and his closest team members have become somewhat counterrevolutionaries. My father has always been a unique man, starting with his worshipping Arnold Schwarzenegger and becoming a bodybuilder and martial-arts devotee while studying biotechnology.”

  “I can attest to the martial-arts aspect,” Jack said. “We were having a reasonably pleasant conversation when he unleashed one of those wild martial-arts kicks at my head. Of course, I started it by trying to shove him out of the way.”

  “You got into a physical fight with my father?” David questioned with obvious incredulity. “I can’t believe you, Dr. Stapleton. And what surprises me, you came out of it without a scratch.”

  “I was saved by your father’s security team,” Jack said. “Who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t shown up. And you can call me Jack. Rescuing me from the slaughterhouse entitles you to be on a first-name basis at an absolute minimum.”

  “Jack it is,” David said. “I am currently heavier than my father and have also studied martial arts and done bodybuilding under my father’s direction, but I would never challenge him to a fight, even though he is nearly seventy. You are very brave, Jack.”

  “Sometimes foolish but not brave,” Jack said. “But let’s get back to your story. You were calling your father and his peers counterrevolutionaries.”

  “That’s correct,” David said. “Especially of late. My generation feels much differently about China today than our parents did. China is ascendant. China is on its way to take its rightful place on the world stage.”

  “Are you suggesting there’s a kind of new cultural revolution?” Jack questioned.

  “In a fashion,” David said. “China needed Mao to force a break from the stranglehold of the past to create a new mind-set for industrialization and pull China into the twentieth century. Now China needs a new incentive to break from the inferiority complex the country has suffered since the Colonial Period, as well as from the capitalist selfishness like my father exhibits. My father is a philanthropist, but he thinks of his billions of renminbi as completely his.”

  “There is an irony here,” Jack said. “Your father admitted to me that he got his start as a Red Guard in the Mao Cultural Revolution. Now you are in a sense doing the same thing.”

  “I suppose that is true,” David said. “But I want to be part of my Chinese heritage. I am proud of it, and I want to be part of the Chinese ascendency.”

  “You aren’t afraid you have become too Americanized, having been living here for nine years?” Jack asked. “Will you find it hard to adapt to living back in China?”

  “I don’t think I will have any trouble at all,” David said. “We Chinese university-age generation are all on the same page, whether we are in school in Wuhan, or Canberra, or Paris, or Boston. We are of the same mind-set to truly make China great again, pardon the hackneyed phrase. Whereas here in the USA there is depressing divisiveness and a kind of anti-immigrant neotribalism that is getting progressively worse, in China we millennials are coming together.”

  “I can’t argue with you there,” Jack said. “Let me ask you something more specific. How did you know that I was being held in the slaughterhouse animal pen?”

  “Kang-Dae called me in New York and told me,” David said.

  “And why would he do that?” Jack said. There still seemed to be more that Jack didn’t know than what he did.

  “It’s a rather complicated story,” David said. “Are you sure you want to hear it.”

  “There’s nothing I want to hear more,” Jack said. It didn’t make any sense at all to him, as Ted Markham had told Jack that Kang-Dae had been Wei’s personal assistant for almost forty years. And he acted as if he was totally devoted to the man.

  “You have to understand exactly who Kang-Dae is,” David said.

  “I was told he originally was a defector from North Korea,” Jack said. “And has been working for your father for practically a lifetime.”

  “That’s correct,” David said. “But the important thing is how he became my father’s assistant. My father didn’t hire him on his own accord. Kang-Dae was a Chinese government plant to keep tabs on my father that my father was compelled to hire, and Kang-Dae has continued in the same capacity to this day. It is all rather ironic in that my father has been aware of Kang-Dae’s role practically since day one but never cared. Since Kang-Dae had no family, my father even let him live in a spare room in our house, despite knowing he was, in effect, a spy. I have known Kang-Dae my whole life. He’s family without being family.”

  “But why would he go out of his way to tell you I was locked up in the slaughterhouse?” Jack asked. “Obviously your father thinks of me as a distinct liability, as he should. Kang-Dae witnessed our brawl.”

  “Because our goals coincide,” David said. “The Chinese government doesn’t want my father to succeed here in the United States, for fear he’ll shut down his companies in China. Same with me and a large contingent of the Chinese interns that are here working in GeneRx.”

  “Your father thinks that these last two heart transplants with the pig-grown organs were sabotaged,” Jack said. “Do you think that is true?”

  “I know it is true,” David said. “It was a regular old-fashioned conspiracy and a group decision. We thought the best way to delay the program was to reintroduce a pig retrovirus into the cloned retrovirus-free litter of pigs used to clone the customized pigs. I was the one who chose the B virus used, as it was known to infect human cells in culture. What none of us had any idea about was that it would be capable of eliciting a cytokine storm. That took us all by surprise. Actually, we counted on them finding the retrovirus well before the organs were harvested. The original protocol called for such a final check. We don’t know why it wasn’t done, although it is obvious it had something to do with the rapidity of Carol Stewart’s clinical deterioration. It is tragic that the final check wasn’t performed. Unfortunately it’s something I’m afraid I am going to have to live with.”

  “Your father thinks that had this sabotage not happened, the two women involved would be alive and well today, ushering in a whole new era in transplant treatment. Do you agree?”

  “My father has usually been right in such things,” David said. “And he is probably right about this. It’s why he is a billionaire and most of his colleagues are not. He knew from the moment he first heard about CRISPR/CAS9 that it was a breakthrough technology. He’s absolutely certain it’s going to change the face of clinical medicine. Revolutionizing the organ-transplant field is just the first of a host of amazing things it will be providing.”

  “You do understand that I will have to report all this,” Jack said. “At a minimum, I’ll be making sure the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations will be alerted tomorrow morning.” Although he understood everything David had said, in the final analysis it was the death of the two women that bothered Jack the most.

  “I was hoping that would be the case,” David said. “It’s why I was intent on getting you out of where you were being held.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking this,” Jack said, “but if you hadn’t shown up as a liber
ator, what do you think would have happened to me?”

  “My father would have delegated your fate to one of his many underlings,” David said. “He wouldn’t have given it much thought. He is good at compartmentalizing.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Jack said.

  “You had impressed my father with the efforts you had made investigating Carol Stewart,” David said. “Kang-Dae told me he was intent on convincing you to join the team. He thought that you would be a terrific asset in dealing with the problems that he expects he’ll be facing from the usual regulatory agencies. I’m somewhat surprised you were able to resist, as he can be very convincing.”

  “I was never tempted,” Jack said.

  As they sped toward the city, Jack felt himself progressively relax the farther they got from the Farm Institute and its slaughterhouse. The traffic was light, even as they neared the George Washington Bridge, the world’s busiest.

  “Your father said something reassuring,” Jack said, breaking the silence. “He said that thanks to CRISPR/CAS9, GeneRx engineers had already developed a rapid test for determining the presence of the new gammaretroviral disease and also how to cure it. Is that correct, as far as you know?”

  “It is,” David said. “It is another tribute to the power of this revolutionary gene-editing technology.”

  “That’s terrific,” Jack said. “That should make the elimination of the mini-pandemic this episode has caused rather easy.”