A Heartbeat Away

by Michael Palmer

  In all, it took twenty-five minutes for the program to complete. Griff, flushed with excitement, waited for the output to compile. When the data finished processing, he sank into his chair. He’d been so conditioned to expect failure that when success finally had occurred, he did not exactly know how to feel.

  Angie was the key. If she had not succeeded in New York, none of this would have been possible. Because of her, they had an antiviral treatment. He wished he could call and tell her, but with Rappaport listening in, he wasn’t certain the idea was a good one.

  Then Griff began to wonder. Orion had worked. At least, according to the computer it had worked. The data said the drug would be a success, but he had no empirical proof—no infected subjects that he had cured.

  What should be done next?

  The laboratory had an extensive supply of biological and synthetic agents to work with. He checked the reagent case and confirmed there was enough antisense/ODN on hand for him to perform at least one test.

  Then he asked himself if he really needed a test to prove that his treatment worked. Wasn’t his computer model proof enough? Wasn’t that the point of his work? Hadn’t he found a way to develop and test drugs that spared animals from the agony and torture of experimentation?

  He studied Orion’s output files again, imagining himself standing at a crossroad. But unlike the crossroad immortalized in song and story, Griff suspected the devil was waiting for him regardless of which direction he chose. He closed his eyes and waited for the answer to come. Soon, his thoughts became filled with noise. It took time for him to recognize the hideous sounds—they were the screams of monkeys, dying in Hell’s Kitchen from an accidental overdose of WRX3883.

  In that moment, Griff knew exactly what he had to do.

  He stood up from his workstation. His legs were barely functional from sitting for so long. He carefully retrieved living WRX3883 virus from the cultures that Melvin had maintained, and used a syringe to mix the virus with a hundred milliliters of saline solution. In theory, his computer models alone should be enough proof that he had succeeded.

  In his heart, though, he knew that was not enough.

  Perhaps one day Orion would be used to jump-start a movement that would reduce or, better still, eliminate animal testing in both virology and other areas of medical and product research. But for now, the certain path to an antiviral treatment, no matter what his computer spit out, was to work with an infected host.

  Moving as in a dream, Griff disconnected his air hose and unzipped his biocontainment suit. He removed his helmet and gratefully wiped the sweat from his face. Then he set the syringe down on the table and prepared a single dose of Orion’s theoretical antiviral treatment—a mixture of Johnny Ray Davis’s serum and a powerful IL-6 boosting adjuvant. He had the perfect test subject to prove all of his theories and validate all of his work.

  He had himself.

  CHAPTER 61

  DAY 9

  12:00 MIDNIGHT (CST)

  Griff knew that calls made from the phone system in the Kitchen were being monitored around the clock, but he didn’t care. Rappaport was about to learn that there might have been a breakthrough, but Griff would figure out what to do about that when it became a certainty. He moved the intercom over to his workstation, put it on speaker, dialed # 9 for a long-distance line, and called Angie’s cell phone. If she didn’t answer, he would try a call to her nurses’ station to get a message to her to call about a family emergency.

  His biocontainment suit lay crumpled in a ball by his feet. Win or lose, the die was cast.

  Two rings and Angie answered. She sounded as if she might have been sleeping. Griff glanced up at the wall-mounted clock. It was twelve fifteen in the morning Kansas time, one fifteen Eastern.

  “Hiya, lady,” Griff said, leaning back and savoring air that wasn’t coming into a helmet via a tube. “Greetings from the heartland.”

  “Griff! I’ve been hoping each call was you. Allaire and his doctor have been in touch with me, and they’ve sent specialists in and put some guards outside the door and in here, but I was wondering when I’d ever hear your beautiful voice again. You don’t sound like you’re speaking from behind a mask, though. Where are you? What’s going on? You got news?”

  Griff smiled at the phone, wishing she could see how happy she was making him. The rocket-fire questions continued. Always the reporter. He held off answering for as long as he could, content just to listen to her. The elevation in his spirit confirmed two things he already knew: He loved her as much as ever, probably more, and he was right in needing to hear her voice before he injected himself with the virus.

  “Angie,” Griff cut in finally, “tell me how you’re doing. You sound okay.”

  “I’m fine. Really. Tired is all. That may have something to do with that I’m not sleeping regularly. Instead, I drop off for twenty minutes here and twenty there, but no real REM sleep, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do, yes. When this is all over, we’re going to this South Pacific island that’s covered from one end to the other with mattresses. I read about it in National Geographic. Sealy, Serta, Tempur-Pedics, all the best brands. Any word on a discharge?”

  “Looks like today. Sometime this afternoon. I want to get back there to you guys. I miss you both so much.” Angie read Griff’s silence almost immediately. “Something’s the matter. What is it?”

  More silence. Griff’s eyes begin to well and he wondered if he was going to be able to speak.

  “It’s Melvin,” he finally managed. “He’s dead.”

  Now the prolonged silence was from Angie’s side of the line.

  “Tell me,” she said after a while.

  Griff shared an abbreviated version of the events following her injury up to the plasmapheresis on J. R. Davis.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Griff,” she said when he had finished. “I am so sad and so sorry. What a terrific fellow he was. I know how close you two were. And I’m glad you got the man who killed him.”

  “Thanks. As soon as we can, we’ll go visit his family in West Virginia.”

  He looked over at the loaded syringes on a metal tray by his desk. It seemed almost wishful to be talking about their future.

  “I do have a bit of good news,” he continued.

  “Tell me, tell me.”

  “Thanks to you and Melvin, I believe we’ve done it. According to Orion, I’ve got a workable antiviral treatment.”

  He had hoped there would be more exuberance in his voice, but Angie understood and the excitement in her voice filled in for his lack of enthusiasm.

  “Oh, Griff, that’s wonderful! I knew you could do it. I knew it!”

  Griff hesitated. It was time to tell her.

  “I still don’t know for certain that my conclusions will work.”

  Not surprisingly, Angie sensed what was coming.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just that. All I know at this point is what Orion has told me, and he looks suspiciously like a computer.”

  There was prolonged silence.

  “Griff, what are you going to do?” she asked finally.

  He could hear the apprehension in her voice.

  “I need to be certain that I’m right, Ang,” he said. “We have a limited supply of Davis’s serum. He’s probably someplace a thousand miles away by now. The people in the Capitol are in serious trouble, and it’s getting worse fast. If we go there with what I have, and Orion is wrong for whatever reason, there’s no time to come back here and fool around.”

  “Griff, I don’t like where this is going.”

  “I need you to be with me, Angie. I need you more than you could ever know.”

  “Griff, please…”

  “I’m going to dose myself with the virus, and then I’m going to give myself the treatment.”

  “No! There has to be another way.”

  “If it doesn’t work, then I’ll leave you my notes and the serum. I don’t trust anybody but you with this
information. You’ll come to Kalvesta with another research team and pick up where I left off. Maybe there’ll still be some people left in the Capitol we can help.”

  “Try it on an animal—a monkey, a chimpanzee. If you’re wrong, you’ll die.”

  “But I’m not wrong,” Griff said.

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  He sighed.

  “All these years I’ve been telling everyone who would listen that computers can supplant animal testing. It’s been my mantra—the one thing since my sister died that allowed me to work in virology. I’ve thought about this, Ang. It’s time to trust the program I’ve spent so much of my life developing. It’s time and it’s right. Now please, I need you to understand.”

  “I … I do understand,” she said.

  Griff could hear her crying. For a time, he cried with her.

  “It’s going to work,” he said. “It has to.”

  “I love you, Griff,” she sobbed. “I’ve loved you since the first day we met.”

  “I love you too, Angie,” he said. “Just think about that island in the Pacific. All those palm trees growing up through those double-thick pillow-top mattresses.”

  “Hammocks, too?”

  Griff picked up the syringe filled with WRX3883 and saline.

  “Hammocks, too,” he said. “All over the place.”

  He had premixed the antiviral treatment based on the data from his only successful Orion test. He and Orion had calculated there would be enough serum for seven hundred and thirty doses.

  “What are you doing? Talk me through it, Griff,” Angie said. “Please, talk me through it.”

  “I’m cleaning the puncture site on my arm with alcohol.… I’m fine, honey. I love you.… I’ve got a vein, a real good one.”

  “I love you, Griff. Everything’s going to be all right. Tell me everything is going to be all right.”

  “I’m in. Everything’s going to be all right. You told me on the houseboat not to just sit there drinking beer and fishing. You were right. This is where I’m supposed to be, doing something that matters.… Okay, I’m going to inject.”

  “Griff…”

  “Here it goes.”

  Griff slid the needle into the bulging cord, snapped off the tourniquet, and depressed the plunger. Since he had chosen to go the IV route, using a large, concentrated quantity of virus, symptoms would not take long to develop. Griff took in a few deep breaths. Could it be that his chest already felt tight? Was that anxiety or was the virus already taking hold?

  “Griff! Talk to me.”

  “It’s in,” he said. “I’m doing fine.”

  “How long will you wait?”

  “Twenty minutes. Then I’ll inject Orion’s treatment.”

  “Twenty minutes.… God, what am I going to do for twenty minutes.”

  “We could tell ghost stories,” he suggested.

  “Not funny.”

  “Just sit with me, Angie. Just breathe into the phone. Just say something every now and then. Be with me. Be my lover. Be my friend. That’s all I need.”

  Griff closed his eyes and listened to every sound that she made. The rustling of her hospital bedsheets. The beeping of some machine in the background. Her sighs. Her sobs.

  His chest was getting tighter. There was wheezing now, too. He could hear it and feel it. Breathing deeply and deliberately through his nose, he picked up the syringe containing the antiviral serum. Orion had been pleased that J. R. Davis’s blood was AB negative. Griff wondered if that was related in any way to the interleukin excess and the heterochromia. Linked genes, perhaps.

  “Talk, Griff. Talk to me!” Angie demanded.

  “It’s in. I’ve got the treatment inside me. We just need to wait, now. Want me to call you back?”

  “You big jerk. How long do we wait?”

  “A couple hours I suppose. Close your eyes, Angie. I’ll wake you up.”

  “I’ve got my phone plugged in so I can stay on the line. I won’t fall asleep.”

  “It’s okay if you do.”

  Griff sat at his desk, staring at the black plastic intercom and wishing it were she. His eyes felt heavy, but he suspected it would be impossible for him to sleep. The tightness was no better, but it did not seem much worse. For an hour they spoke only intermittently. They talked about Melvin, mostly, and what Angie had been through in Chinatown. And they talked about Africa.

  Somewhere in the second hour, Angie fell asleep. They had been quiet for a stretch and then Griff heard the pattern of her breathing change. Instead of waking her, he just listened. An irritation had developed in his throat, and he cleared it with a small cough. He didn’t want to think about the scene when he first arrived in Statuary Hall at the Capitol, but there was no way he could stem the flood of images. He wondered if by now, he should have been feeling sicker.

  He continued to listen to Angie as she slept.

  It was nearing five in the morning—six, Angie time. Griff took his vitals on the hour. No change. He reached for the pen and notebook where he kept those records. Something about his hand caught his attention. Something that had not been there just a short while before.

  Trying to will what he was seeing not to be so, he turned his hands over and held them up. His heart sank. Suddenly, the tight band around his chest intensified and his breathing became more labored.

  Covering most of each palm, not unlike the bull’s-eye symbol for the popular department store, were intense, slightly irregular, concentric, scarlet circles.

  “Everything okay, darling?” Angie asked dreamily. “I think I fell asleep.”

  “Yeah, Ang,” Griff said, still staring in utter dismay at his palms. “Everything’s fine.”

  CHAPTER 62

  DAY 9

  6:30 A.M. (CST)

  The sharp knock on Paul Rappaport’s front door awakened him from a fitful sleep. Time was running out for the seven hundred in the Capitol. He felt certain he had been dreaming about how he would have handled the disaster had he been in Jim Allaire’s position, but he couldn’t recall any of the details. With the possibility of starting a pandemic very real, would he have made the heroic choice Allaire had made—essentially opting to sacrifice himself, his family, and many, many of his friends and supporters in exchange for keeping the country and possibly even the population of the world safe?

  Unless the rebel, Rhodes, came through—and Rappaport strongly doubted that was going to happen—it would not be long before the call came summoning him to D.C. to assume the presidency. His mouth went dry at the prospect.

  “Come in,” he called, pulling on a terrycloth robe.

  Janet Fox, the Secret Service agent covering him on the graveyard shift, slipped inside. She was dressed for the high plains winter in ski pants and a furlined parka, but still looked cold.

  “Mr. Roger Corum and two others are here to see you, sir,” she said. “They say it’s important and confidential. I’ve taken them next door and sent for backup to help me check them over.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Janet.”

  “I’m afraid we have our orders about that, sir. Straight from the top.”

  “Oh. I understand. Do what you have to do. I won’t get in the way.”

  “Hopefully things will get better at the Capitol soon, sir.”

  “Hopefully so.”

  But I don’t see it happening.

  Rappaport had showered, brushed his teeth, and brewed himself a cup of coffee when Fox returned. He wondered what could be happening at this hour that was so important to the Staghorn people.

  At last report, five or six hours ago, Corum and his technical crew were making rapid progress, and would probably finish establishing their state-of-the-art security and monitoring system by the end of the day. The final task would be the most important—installing monitoring cameras inside the Kitchen. If Rhodes failed, the system would still be put to good use.

  One of Rappaport’s first acts as president would be to b
eef up the Kalvesta facility as the jewel in his administration’s bioterrorism research and counterinsurgency force. That division of his new-age army would be only the beginning of an all-out war to secure national borders, keep out illegal aliens, and quash terrorism—a comprehensive approach that would dwarf all such efforts to date. Allaire had done a half-decent job battling a complex problem, but Paul Rappaport would go down in history as the president who made it safe to live in America.

  After Janet Fox assured him that the officials from Staghorn Security were “clean,” she led them in and directed them to the conference/monitoring area set up in one of the large front rooms. In less time than Rappaport believed possible, Corum and his team had mounted three digital touch-screen maps to the bungalow walls. The maps allowed the Homeland Security Chief to track threats against the United States from any number of terrorist organizations, domestic or international.

  In the room across the hall, there were several computer workstations, and two satellite phones, one of which had a dedicated connection to the Hard Room at the Capitol. Marguerite Prideaux and Colin Whitehead followed Corum to the conference area, each carrying a mug of coffee. Their expressions were grim.

  “What’s going on?” Rappaport asked once the four of them were settled in around his small table.

  “We were in the process of getting the communication hub online with the new monitoring equipment,” Corum said, “when one of Marguerite’s workers picked up a transmission from the laboratory’s intercom phone system. Here, have a look.”

  Corum handed Rappaport a stack of printed-out pages. The three security experts waited patiently while the secretary of Homeland Security read. When he finished with the transcript, Rappaport set the pages facedown in front of him.

  “What do you make of this?” he asked.

  Pallid, cachectic Colin Whitehead answered for the group. He was an Ivy League intellectual—Yale, Rappaport thought he remembered.

  “We aren’t sure,” Whitehead said. “We’ve had to shut down all laboratory video feeds in order to get the new board and the updated equipment installed. All we can monitor for about another three or four hours are conversations within the various rooms down there, and also the phones.”