by Mara, Wil
The scrambled eggs sizzled and popped in the grill pan in front of him. He kept prodding them with the spatula, trying to get them evenly cooked and finely chopped. Billy sat in his chair, waiting. He was playing with a pair of little toy trucks, crashing them together in slow motion while adding his own sound effects. Scooter watched him from a sitting position, his tail sweeping the floor every time Billy giggled.
Dennis sang along softly to Dave Matthews’s “Too Much,” which was playing on the under-cabinet stereo. “Oooh, traffic jam got more cars than a beach got sand.…” He remembered how much he liked the song, and that he kept a copy of Matthews’s Crash CD here, when he spoke with Elaine on the phone about an hour earlier and it was playing in the background on her car system. She was on her way to work after a luxuriant six hours’ sleep and giving him updates. He and Andi had also been following reports via radio and the Internet. Over six thousand dead in twenty-three states, the American economy slowing down, and the possibility of an Iranian connection. If this keeps up, we’ll be living here forever, he thought, and shuddered at the prospect of that actually happening. We’ll also be the only ones left alive. That was utterly ridiculous, he told himself. Of course it was. But the fact that you even thought it.… There was a time when such an idea wouldn’t even have materialized on the most distant edges of his consciousness.
“Daddy…”
“Huh? Oh, sorry. Sorry.”
He dug under the eggs and flipped them one more time. They had browned on the bottom as the last of the butter evaporated, but at least they weren’t burnt. Billy wouldn’t complain either way, as he had a most agreeable attitude toward food for a five-year-old. But Chelsea would—she expected eggs to be yellow, not brown. She was that way about everything she ate—if what was on that plate wasn’t precisely what she envisioned, she’d either cut and pick off the parts she didn’t like or wouldn’t eat at all. She didn’t whine, though, and Dennis was grateful for that. She might make a face, but—thank merciful God—she wasn’t much of a whiner compared to the average second-grader. Still, he planned to make her eggs next, so he had to be careful. After that, an omelet for Andi. She loved a good egg-and-cheese omelet.
Andi and Chelsea had apparently decided to sleep in this morning. It was going on seven thirty, and the door to their bedroom still hadn’t opened. Technically, of course, it was Dennis and Andi’s bedroom, but the buddy system had been reworked due to a thunderstorm that began in the middle of the night. One parent slept with one child because neither of the latter was willing to sleep “alone.” So it was Dennis and Billy in the kids’ room, and Andi and Chelsea, along with Scooter most nights, in the adults’ room. It was the first time Dennis had slept without his wife beside him since they were married—and he didn’t have the heart to tell Andi he’d never felt so rested. There were two single beds in there, so he was by himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so deeply or felt so refreshed. He even began having vivid dreams again.
He heard Billy coughing behind him, and in that strange way the human body sometimes responds to the ailments of others, a cough coalesced in his own chest and rose to the surface.
“You can thank your father for that,” he said as he lifted the frypan from the coil, whose orange glow was fading quickly. “I’ve got the allergies in the family. The pollen up here is unbelievable.” He tried to inhale through his nostrils, but they were both clogged. “Mold, too. So I guess we can thank Mother Nature as well.”
He shoveled a portion of the scrambled eggs onto Billy’s Styrofoam plate, then put the rest on his own. The bacon was already done and being sweated of its excess grease in a folded paper towel. He took a test bite of one slice, deemed it suitable, then gave two to his son. Billy looked at him adoringly; he loved bacon. It was hardly nutritional, but today was Sunday—what the Jensens liked to call “Bacon Day.” Everyone got to eat whatever they wanted for breakfast and hang the health considerations. Bacon was a staple because they all loved it, although Chelsea sometimes deviated to hash browns or—best of all, when her parents bought them—pork sausages.
Dennis was halfway through his meal when another coughing jag came over Billy. The little boy’s face twisted with pain as bits of phlegm—pale and tinted green, Dennis noticed with alarm—flew out. Then he began turning an ashy shade of grayish blue. Dennis, thinking he was choking, jumped out of his seat. He knocked his orange juice over in the process.
“Billy? Are you okay? Hey—”
The child was leaning forward with his mouth open, and there was a peculiar expression on his face—more confusion than fear, as if he was puzzled by what was happening and waiting to see what came next. Then a thin string of blood came out, extending from Billy’s mouth to the egg heap with the laziness of a spider on a thread.
Dennis thumped him on the back with his open hand. “Billy? Billy!” He tried again, then a third time. What dropped out after the last blow was a revolting package of phlegm, blood, scrambled eggs, and warm milk. The boy gasped for air, refilling his lungs in great and noisy heaves.
“Oh, thank God,” Dennis said, his hand on his chest as his heart rate slowly diminished. “Thank G—”
Then the screams—“Dennis! DENNIS!”
They were muffled, distant, and he instantly understood why—they were coming from behind a closed door.
Upstairs …
“DENNIS!”
He was up the rough-hewn steps in seconds. The door was just to the right, and he pushed it back roughly. Andi and Chelsea were sitting together with their knees raised, holding each other tight, and crying wildly.
They were covered with rashes.
* * *
Porter had waited until everyone else left before she cleaned out the cages that night; it gave her the privacy she needed to fire a line of profanities in the general direction of Kevin Little. If there was one aspect of lab work she had always hated with a passion, it was experimenting on animals. She knew it was necessary to infect them so their physiological reactions could be observed, recorded, and studied … but to see them suffer, even if it was for a greater good, was unbearable. She had a professor in college, handsome like a model in a cologne ad, who grinned with his perfect teeth and told her soothingly that she’d get used to it. But she never did. Even if watching one mouse endure the agonies of cancer led to the finding of an across-the-board cure, she still felt there was something wrong with it. For this alone, she seriously considered joining Beck in the field of epidemiology and leaving virology to those who had the stomach for it.
She kept her focus on the large computer screen, on the ultramagnified images of one sample after another, in the hope that she’d see something significant: some sign that one of the many treatments they were trying would prove effective. Information was flying around the world between the eight labs that were now working nonstop, via computer, fax, and telephone. No one had made any progress, and frustration was mounting. Since this was a new virus, they were having trouble building a foundation upon which to attack it. Exhaustive examination of Ben Gillette’s gene map had gleaned little. One of the CDC people believed there might be an influenza connection, although none of the drugs geared in that direction had made an impact. With the media, the politicians, and the general public putting pressure on the Centers to produce results at any cost, out-of-the-box thinking was now being encouraged, albeit quietly and indirectly. Porter shivered when she’d heard this, as she knew what it meant—anything goes. A part of her wanted to lock the animal room and hide the keys. But then she reminded herself of the necessity of it all.…
She was studying a blood sample taken from one of the chickens—they had six different specimens on hand—when her cell phone jingled. She put the small Bluetooth device in her ear and pressed the button.
“Cara Porter.”
“Hello, Cara Porter, this is Michael Beck. How’s it been going?”
“Less than stellar.”
“Yeah, I heard. I assume you
guys are trying pretty much everything at this point.”
“You name it, we’re trying it. Amantadine, ribovirin, penciclovir, interferon type one, even ganciclovir, which only works with herpes … We’re not getting anywhere.”
“Always the problem with antivirals. What works with one doesn’t work with any other.”
Since antiviral drugs were designed to interrupt the viruses at a certain stage in their life cycle, each one had to be essentially tailor-made for the virus it was designed to target. Success in producing such a medication required exhaustive testing and experimentation due to the unique characteristics of each pathogen. In some instances, for example, a virus was best stifled in the preentry stage, before it had the chance to subjugate the host cell. One effective way to achieve that was by providing mimicking agents that misled the virus into attacking “decoy” cells. Another was to prevent the virus from binding with the host cell’s receptor molecules—an approach that had worked with some success in the treatment of HIV and AIDS. A second approach was to disrupt the virus after it had invaded the host cell. Again, deceiving the pathogen was the most effective strategy. One, known as reverse transcription, provided nucleoanalogues that acted as RNA/DNA building blocks but would instead shut down the virus’s sythesizing enzymes. Another, the protease inhibitor, prevented a virus from reassembling protein chains before new viruses could be created. Protease inhibitors had shown great promise in spite of some troubling side effects, and research on their improvement had continued unabated. A few antivirals focused on the assembly and release phases of the viral life cycle, and a handful bypassed the replication process altogether and worked to stimulate the immune system.
“We’ll keep at it, though, and try everything we can.” Porter said. “Every drug we can get our hands on. We just need some bell bottoms and lava lamps and it’s Haight-Ashbury all over again.”
Beck chuckled. “Except without the free love.”
“Considering how much tension there is over here, it couldn’t hurt.”
“Now, now, let’s remember you’re a lady.”
“Up yours.”
“Right. Hey, listen, I understand someone in Atlanta thinks there might be an influenza connection?”
“Yeah. Gregory Cox thought he saw something in the gene sequence that was similar. Everyone else is taking a look.”
“Hmm … well, I guess it’s a start. Now that they’ve mapped out the whole thing, they’re sure it’s not in the pox family?”
“No, that’s still a possibility. But it isn’t smallpox. They did a side-by-side with Variola.”
Beck said, “I hope Sheila releases that information soon. The press just won’t let go of it. All someone has to do is read up on smallpox and they’d know. Even if it’s a relative, it’s not smallpox. It’s obviously much deadlier.”
“Let’s lay odds on someone at home taking the time to conduct that research.”
“I know, but the public is scared out of their wits, and they have every right to be.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Porter said, “it seems to me that the virus is pretty stable. I’ve been throwing some foreign genetic bits and pieces at it, and none of them have stuck. That’s good news, I guess. It reduces the chance of it turning into something else.”
“You’ve been doing this research on your own?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Someone’s going to have to do it anyway, so I figured I’d get the ball rolling.”
The viruses with the greatest likelihood of changing form and developing drug resistance were those with lesser stability. They could more easily swap genetic material with other pathogens, essentially creating altogether new organisms on the fly.
“The little detective in you.”
“Something like that. The instability of the H1N1 virus was what had health officials so concerned in ’09, right?”
“Right. It didn’t turn into anything more virulent, but there seemed to be a fairly good chance that it would. Even to this day, a lot of people in the CDC, WHO, and elsewhere are waiting for that to happen.”
Porter tapped her keyboard and switched to another sample. “Speaking of that, how’s the Hardy Boys stuff going?”
Now Beck sighed. “One lead brings me to another, then to another, and then another. I can’t find the beginning of this thing. Maybe I never will. It’s like that movie we watched on DVD last year, National Treasure, where Jon Voight says to Nicolas Cage, ‘And that clue will lead to another clue. Don’t you see? There is no treasure.’”
“That was a good movie,” Porter said, ignoring the fact that she’d complained all the way to and from the rental store.
“Yeah, but this isn’t a movie. This is real. We’ve got to find the treasure.”
“Nicolas Cage found the treasure, remember?”
“Optimism? From you?”
“I just want to get my picture in the paper.”
“Ah, of course.”
“Where are you headed now?”
“To the home of a guy named Bob Easton. More backtracking, and this after doing nothing but backtracking and following narrow leads for the better part of two days. Pure drudgery.”
“I know, you’ve been busy as hell.”
“Yeah. And worst of all, this is probably another dead end.”
“So to speak.”
“Yes, so to speak. He had the infection and gave it to his wife. Apparently he killed her before drowning himself in their pool.”
“Lovely.”
“The fun part of this job.”
Porter thought about the animals being tortured in the glass-walled room directly behind her and shuddered. Of the two professions, I think I’d prefer the one that has me finding people in swimming pools. “Well, you enjoy that. Let me know if you find anything. Any treasure.”
“I will.”
She ended the call and dropped the earpiece back into the pocket of her lab coat.
After a few more samples, she decided to get up and walk through the halls for a few minutes. She’d been sitting for over two hours and her eyes were burning.
Halfway to the door, she couldn’t resist the urge to at least glance into the animal room. One of the white rats was lying on its side, trembling and looking terrified.
She fought back the urge to scream and kept moving.
TWELVE
The room in President Baraheri’s Tehran residence where he liked to hold these meetings was spare and humble, with white walls, plain brown carpet, and a collection of antique furniture. The Iranian flag stood in one corner, and a framed photo of the Supreme Leader—technically, as the highest authority in both politics and religion, Iran’s most powerful man—hung on the wall, more for its diplomatic value than anything else.
Maziar Baraheri sat on a gold couch near a pair of heavy curtains. His neat silver hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and pleasant face made him look more like a scientist than like a political leader. The election was almost half a year in the past now, yet he was still a complete stranger—the official International Man of Mystery of global politics.
When Iran’s last presidential campaign began, it appeared as though the only two candidates of consequence were the incumbent, conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the president before him, moderate Mohammad Khatami. After years of Ahmadinejad’s incendiary policies toward the West, verbal abuse of Israel, and failure to improve the nation’s economy, Khatami found himself with a tremendous lead in the polls, much to the excitement of his many supporters at home and abroad—including the American government. However, he dropped out of the race just two months before the summer election, citing the belief that those in other powerful positions would block him from making the reforms he felt were necessary. Critics and analysts believed another factor was the refusal by Ahmadinejad’s government to allow Khatami to hold rallies in key locations, plus their nocturnal habit of removing Khatami posters from public places.
With less than sixty days to go, Khatami threw his sup
port behind Baraheri, a former two-term mayor from the Shia province of Kerman. Totally unknown outside his obscure hometown, Baraheri endeared himself to the Iranian public with his calm demeanor, seemingly boundless knowledge of the Koran, promise of a “sensible government that works in the best interests of all our people,” and his reputation as a uniter. Khatami campaigned vigorously for him, creating the illusion that Baraheri was equally moderate and thus the two were interchangeable. But mostly, Khatami simply wanted to dethrone Ahmadinejad, which in turn would move Iran closer to a position of sanity on the world stage.
The Iranian people spoke on June 12, and Baraheri took 63 percent of the popular vote—a landslide by any definition. Ahmadinejad’s people did their best to squelch it, but in the end he had no choice but to vacate his office, and the rest of the world breathed a sigh of relief. Baraheri’s first address to the public was rambling and unfocused, leaving other world leaders scratching their heads. It was as if the man was purposely trying to avoid a hard stance on any issue. With rumors rampant that he had written the text himself, most dismissed it as the awkward first effort of an amateur. In time, however, they would realize this “nonimage” was carefully sculpted, suggesting there was more to him than previously estimated. He was unpredictable and subtly manipulative, leaving those around him unsure of whether he was their ally or their enemy, yet he made significant progress on both domestic and foreign fronts. Nevertheless, he did not speak to the media, avoided being photographed, and rarely traveled outside the country.
The only other man in the room with him asked, “The conversation did not go well, I assume?”
Sanjar Hejazi was still handsome and boyish in his fifties, with large eyes and a pile of dark hair on top. He had been friends with Baraheri since childhood. They rose through the political ranks together, with Baraheri always out front and Hejazi behind the curtain working the controls. Baraheri could not have gone far without him and trusted him completely.
