Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “But the same equipment, same lab, same testers. I admire your zeal and dedication. Let’s begin from scratch. Tell me, what would you have us do right now?”

  I answered immediately. “Protocol four.”

  The faces seemed shocked. Protocol four was one of those secret plans, hopefully never to be used, to attempt to impose rules on danger. It called for an executive order to seal off a small town, in the event of a contagious outbreak. Protocols one to three involved similar measures in a major city, military base, harbor, or airport.

  I said, “To be safe. Nothing leaves or enters until we track down the source. Hold any planes out of Barrow on the runway, and get more serum up here . . .”

  In disaster films, it looks relatively easy to seal off a populated area. The president makes the call. The troops move in. The fences go up. Voilà!

  But in the lawsuit-crazy U.S., protocol four took a lot more into consideration, involved coordination of multiple moving parts. Governors secretly notified, health officials secretly on board, judges secretly signing papers, a whole set of contingencies designed to cover the asses of the decision makers later, after the emergency was over, when the lawsuits and finger-pointing began. Protocol four was as much an act of political preservation as it was an attempt to control a deadly outbreak or attack.

  Now the man in Atlanta listened, as if he was considering it, but he wasn’t.

  “Premature.”

  “Would you say that if the disease had broken out in, say, Greenwich, Connecticut? Or Beverly Hills?”

  “If you’re implying that I regard life differently for a native population, or a poorer one, that’s offensive.”

  “Really? Beverly Hills stops funding candidates if garbage collection gets held up for more than forty-eight hours.”

  “Colonel, you can’t test for rabies until symptoms appear, and you know it. You want passengers to sit in planes for days? And have the news get out? Panic! And shots? There’s no stockpile of vaccine for this disease. It is not a mass threat. At summer’s end, what few supplies exist have been diminished. How many people in that town? Five thousand? We don’t have enough vaccine in the entire country to treat a quarter of that amount.”

  “Then perhaps we need a crash program.”

  I heard a groan from the speaker on my laptop. It came from General Wayne Homza, whose bristling visage stared out from the top left box. The general looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. He was undoubtedly envisioning the cost of mass manufacturing a drug instead of spending the money on weapons or troops.

  Dr. Rudolph Gaines sighed. “Phhhhpt! Because of five presumptive positives? Only two companies make the stuff and they’re in Europe. And even if they started a batch, it would be a year before they had any supply for the FDA to check. So let’s come back to Earth, Doctor.”

  “In the meantime, what if more people die?”

  “No need for theatrics,” he said unpleasantly. “I’m not saying ignore your problem. I’m saying this will turn out to be something else. We want to get it right, sir. Of course, I’ll be grateful if General Homza allows you to stay on, you know, to liaise with the locals. Calm them.”

  Homza smiled with his lips only. His eyes wanted me out of there. He radiated force. “Yes, he will assist,” he said. It was like watching a piece of wood talk.

  One by one the faces before me signed off, and other ones grew larger as their space expanded on screen. Gone was the Alaska state epidemiologist, state department of health, a timid political appointee Merlin had called, now grateful to be relieved of responsibility. Gone was the Federal Aviation Administration deputy administrator, who’d listened in about the part concerning quarantining an airplane. Gone was the White House rep, who had been silent the entire time, taking copious notes.

  Homza’s face filled the screen. I flashed to a story I’d heard about him once at a hotel bar, at a conference on biowarfare. The source had been a colonel who’d attended West Point with Homza. The story was that Homza’s father had been a violent drunk who routinely beat his mother, and killed her with a garden rake when Homza was eleven, at school. Previously, the father had been released early from prison after agreeing to participate in a University of Chicago study on domestic-violence causes. The story was that eleven-year-old Homza had been restrained in court, trying to attack a testifying psychologist. “You studied him? You should have shot him,” the boy screamed over and over as guards dragged him from the room.

  Now Homza’s brows drew in. From thousands of miles away, he watched me.

  “You are a troublesome man,” he said.

  “I’m just trying to complete my mission, sir.”

  “If we find proof that you’ve shared security secrets with enviro-agitators, I will prosecute you.”

  “There’s no proof because I didn’t do it.”

  Close up, Homza’s lips were thick, his jaw powerful, a nut cracker, his eyes blunt and deep blue, and I could see the swell of muscle beneath his taut shirt and crisp tie. He’d trained to be a weight lifter, I’d read somewhere. He was legendary at the Pentagon gym.

  “Perhaps, Colonel, you believe that because you will be retiring in a few months that you have more latitude than others to do whatever you want.”

  This was true, actually, but I said, “No, sir.”

  “If you do think that, I suggest you reconsider. You are in until we say you are out. I can and will bury you, Colonel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve checked you out. In the past you’ve had the protection of powerful people. “Then, in front of the president, you asked that a key policy, a necessary policy, be changed. Well, one word about contagious rabies and you go down. We sell a story up there until we know more. You will be our mouthpiece.”

  “Sir, what exactly do you want me to do when the CDC gets here?”

  “I admire loyalty. I reward loyalty.”

  He was gone.

  • • •

  I FELT THE AIR GO OUT OF ME. I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW AND SAW MIKAEL Grandy trudging away from our hut, glancing back. I had not heard the door close. Shocked, I turned. Karen was in the doorway, snow still dusting the shoulders of her parka, stocking hat over her hair. Her beautiful mouth moved, but no sound came out. How much had she heard?

  She said, “Don’t worry. I sent him away before we got inside.”

  And then, in a very quiet voice, “Rabies?”

  I slumped. “Yes. But they won’t believe it yet.”

  She took a step into the room, which seemed smaller suddenly. “Infectious? Is that possible?”

  “We don’t know.”

  She nodded. “You said you wanted them to seal the town, quarantine everyone.”

  “Yes, until we know for sure, because . . .” My mouth snapped shut and we stared at each other in bald understanding. I’d forgotten about her, forgotten, in the urgent moment, that I was talking not only about shutting in myself and strangers with death, but her, too. I felt sick. I’d seen my friends dead, heard the agony in the way they died—the pain, the terror. Then I’d asked . . . no, demanded that my superiors order the woman I loved shut in with a possible killer, intentional or accidental, either way.

  I felt my face go hot, my mouth dry up.

  “Got to take precautions,” she said. She was a scientist. She understood. She meant it. But it wasn’t the point just now. The point was, I’d forgotten her.

  “I know.”

  “Can’t have the thing spread, if you’re right.”

  I could have said, You weren’t here, Karen. I could have said, I planned to tell you, or, There was no time to call. But there had been time. I’d had over an hour to call. She’d been within phone reach all day.

  I just said, “No.”

  “Want some tea? Mikael got a package from his boys at HBO, from Zabar’s,” she said. “Russian tea. New
York sesame bagels, chorizo sausages, and cheese, air-dropped supply.”

  Tea! I suppose that every couple have their trigger words, which, when said, raise the alert level to DEFCON two. My first wife used to say, take a nap when something bothered her. My mother preferred, bake pies. My father opted for, couple of cold ones. I glanced at the thermostat, set at sixty-seven. But the room had gone chillier.

  “Sure,” I said, hoping that what had just happened would have limited consequences. Joe Rush, great at professional problems. There’s nothing like ignoring personal ones, hoping they’ll go away.

  Why do I screw up every relationship?

  The tea tasted odd, metallic, wrong, but I attributed that to the acid surging out of my stomach. The bitter taste went down and came back as harsh bile. She cut up the chorizo. We sat snacking silently on Mikael’s gift. The TV went on—I wanted sound—and an announcer out of Anchorage said something about a dispute in the Bering Strait between Russia and America, the Russians wanting to move the border—which has never been nailed down—to give them more space. “Sources inside the State Department confirmed that the Russians offered a trade, they will back off on the Ukraine if Washington agrees to a small shift in the Arctic.”

  “Everybody wants a bigger piece,” Karen said at length, chewing. So we were both going to ignore it.

  Ignore threats and they come back.

  But it was easy to ignore this particular threat that night because an hour later my phone rang and Merlin told me that a sixth case had shown up at the hospital. It was a child this time, a six-year-old, the son of one of the Cambodian taxi drivers. The boy had been complaining of a headache for two days. Now he was vomiting, running a high fever, and he was losing feeling in his right hand.

  Seven hours later, he died.

  • • •

  EDDIE, RANJAY, AND I SAT IN THE MAYOR’S OFFICE WITH MERLIN, IN BOROUGH Hall, a new comfortable building built with oil tax money. Exhibits—artifacts and photos of Eskimo dances, or bowheads—were displayed on walls or in glass cases inside the bright atrium. I’d been ordered to downplay rabies. I’d been threatened with arrest if I disobeyed. My intestines burned as Ranjay filled his bosses in on the medical situation.

  Ranjay seemed relieved that the CDC believed that our tests had been flawed. He wanted to believe that the rabies was a false alarm. When the mayor asked me if I agreed with the CDC opinion, my words came out in my normal voice, but I was surprised that my throat didn’t cut them off.

  “CDC has a pretty good record,” I said.

  Sengupta nodded, admirably devoid of ego. “If the CDC believes we made an error, that is good enough for me.”

  At least the mayor followed our recommendations to cut down on panic or illness. Schools closed due to flu. Pets that have not been vaccinated to be inoculated at the vets for standard diseases: distemper, animal flu, rabies. Wash your hands more. Cover your mouths when coughing. There is illness in Barrow, the mayor told the North Slope’s eight villages, over the radio that night.

  And we waited.

  Sixteen hours later, two CDC experts got off the morning 737 from Anchorage, looking young and concerned, advising Eddie and I to steer clear of the labs as they worked. They seemed certain before they started that their tests for rabies would turn out negative.

  Another day passed before they knew they were wrong.

  “You seem to have been correct, Colonel,” Dr. Rudolph Gaines told us, stiffly, on the next conference call. “I am now suggesting, one and all, that we recommend to the president that he proclaim Barrow the nation’s first protocol four.”

  ELEVEN

  Thirty-six hundred miles from Barrow, Alaska, the angry man sat in the second-floor study of his luxurious, log-sided country home, on a forested three-thousand-acre mountain property, watching Quonset hut one in Alaska via satellite. It was a crystal-clear view right down to magnified fresh polar bear tracks crossing the base; stars out, new snow reflecting prisms of light between huts. He saw the curving roof beneath which his two operatives sat, their voices encrypted and distorted so that any listener—if they’d managed to break in—would not know if men or women spoke.

  The first voice, even modified, came across as tentative, fearful, tailing into a soft wooooo. “If it wasn’t for Rush, they would have called the first deaths a shooting. They wouldn’t have found rabies. It’s not fair!”

  A fire roared in the big room, smelling of hot, popping resin. The angry man was fortyish, with a cherub’s pudgy cheeks and body, sloped shoulders, and thick chestnut hair. Black eyes. Soft mouth. Soft hands. Red silk robe. The plainest face in the world. Natural camouflage. Because of this mild appearance he’d been underestimated his whole life. Because of his intelligence, he’d used that to his advantage.

  The second voice in his ear was lower, a rumble rising to an opera soprano’s note, earsplitting over the screwed up sound system. “If you would have let me infect him at the beginning, this wouldn’t have happened-d-d-d-d.”

  “It’s not my fault . . . ault . . .” the first voice whined.

  “Nothing ever is.” The second voice remained calm. It was the voice of a professional chewing over a problem. “The quarantine starts in an hour. Whatever we decide, it has to happen now.”

  The angry man curbed his rage. He demanded of his listeners, “You understand what’s at stake?”

  No answer! Had the satellite spun beyond range? The man was almost apoplectic. Had his communication system failed? No . . . no . . . just a delay, a traffic interruption above Earth, where messages whizzed through space; a phone scammer in Mumbai, tricking a retiree in Florida; a Chinese destroyer receiving orders as the ship maneuvered off the Philippines; a diplomat in Tokyo whispering endearments to a lover in Havana.

  The first voice was back. “At stake? Many millions.”

  “Millions? Billions! We’re on a deadline! You made a promise! You assured me!”

  The roaring fire illuminated original oil paintings; American West motif, Remington buffalos, Bierstadt Yosemite, flatboat river men. The desk was Zairian mahogany, the carpet Italian, the rugs from Iran. A wall of leather-bound books featured works on strategy, military, and finance. Beyond open silk curtains, floodlights illuminated a crushed stone driveway, an armored Mercedes, and a private forest of pine and birch, the leaves brittle in October. Down the hall slept the angry man’s twenty-seven-year-old trophy wife . . . He’d heard older, jealous wives of colleagues whisper that term at last night’s cocktail party in the capital, a ninety-minute drive from here.

  Stupid women go dry, lose the urge to have sex at forty and then blame men for getting it elsewhere. Now I understand why Moslem men have five wives.

  The second voice—the professional—said, “He’s with his fiancée now, asleep. We hear their breathing. I know the combination of the lock on their door and—”

  The first voice cut off the second. “Are you crazy? That would focus everything on what he’s saying. And you’d leave tracks in the snow!”

  The angry man tried to ignore electronic interference, earsplitting over the German-made speakers, fucking things were supposed to be the best in the world. Krauts, he thought. They killed my great-grandfather.

  He spat out rapid questions.

  “You said he shares ideas with the fiancée?”

  “Last night he told her what he wants to do next. They both know the idea. He’s figuring it out!”

  “That major, Nakamura, does he know, too?”

  “He’s been out at the campsite for the last day. He’s not aware of what Rush wants to try. And, sir, once the quarantine starts, it will be much harder to get to him. They’ll be bunking soldiers in all the huts.”

  The angry man tried to ignore the hot sensation coursing through him; throat dry, fists clenched, temples throbbing—and he had an idea. “If you can’t reach him, what about her? Is Rush
the kind who would lose focus? Fall apart? Or come at things harder?”

  “He’s crazy about her. That’s for sure.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I’m not a mind reader, sir.”

  “You will stop him or distract him! Do you hear!”

  The angry man had grown up on the streets and learned early; when you have an enemy you hit hard, right away, with all you have. You don’t strategize or negotiate. You don’t whine. You don’t allow a modicum of thought in the foe as to the possibility of equality between you. But he’d permitted himself to start slowly in Barrow—and it had come back to haunt him. So he explained what he wanted now and the professional went quiet. The angry man heard: Weeeee. Then the pro said with some delicacy, negotiating, taking advantage, “Sir, once the quarantine begins, I’m stuck here.”

  “Double.”

  “Stuck with soldiers. No way out.”

  “Triple.”

  “If I get caught?”

  “You’re supposed to be good.”

  “Even the best get caught if you wait too long.”

  The angry man swallowed the insult. His voice softened considerably. This was a tell. Anyone who knew him understood that you did not want his voice to go mild. It meant he’d left the red zone, where he generally resided, and entered a worse one, purple alert, DEFCON one.

  “If you’re caught, I can probably get you out at some point,” he said.

  “Even from military prison?”

  “I said, at some point. But if you feel like you need to refuse, I understand.”

  “I’ll do it,” the professional said quickly, understanding that he had pushed things too far.

  The angry man slammed the phone down, stomped down the hall to his dozing wife. Fucking bitch would sleep through a bomb. Action usually made him feel better. He dragged her awake by her long blond hair. She’d not seen this rough side of him yet and she started screaming, which excited him, so he hit her a couple of times, but not in the face. Hell, she wanted money to shop every day? The art galleries? The vacations? Fine. He’d bought her, so to speak, and he’d get what he wanted now.