The Kennedy Moment

by Peter Adamson

  Camden looked up from his cup, a smile dawning. ‘So that’s how we got ourselves a hole in one.’

  Becket nodded. ‘And it’s why I’m struggling just a little bit to imagine her in the Oval Office right now telling the President of the United States what he should do.’

  Camden tore open a tube of sugar and poured it into his cup. ‘You know they’ve christened her “Manapo”?’

  ‘Manapo?’

  ‘Seems some celebrity magazine nominated her Most Attractive New Arrival on the Potomac.’

  ‘How do you know these things, Camden?’

  ‘Man likes to keep his ear to the ground.’

  Becket smiled and watched Camden stir coffee. The man had no medical background, and there were those who considered him to be a token African-American on the Federal Advisory Committee. Becket knew better. Over the last few years, Camden Hughes had steered the agency through the kind of legal, personnel and admin issues that had left other rapidly expanding federal institutions with reputations in rags.

  Toni Restelle took a seat outside the Oval Office, the leather slip case on the carpet at her feet, and began putting in order what she had absorbed in the last half hour. Inside, the meeting was obviously coming to an end, the casual loudness of it all indicating that it was probably an all-male gathering.

  The girl who had grown up next door to Becket Bradie had come a long way from Vaughan Street, Portland. Armed with an MBA, another Masters in International Studies and a few years on the Christian Science Monitor, but with very little in the way of political background, she had been invited to join the Presidential campaign team after stepping in to rescue the Maine Primary from a potential public-relations disaster. From this foothold she had made herself indispensable both as organizer and increasingly as strategist, gradually becoming one of the Candidate’s closest advisers. Always ahead of the game, able to go against the flow without making too many enemies, and seeming not to need sleep, she had ended up managing the core campaign team, including running the Candidate’s schedule. According to some insiders, she was also responsible for the changes in emphasis and presentation that had helped turn the polls around and secured victory the previous November. There had been others, better qualified and more experienced, who had coveted the office of Chief of Staff, but Toni Restelle was the one the President wanted to have around and in the end that had been all that counted. Now, as the door to the Oval Office opened and she reached for the slip case, she had a clear sequence ready to present. One thing she had learned along the way was that you went to the boss with solutions, not problems.

  ‘Okay, here’s what happens.’

  Toni had gone straight back to her desk, sliding the envelope in its plastic bag into a drawer. The two men heard the fall of a lock as she straightened. ‘An NYPD HazMat team will pick up whatever’s in the locker, using a bomb scare as cover. What I need you to do, Beck, is to get whatever you need up there to take delivery and get it back to a lab.’

  Becket nodded. ‘We can get a bio-containment transport there by tonight.’

  The Chief of Staff came around from the desk and took a seat at the table. ‘Let me have the licence plate. What about the pick-up team, drivers, lab guys? They have to know?’

  Becket shook his head. ‘That’s no problem. Things turn up from time to time – unlabelled ampoules from the back of a freezer in some lab somewhere, or maybe a package marked “anthrax” turns up in a mail room. Stuff happens. The guys know how to bring it in.’

  ‘What about the lab people who do the ID. They have to know what it is?’

  ‘Even then it could just be something that’s been found late in the day in one of the research labs. Some of these places were a bit careless about clearing out the freezers when they were all asked to certify destruction. Like I said, it’s happened before. Just the checking isn’t going to set off any smoke alarms.’

  ‘Okay. But if you get a positive ID, can you make sure only one more person knows what it is?’

  ‘Yes, though, as I’ve said, there’s no real need.’

  ‘Humour me on this one, Beck. How long before we know?’

  ‘Once we get it back to the lab? We’ll know if it’s a virus more or less straight away. Probably another couple of days or so to know if it’s smallpox.’

  The Chief of Staff stood to bring the meeting to an end. ‘I’d like you both to be on standby. No need to stay in DC, but be on the end of a line, and be ready to get yourselves back here, okay?’

  Camden Hughes could not help smiling as they were escorted back to the east entrance and out on to Pennsylvania Avenue.

  32 | Ours not to reason why

  Becket Bradie’s first act on getting back in his office that afternoon, was to despatch a bio-safety vehicle on the seventeen-hundred-mile round trip to a location near Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Working in shifts, the two CDC drivers were under orders to pick up a potentially hazardous substance from an NYPD compound and head straight back to Atlanta. Depending on exactly when the bomb squad were given the order to go in, there might be a delay of a few hours in New Jersey. At best, whatever had been left in the locker at Grand Central would not be in Atlanta until the early hours of Friday morning. This confirmed, Bradie called through the licence plate on Toni Restelle’s private line. Then he put his head round the door and asked his secretary to call his deputy. The next few minutes were spent cancelling his travel plans for the following week. The holiday was already history. He left his desk and sat down to wait in one of the two armchairs overlooking the CDC campus.

  Paul Lewis, he knew, could not long continue to shoulder the workload of principal deputy. After a talk in the middle of January, the two men had agreed that no announcement of Paul’s illness would be made until the spring. Without attracting too much attention, the top end of the organizational chart had been rejigged to ease the burden of some of the committee work, but otherwise things would carry on much as normal until the end of March. More immediately troubling to Becket Bradie was that it felt entirely wrong not to be levelling with a man who held all of his trust and respect.

  When Paul arrived, closing the door behind him and taking the second chair, it was obvious that the illness was beginning to take its toll. His suit jacket was tent-like around the middle, his face was showing signs of becoming gaunt, and there was a brittle brightness in his eyes that pierced Becket Bradie’s heart.

  After a few preliminary inquiries, Becket came to the point. ‘Paul, odd thing to ask, but there’s a lab job coming up tomorrow that I want to ask you to handle yourself.’

  Paul Lewis looked up at him in surprise, prepared to be amused. ‘Sure. If I can remember where the labs are.’

  ‘And I’m afraid you might have to go looking for them at an unsociable hour, like the early hours of Friday morning.’

  The smile left Paul’s face. ‘What’s up, Beck?’

  ‘Can’t give you the whole story. Don’t know the half of it myself. But there’s a possibility that a small quantity of variola has liberated itself from one of the labs that wasn’t properly checked. As we’ve said, national certification was a farce.’

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘It’ll be here late Thursday or in the small hours Friday, all being well. Sorry I can’t level with you on this one, Paul. Orders coming from Washington, which is where I was all day yesterday by the way. Probably turn out to be a lot of fuss over nothing, but anyway all we’re required to do is take delivery and tell them asap if it’s variola.’

  Paul’s face was still registering surprise. ‘Okay, but why not the regular lab guys and why the middle of the night?’

  Becket Bradie raised both hands from the arms of the chair in a gesture that implied Washington moved in mysterious ways. ‘Because apparently it’s come from some unusual source, that’s all I know, and we need an immediate ID without anyone other than you and me knowing about it. They even asked me if I could do the lab work myself, but I’m no virologist and anyway there�
��s no way I could find the lab.’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Obviously we can’t be certain without going to culture.’

  ‘How much will the scope tell you?’

  Paul pushed out his lower lip. ‘Whether variola is in the frame.’

  ‘Okay, and how certain can we be at that point?’

  ‘If it’s negative, a hundred per cent. If it’s not we’ll just have to wait two or three days for the culture.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then we’ll know if it’s an orthopox virus. But if it is, we’ll only be looking at smallpox or a white pox. And at that point you’d have to say that the variola would be favourite.’

  ‘Okay, that’s it. You all right for a late night?’

  ‘Sure, but I’m still thinking why the cloak-and-dagger stuff. It’s not the first time something without a label has turned up in the corner of a freezer in some badly run lab in the wilds of God knows where. Usually turns out to be some lab assistant’s little stash of Friday-night fun.’

  Becket shook his head. ‘Don’t ask. Whole thing’s probably a Level 4 waste of time.’ He raised his hands again from the chair. ‘But we ain’t got the option.’

  Paul stood up to go. ‘No problem, I’ll be here. Got plenty to catch up on.’

  ‘Why don’t you take off home now? Get some rest before the circus hits town.’

  ‘Nah, I’m okay. By the way, if the scope doesn’t rule anything out do we go straight to culture?

  ‘I’m hoping we won’t need to but, yes, get right on to it.’

  ‘You want me to let the biosafety people know?’

  ‘No. And, by the way, if this thing gets past first base we’ll need to get someone from Detrick to take a look at it and maybe someone from NIH as well. You set that up?’

  Paul paused, his hand on the door handle. ‘From Detrick?’

  ‘Yeah. Can you do that?’

  ‘Sure, but they’re going to think something very odd is happening if the CDC calls them in to ID a virus.’

  Becket gave him a ‘my hands are tied’ look. Paul rose, shaking his head. ‘Ours not to reason why.’

  33 | Lounge lizards

  Late on the morning of Thursday, February 12th, Michael Lowell showed his pass at the delegates’ entrance to the United Nations HQ on First Avenue and rode the cantilevered escalator to the mezzanine floor. Turning left in front of the tapestry of the Great Wall, a recent gift from the People’s Republic, he headed for the murmur of a thousand voices coming through the open double doors of the Delegates’ Lounge.

  The vast carpeted area with the view overlooking the East River was packed with UN staffers, ambassadors, diplomats and second and third secretaries from a hundred countries as he slowed his pace to a stroll and made his way into the crowd. Ten years earlier, when he had first joined the UN, he had thrilled to the sight of so many nationalities, languages and cultures gathered under one roof. But he had soon come to think that the really striking thing about a scene like the one before him now was not its diversity but its uniformity: almost all of the three or four hundred people gathered here lived in the same style, read the same newspapers, wore the same kind of clothes, attended the same shows and galleries, talked about the same topics in the same languages, and in many cases sent their children to the same schools. Stephen would doubtless have said that what homogenized these representatives of so many nations was that they were all members of the same class. The irritating thing about Stephen, as Toby had sometimes remarked, was that he wasn’t always wrong.

  Under normal circumstances the Delegates Lounge would have been the last place Michael would have chosen to spend his lunch time. But the place was well known as a swamp of gossip and rumour and, steeling himself, he began to make progress towards the bar, stopping here and there to exchange a few words with colleagues or acquaintances, mostly those he had met at inter-agency meetings or on one of the joint ventures that are a feature of life in the specialized agencies. More than once he was stopped by a complete stranger, of the species known as lounge lizards, whose main area of professional expertise lay in knowing not only everyone’s name but exactly where he or she stood in the hierarchy.

  He never reached the bar, but then he had never intended to. What he had reached was the conclusion that no hint of what had happened in Sutton Place the previous evening had been leaked. After less than an hour, he was heading back up First Avenue, satisfied that Camden Hughes had made the right call.

  34 | To satisfy our masters

  Thursday, February 12th, 1981 was an unremarkable day in the offices of the New York Times. Recently installed chief medical correspondent Tom Keeley had spent the morning looking into rumours about a virus that appeared to be circulating among the gay community up on Fire Island. Picking up the threads again after lunch, he was interrupted by a call from the news desk: someone had apparently broken a record by climbing all one thousand five hundred and fifty-seven steps of the Empire State building in eleven minutes; could he quickly pull together a five-hundred-word sidebar on the risks of stroke and cardiac failure associated with sudden, violent exercise?

  By the time the piece was finished and checked, it had been too late to do much else and he had decided to call it a day. Walking the few blocks to Grand Central, his attention was drawn to a wall of flashing blue lights on the opposite side of Bryant Park. At 42nd Street he saw that the area was being sealed off by police barriers and incident tape stretching uptown as far as The Roosevelt. On the corner of Madison he stopped for a word with an NYPD officer staffing one of the barricades; a bomb scare had shut down Grand Central Terminal and half a dozen blocks of Midtown Manhattan. He wondered whether to repair to a bar and wait the incident out but, having spent the afternoon writing about the benefits of moderate exercise, he decided instead to walk to his brother’s place on the Upper East Side, thinking that he might relieve him of his car keys until the following morning.

  Reaching the apartment in time to catch the seven o’clock CBS news, he learned that an NYPD team had recovered a suspected bomb from a luggage locker in the lower concourse of Grand Central and that on examination the device had been found to be harmless. The main focus of the bulletin was on the disruption to commuters who had piled into buses and cabs, leaving thousands more hanging around Madison and Lexington Avenues hoping that the terminal might reopen in time for them to get home while there was something left of the evening. By the end of the week the story had died down; just another crazy moment in the life of a crazy city.

  At seven o’clock on the evening of Thursday, February 12th, an unmarked van left a razor-wire compound in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, to begin the eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile return drive south, staying with I81 deep into Virginia then picking up I85 for the final stretch to arrive in the early hours of Friday morning at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control near the Druid Hills Golf Club in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.

  A little under an hour and a half later, Deputy Director Paul Lewis was in Becket Bradie’s office informing him that a DVE under an electron microscope had identified the substance brought in from New Jersey in the middle of the night as an orthopox virus. Variola was therefore a distinct possibility, and culturing had begun.

  Becket absorbed the news and indicated the two chairs by the window. Nothing else was said until they were both seated and coffee had been poured. ‘So, what are we looking at? Two more days?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe three.’

  ‘And then it’s a hundred per cent?’

  ‘Almost. There’ll still be a remote possibility of a white pox.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be just as bad?’

  Paul Lewis shook his head. ‘Nasty piece of work, but not good at getting itself from one body to another.’

  The two men sat in silence for a few seconds, looking out at the grey skies and the lightly drifting snow. On the parkway below hundreds of CDC staffers were arriving for the day, the double line of cars stretching back from the checkpoint t
o the Clifton Road.

  Becket finally stirred himself. ‘Sorry to have you go through the motions with this, Paul, but when you’re ready we should get someone down from Detrick to look at it. Bethesda as well, just to satisfy our masters.’

  Paul Lewis raised his eyebrows in exaggerated forbearance. ‘Okay, I’ll set it up.’

  ‘Good, now go get some sleep.’

  As soon as the door had closed, Becket Bradie reached for the phone.

  The following Monday morning, NYT city editor Bob Delius stopped by Tom Keeley’s office to mention that there might have been something strange about the bomb scare that had shut down Grand Central on the previous Thursday. One of his beat reporters was married to someone whose brother had been on duty with the NYPD HazMat team that afternoon, and from this source word had filtered back that the device retrieved from Grand Central had been driven to a compound in New Jersey where, rather than being detonated, it had been transferred to an unmarked vehicle whose licence plates carried the peach symbol of the State of Georgia. With an eye for detail that would have done a reporter credit, the officer had also noticed that the words embossed under the licence number had read ‘Dekalb County’.

  ‘Mean anything?’ Delius remained in the doorway, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Spent the last five years there.’

  ‘Thought so. Think you could make a couple of calls?’

  That afternoon, Tom Keeley called three former colleagues in the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control in Dekalb County, Atlanta. All were keen to hear about how the new job was going. Eventually, he had worked the conversations around to the incident at Grand Central and the unmarked van with the Dekalb County plates. The first two calls drew a complete blank. The third, a notorious aficionado of agency gossip, produced enough rumour to fill an edition of the staff news. The only item that interested Tom Keeley concerned an unconfirmed report that one of the CDC’s bio-safety vehicles had made an unlogged overnight trip on the previous Thursday, plus a suggestion that something strange had been going on in the early hours of Friday morning when the lights had apparently burned most of the night in the bio-containment labs and the Deputy Director’s car had remained in the parking lot all night. He also learned that the CDC had begun to take seriously the idea that an unrecognized virus of some kind appeared to be targeting the gay community, though the investigation was being focused not on New York’s Fire Island but on San Francisco’s Castro Street.