“It’s just three hours away,” Patel pointed out.
“Yes, that is fortunate,” the Ambassador agreed. “I can’t say for certain, but given the urgency of the situation, the Secretary of State might be able to get here in the morning.”
“Yes, that would be perfect, if you can arrange it,” Patel said.
“This is her top priority,” the Ambassador assured him. The details for the meeting were fixed. The Ambassador immediately phoned the Secretary of State, who was attending a banquet hosted by the Royal Family. The paperwork for the flight to Delhi had already been prepared for this contingency; a pilot and flight crew were standing ready. The Secretary excused herself from the banquet, which had gone from tedious to excruciating over the course of the evening. And so, less than two hours after the Communications Director had issued the press release announcing a “scientific breakthrough” with regard to Capellaviridae, the Secretary of State and the Strategist were on an Air Force jet bound for India.
Upon landing in India, the Secretary of State found herself with a curious problem: she had no entourage. The American Secretary of State does not travel alone; no one on the Indian side would believe that she had been in Bahrain for meetings without a large complement of aides. The fact that she was traveling with the President’s top strategist and pollster would raise even more questions. The Indian Prime Minister was vain and self-interested, but he was no fool; if word leaked that the Secretary of State had been loitering in Bahrain without all the usual hangers-on, he would suspect a scheme. (Political schemers are, of course, most adept at detecting scheming by others.) The Ambassador solved this problem by “loaning” the Secretary of State eight embassy staff members, all with the requisite security clearance. “Follow her around, look obsequious, and don’t say anything to anyone,” he instructed them. Those eight “staffers” can now claim to be a footnote to one of the most famous negotiations in modern diplomatic history—as fake lackeys.
The Secretary of State was scheduled to meet with the Prime Minister at ten in the morning Delhi time. The Strategist would not attend the meeting; even his presence in India was secret for the reasons I alluded to above. Over breakfast, he coached the Secretary on strategy for dealing with the Prime Minister. “I’ve dealt with him on many occasions,” the Secretary said, peeved by the suggestion that the Strategist’s dark arts somehow trumped her deep knowledge of foreign affairs and diplomacy.
“You need to downplay this breakthrough on the virus,” he continued, ignoring—or, more likely, oblivious to—the Secretary’s vague hostility to his briefing.
“That’s the only leverage we have,” she said.
“No, no, no,” the Strategist insisted. “No.” He paused, like a professor who realized his student had not done the reading. “Look, the PM is a guy who’s always worried he’s getting played, because that’s what he’s always doing to other people. He’s always got an angle, so he assumes everyone else does, too.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“If you walk into the room and declare that American scientists have figured out Capellaviridae, he’s not going to believe you. If you tell him that we probably won’t need extra Dormigen, he’s going to ask why the hell you are sitting in New Delhi asking for it, right?”
The Strategist had captured the Secretary’s attention, if only by the convoluted nature of what he was arguing. And he had been right so far. The California Pizza Kitchen Summit was brilliantly choreographed, she had to admit. (Upon hearing the recap, the Strategist had yelled, “Mango fucking ice cream! I love it!”) The Secretary asked, “Our only leverage here is that we may develop some kind of vaccine in the eleventh hour—and I’m supposed to downplay that possibility?”
“Play possum,” the Strategist instructed her. “Tell him you really don’t think there’s time to develop a vaccine. Scientists are working on it around the clock, but they’re pessimistic . . . blah, blah, blah. That kind of thing.”
“Okay,” the Secretary said, still not sure where the strategy was headed.
“This is a guy who’s always wondering if he’s paranoid enough. If you tell him we’re on the brink of developing a vaccine, he’ll know you’re bluffing. But if you downplay that possibility, then he’s going to worry about the opposite: ‘Oh, shit, what if they pull off the vaccine right as I’m about to ride my white horse down Fifth Avenue?’ ”
“You really think he’s that callow?” the Secretary asked.
“What’s so callow about that? We all want to be the hero. We’ve set him up to think there’s a huge political payoff—which, by the way, there may well be. Just because we made up the poll numbers—”
“Stop,” the Secretary said sharply. “I don’t want to hear anything about that.”
“Anyway, I think he’s like anyone else. He doesn’t want a lot of people to die unnecessarily in the U.S., but if someone is going to prevent that, he wants it to be him.”
“You think this is going to work?” the Secretary of State asked.
“I have no idea, but I do know that if you’re holding a pair of twos, you don’t try and persuade people around the table that you’ve got four aces. You try to make them think that you’re trying to make them think that you have a pair of twos.”
“I don’t play poker.”
“Yes, that’s apparent.”
They were holding their discussion in a small, secure conference room at the U.S. Embassy (a curious building with offices arrayed around a large indoor fountain and pool that had allegedly inspired Jackie Kennedy to hire the same architect to design the Kennedy Center in Washington). The U.S. Ambassador knocked and then entered. “Your meeting has been pushed back to eleven,” he told the Secretary. “There was some shooting across the border in Kashmir and the PM is dealing with that.”
“Anything serious?” the Secretary asked.
“No, just the usual,” the Ambassador assured her.
The Secretary of State used the time to check in with the Chief of Staff, who pointed out a logistical reality that had not been top-of-mind. The U.S. was now, by our most recent estimate, three days from the point at which the existing Dormigen supply would have to be rationed. “Maybe a little sooner,” the Chief of Staff warned. “Doctors haven’t been as strict with Dormigen prescriptions as we had hoped.” She walked through the realities of the globe: Delhi was an eighteen-hour flight from New York. It would take additional time to distribute Dormigen across the U.S., particularly to rural areas. The Chief of Staff connected the dots for them: “If the Indian Prime Minister is going to save the day, that Dormigen is going to have to be on a plane sooner rather than later.”
79.
IN WASHINGTON, THE NIH SCIENTISTS WERE HOPING TO REPLICATE the success of the Manhattan Project in a fraction of the time, albeit with the benefit of the Internet. The technical details of the most recent Capellaviridae breakthrough—the difference in the protein structure between the virulent and indolent viruses—were posted publicly with an invitation for teams of scientists anywhere in the world to explore the crucial questions: What caused the difference in the two forms of the virus? And how might the virulent form of the virus be rendered indolent? The hope was that “parallel science” might replicate the success of parallel computing, in which millions of personal computers linked together by the Internet had proved more powerful than even the largest supercomputer. The Scopes Foundation, a previously obscure philanthropy, offered a $1 million prize for a definitive answer to either Capellaviridae question, though the prize was quickly canceled at the behest of the Acting HHS Secretary, who feared that it would promote secrecy at a time when “massive openness” offered the only hope of a breakthrough in the little time available.
One bottleneck to this massive scientific effort was bizarrely low-tech: access to dust mites. The North American dust mite was not endemic to most of Europe, Asia, or South America (as the name would suggest). Even in the U.S., there was no ready supplier of dust mites for laboratory
work as there was for mice or rats. A cottage industry grew up almost immediately, with the people who had been previously afflicted by the small, itchy bites suddenly able to cash in on the nuisance. (Despite the very clear description of the North American dust mite on the NIH website, eager entrepreneurs showed up at regional laboratories bearing everything from red ants to cockroaches.) The Midwest turned out to be the place where dust mites could be gathered most easily for research purposes. As a result, we leaned heavily on teams at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and several of the other Midwest universities.
We set up a “war room” in the NIH headquarters to be the central repository for the myriad decentralized research efforts. Almost immediately we realized that we were lacking even the most basic tools for sharing the information that was being generated. The normal scientific process involves peer review, publication in journals, and presentations at scientific conferences—all things that take months or years. Now we had hours. “We need a place where everyone working on pieces of this challenge can post their progress,” I explained to the Director. The NIH had internal sites where we posted this kind of information, but there was no way to grant security clearance to outsiders in a short amount of time (nor did we necessarily want teams of foreign scientists to have access to these sites).
“How much security do we need?” she asked.
“Not much,” I figured. “We don’t want anyone without access posting a lot of nonsense. Other than that, we just need a place to gather a lot of information.” Even as I spoke, I was thinking of an easy solution, but it seemed too silly to mention.
“I’m sure somebody from the NSA can set something up for us,” the Director suggested. “Or maybe we should call one of the big software companies.”
“It will take three hours just to get the right person on the phone,” I said. “Look, I think all we need here is a big Google Doc. We can invite people to join.”
The Director was scrolling through messages on her phone, trying to manage other problems as she dealt with mine. My suggestion caused her to stop and look at me. “A Google Doc?” she asked incredulously. “That’s what my daughter uses for eighth-grade projects.”
At that moment, like so many other moments during the Outbreak, I was tempted to blurt out the obvious: “If you’ve got a better idea . . .” In fact, there may still be a commercial market for some product in this spirit—maybe an iPhone app with an elegant-sounding British voice that says, “If you’ve got a better idea . . .” at the push of a button—because if I learned anything during this ordeal, it is that the world is full of people who are very good at criticizing any proposed course of action and far less skilled at offering practical alternatives. To her credit, the NIH Director was not normally a naysayer, and she came around quickly to my suggestion once she focused exclusively on our conversation. “Really?” she asked. “Do you think that would work?”
“Why not?” I said. The Director gave a small shrug of approval. With that, the world’s most intensive scientific effort since the Manhattan Project was launched on the same platform that the NIH Director’s daughter was using to collaborate with three classmates on their U.S. Constitution project. We posted our plan on the NIH website and invited researchers to request access to the document. The timing was not good, as it was now nearly midnight on the East Coast. I worried that we would lose precious time since few scientists would pick up the news until morning. Still, we granted access to the document to thirty-one researchers in the first half hour; by one-thirty a.m., there were one hundred and twelve: biologists, physicians, biochemists, epidemiologists, virologists, evolutionary biologists. Giscard became the self-appointed master of the document, like a disc jockey managing the flow of information. I must admit that he was really, really good at it. The flow of data, questions, and theories was overwhelming. Giscard stood in the middle of this surging river of information, constantly directing the effort back to the questions that mattered: Why did the indolent form of the virus have a different protein structure than the virulent form? How did it get that way? And, of course, the holy grail of this whole endeavor: How could we render the virulent form of the virus harmless in the absence of Dormigen?
Almost immediately, we had our first breakthrough. A team from Rockefeller University in New York explained how the benign form of the virus could lose a protein, rendering it virulent. The long, scientific explanation for that process (which they would subsequently publish) involves changes that take place in a cell as it replicates (divides); namely, that parts of the cell break down after repeated replication. (This is the reason living creatures grow old and die; their cells degrade as they divide over time.) The shorter, more accessible answer to how the benign form of the virus could lose a protein is comically simple: it eventually falls off, “like a button on some pants that go through the washing machine over and over,” as Giscard would explain to his social media followers.
There was euphoria in our war room as we celebrated this discovery—and the speed with which it happened. We were painfully aware of how little time we had left. The Army had provided us with a small logistical team that was offering guidance on everything from how long it would take to mass-produce a new vaccine (long) to what would be the best way to distribute such a vaccine around the country (UPS and FedEx). At every turn, the Army logistics experts told us things would take longer than we expected. Still, it was the middle of the night and we had just unlocked one of the key mysteries of Capellaviridae, which would in turn fuel insights by the other teams.
“Beautiful work, everyone,” Giscard exclaimed to the room. I admired his confidence and extroversion. We are going to figure this thing out, I thought.
It was right about then that the French film crew arrived. I heard the NIH Director’s voice before I knew what was happening. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she yelled from somewhere outside the war room. The film crew was waiting down in the lobby: two camera operators, a producer, and a technician, all from a famous French news program.
Giscard, alerted to their arrival, stood up in the war room and said loudly, “We are in history!” A film crew was the last thing we needed in our cramped, hot, frenetic war room. Giscard had invited them, of course, with no approval from anyone. As obnoxious as that was, it was becoming increasingly apparent that we were participating in something historic. The next major discovery came around three in the morning, just after the start of business in Europe. A team from the Munich Institute for Tropical Diseases confirmed that Capellaviridae had indeed evolved from the influenza virus. Using DNA analysis, they discerned that Capellaviridae was a near-exact match for a flu virus that had infected Native Americans roughly nine thousand years ago. The German team found one other interesting thing: the benign form of Capellaviridae resembled a flu virus that had been neutralized by human antibodies. Less than an hour later, a team of evolutionary biologists offered an elegant explanation: The North American dust mite transmitted the flu virus to its ancient human hosts along with antibodies to neutralize it. “The North American dust mite evolved into the earliest known flu shot, thus bestowing an evolutionary advantage on the human populations where it was endemic,” the lead Stanford scientist wrote on our Google Doc.
We were getting very close to the answer for one of Professor Huke’s final exams, and we could feel the time slipping away. As we were celebrating our wiki science project, the Chief of Staff requested a moment alone with the President. “The doctors are going to bring Cecelia Dodds out of a coma,” she informed him.
“That’s great—”
“No,” she said gently. “They don’t think she will make it, and this will give her some time with her family.”
“Thank you for letting me know.”
80.
THE MEETING BETWEEN THE SECRETARY OF STATE AND THE Indian Prime Minister kept getting pushed back, first to eleven-fifteen a.m. Delhi time and then eleven-thirty. Just as the Secretary of State and her entourage were prepa
ring to leave the American Embassy for the Parliament building, the Secretary of State was summoned to a secure conference room to take a call. It was the Secretary of Defense, who had been consumed with the Saudi hostage situation, but was now insistent on speaking to the Secretary of State before her meeting with the Indian Prime Minister. The two cabinet members had a prickly relationship in the best of circumstances. The Secretary of State was still angry at having been left out of the China Dormigen discussions, something for which she blamed the Secretary of Defense (unfairly, I would argue). In any event, she did not welcome his reappearance in what was clearly a diplomatic process. “We think the Indians are going to ask for the F-80,” the Secretary of Defense said without any prefatory small talk.
“And why do we think that?” the Secretary of State asked coldly.
“That’s what sources are telling us,” he replied vaguely. The F-80 was America’s most strategically advanced fighter jet. The U.S. government had not offered to sell the jet to any other countries save for the Israelis, and even then some of the most important technology had been removed. “It can’t happen,” the Secretary of Defense said emphatically.
“The Indians are an important ally,” the Secretary of State answered. “Maybe we offer to share some of the technology down the road.”
“No,” the Secretary of Defense said. “It will destabilize the entire region. The Pakistanis will go nuts.” His voice was rising. “There can be no mention of the F-80—none.”
The Secretary of State knew he was right but resented the lecture anyway. “How good is your intelligence?” she asked.
“The intelligence is good,” the Secretary of Defense answered. “We know the Indian generals want the F-80. What we don’t know is how the PM feels about it. We don’t know if he cares enough to make it a negotiating point.”
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