Bat out of Hell

by Alan Gold

  “Of course, sir,” she said. “And as a scientist, I know you’ll understand the importance of getting the best people for this job. But I’ll see who’s really good in these fields in non-Western universities and try to enlist them.”

  He smiled. She felt a charge of electricity surging through her body at his world-famous smile, which had been compared by the editor of Paris Match magazine to a thousand-megawatt generator, able to light up a town.

  “You know, Debra, we really should have a reception at the White House when your team is complete. A dinner to honor the men and women who have come forward to accept the challenge. Have you been to the White House?”

  She laughed. “When I was a kid, I did a tour. I even fantasized that I’d be the first female president.”

  He grinned. “I hope you’ll wait until I’m out of office before you run.” He put his hand on her shoulder, the touch of an older brother. She felt ridiculously fragile, as though a puff of Roman wind from the open curtains would blow her over. It was as though she was on her first date. God, but this man was sexy.

  “Would you show me around the White House?” she asked, and suddenly felt herself flush and she knew she’d gone the color of beets. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I just said that. I’m so sorry, Mr. President. It just slipped out. I don’t know what came over me.”

  Nathanial Thomas laughed and squeezed her arm. “I’d be offended if you didn’t let me show you around. I’ll show you the Oval Office and the staterooms, and all the other places that are so famous. I take special people on special tours. And you’re a very special person because we’re all relying on you to keep us safe from harm.”

  Suddenly she felt the press secretary’s presence beside his president. After a whispered conversation between the two, the president said, “You’ll have to excuse me, Debra. I must speak with the prime minister. Now you just contact my personal secretary and arrange that tour when you get back. Make it sooner, rather than later.”

  And he was gone. She watched him walk away. Debra spent the next fifteen minutes totally alone, unable to speak, still in the company of the most powerful and sexiest man she’d ever known.

  3

  ST. STANISLAV’S PRIMARY SCHOOL CRICKLEWOOD, NORTH LONDON

  It was a game the children had played a dozen times before, especially when the teachers were engaged in supervision duties on the other side of the playground. The kids, aged between five and nine, from parentage as diverse as China and Libya, Uganda and Northern Ireland, stood beneath the huge two-hundred-year-old oak tree, and threw stones into the canopy hoping to dislodge one of the dozens of bats that had taken up residence.

  As they threw their stones and gravel upward, shouting with delight as each pellet left their hands, other younger kids who didn’t have the muscular strength to throw that high, sang:

  What are you doing, Mr. Bat

  Hanging upside down?

  Stop your sleeping, Mr. Bat

  You’ll lose your grip

  Your feet will slip

  And then you’ll all fall down

  The bell rang, the children screamed one last time, and scampered off to their classrooms, leaving the bats shivering in fear and trying to regain their sleeping posture.

  The following morning, one of the smallest and youngest of the children who attended St. Stanislav’s, Fergus O’Mara, kissed his mother, walked away from her toward his classroom, and, as he did most mornings, ran his hands along the top of a low wall that separated one playground from another. He didn’t notice the tiny spots of shiny congealed liquid that had dried in the early morning sunshine. Nor did anything prevent him from digging into his school satchel and having a quick bite of the chocolate biscuit his mother had packed for his mid-morning milk break.

  But as the teacher droned on during the day about playground rules and not throwing things into the oak tree, telling the boys that the tree had been their age even before the Victorian age, young Fergus began feeling a bit sick to the stomach.

  Half an hour later, the teacher was surprised when Fergus vomited over his desk and the floor. The lad was helped to the principal’s office and stayed there, feeling worse and worse, until his mother came hurriedly from her work at the local supermarket to take him home.

  The following morning, Fergus, comatose and shivering, was rushed to Cricklewood General Hospital, where he was diagnosed as having all the symptoms of parvovirus B19. But Fergus’s consulting physician told the pathologist who had just delivered the results to him, “This is like a parvovirus on steroids. I’ve never seen symptoms like this before. Normally you’d expect an erythema infectiosum rash on the cheek and a rash on his chest and limbs. Perhaps a low-grade fever. But this kid is as sick as a dog, and yet parvovirus is the only thing that fits all the symptoms. There’s got to be something else in his system that is potentiating the parvovirus, but God only knows what it is.”

  The pathologist shook his head. “I’ve examined his fluids and tissues and I can’t find anything except for parvo. If there is something else in there, something giving the parvovirus balls, it’s not showing up in our test results.”

  The consulting physician nodded gloomily. “Then I’m keeping him under quarantine for a couple of days to see what develops.”

  Fergus died that night. Antipyretic and anticonvulsive injections didn’t help him at all. He suffered a raging fever that even an ice bath couldn’t bring down. When he died, screaming that his head hurt really badly, the attending medical staff was stunned by the look of his body. It seemed as though he’d just been in a ten-round heavyweight boxing match. The kid was black and blue, with huge blotches ranging in color from purple to jet. As his life slipped away, blood oozed from his nose, his mouth, and his eyes. His breath sounded as though he was under water. The physicians and nurses looked on in horror as his body seemed to disintegrate in front of them.

  And the mystified medical staff was even more surprised when four more children from the same school were brought in during the following two days, suffering identical symptoms. It was then that the hospital called in the chief medical officer for London.

  A quarantine area was set up around the school, and all students, administration, teachers, kitchen staff, and cleaners were ordered to be driven by ambulance to a biohazard reception center in Ealing, West London. Blood tests were done, and those found to be carrying the parvovirus were segregated and given massive doses of medicines. Twenty more people died during the following four days.

  Dozens of police and ambulance vehicles raced to the school, their alarms cacophonous in the narrow, restricting streets; their flashing red and blue lights cutting the air like laser beams. It disturbed the small bat colony that had been forced to roost in the old oak tree for the past three years after their traditional roost site had been bulldozed for a new housing development. Now, terrified and in a panic, the bats had risen from their sleep and flew off following the bat colony’s scouts where a new roosting site had been discovered far away. For the first time in a year, the oak tree was suddenly free of bats.

  But nobody, neither teachers nor pupils nor ambulance nor police nor neighbors saw the entire diminished and frightened bat colony leave their oak tree home for the last time. Everybody was too busy trying to deal with the situation on the ground.

  ***

  Britain’s chief medical officer, Professor Lord Soames of Tewkesbury, read, and reread the national emergency safety alert broadcast report that wouldn’t be published or put onto the airwaves without his signature.

  The urgency of the situation in North London was paramount; every minute wasted would almost certainly lead to further catastrophic problems; but to be too hasty could lead to a national panic, the consequences of which would be horrific.

  Yet to delay was unthinkable. Men, women, and children were dying of some hideous new infectious outbreak. Hazmat teams were crawling over the area. There was no traffic in or out of Cricklewood, Kilburn, Golders Green, Neasden, or
West Hampstead. Residents, many of them elderly and in the throes of panic, had been ordered to remain indoors until the source of the infection had been identified. Food was being delivered door to door to residents in the quarantined areas by men in spacesuits, which simply added to the panic. And what increased the level of fear among the residents was the arrival of fleets of ambulances, driven by men wearing breathing apparatus and hazmat suits, carting people off to the hospital. Those neighbors watching out of windows thought that the patients were suffering from the disease, whereas all that was happening was that the elderly, infirm, or sick from other causes, were being taken to someplace safe and isolated for their normal treatments.

  It was a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The prime minister had been on the phone every hour, and the media calls bombarding his office had been unprecedented—not just local media, but papers and broadcasters from all over the world. A hideous infectious outbreak in some Third World famine- and poverty-stricken area was one thing . . . but in central London?

  This made Lord Soames stop and think before he acted, much to the fury of his staff. The infection seemed to be localized to a huge area of North London, but it hadn’t yet spread to other districts of the capital, nor had it shown its horrible head in other towns or cities. So to put out a central infection alert to all doctors and hospitals that a virulent infectious organism, whose transmission procedure was as yet unknown, whose carrier was unknown, whose source was unknown but was 100 percent fatal to anybody infected could be counterproductive. Such an alert would instantly cause regional quarantine procedures to be put into effect with all the fear and trepidation that alone would create. And the disruption to the business and cultural life of the largest city in Britain—for potentially no reason if the contagion was confined to this area in the North.

  Lord Soames’s thoughts were interrupted by a tall grave-looking young man at his office door who said, “Malcolm, we must have that report immediately if we’re to initiate the alert before tonight. Have you decided whether or not to sign it?”

  Years of public medicine tempered his answer. “No, not now. Nothing beyond North London. We’ll review the situation in six hours.”

  The young man shook his head in amazement and left the room. Lord Soames called out, “Get me a hazmat suit. I want to go to Cricklewood and see for myself.”

  His assistant turned in surprise. “But the protocols say that you have to remain in this building because of the . . .”

  “Alistair, I know the protocols as well as you. But you forget that I’ve been in Sierra Leone when there was an outbreak of Ebola and I worked with the frontline people who treated the victims. I know what to look for. Maybe the reason our people haven’t been able to trace the source is that they’re looking in the wrong direction. Now, get me the hazmat equipment and get my driver to bring the car round the front, will you.”

  “Certainly, Malcolm. Police escort?”

  “Absolutely not . . .”

  ***

  It took two days for the rapid response team headed by Debra Hart to arrive in London and assemble in one of the conference rooms of the Department of Health. They came from the United States, Israel, Italy, France, China, Australia, Mexico, and Russia. Other members of her team—those who didn’t deal with frontline issues, but were world-class laboratory scientists—were put on alert to drop everything and anything they were doing, including family holidays, and await the arrival of samples for laboratory analysis.

  Two days had passed since the UK’s chief medical officer, against the specific instructions of the prime minister, had notified the World Health Organization who, as the coordinating body, had then informed the United Nations and had authorized Doctor Hart to pull together her team to travel to England. Doctor Hart had immediately arranged for leading laboratories at Oxford and London universities to make ready all the analyses and other equipment she would require when she had samples to send them. She arranged with the Metropolitan police to have high-speed drivers available to transport the samples by the quickest possible methods—PolAir helicopters if necessary.

  Lord Soames stood as Debra Hart and four of her colleagues entered his office. He’d just endured the most aggressive and unpleasant phone call from the prime minister who’d shouted at him for demeaning his country’s reputation, making it seem as though they weren’t able to look after Britain’s own problems. Soames had shouted back that his responsibilities to the people of England were infinitely more pressing than meeting the prime minister’s concerns about Britain’s medical reputation, and had slammed down the phone. As a statutory officer answerable to Parliament, he couldn’t be fired, but life from now on would be far from pleasant.

  Soames walked around his desk and shook Debra’s hand. “Doctor Hart, what a pleasure to meet with you.”

  She introduced him to the others on her team, and as they sat, she got straight down to business.

  “Okay, Lord Soames, could you bring us up to date on what you’ve done to identify the source since we received your last report yesterday evening.”

  “It’s still a mystery. We’ve had our top people examining virtually everything in and around the school, which was the source of the original outbreak—insect carcasses, food from the canteen, skin, hair and body tissues from everybody, animal dander, urine, feces, soil . . . you name it, we’ve tested for it. We just can’t seem to find the vector or the reservoir,” he said.

  “And have there been any more outbreaks?”

  “We’ve confined it to the staff and pupils at this school and a couple of hundred or so unfortunate men and women who live in the immediate surrounds. And there have been isolated cases in the more distant surrounding streets north of the school. We’ve also had a dozen or so cases in the area of North and North East London, quite a way from the school—but not many. We have no understanding of how the disease could have spread north and in such isolated areas. Unless one of the kids or parents or staff traveled to those houses, we’ll probably never find out because tragically they’ve died so we can’t ask them,” he said, his voice strained and weary from a few snatched hours sleep here and there in the past week.

  One of Debra’s team, a tall, rangy man who’d been introduced as Professor Daniel Todd, a mammalian biologist from Harvard, interrupted and said, “Do you happen to have a topographical map of the spread of the infection?”

  Soames nodded, and his assistant shuffled through a series of boards until he pulled one out and propped it up on the desk.

  Professor Todd stood and walked over to have a closer inspection. The rest remained quiet as Daniel picked up a pencil from the desk and drew some lines joining up dot points between sites of infection breakout.

  He turned and looked at Debra, then at Lord Soames who was studying the lines Daniel had just drawn.

  “That’s a flight path, Lord Soames. The reservoir of your infection flies. It’s either birds or bats. I’ll bet that if you follow the path northwest, you’ll find a food source. Tell me, are there bats in or around the school?”

  Soames looked at his assistant who shrugged his shoulders.

  ***

  President Nathaniel Thomas was in the middle of writing a telling phrase into the speech he was due to deliver the following evening to the Daughters of the American Revolution. He wanted to deal with the way their nation had changed for the better as a result of immigration and tell those attending, who he feared would be far-right matriarchs, that change can be a force for good. But just as he’d defined an interesting philosophical argument that his speechwriter hadn’t thought of, his phone buzzed.

  “Excuse me, Mr. President, the British prime minister is on the phone for you. Will you take his call?”

  Nathaniel frowned. He wasn’t expecting a call from Alistair Blain. He’d last spoken to him a week earlier when he’d first heard of this terrible outbreak, but the man had been quite off-putting, even arrogant. When he was abusive or angry, his Scottish accent became much str
onger, and Nathaniel found him hard to understand. He didn’t think he could put up with another bout of Blain’s high-handed British superiority this morning.

  “Could you see if Prime Minister Blain will talk to Jenny Tan over at State?”

  A moment later, his secretary buzzed through again. “I’m sorry, sir, he insists on talking to you. He said he wasn’t interested in talking to flunkies.”

  Flunkies? Jenny was the most brilliant secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. “Okay, put him through.”

  He waited until the secretaries and personal assistants had finished checking that their various bosses were ready for the call, and the red light on his phone suddenly flashed.

  “Mr. Prime Minister,” he began. “Good to speak with you.”

  “Mr. President, how are you?”

  When pleasantries were over, the prime minister of the United Kingdom came to the point. “Nat, I’m going to be very direct, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way Alistair.”

  “I find it quite objectionable to have this team of yours in my country, taking over from my scientists, telling my people how to fight an infection.”

  So that was what it was all about. Great Britain puffing up her chest—“Rule, Britannia” for the twenty-first century. “Alistair, I’m sorry you think that way. You were a supporter of my move for an international effort to deal with epidemic outbreaks.”

  “Sure, when they were in Third World countries. Africa, Asia, South America. Where they didn’t have the skills or the infrastructure to deal with what could become a pandemic. But this is England, my friend. England! We have the best scientists and medical laboratories in the world. We’re the last country that needs some visiting firemen to put out a blaze in one of our cities. No, Mr. President, call off your dogs. Thank them for their efforts but have them go home and deal with outbreaks in nations that can’t defend themselves. Not England!”