by Alan Gold
Debra looked down at the carpet, realizing the naivety of her decision to send Daniel to be on television.
Kia said softly, “I’m afraid that it might be too late to do nothing, Mr. President.”
She explained what had happened in the United Kingdom. The president nodded as he listened. He looked at Debra and was concerned that she was obviously horribly uncomfortable.
Kia continued, “And so, having made that gaffe, I think the only thing to do would be to instruct Debra to remove Professor Daniel Todd from the team. Make him a sacrificial lamb. I think that’s what you should be doing, Mr. President.”
Debra held her breath for a moment and only began to breathe when she heard the president say, “Firstly, Kia, I can’t fire anybody. I can’t tell Debra what to do; only the secretary-general of the United Nations can do that. Secondly, it would be an unwise move. Daniel Todd didn’t tell any lies. I can’t recommend firing somebody for telling the truth. Neither I nor the British prime minister ever said in our media conferences that birds were definitely not the cause of this outbreak. We were very careful about how we addressed this issue. We said that birds almost certainly weren’t the reservoir, but we said that the reservoir would probably turn out to be bats, and we were working hard to prove it. And from what you’ve told me, that’s exactly what Doctor Todd said. Look, this thing will blow over soon. Debra and her team will find the cause. We’ll destroy a couple of colonies of bats; nobody will be too concerned. Situation over.”
Debra looked up at the president and realized that he was expecting her to say something. “Absolutely. Once we find the bats, it’ll take us just hours to prove that the virus is in their blood.”
Kia shrugged and accepted her boss’s decision. He could see she was uncomfortable being contradicted in front of Debra and said softly to the two women, “Ladies, do you know the story about the white swan?”
Both women shook their heads. He continued, “Well, in all of Europe from time immemorial, people knew swans were white. That’s how they were defined. It was an absolute, immutable rule of science that swans were white birds. It was in all the nature books. And then in 1697, a Dutch explorer saw a black swan in Western Australia, and that’s why we’ve had to develop the Law of Falsifiability, which states that a hypothesis can only be scientific if it is refutable. Otherwise, it’s just unscientific. So the immutable rule about white swans had to be rewritten.”
He looked at Kia and said, “Sorry, Kia, but I’m not prepared to ruin the reputation of a man like Daniel Todd because he won’t give me an immutable rule that later turns out to be false. He’s a scientist and he’s told the truth, and it’s our job, not his, to make the American people come to terms with it.”
The president stood, as did the two women. “Kia, I wonder if you could allow me some time alone with Doctor Hart.”
Surprised, Kia nodded and left the room. It took Debra a moment to realize that she was alone with the most powerful man in the world in the world’s most famous office. He was a man who was tall, brilliant, muscular, good-looking, and devastatingly charismatic; he’d been called a once-in-a-century politician, a man who was held in both awe and affection by the American people. When he first came to power, he was called a second Teddy Roosevelt, but now, even after years in the vicinity of the Oval Office, he was known as a Renaissance man, another Kennedy, a moral Clinton; he was a charmer with a serious bite; in debates on television, he used his looks and charisma to seduce his audiences and his brilliance and encyclopedic knowledge to overwhelm his opponents.
He was a Republican because he believed in the freedom of the marketplace to find its own level, but his social policies were akin to Democrats. He had the support of fully 68 percent of the American people, a phenomenal approval rating for a man who’d been this long in the White House. When he’d first taken over the presidency following the incapacity in office of the recently elected president, he’d served the remainder of the four-year term, and, unlike the one-term President Johnson who’d taken over after the assassination of President Kennedy, Thomas had offered himself up for election in his own right and had won overwhelmingly. The Democrats had struggled to find a third-rate politician to run against him because they didn’t want to waste a top class candidate against a certain winner, knowing that the American people would give the hugely popular President Thomas a second term.
“Come over to the window, will you please Debra.”
He led her to the windows at the rear of his desk that looked out at the green magnificence of the White House gardens. There was no sensation of heat or cold from the bullet- and blast-proof, double-thickness windows, which hermetically sealed the president into his office and away from the outside world. There was no smell of blossoms, no wind to gently cool her flushing face, no feeling of being as one with nature. It was as though she was a visitor to a museum, and nature was one of the exhibits. She stood close to him and could feel his warmth. She realized, for the second time in his presence, that she wasn’t breathing.
“Beautiful, isn’t it,” he said.
She nodded. Her voice failed her.
“You know Debra, I never sought this office when I was the vice president. I know that every VP secretly harbors a desire to step out from the president’s shadow and take on the top job, but that never, ever, was my intention. If my president hadn’t shown increasing signs of memory loss through Alzheimer’s within months of being elected, I would have been happy just being a VP. Giving a bit of advice here and there, sitting, and banging my gavel in the senate, opening and closing pony and trap shows, attending weddings and funerals of world leaders. Despite what might be written about me, I don’t have politics flowing in my veins. What I do have is the desire to do some good for the American people, to leave a legacy, and to ensure that the nation is better off financially, culturally, and socially, than when I came into office.”
“Uh huh?” she said. She was mute. What could she say? Was this the opening gambit for him to seduce her? Did he look on her like a Monica Lewinsky?
Uh huh? Did she really just say “uh huh”? What a stupid thing to say. She was mortified, a second time, by the inanity of her response. She was expecting him to put his arm around her. To pull her close to him. To kiss her on her forehead, then on her lips. To lead her onto the couch and make gentle, then passionate love to her. She felt a surge of electric intensity flow to every part of her body.
But why was she thinking like this? It was so far away from her true character. She was behaving like a hormonal teen. It was silly, unworthy. And worse, much worse, it was an insult to a president who had never made even the slightest suggestion of a move toward her sexually, not even the subtlest and most guarded innuendo or the most tangential of seductive comments. Maybe it was wishful thinking on her part. Yes, he was married to a beautiful woman; yes, he had three kids and was a devoted family man; but 60 percent of married men have affairs during their marriage, and it had been so long since she’d had a relationship . . . sex . . . the joy of feeling herself lost in the embrace of a man . . . that if her commander in chief demanded it of her, for the sake of her country, she’d have to consider allowing herself to be seduced by him.
She waited breathlessly for his next move.
“Debra, I wanted to say to you in private that I have a very real fear that this outbreak in the United Kingdom could be a precursor to what might happen in other major population areas. US cities . . . New York, Washington, Chicago. We’ve recently seen tuberculosis reemerge in our population of homeless. We recently had thousands, tens of thousands of our best and brightest citizens dying of HIV/AIDS. With untrammeled international air travel, with our borders being so porous, how far away can these new diseases be from entering our homeland?
“I can’t have that happen on my watch. I simply won’t allow another AIDS kind of epidemic to strike down the very best and brightest of our innocent men, women, and children. If it’s money you need, staff, assistance, all you�
��ve got to do is ask. You know that I can’t say this to you officially, which is why I asked to speak to you in total privacy, but as you know, my background is in science, so I’m probably more able to understand the ramifications of what’s happening than other politicians. I know the kind of dangers that face humanity if these viruses spread. We’ve seen it with the Black Death, with the influenza epidemic after the First World War, and recently with outbreaks of AIDS and the Ebola virus.
“The world was incredibly slow to move on climate change and global warming because politicians were, frankly, unsure, unaware, and probably too scared to admit to the truth. I don’t want this to happen with this latest series of viral outbreaks.
“I wanted to talk to you privately and not to be repeated, that I, as president of the United States, am very well aware of the dangers we face, and of the stresses and strains you’re under. I’ve already instructed the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, your boss, in fact, to begin a top secret research facility based on what you’re doing. It’s a backup to help you with the science and forensics to track down and destroy these viruses.
“Because of the political necessity of ensuring the cooperation of some intransigent Third World dictators, we put you and your team under the control of the United Nations, but Debra, if you want anything . . . anything at all . . . money, help, transport . . . anything . . . you’ve got an open line to me. I’ll facilitate anything you need to ensure the safety of people throughout the world. My secretary will give you my direct number. Only a few people have it. It rings on my personal assistant’s desk. Tell her precisely what you want, and if it’s truly imperative, she’ll be instructed by me to put you straight through, even if you interrupt a meeting. That’s how seriously I view what you’re doing. You’ll report to the secretary-general, Debra, but it’s me, the United States government, who is in largest measure funding you, so talk to me as a friend and mentor first if you need help and advice. Now, is there anything you want?”
She shook her head. If she told him what she really, truly wanted, why her body had suddenly started to ache and throb and what it was currently demanding, she’d probably be kicked out of his office. Debra wanted to pinch herself for utterly inappropriate thoughts, wrong in time, place, and person. But she’d been under so much strain and pressure during these past traumatic couple of weeks and had neither opportunity nor place to find an outlet for relief that her body had taken off on its own, regardless of propriety and occasion.
She wondered whether the death penalty could be invoked for her sexual harassment of the president of the United States.
7
UPSTATE NEW JERSEY
Only a farmer would have known that the number of bats flying over his acreage this year was noticeably smaller than in previous years. And only a farmer who’d been working his land day and night for decades would have realized that the actual numbers of bats swarming from a cave in the New Jersey Highlands just north of Pompton Lakes had shrunk by three-quarters. The dramatic decline from the 1980s to the present day coincided with the apple and pear and stone fruit trees having been plowed into the ground to be replaced by the rich harvest of canola and sunflowers and other oil-bearing plants for which the food companies paid good money—plants that the fruit bats couldn’t eat. For years, in declining numbers, they searched the area for alternative feeding grounds, but the paucity of supply had made the colony wither to a fraction of its original size. Where once there had been a huge family of thousands of bats, today, there were barely a couple hundred.
But it wasn’t just the difficulty of finding new food sources that were causing increasing problems for the large brown bats. What made the bat colony really stressed was the construction of a new tourist center in the heights overlooking Pompton Lakes in the Ramapo Mountain State Forest, adjacent to where the bats slept in caves during the day. The noise of excavators, bulldozers, dynamiting of rock overhangs; seventy construction workers on site from early morning to mid-afternoon and using the mouth of the bats’ cave for shelter during meal breaks to escape the heat of midday; shining flashlights into the bats’ eyes and inviting friends and visitors to peer at the bats hanging upside down and trying to sleep—all had a deleterious effect on the remaining number of bats in the colony.
Fighting and squabbling, tearing of flesh, and death of bats had become a common occurrence in the months since the construction began. Young were no longer born to overtly stressed females, and in the unseasonably hot summer, now that the weather pattern of North America had changed since global warming took hold of the climate, food sources became more and more scarce.
None of this would have been known to Katrina-Joy Elder, a thirty-something school teacher at the Benjamin Franklin Nursery and Primary School, in Newton, upstate New Jersey, who had taken her class to the Wantage County Petting Zoo as she had done every year for the past five years. The toddlers loved it, and it gave Katrina-Joy an opportunity to have a day out of the classroom in the warm summer sun while her little ones were looked after by the petting zoo’s education officer. In preparation for the children’s visit, the animals had been well fed to make them docile. For some, a new bale of hay was cut open and distributed, which the little animals ate greedily. And the piglets had been given specially enriched food pellets in their trough, a trough that lay in the open paddock, which itself lay beneath the flight path of the stressed bats from a cave overlooking Pompton Lakes in the Ramapo Mountain State Forest.
Twenty-five little children, boys and girls aged four and five, were screaming with joy at the face painting, laughing at the bouncing wallabies, hugging the animals close to their bodies, thrilling to the pony rides, and adoring the chance to bottle feed the newborn. And the newborn were in abundance. There were baby bison, ponies, kangaroos, emus, goats, sheep, pigs, ducks, fluffy chickens, and lots more. The children kissed the baby animals, fed them, cuddled them, and named them with their own special names, regardless of the names chosen by the zoo’s staff.
Their day continued with a picnic where, after washing their hands with soap and water, the children sat on rugs and ate sandwiches, fruit, and drinks from their lunch boxes. The day ended when the exhausted children were lined up, counted, checked off the register, and piled back on to their school bus to be deposited an hour and a half later into their school’s parking lot, watched in envy by younger children who would have to wait a year or more before it was their turn. Parents were there to collect them, and they returned to their homes to an excited family who demanded to know what they’d done during the day and to enthuse over the souvenirs that the zoo had given to the children as a memento of their visit.
It was when the education officer was clearing up after the kids’ visit that she noticed one of the piglets was lying on the ground, breathing in a shallow manner, with mucus oozing out of its nose. She immediately rang for the zoo’s vet, who came and carried the piglet to the infirmary. Blood tests were taken, bottled, sealed, and sent to a veterinary laboratory in Hackensack, New Jersey. But the piglet died before the bottles had been delivered. Concerned, the vet ordered that its body be sealed in biohazard material and sent for postmortem investigation to New York University.
While the twenty-five youngsters were bathing and laughing as their mothers and fathers tried to get the face paint off their noses and ears and out of their hair, the body of the piglet was being rushed south to the laboratory that had been warned by the zoo’s veterinary officer. When it arrived at the university, the piglet’s corpse was immediately quarantined and samples of mucus, tongue, muscle, blood, nerve, gut, lung, liver, and other tissues were taken and rushed for analysis. The danger everybody was concerned about was swine flu, which had last reared its head in Fort Dix in 1976. President Ford had ordered the inoculation of the entire US population, and it was estimated that five hundred people had caught Guillain-Barre syndrome from vaccinations and twenty-five people had died as a result before the mass inoculations had been stopped.
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nbsp; Swine flu was the very last thing that the United States needed right now, especially with the panic throughout the world caused by these virus explosions. The professor in charge of the animal health laboratory of the university decided that even before he’d received the results of the tissue analysis, he ought to phone the nation’s chief veterinary officer and alert him to the possibility.
While the phone calls were being made, the first of the twenty-five children from Newton, New Jersey, who would die in agony during that night, awoke from her sleep, clutched her head, and began wailing from the awful pain caused by her severe headache. Small for her age with a low body weight, the little girl, Jessie, had a history of asthma and skin rashes, for which her doctor had prescribed very low continuous doses of pediatric antibiotics. They had repressed her immune system, which caused the new strain of virus she had inhaled from the piglet she’d been cuddling hours earlier to ravage Jessie’s tiny body.
When they heard her screaming in agony, Jessie’s parents rushed into her room, fearing that she’d had too much sun, and gave the child a dose of infant’s analgesic, holding her close, assuring her that she’d feel better in a few minutes, mopping her brow, singing her songs. The little girl lapsed into a coma and the relieved parents, thinking that she’d merely gone back to sleep, removed the blankets, covered Jessie with a single sheet, kissed her tenderly, and turned off her light. Jessie died three hours later of massive organ failure without recovering consciousness while her parents slept next door soundly.
WASHINGTON, DC
About to descend the air bridge which would enable her to board the Boeing 757 to London, Debra Hart was stunned when two burly Secret Service men pushed through the crowd of passengers surrounding her, without any apology, and asked for her identification. Astounded travelers looked at Debra with suspicion as she demanded to know what this was all about.
