by Alan Gold
Debra knew that she had to center everybody’s thinking back on the report she was delivering. “The issue has arisen because of the very special nature of bats in our biosphere. Bats are unique, as Professor Todd has said, not just because they’re the only mammal that flies but because they’re so genetically close to humans, they enjoy a special environmental and ecological niche. Because they carry so many viruses to which they’ve grown immune over the eons, the moment we start to pressure and stress them with the degradation of their forests and the diminution of their food supplies, we increase exponentially the risk of disease spill from their noses or mouths or urine or feces as they fly over farmlands or populated areas and infect the foodstuffs eaten by the human population.
“As we’ll never find one or more vaccines in time, the only way is either to move human populations from traditional flight paths, which would be ridiculous if we’re talking about the bats in botanical parks in our major cities or to find the endangering populations, and eradicate them.”
“That,” said the president, “is obviously the best course. Except that it’ll pit us right up against the environmentalists. We can’t stop global warming immediately nor change farming habits overnight, and even if we could it might not diminish the viral load in bats’ blood until many generations have been and gone, so I’m afraid that the only course we’ve got is to find dangerous bat colonies and eradicate them, worldwide.”
A voice from the edge of the room caused everybody to turn as Professor Daniel Todd, Debra’s colleague, stood and spoke. “Mr. President, may I? Sir, ladies, and gentlemen, as you know, I’m a bat specialist. I’ve been foretelling what’s now happening for quite a long time. Debra was the first person to take me seriously. My specialty being bats means that I’ve come to some conclusions that I need to bring to your attention. While a handful of bats throughout the world have turned deadly, and while those colonies that are dangerous have to be exterminated, we must understand the place of bats in the scheme of things. Sure, they’re scary to most people, and lots of folk know they’re carrying rabies, but what’s not generally known is that bats are one of the most important natural ways of keeping down the numbers of moths and mosquitoes and flies. Over agricultural land, they prevent billions of insects from damaging fruit and wheat and dozens of other crops. On the wing, a large colony of bats can eat tons and tons of nasty insects every night, meaning that a lot more people would become very sick if it weren’t for the bats. And they’re a significant method by which plants and fruit trees are pollinated.
“What I’m saying, sir, is that you can’t eradicate one species without it having severe repercussions on other species. And we haven’t even looked at the effect of dramatically reducing the bat population. What we’re planning on doing could have severe unintended consequences. We have to model all the contingencies before we start the wholesale slaughter. Thank you, sir,” he said and sat down.
“Your point is well made, Professor Todd, but this won’t be wholesale slaughter; we’re going after specific colonies that carry the dangerous viruses, not the benign colonies who’ve lived in coexistence for millennia.” The president turned to the secretary of agriculture. “Zac, can you put together a task force on how to deal with the unintended consequences of significant reductions in specific bat populations? I’m sure Debra will allow you to co-opt Professor Todd from her team for that purpose.
“Meanwhile, Debra and I will start to put together a working model of how we’re going to deal with dangerous bat populations. I’ll contact each of you in due course, asking for your expert input.”
“Will you announce this working model or keep it secret?” asked the secretary of agriculture.
“I’m going to do this very publicly. We do this openly, transparently, and blatantly. With no apologies. We regret what we have to do, and we’ll do it as humanely as possible to cause the least suffering, but we have to save human lives. If we try to do this thing without telling people, it’ll leak out within minutes and make the environmental movement seem like the good guys. But we will allow no vigilantism. There’ll be no cowboys out there killing bats. I’ll invoke severe penalties for anybody or any group unofficially acting against bat colonies. No, this is the president’s conflict, a humane, contained, and painless confrontation with an animal species that is endangering the human race. Normally we eradicate bacterial, insect, or rodent pests to protect ourselves. This is, perhaps, the first time in recent memory that we’ve been forced to exterminate mammals. We’ll answer the animal liberationists point by point, item by item. And if you think that the American people will side with them and the bats when there’s flying death right above their heads, you’re misjudging the mood of the American people,” said the president.
The director of the FBI asked, “How will you announce it, Mr. President? Television broadcast? Media conference? Over the Internet?”
“The first thing I’m going to do is to call on the secretary-general of the United Nations and give him Debra’s report. Then I’m going to telephone the heads of government of all our major allies. At the same time, our ambassador to the United Nations will brief every other ambassador to every other regional bloc, so by the time I make the announcement at a media conference in the White House, the African, Asian, Middle East, Oceanic, South American, and European groups will all know what we’re planning to do with our bats. Once that’s done, we’ll offer our scientific teams worldwide to every nation, friend or foe, who wants their bat population analyzed to see if they’re carrying deadly viral loads. And we’ll offer to assist with humane eradication.”
“And how will you deal with the animal rights and liberation lobby?” the FBI chief asked.
“I’ll make it very clear in my media statements that if it’s a choice between diseased bats and us, the bats are going to lose every time, and I’ll make it equally clear that healthy bat populations are essential in the ecosystem and are to be left alone. I’ll also make the point that it’s us, we human beings, who’ve caused this problem for the bats, and it’s us that’ll have to clear up our own mess.
“Sure,” said the president, “the liberationists will yelp and holler and curse; they’ll blame humanity and demand that we go back to the lifestyle of pre-industrialized humanity . . . but nobody will be listening because they’ll sound like anarchists and fundamentalists, and they’ll be up against world governments ensuring the safety of their people. No matter what they say, it’ll be too little and too late.”
“Sir, it’s not what they say that worries me . . . it’s what they’ll do when they hear your plans.”
“That, Director, is your problem,” said the president.
13
At the request of the president of the United States of America, Debra remained seated when all others had risen from the crisis meeting and left the Roosevelt Room. They sat at opposite ends of the huge table, and it took some moments for her to stop arranging her papers and to realize that he was just sitting and looking at her. He was smiling.
“Well, that was quite a performance, Debra. You had them eating out of your hand.”
“Except for me breaking into techno-babble at the beginning. I totally forgot that they weren’t scientists but a lay audience. I’m so sorry, Mr. President.”
He smiled. “They may be a lay audience, except for Damien Close, but they’re very well-read and clued up. And don’t underestimate Damien. He’s pretty bright, y’know. He did win the Nobel Prize for chemistry.”
“Sir, in no way was I seeking to denigrate Professor Close, nor any of your cabinet . . .”
Nat Thomas burst out laughing. “Lighten up, Debra. I’m making fun of you. Look, this was a pretty heavy meeting. It’s laid out the whole of the problem for all of us to see, and we now know what we’re dealing with. While your scientific colleagues are working on the cause and cure, you and I have to do some serious work on a strategy of how we’re going to implement this search-and-destroy method. And it might
surprise you, but I’m going to bring in the army chief of staff, General Coles because I’m going to give him the job of working on the fine details of our broad strategy. His people play war games all the time in the Pentagon so they’ll have a way of approaching this and deploying materiel and forces that you and I just wouldn’t understand. That okay with you?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then unless you have a pressing reason to get back to your offices, I’m going to do something for you that I’ve been promising myself I’d do for weeks now.”
She put the papers down, looked along the length of the table, and said, “Sir?”
She felt her heart race. In the past weeks she’d been working eighteen hour days, traveling everywhere, negotiating, cajoling, demanding, and explaining; she’d not allowed herself a single moment of “me” time. Sometimes, she was so busy running from meeting to meeting that she didn’t even have time to put on proper makeup. Now that the pressure of this presentation was over, now that she and the president had set the train in motion, she realized that this was one of the first times since she’d been appointed that she’d had a chance to breathe.
Nathaniel Thomas smiled. He had a devastating smile. With the enormity of the meeting behind her, she again remembered that she wasn’t just in the presence of the president of the United States but was sitting alone in a room with a devastatingly gorgeous man. Tall, tanned, muscular, elegantly graying, and green eyes that made a woman’s heart pace, he could have been a Hollywood matinee idol as easily as he was a Nobel laureate and America’s most popular president since the early days of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And she also remembered how she’d been incapable of intelligent speech when they’d first met and how she’d felt his magnetic power drawing her in as he stood next to her in a palace in Rome. Was this how Monica Lewinsky felt when Bill Clinton stood near her?
Debra hadn’t been romantically involved with a man, any man, in years. She’d accepted that she’d never be married to anybody or anything but her work and knew that she had become one of those women her mother disparaged as “professional spinsters,” but the importance of her work and her reputation in the scientific community was all the relationship she needed. She realized again that she was holding her breath, like an estrogen-saturated teenager.
“I know it seems a lifetime ago, Debra, but I promised you a tour of the White House. I’ve had to put it off a couple of times, but now that we’re going to be working together in here on this strategic plan, I was wondering whether today was an appropriate time for me to show you around?”
“Oh!”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“But don’t you have lots of things to do?” Then she bit the inside of her lip for asking such a stupid question.
“There are lots of good people around here that are quite capable of doing the things that need to be done. I’m not an interventionist president, Debra. I don’t believe in micromanagement. If you put your faith and trust in good people, they ought to be allowed to get on with the job. My predecessors, like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, were micromanagers. I’ve treated my presidency as if running a very large and complex company. I can’t do everything myself, so I’ve gathered around me the very best people I can find, and I’ve limited my activities to decision-making, hand-shaking, back-rubbing, and ass-kicking.”
“Yet you’re working on the details of this strategic plan with me?”
He smiled again and shook his head. “No, Debra. You’re working on the plan, along with General Coles. I’m just giving assent or demanding more.”
“Oh!” Again, she bit her lip and wished she’d stop saying, “oh.”
“I have ten meetings scheduled for today, starting in two hours’ time. I’ll be working through till after seven this evening when I have to dress in black tie and host a banquet here for the prime minister of Greece and assure him of our continued support in his continuing financial struggles. So my day is pretty fraught. But I have a couple of hours free this morning to show you around . . . although from the number of times you’ve visited the White House in the past weeks, I’d say you know the pathway from the portico to the Oval Office pretty well. But there’s a lot more to see, and if we start now, I can give you an informative and personally guided tour. Interested?”
FBI REGIONAL HEADQUARTERS MADISON, WISCONSIN
Inspector Marcus Stone prepared himself for what surely would be one of the most important briefings of his career. The large conference room was full of local agents and a contingent flown in from J. Edgar Hoover Building in DC to help out with the investigation into every microcosm of the life that Stuart Chalmers had led from birth until five minutes ago. He had been given the job of field team leader by Deputy Operations Director Zane Trobe after he and his team had won a bare-knuckle fight between two divisions of the agency, the Counterintelligence Division and Trobe’s Counterterrorism Division. Intelligence had petitioned directly to the FBI Director Dennis Molner, but the director was of the opinion that it wasn’t so much Intelligence as Anti-Terrorism at play, and so the responsibility had ultimately devolved onto the local Bureau chief, and Marcus Stone knew he was ready. But before he entered the room, he had to work out his first couple of sentences for the briefing to gain both attention and respect.
He took a deep breath and walked toward the closed door behind which forty of the most experienced agents of the Bureau were waiting, but before he could open it, his assistant ran up to him and said, “Boss. Before you go in there . . .”
“What?”
“Stuart Chalmers is downstairs. In an interview room off the reception lobby. He’s asking to see you.”
“Here? Chalmers is in the building?”
His assistant nodded. Stone thought quickly and told his assistant to explain to those in the conference room that the briefing would be delayed for half an hour but not to explain why. He paced downstairs, but before he walked into the interview room, he went into the adjacent monitoring room to check that the monitors were waiting ready to activate all the complex video and recording equipment. It gave him a few moments to look at the slight, hunched academic sitting there, lost in thought, as though he’d come in to report a bag snatch. Stone straightened his jacket and waistcoat and prepared to walk in on the suspect, but just before he left the antechamber, Chalmers turned to the one-way mirror, gave a ghost of a smile, and seemed almost to wave his fingers in greeting. It was as if he knew Stone was looking at him. It unbalanced the FBI agent. He’d interviewed hundreds of suspects in his career and knew most of the tricks of their trade, but this guy seemed different—as though he wanted to give the appearance of being a suspect, but in reality he was letting Stone know that he was very much in control.
“Good morning. I’m Agent Stone.”
“And I’m sure you know who I am, Agent Stone. But you’re probably wondering why I’ve come here.”
Stone nodded. He was going to say as little as possible to draw more information from Chalmers.
But Chalmers just looked at him, obviously knowing the silent interrogation technique, and waited. And waited.
Eventually, Stone had to break the impasse and said, “Why are you here?”
“I would guess that either today or tomorrow your local agents, joined by a contingent of people from Washington, would raid my property. My problem, Mr. Stone, is that my land is planted with some very sensitive and precious root and plant stock from endangered species, and if your people trample over my land, they’ll destroy what takes years to cultivate. So I’m here to answer any questions you might have in the hope that you’ll respect my property. Or is that too much to ask?”
Stone found it hard to respond; he was so stunned by the opening gambit of Chalmers’s approach. The forthcoming raid on Chalmers’s property was a closely guarded secret. Was there a leak in his office? Had somebody warned Chalmers of what the FBI was planning? Or did it come from DC?
“And just how do you know that we’re goin
g to be knocking on your door in the near future?”
“Oh, come now. The president of the United States mentioned me by name as a suspect in the terrorist murder of a cabinet secretary. Once an allegation of my involvement was out in the open, it must have necessitated swift action to coordinate the investigation of me and my affairs.
“I assume that it would take a maximum of two days to get all the law enforcement organs into a coordinated operation. Contacts then had to be made between Homeland Security, CIA, Marshal’s Department, FBI, and local police here in Madison. Then there’d be meetings, planning, consulting, and implementation . . . what . . . say another two days. Flying the people out from DC and making sure that all the ground logistics like accommodation, money transfers, sufficient transportation, and such were in order would, I assume, take another day. That brings us to today. So it’s either today or tomorrow. Just as a matter of interest, which is it?”
“I’m not here to discuss operational procedure with you, Professor Chalmers,” he said. In reality, Stone wanted to reach across the table and punch out the little academic’s arrogant lights, but the cameras were rolling, and it would be a career-ending moment of gratification.
“But assuming you’re right, why do you think that an appeal from you to protect your plants would prevent us from raking over every minute of your life and every inch of your property in order to determine whether you’ve been a murderer?”
“Because,” he said leaning across the table and fixing Stone with an uncompromising stare, “I’ve been tipping you guys off for decades about who’s really behind the assaults on America in the name of animal liberation. And you’ve missed every single opening I’ve given you. Every one! Each time I learned that there was going to be an attack, every time a laboratory or a factory farm or a vivisectionist was going to be murdered, I phoned the FBI in Washington or the city where the atrocity was going to be conducted, left an anonymous message, told you who I thought was behind it, and hoped to heavens that you’d have the sense to prevent needless loss of life in the future. But you’ve never been able to put two and two together.”
