The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  The evening temperature was a gift from the gods. It lingered no lower than an unseasonably mild mid-sixties, which would be a pleasant June evening in Colorado. We caught the last of the sunset and toasted it and the project’s success with a local microbrew.

  Nebraska Beef Packing Company may have been exporting beef to the entire world, but I discovered a secret that night: they kept the best for themselves. I had never, in my entire life, had a steak so tender and flavorful. Who needed a knife? Or even a fork. It nearly fell into luscious, edible pieces with just a glance. I forgave the iceberg lettuce salad and canned corn. Who cared?

  The amazing steak, the heart-stopping sunset, the unpretentiousness of a house built and decorated decades ago—and, okay, more microbrews than I drink in a week—left me careless in my talk. I should have planned better.

  As the last of the sunset faded into purples and blacks, Marcia Wells, the sweet, matronly purchasing lead, and I found ourselves out on the deck sometime after the cheesecake but before the cognac.

  Those Nebraskans had a knack for drinking.

  Craig, her husband, who was losing his battle with a creeping middle-age paunch, joined us while we were still comparing project war stories. I remembered meeting him earlier at some other celebratory dinner and liking his straightforward style. Craig had brought Marcia’s jacket out although the evening still held enough of the day’s heat that none of us wanted one yet. He waited patiently until it seemed as though we didn’t need to talk about data validation or test scripts one more time before he steered us in another direction.

  “Maggie, so how are things in Colorado?”

  There were a hundred ways to answer that question, but I went with the least complicated. “Good. I miss being there.”

  “Pretty place, huh?”

  “It is. A different pretty than this, but still beautiful.” Most Coloradoans can be so egotistical about the state. I wanted them to know I understood every land had its splendor. “I’ve lived there forever. Have you been to Colorado?”

  Craig Wells nodded his head. “Mostly up in the Summit County area to ski. Isn’t Colorado Springs close to where that first smallpox outbreak was?”

  Ah, the crux of the conversation. We’d arrived quickly.

  I nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say.

  Craig waited, too. Marcia had less patience. “Didn’t all that make you nervous?”

  If she only knew.

  “It did,” I said. I realized I shouldn’t have had that last beer, or perhaps even the one before it. My filters were gone, and we were headed into dangerous territory.

  “Have you been vaccinated?” Craig asked.

  I nodded again. I’d forgotten about it for the last three hours or so. The mention of it made my arm tingle slightly. “Have you?”

  Craig shook his head. He rested his muscular arms on the deck rail. Maybe twenty years earlier when the three of us had been in high school, he would have been a handsome boy, a football star. “I’ve got a client right now who refused the vaccine. He’s a doctor, so it complicates things.”

  I’d forgotten he was an attorney. I perked up and my head cleared a tiny bit. “So what’s happening with him?”

  “We’re still in the middle of it, so I can’t say much, but it’s been interesting to see who’s coming out of the woodwork on the case. The Feds swooped in from the beginning.”

  “What?”

  He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. “Small town doctor? Rural Nebraska? Not a likely terrorist for five hundred miles. Someone needs to prove a point.” He took a long swallow of beer.

  My head swirled with the information. I wondered if he’d surfed Eddy’s site. Give it twenty-four hours, and he’d see a reference to this case on it.

  “The vaccine is a real invasion of privacy, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It is. Without question.”

  “But you went ahead with it anyway?”

  “I did,” I said. “I don’t know if you can comprehend the panic I felt before then. At the time, it seemed like a good solution.”

  “Funny how easy it is to lead sheep to the slaughter.”

  “Craig!” Marcia sounded mortified that he’d insulted me, but it’s only an insult if it’s not true.

  “It’s okay, Marcia. I’ve been sorry ever since.”

  The stars flickered into the night sky. Even with only the quarter moon, I think I could have read a book by the light. We all stayed quiet while the night came on. It impressed me that fourteen thousand nights of emerging stars hadn’t jaded Marcia and Craig. Maybe I could live in Nebraska someday.

  “What’s at stake for your client?”

  Craig paused before answering. Maybe he was double-checking his own beer intake and downed filters. But he finally answered, “Could be a lot. Worst-case scenario he could lose his license. Believe it or not, they’re hinting at prison time.”

  “For not getting a vaccine?” Even given every conversation I’d had with Eddy, I could hardly believe this one.

  “I know. When I first took on the case, I thought it would be pretty simple. But he’s a healthcare worker and has the potential to infect others. You can’t send your kindergartner off without a measles shot. Turns out you can’t practice medicine without a smallpox vaccination, even if you don’t think this is a real epidemic.” He casually glanced around at the crowd on the deck and then looked back at me. “Or even if you don’t think the vaccine is really a vaccine.”

  “Craig.” Marcia’s voice was a mix of embarrassment and wistfulness.

  I sighed. “It’s okay, Marcia. I guess I have my questions, too.” My moment of understatement. “You clearly have doubts. What’s your research telling you?”

  Craig finally said, “It’s a ruse. The whole epidemic isn’t real.”

  “Really?” My own heart pounded in my ears. “Then what do you think these smallpox reports really are? What’s the purpose?”

  “It’s to get us to do something. That’s what this kind of stuff is always about.”

  Marcia sighed softly. It looked like she was trying to catch Craig’s eye. She gave a tiny headshake. But we were in too deep. Craig was looking at me, not her, so he missed it. Maybe he’d seen enough tiny headshakes over the years that he no longer paid any attention.

  “This kind of stuff?”

  “Remember the scare in the late eighties about the FDA finding cyanide in the grapes from Chile? You know about that one?”

  I did. This was a favorite conspiracy theory of Eddy’s. “They made grocery stores dump all their Chilean grapes and stopped imports. All because someone had called the US embassy in Santiago and claimed they’d pricked a couple of grapes with cyanide.”

  “Exactly. The US government stopped imports on thousands of tons of grapes. Two grapes out of three thousand tons? You think that was truly about consumer safety?”

  I shook my head. Even without Eddy’s paranoia tendencies, I had that one figured out. “It was political. The US wanted Chile to do something and flexed its muscle just to make sure Chile did it.”

  “No kidding. The mad cow scare is the same thing. You think because they ‘find’ one cow with mad cow disease that people are going to stop eating beef? They could stop the imports from Canada, which probably isn’t as straightforward as it looks either. They certainly couldn’t shut down the domestic beef industry. But if the media hypes it enough, you can get them to eat a whole lot less. You think that single cow or even a thousand sick cows would kill as many people as the air pollution the government allows companies to spew out every single day?” Craig snorted softly and shook his head. “The government wanted to send a message to the meat industry.”

  Eddy loved that conspiracy theory, too, so I knew it well. “So what was the government’s message?” That was the missing part to Eddy’s theory.

  Marcia and Craig looked at each other. She’d stayed silent up till now, although her misery was clearly growing. She couldn’t have held her arms
tighter across her chest. Craig nudged her with his elbow. “Marsh, tell her what came out of that. It’s not like it’s any kind of a secret around town.”

  She looked around the deck at the other pockets of people. Most of them had beers in hand and were growing more boisterous in the still-warm evening. We, on the other hand, had moved in closer and dropped our voices. Marcia was shaking ever so slightly, but it wasn’t from the temperature. She still had the jacket draped over her shoulders that Craig had brought her.

  “Tell her what the concessions were, Marsh. The local paper reported heavily on it, but somehow it never got onto the national news radar.”

  Marcia sighed again. “The meat industry agreed to incorporate tracking devices into every meat package within two years.”

  “You mean like bar coding?” I didn’t get it. For all the drama, it didn’t sound all that ominous. “Don’t companies already track products by lot, date, regions, and all that?”

  “Sure. And we think that’s sufficient. If, God forbid, E. coli shows up in a hamburger, the package will tell us where the hamburger was ground, what cow it came out of, and where the other hamburger shipments went to. The consumer checks to see that their hamburger matches or doesn’t match that description. If it does, they bring it back and the store gives them a new one or a refund, which we pay for. Or the consumer can just cook the hamburger till it’s well done and not worry about it at all.”

  “But the government wanted more for some reason,” Craig said. She wasn’t telling the story fast enough.

  Marcia nodded. Her eyes were all over the deck but not on us. “They want us to truly track by individual package.”

  “But how is that any better?” I still didn’t get it.

  “How old is your refrigerator?” Craig asked.

  It was a non sequitur. My face must have showed it, but I answered anyway. “I don’t know. We’ve lived in our house for twelve years, and we bought it new then. So I guess twelve years old.”

  “Hang onto it. Get it fixed if the compressor goes out. All the new ones now have receivers for radio frequency identification, or RFID. You know what that is?”

  I nodded. I remembered my conversation with Scott Leinbach.

  “Well, get this. If you put a package of meat into your refrigerator that has an RFID—the thing the government wants the meat processors to use—your refrigerator collects that information and stores it.”

  “But then what? I mean beyond the discomfort of one more loss in my sense of privacy. I guess I’m not clear on why it’s a big deal. Is it the cost?”

  Marcia waved her hand like the cost was nothing. “The price of the ink as long as the antenna is printed in copper. It adds fractions of a cent, but that’s not the problem.” She looked at Craig.

  “Here’s where this is headed. You have high cholesterol. Your doctor says to cut out fats. You end up with a heart attack, so your insurance company subpoenas your refrigerator’s RFID receiver. They see that you purchase, on average, five pounds of red meat every week, go through a pound of butter every two weeks, and use a dozen eggs every two weeks. They say they don’t have to pay your health care costs because you didn’t follow your doctor’s orders.” Craig tilted his empty beer bottle at me. “An alcoholic. He stores beer in his refrigerator.” He left that one hanging. “Now do you see where this is headed?”

  “This isn’t science fiction? The ability to track to that level?”

  “Not at all,” Craig said. “The technology is all here today. Some companies are using it, some aren’t yet. Gillette’s doing it. Coke, Proctor & Gamble. Walmart tracks aggressively. They can tie the information right back to your charge card or those shopper cards that Osco and the other grocery chains are already using to track your every purchase.”

  “But the meat industry doesn’t have a choice. We were bought during the mad cow scare,” Marcia said.

  “It all comes down to dollars,” Craig said. “The government can shut down the beef industry overnight if it wants to. That mad cow business was just an opening volley to let us know what the consequences were if we didn’t cooperate.”

  “But why would the government want to shut down the meat industry?” This seemed a stretch.

  Craig shrugged his shoulder. “Call me the cynical attorney, but it doesn’t really matter. If there’s no reason today, there will be tomorrow.”

  “The military is doing it,” Marcia said.

  Craig shook his head at the sky. “The military is huge into this. I’ve read that they embedded RFIDs into every soldier in the Iraq War. They said it would reduce friendly fire because they could track who was an enemy and who was an ally.”

  Marcia shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve heard that’s not true. That’s just conspiracy talk.”

  Craig looked at her as though they’d had this discussion a hundred times already. “You know, I don’t even care if it’s true or not. The capability is there right now. If they’re not doing it today, they’ll be doing it tomorrow. And not just to military personnel. They’ll be embedding it in everyone.”

  I shivered even though the temperature hadn’t dropped.

  “So what do you think of that vaccination now?”

  CHAPTER

  17

  FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, I WAS THE ONE TO UNNERVE EDDY.

  I called him on my cell as soon as I got to my hotel room. We hung up and a minute later, he called me on the hotel phone. For once, his paranoia of cell phones made perfect sense. Timber Holiday Inn was just another speed-dial number on his phone.

  “Did you have a good evening?”

  “Well I had an interesting evening,” I said. “Are you online?”

  “Did the sun come up this morning?”

  "Do an Ixquick search on RFID.”

  “F as in Frank?”

  “Yup.”

  The pause on the other end lasted no more than five seconds. “Got it. Over five hundred thousand results. Big topic.”

  “There’s your evening of reading.”

  “Give me a few minutes. I’ll call you back.”

  I got ready for bed while my laptop booted up, then crawled under the covers and connected to the Holiday Inn’s wireless. Eddy always told me to avoid the Wi-Fi systems because it was so easy to get hijacked, but I trusted Zaan’s firewall. Maybe more than I should have. I Googled Craig’s legal case and found links to the local paper that were pretty light on information, but I sent them to Eddy anyway. He only

  needed a breadcrumb. Then I Googled RFID and started surfing while I waited for Eddy to call back. One site in particular, www.spychips.com, was loaded with all kinds of articles, pictures of RFID styles, and information.

  The phone rang and I picked it up.

  “One word,” he said.

  “Chilling,” I said.

  Fifteen years of marriage. Same skin.

  “You think that’s what the vaccines are about?”

  “I know that’s what they’re about. It didn’t register when Michael and I had dinner with Sanjeev, but when I talked to the NBP people tonight, it suddenly all made sense. Sanjeev said that Zaan built a simple application for the database. He said the CDC only needed to be able to store, organize, and retrieve information. It’s the most basic kind of software. Then he added that tracking was important, too. When he said it, I was thinking about tracking basic information, which to me is the same as organizing and retrieving information—”

  “—but he meant tracking as in tracking people,” Eddy finished my sentence.

  “That’s what he meant. I’m sure.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “And here’s another one for you. I just sent you a link for an ‘RFID Overview.’ Tell me when you get it.”

  I heard Eddy’s Outlook email tone. “Got it.” There was a pause. “Looks like a good big picture of—” He stopped mid sentence.

  “Do you see what I see?” I knew he did. It had taken my breath away, too.

  “Zaan is a huge
player.”

  “It only makes sense. If you’re going to suddenly be overloaded with information, a good database is your best friend.”

  “You gotta quit working for that company.”

  “I do.”

  But I didn’t. Quit working for Zaan, that is.

  Instead, I finished my week at NBP and returned to that messy land of Baja Breeze the following week, then continued the flip-flop between Nebraska and California all over again. What a contrast.

  Evenings, I job hunted, but no one seemed to be hiring, especially for someone with such nebulous skills as mine. At least, no one listed “corporate therapist” as a job description. So I checked with all my contacts from over the years, polished my resume some more, and shopped it with headhunters, who promised me I’d be easy to place. They were wrong. The economy had ground to an ugly halt. The few jobs that offered the most promise meant a significant paycut, a serious move, just as much time on the road—or worse, a grueling daily commute to Denver.

  I prayed for the inevitable layoffs and the severance packages they’d bring to start and to start with me. But my phone didn’t ring.

  Weekends, Eddy and I sorted through our finances. His website now had well over a million hits, and he was getting daily inquiries about advertising. He could have paid our bills in a heartbeat with the offers, but he refused to compromise the site. So he kept on updating and maintaining the site—now with links to RFID sites and Craig’s case in Nebraska—out of the goodness of his heart and our checkbook. It wasn’t a battle I wanted to pick with him, although I really didn’t think The Wall Street Journal and CNN advertising was all that much of a compromise.

  We decided to try to hang on till spring when we could put our house on the market, our lovely old log-and-stone heat-guzzling monster that had been built in the late 1800s. It made us sad, but downsizing would give us a dozen options, including me not working at all for a while. Eddy would have liked to do it at that exact moment—have me quit—but I couldn’t imagine the huge and sudden pay cut.

  He finally agreed, but only if it meant I wouldn’t have to start taking drugs to get me up in the morning to face the day.