Darwin's Radio Page 15

  Using her cell phone—the lab phone lines had been disconnected—Kaye called Dicken’s number in Atlanta.

  25

  Washington, D.C.

  We have test results from forty-two hospitals around the country,” Augustine said to the president of the United States. “All instances of mutation and subsequent rejection of fetuses, of the type we are studying, have been positively associated with the presence of Herod’s flu.”

  The president sat at the head of the large polished maple table in the Situation Room in the White House. Tall and portly, his curly head of white hair stood out like a beacon. He had been affectionately dubbed “Q-Tip” during his campaign, converting a derogatory term used by younger women to describe older men into an expression of pride and affection. Flanking him were the vice president; the Speaker of the House, a Democrat; the Senate majority leader, a Republican; Dr. Kirby; Shawbeck; the secretary of Health and Human Services; Augustine; three presidential aides, including the chief of staff; the White House liaison for public health issues; and a number of people Dicken couldn’t identify. It was a very big table, and three hours had been set aside for their discussion.

  Dicken had surrendered his cell phone, pager, and palmtop at the security check point before entering, as had all the others. An exploding “cell phone” on a tourist had caused considerable damage in the White House just two weeks before.

  He was a little disappointed by the nature of the Situation Room—no state-of-the-art wall screens, computer consoles, threat boards. Just a large, ordinary room with a big table and lots of telephones. Still, the president was listening intently.

  “SHEVA is the first confirmed instance of human-to-human transmission of endogenous retroviruses,” Augustine continued. “Herod’s flu is caused by SHEVA, beyond any shadow of a doubt. In my career in medicine and science, I have never seen anything quite so virulent. If a woman is in the early stages of pregnancy and contracts Herod’s, her fetus—her baby—will eventually abort. Our statistics show a possibility of over ten thousand miscarriages that can already be attributed to this virus. According to our present information, men are the only source of Herod’s flu.”

  “Horrible name, that,” the president said.

  “An effective name, Mr. President,” Dr. Kirby said.

  “Horrible and effective,” the president conceded.

  “We do not know what causes expression in males,” Augustine said, “though we suspect some sort of pheromone triggering process, perhaps from female partners. We haven’t a clue how to stop it.” He handed sheets of paper around the table. “Our statisticians tell us that we could see more than two million cases of Herod’s flu in the next year. Two million possible miscarriages.”

  The president absorbed this thoughtfully, having heard most of it from Frank Shawbeck and the secretary of Health and Human Services in earlier meetings. Repetition, Dicken thought, was necessary to help lay politicos understand just how much in the dark the scientists really were.

  “I still do not understand how something from inside of us could cause so much harm,” the vice president said.

  “The devil within,” said the Speaker.

  “Similar genetic aberrations can cause cancer,” Augustine said. Dicken felt that was a little broad, and Shawbeck seemed to agree. Now was the moment to deliver his pep talk, as top candidate for the rank of surgeon general, to replace Kirby.

  “We are facing a problem new to medicine, no doubt about it,” Shawbeck said. “But we’ve got HIV on the ropes. With that experience behind us, I have confidence that we can make some breakthroughs within six to eight months. We have major research centers all around the country, the world, poised to take on this problem. We have designed a national program that utilizes the resources of the NIH, CDC, and the National Center for Infectious and Allergic Diseases. We divide the pie to consume it more quickly. Never have we, as a nation, been more ready to tackle a problem of this magnitude. As soon as this program is in place, over five thousand researchers in twenty-eight centers will go to work. We will enlist the aid of private companies and researchers around the world. An international program is being planned right now. It all begins here. All we need is a quick and coordinated response from your respective branches, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “I don’t see anybody on either side of the House who’ll stand in the way of an extraordinary funding appropriations bill,” the Speaker said.

  “Or in the Senate,” added the majority leader. “I’m impressed by the work done so far, but gentlemen, I am not as enthusiastic about our scientific ability as I would like to be. Dr. Augustine, Dr. Shawbeck, it’s taken us over twenty years to even begin to get a handle on AIDS, despite pouring tens of billions of dollars into research. I know. I lost a daughter to AIDS five years ago.” He stared around the table. “If this Herod’s flu is so new to us, how can we expect miracles in six months?”

  “Not miracles,” Shawbeck said. “A beginning to understanding.”

  “Then how long before we have a treatment? I ask not for a cure, gentlemen. But a treatment? A vaccine at the very least?”

  Shawbeck admitted he did not know.

  “We can only proceed as fast as we can harness the power of science,” the vice president said, and looked around the table a little blankly, wondering how this might go over.

  “I will say again, I have my doubts,” the majority leader said. “I’m wondering if this is a sign. Maybe it’s time to get our house in order and look deep into our hearts, make peace with our Maker. Quite clearly, we’ve disturbed some powerful forces here.”

  The president touched his nose with his finger, his expression serious. Shawbeck and Augustine knew enough to keep quiet.

  “Senator,” the president said, “I pray you are wrong.”

  As the meeting concluded, Augustine and Dicken followed Shawbeck down a side corridor past basement offices to a rear elevator. Shawbeck was clearly angry. “What hypocrisy,” he muttered. “I hate it when they invoke God.” He shook his arms to loosen the tension in his neck and gave a small, crackling chuckle. “I vote for aliens, myself. Call in the X-Files.”

  “I wish I could laugh, Frank,” Augustine said, “but I’m scared out of my wits. We’re in uncharted territory. Half the proteins activated by SHEVA are new to us. We have no idea what they do. This could sink like a rock. I keep asking, Why me, Frank?”

  “Because you’re so ambitious, Mark,” Shawbeck said. “You found this particular rock and looked under it.” Shawbeck smiled a little wolfishly. “Not that you had any choice . . . in the long run.”

  Augustine cocked his head to one side. Dicken could smell Augustine’s nervousness. He felt a little numb, himself. Up the wrong creek, he thought, and paddling like sons of bitches.

  26

  Seattle

  December

  Never one to sit still for long, Mitch spent a day with his parents on their small farm in Oregon, then took Amtrak to Seattle. He rented an apartment on Capitol Hill, dipping into a former retirement fund, and bought an old Buick Skylark for two thousand dollars from a friend in Kirkland.

  Fortunately, this far from Innsbruck, the Neandertal mummies aroused only mild curiosity from the press. He gave one interview: to the science editor of the Seattle Times, who then turned around and labeled him a two-time offender against the sober, law-abiding world of archaeology.

  A week after his return to Seattle, the Five Tribes Confederation in Kumash County reburied Pasco man in an elaborate ceremony on the banks of the Columbia River in eastern Washington. The Army Corps of Engineers capped the burial ground with concrete to prevent erosion. Scientists protested, but they did not invite Mitch to join the protest.

  More than anything, he wanted time to be by himself and think. He could live on his savings for six months, but he doubted that would be anywhere near enough time for his reputation to cool, for him to land a new position.

  Mitch sat with cast outstretched near the apartment’s
prominent bay window, looking down on pedestrians on Broadway. He could not stop thinking about the mummified baby, the cave, the look on Franco’s face.

  He had placed the small glass tubes containing tissue from the mummies in a cardboard box filled with old photographs and stashed the box in the back of a closet. Before he did something with that tissue, he had to be clear in his own mind about what had actually been discovered.

  Self-righteous anger was not productive.

  He had seen the association. The female’s wound matched the infant’s injury. The female had given birth to the infant, or perhaps aborted it. The male had stayed with them, had taken the newborn and wrapped it in furs even though it had likely been born dead. Had the male assaulted the female? Mitch did not think so. They were in love. He was devoted to her. They were escaping from something. And how did he know all this?

  It had nothing to do with ESP or channeling spirits. A substantial part of Mitch’s career had been spent interpreting the ambiguities of archaeological sites. Sometimes the answers came to him in late night musings, or while sitting on rocks, staring up at the clouds or the starry night skies. Rarely the answers arrived in dreams. Interpretation was a science and an art.

  Day in, day out, Mitch drew diagrams, wrote short notes, made entries in a small vinyl-bound diary. He pasted a piece of butcher paper on the wall of the small bedroom and drew a map of the cave as he remembered it. He placed paper cutouts of the mummies on the butcher paper. He sat and stared at the butcher paper and the cutouts. He bit his fingernails to the quick.

  One day, he drank a six-pack of Coors in the afternoon—one of his favorite hydrators at the end of long days of digging, but this time, without digging, without purpose, just to try something different. He got sleepy and woke up at three in the morning and went for a walk on the street, past a Jack-in-the-Box, a Mexican restaurant, a bookstore, a magazine rack, a Starbuck’s coffee shop.

  He returned to the apartment and remembered to check his mail. There was a cardboard box. He carried it up the stairs, shaking it gently.

  From a bookstore in New York, he had ordered a back issue of National Geographic with an article on Ötzi, the Iceman. The magazine had arrived packed with newspapers.

  Devoted. Mitch knew they had been devoted to each other. The way they lay next to each other. The position of the male’s arms. The male had stayed with the female when he could have escaped. What the hell—use the words. The man had stayed with the woman. Neandertals were not subhuman; it was generally recognized now that they had had speech and complex social organizations. Tribes. Nomads, traders, toolmakers, hunters and gatherers.

  Mitch tried to imagine what would have driven them to hide in the mountains, in a cave behind the sheets of ice, ten or eleven thousand years ago. Perhaps the last of their kind.

  Having given birth to a baby indistinguishable in most respects from a modern infant.

  He ripped newspaper wrappings from around the magazine, opened it, and opened the multipage spread showing the Alps, the green valleys, the glaciers, the spot where the Iceman had been crudely hacked and chipped from the ice.

  The Iceman was now on display in Italy. There had been an international dispute as to where the five-thousand-year-old corpse had been found, and after major research had been completed in Innsbruck, it was Italy that had finally claimed him.

  Austria had clear title to the Neandertals. They would be studied at the University of Innsbruck, perhaps in the same facility where they had studied Ötzi; stored in deep cold, under controlled humidity, visible through a little window, lying near each other, as they had died.

  Mitch closed the magazine and pressed his nose between two fingers, remembering the awful sense of entanglement after he had found Pasco man. I lost my temper. I nearly went to jail. I went to Europe to try something new. I found something new. I got trapped and screwed it up. I have no credibility whatsoever. If I believe these impossible things, what can I do? I am a tomb raider. I am a criminal, a rogue, twice over.

  Idly, he smoothed out the crumpled wrappings, taken from the New York Times. His eye lit on an article at the bottom righthand corner of a torn sheet of newsprint. The headline read “Old Crimes, New Dawn in the Republic of Georgia.” Superstition and death in the shadows of the Caucasus. Pregnant women rounded up from three towns, with their husbands or partners, and taken by soldiers and police to dig their own graves outside a town named Gordi. Seven column inches next to an ad for stock trading on the Internet.

  As he finished reading the piece, Mitch shook with anger and excitement.

  The women had been shot in the stomach. The men had all been shot in the groin and clubbed. The scandal was rocking the Georgian government. The government claimed the murders had occurred under the regime of Gamsakhurdia, who had been ousted in the early nineties, but some of those alleged to have been involved were still in office.

  Why the men and women had been murdered was not at all clear. Some residents of Gordi accused the dead women of having consorted with the devil, asserted that their murder was necessary; they were giving birth to children of the devil, and causing other mothers to miscarry.

  There was some speculation these women had suffered from an early appearance of Herod’s flu.

  Mitch hopped into the kitchen, catching the bare toe at the end of his cast on a chair leg. He swung back and swore, then reached down and pulled from a shallow stack of newspapers in one corner, near the gray, green, and blue plastic recycling bins, the A section of a two-day-old Seattle Times. Headline: an announcement about Herod’s from the president, the surgeon general, and the secretary of Health and Human Services. A sidebar—by the same science editor who had judged Mitch so severely—explained the connection between Herod’s flu and SHEVA. Illness. Miscarriages.

  Mitch sat in the worn chair before the window looking out over Broadway and watched his hands tremble.

  “I know something nobody else knows,” he said, and clamped his hands on the chair arms. “But I haven’t the slightest idea how I know it, or what in hell to do about it!”

  If ever there was a wrong man to have such an incredible insight, to make such a huge and unsubstantiated leap of judgment, it was Mitch Rafelson. Better for all concerned if he started looking for faces on Mars.

  It was time to either give up and lay in several dozen cases of Coors, settle for a slow and boring decline, or to hammer together a platform he could stand on, plank by carefully researched scientific plank.

  “You asshole,” he said as he stood by the window, scrap of packing newspaper in one hand, front page headlines in the other. “You goddamned . . . immature . . . asshole!”

  27

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta

  Late January

  Low lazy clouds, thin sunlight neutral through the windows of the office of the director. Mark Augustine stood back from the scrawl of crisscrossing lines and names on the whiteboard and clasped his elbow in his hand, rubbed his nose. At the bottom of the complex outline, below Shawbeck, the director of the NIH, and the as-yet unannounced replacement for Augustine at the CDC, lay the Taskforce for Human Provirus Research: THUPR, pronounced like “super” with a lisp. Augustine hated this name and referred to it always as the Taskforce; just the Taskforce.

  He swept his hand down the management staircases. “There it is, Frank. I leave here next week and hop on over to Bethesda, at the very bottom of the whiteboard jumble. Thirty-three steps down. This is what it’s come to. Bureaucracy at its finest.”

  Frank Shawbeck leaned back in his chair. “It could have been worse. We spent most of the month trimming it down.”

  “It could be less of a nightmare. It’s still a nightmare.”

  “At least you know who your boss is. I’m answerable to both HHS and the president,” Shawbeck said. The news had arrived two days earlier. Shawbeck would remain at NIH, but was moving up to be director. “Right in the middle of the old cyclone. Frankly, I’m glad Maxine has
decided not to step down. She’s a much better lightning rod than I am.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” Augustine said. “She’s a better politician than either of us. We’ll take the bolt when it comes.”

  “If it comes,” Shawbeck said, but his face was sober.

  “When, Frank,” Augustine repeated. He gave Shawbeck his characteristic grin-grimace. “WHO wants us to coordinate on all outside investigations—and they want to come into the U.S. and run their own tests. Commonwealth of Independent States is dead in the water . . . Russia lorded it over the republics for too long. No coordination possible there, and Dicken still hasn’t been able to get a peep out of Georgia and Azerbaijan. We won’t be allowed to investigate there until the political situation stabilizes, whatever that means.”

  “How bad is it there?” Shawbeck asked.

  “Bad, that’s all we know. They aren’t asking for help. They’ve had Herod’s for ten or twenty years, maybe longer . . . and they’ve been dealing with it in their own way, on a local level.”

  “With massacres.”

  Augustine nodded. “They don’t want that to come out, and they certainly don’t want us saying SHEVA originated with them. The pride of fresh nationalism. We’re going to keep it quiet as long as we can, just to have some leverage there.”

  “Jesus. What about Turkey?”

  “They’ve accepted our help, let our inspectors in, but they won’t let us look along the borders with either Iraq or Georgia.”

  “Where’s Dicken now?”

  “In Geneva.”

  “He’s keeping WHO in the loop?”

  “Every step of the way,” Augustine said. “Carbon-copy reports to WHO and UNICEF. The Senate’s screaming again. They’re threatening to delay UN payments until we get a clear picture of who’s paying for what on the world scene. They don’t want us holding the tab on whatever treatment we come up with—and they can’t believe it won’t be us who comes up with a treatment.”