Jakarta Pandemic, The (5 page)

“Not a problem. Actually, I don’t think I’m going to keep the samples here just yet. Too tempting for staff and others. Samples have a tendency to disappear around here, despite their perceived unpopularity. No, I’ll pull my Land Rover around to your car and pile them in there for now. You fit all of it in your car?” he asked, surprised.

“I put all of the seats down, and it’s jammed full. It may not be as much as you think, but I just got a shipment a week or so ago, so it’s more than I usually have in my storage unit.”

“Whatever you have, I will gladly take off your hands. Where are you parked?”

“Second level, pretty close to the elevators.”

“Beautiful, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Alex picked up the computer tablet and checked Dr. Wright’s signature. He had just signed for Alex’s entire allotment. He decided then not to close out the transaction until he had disabled the wireless card. If he pressed “complete” right now, the transaction would probably set off some kind of alarm at their data collection center. He was sure that any transactions of TerraFlu samples will be flagged for immediate review.

Last thing I need right now is Ted going apeshit.

He opened the “Intel Pro Wireless Manager” and disabled the wireless card. He then clicked on the “Complete Transaction” icon. The transaction would be instantly transmitted when he enabled the wireless card.

Sometime next week, probably.

“See you in a few,” Alex said and moved to open the door. He looked back and saw Dr. Wright taking off his white coat, pulling his car keys out of his desk drawer.

“Hey, before you open the door…”

Alex took a few steps back toward Dr. Wright’s desk and leaned in.

“If I were you, I’d make a few trips to the store and stock up on necessities. I heard from a very well-placed source that they are close to making an announcement about the classification of the mystery flu. If this turns out to be a truly novel flu strain, we are headed for a disaster of epic proportions. Remember the talk I gave at your regional sales meeting down in Stamford? Think about the worst case scenario I described and make it worse. Much worse,” Dr. Wright said in a hushed tone.

“Jesus,” Alex said.

Dr. Wright just nodded his head and grimaced. Alex left his office and walked back down toward the automatic door. Giddiness overtook him after Dr. Wright’s foreboding message, and he began to grin again.
I can’t believe I just did that.

He waited impatiently in front of the elevator, thinking about the lecture Dr. Wright had given to over two hundred sales representatives and managers in a jam-packed ballroom at the Stamford Hilton
.
Dr. Wright had spoken for close to an hour and a half about flu strain mutations, characteristics of history’s deadliest flus, flu transmission variables, and nearly every other scientific aspect of the influenza virus. His talk had been received with a standing ovation.

Alex remembered the talk vividly because it had preceded his own harrowing lecture about the potential impact of pandemic flu on society. Thirty minutes of PowerPoint doomsday predictions, each slide edited and approved by Biosphere’s northeast regional manager, who had wanted to drive home the importance and urgency of the sales force’s vigor in promoting TerraFlu’s laboratory efficacy against pandemic grade viruses. Biosphere launched TerraFlu with several FDA-sanctioned clinical trials demonstrating its superiority against seasonal flu strains, but it was still viewed as unproven against pandemic-grade viruses.

Alex had recently completed his six-month probationary period with Biosphere when Ted Stanton eagerly volunteered the district to provide the lecture. When nobody from Alex’s district team volunteered to stand in front of the entire northeast regional sales team, he reluctantly agreed to spare Ted the agony of assigning the lecture to one of the team’s less enthusiastic and less capable members. The decision to give the lecture had changed his life.

First, it had solidified his opinion of Ted as a micromanaging, egocentric, compassionless ass-kisser. He had his suspicions from the very beginning, but Ted had never done anything overt to threaten his autonomy or sour their relationship. At least not before Alex volunteered to give what appeared to be the most important lecture of Ted’s career. Sure, he’d witnessed some despicable leadership behavior, but in his mind, he couldn’t hold this against Ted, as Ted’s leadership came mainly from books. He had been hired by Biosphere right out of college to sell vaccines and had quickly risen to the rank of district manager, where he appeared to have been stuck for the past three years.

Despite the relative calm they enjoyed, there was an underlying current of tension, barely perceptible, but strong enough for Alex to sense. Ted was uneasy in his presence, in part likely due to the fact that Ted hadn’t been given a choice when it came to Alex’s assignment to the district. Biosphere was expanding its sales force for the upcoming launch of TerraFlu, and rumor had it that Ted received a call one week before the job had been officially publicized. The call, supposedly placed from the vice president level at headquarters, informed him that his district would be joined by a decorated war veteran and seasoned pharmaceutical sales rep. Ted Stanton was more than displeased with the forced assignment, and his attempt to torpedo the decision was apparently a big part of why his fast-tracked career had skidded to a halt.

This explained Ted’s initial discomfort, but Alex was pretty sure that most of the distress stemmed from the massive gulf between their ages and experiences. In 2003, while he was commanding marines under the constant threat of enemy machine gun and artillery fire in Iraq, Ted was busy dodging keg stands and tequila shooters in his fraternity house at UCONN.

Alex had included copies of his military decorations with his original resume submission to the vice president of sales. Biosphere was a small operation in the grand scheme of pharmaceutical companies, and he suspected that copies of his decorations, or rumors of them, had found their way to Ted. Whatever the cause, Ted had kept his distance from him, which was exactly how Alex liked it, until the big lecture in Stamford had brought them a little too close for comfort.

No fewer than thirteen videotaped practice lectures later, two of which were full dress rehearsals in a rented conference hall, and he was ready to kill Ted with his bare hands. The mere mention of his name or the buzz of his smartphone caused Alex to clench his fists. He had seriously miscalculated the situation when he volunteered to give the lecture. He hadn’t factored in the possibility that this lecture was a key part of Ted’s career redemption plan, and the oversight cost him dearly. Hourly emails and texting; several daily phone calls. He was convinced that Ted had quit doing everything except for micromanaging his thirty-minute lecture.

He even got Michelle Harke, their regional manager, in on the act. Apparently, several senior executives from headquarters would be there to listen to Dr. Wright’s lecture, and the possibility existed that they might stick around for Alex’s presentation. All of his slides started to filter through Michelle’s desk, and before he knew it, he had two sets of revisions to process, each set often contradicting the other. He seriously considered sending a letter bomb to each of them. Despite the nonsense, his talk was hailed as a success by both Michelle and Ted, though it paled in comparison to Dr. Wright’s talk, which any speaker would have found a hard act to follow. He had smiled and shook their hands after the talk, cringing inside as they patted him on the shoulder. He silently promised himself that he would never volunteer for anything at Biosphere again. Fortunately, the experience hadn’t been a total loss.

The most important result of the regional lecture stemmed from his research. Alex had combed the internet for a variety of sources and had found a broad continuum of opinions, speculations and predictions about the future of pandemics. Most articles and international disease control agencies agreed that the 2008–2009 avian flu served as the best model of a worst-case scenario. Despite over twenty million deaths worldwide, casualties in the United States, Europe and most other modernized nations were minimal. Close to twenty thousand deaths in the United States were attributed to the avian flu, which was still far below the forty to fifty thousand deaths annually attributed to the regular seasonal flu. The overall impact on society was minimal.

However, the deeper he dug into the topic, the more he began to believe that most of these articles and reports were a little too optimistic. When he stumbled upon the International Scientific Pandemic Awareness Collaborative (ISPAC) website, he found all of the decidedly less optimistic opinions and research condensed into one convenient location. ISPAC had been privately founded, on the heels of the avian flu pandemic, to counter the prevailing optimism and spur the international community to strengthen pandemic response planning and resource allocation.

Alex spent countless hours studying document after document, until he was convinced that avian flu was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of pandemic potential. He had a hard time condensing all of the available information and research into a thirty-minute talk, but when he was finished and the final revision had been approved by his regional manager, his slide presentation could have fueled the next blockbuster Hollywood disaster movie. He shook himself free of the reverie as the elevator door opened.

We might end up needing our basement stockpile after all.

Chapter Six

Friday, November 1, 2013

Alex walked out of Hannigan’s with his second shopping cart full of groceries. He had made two separate trips into the store, the first one to buy nonperishable items, which nearly overflowed from the cart, and the second to buy refrigerator items. He felt pretty strange going in for the second time, but managed to stand in a checkout line far enough away from the first one to avoid any uncomfortable glances, not sure why he even cared.

The store was about as crowded as he would expect for a Friday afternoon which, despite the looming threat, didn’t really surprise him. He knew the public would wait too long, and one electrifying news report would send everyone into the stores at once, effectively crippling the food supply system. Most of the grocery stores, just like the big retail stores, had become so efficient that they carried little additional stock on hand to meet even the slightest increase in demand.

He scanned the parking lot, noting mostly empty spaces.

This store is one bad news report away from mayhem.

Alex decided to call his family and friends to urge them to hit the stores now. He jammed the groceries into his packed car and started the drive home.

**

He turned his company car left from Harrison Road onto the Durham Road loop. Ryan sat in the rear passenger side seat, just barely visible to him in the rear-view mirror, staring out of his window. After the turn, they passed four houses, two on each side of the street, and then the road split. He turned the car right at the split and headed toward their home. If he continued past his house and kept driving, he would end up back at the split. Durham Road was a loop and had only one access point, the turn he had just taken from Harrison Road.

The subdivision contained thirty-four houses located on both sides of the street and evenly spaced on half-acre lots around the loop. Since both Durham Road and the streets surrounding it were built on recently converted farmland, most of the trees throughout the neighborhood were still smaller than the houses. Compared to most of the older, established neighborhoods nearby, the trees on Durham Road still looked like saplings.

As he passed more houses on the way home, he started to see some of his neighbors, the first one being Todd Perry, in front of a red colonial with gray doors. Todd was adjusting a sprinkler head in the front yard when he noticed Alex’s car, and he waved. Alex waved back through the side passenger window.

He glanced to the left as he passed a gray colonial with dark blue doors and a three car garage. Thick evergreen bushes crowded the sides of the walkway leading to the front door, standing guard over wide, raised beds filled with yellow and orange fall flowers. He waved at Julia Rhodes, who was examining her mail on the mudroom porch. She looked up as he passed, returning his wave.

Alex pushed the garage door opener as he passed the Walkers’ house on the right. He looked at their house, a yellow contemporary colonial with green doors, and did not see any signs of activity. The Walkers usually started to spill home at around 5:30. First, Ed would arrive with at least two of their children. Then at about six, Samantha would pull in with whichever kid had a late practice.

As he pulled into the driveway, the right side garage bay door finished opening, and he pulled his car into the garage.

“Make sure you have all of your junk,” he said to Ryan.

“Got it,” Ryan replied and opened his door.

Alex carefully slid behind his wife’s Toyota 4Runner, trying not to dirty his suit.

She never pulls in far enough
, he mentally complained.

As he opened the screen door and walked into the mudroom, he could smell dinner.

Garlic, onions, ginger…probably a stir-fry.

He hung up his suit jacket in the mudroom closet and took off his shoes, kicking them into the open floor space of the closet.

“Hey, honey, smells great!”

“Yeah, I thought a stir-fry was in order for tonight,” she said.

He crossed the kitchen and gave her a kiss, holding her for a few seconds. He looked around.

“Are you making rice for the stir fry?” he asked.

“Yep, already in the pressure cooker. Don’t you have anything better to do other than hawk me?”

“Probably not.”

He heard Ryan enter the mudroom and kick off his shoes. One of the shoes banged against the closet door.