Resistant (20 page)

Humphrey didn’t give Lou the chance to question the order. He depressed a large button on the right side of his tray, and a modest-sized computer screen rose smoothly in front of him, already booted up.

“Game versus Henri Delacourt,” he said.

Many might have had trouble discerning Humphrey’s thick speech, but the computer had none at all. In seconds a chessboard appeared on the screen. Lou could play a half-decent game, but over the last six months or so, Emily, a fierce game player at everything from jacks to Monopoly, had begun to win their encounters more often than not. He knew enough to see that the game on the screen was already in progress, but it wasn’t clear whether white or black was winning.

Henri, it’s Humphrey. Are you there?

The words he spoke printed out in a dialogue window below the board.

Right here, my friend.

How are things in Paris?

Rainy as usual. And there in Atlanta?

Hot. I believe you are in some trouble, good sir.

I believe you are right, Monsieur Miller. One more move, and if it is the right one, I am afraid you will have beaten me once again.

In that case, it is time for us to plan our next encounter. Ng1-f3 discovered check.

On the screen, the black knight moved from the first space in the
G
row to the third space in the
F
row.

There was a prolonged pause, and then the word
RESIGN
appeared on the screen, followed by a few words of gentlemanly congratulations, and the promise to schedule another match as soon as time allowed.

The chessboard was replaced by a screen saver showing an eagle in constant flight.

“Nice going,” Lou said, not bothering to ask the obvious question regarding the connection between Cap’s situation and Humphrey’s victorious online encounter. He did not have to wait long for at least a part of the answer.

“Henri Delacourt’s bio,” Humphrey said to the console.

In seconds, a handsome, aging face appeared, topped by a thicket of silver hair. Lou was only a few lines into the man’s résumé, when he understood at least some of the demonstration. Delacourt, a professor of physics, was an international chess grandmaster, and the champion of his country seven times.

“Quite a pedigree,” Lou said.

“Seldom lose to him, or any of ten grandmasters I play.”

“You must be very good.”

“Correction,” Humphrey said. “I must be very smart. Need you believe just how smart before we can move to purpose of this little trip.”

“Well, that was quite a demonstration. I am genuinely interested in what this is all about if that’s what you mean.”

A genius … Not just smart, a frigging genius.

Lou had no trouble seeing how difficult it must have been throughout Humphrey’s life, being thought of first and foremost as broken and unappealing, especially with an intellect as remarkable as his obviously was. How difficult and frustrating over the years for the pharmacy tech to be unable, for whatever reasons, even to approach his potential.

“Okay, then,” Humphrey said. “Let’s travel.”

“Where are we going?”

“Down,” was the terse reply.

He spun his chair around and motored to the elevators, with Lou hurrying to keep up. The car at the far end was labeled as
FREIGHT ONLY
. With practiced skill, Humphrey took a custom-made rod created out of metal and plastic, and hanging off his tray table. A key card was fixed to one end. Then, with difficulty, he drew the card along a slot on the wall, and the elevator door glided open.

The padded car had only two buttons: SB 1 and SB 2. Humphrey, clumsily turning the extension wand around, used a rubber tip to press the bottom button. Lou found himself wondering if the repeatedly vanquished chess masters had any idea of the nature of the man who was drubbing them again and again.

The elevator came to a stop, the doors slid open, and in moments Lou was following Humphrey along the poorly lit corridor of Subbasement Two. On either side were closed metal doors, labeled in black-painted block letters with the equipment and supplies stored within. In the dense quiet, the soft hum of Humphrey’s wheelchair was the only sound. Lou’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light when they turned a corner and came to a stop facing a metal door labeled simply
STOCK OVERFLOW.

“What is this place?” Lou asked.

“Where we’re going to save Cap’s life.”

There was a note of excited pride in his voice as he inserted the key card straight into a slot above the handle of the door. Instantly, a lock clicked, the door swung open, and they entered an extremely chilly room—in the fifties Fahrenheit, Lou guessed.

“Impressive,” Lou said.

“Choose friends carefully,” Humphrey responded. “One is hospital engineer. I ask, he makes.”

“Why so cold?”

“Muscles less spastic.”

Grinning, Humphrey lifted an arm, and Lou saw somewhat of an improvement, although not a great one.

The faint spill of light from the corridor partially illuminated a high-ceilinged room approximately the size of a two-car garage. Lou could see the outlines of boxes, stacked in towers and arranged in neatly ordered rows. When Humphrey used his extender to flip on the lights, Lou saw two ten-foot-long Corion-topped tables with storage units built underneath. A side-wall table with a built-in sink occupied one corner of the room, and opposite that was an antivibration table—a workstation specifically designed for vibration-sensitive imaging applications. There were some other items not boxed, including a small refrigerator, a freezer, and even an ice machine, but most of the supplies were still sealed inside their cartons.

In addition, there was a pair of large incubators against the far wall. And from what Lou could tell, both of them were functioning, and contained labeled petri dishes of microorganisms.

Humphrey wheeled around to face Lou.

“You like?” he asked.

“Humphrey,” Lou said, struggling to find his voice. “What’s going on?”

“Less exhausting if I write this.”

Humphrey set his hand around his joystick. His screen featured an alphabet and a large number of word combinations. His text was produced slowly, but accurately, and faster than even his verbal shorthand would have produced. Lou read patiently.

I told you I had many interests besides chess—mathematics, the Japanese game of go, physics, anthropology, classical music. When a person of great intelligence is chained to a computer and the Internet, there is no limit to the world available to him. Chief among my areas of expertise, the one I am much more adept at than any of the others or any board game, is microbiology. That bacteria eating away at your friend’s leg is known by those working on it as the Doomsday Germ. With your help, we are going to cure it.

CHAPTER 26

           The French revolution’s
régime de la terreur
was a means to establish order during a period of turmoil, and was embraced equally by the populace and political establishment. If these so-called terrorist acts can create order, it is logical to conclude they should be employed to prevent the turmoil in the first place.

        
—LANCASTER R. HILL, LECTURE AT LEHIGH UNIVERSITY, FEBRUARY 18, 1940

Lou was stunned—absolutely incredulous.

Even though Humphrey’s chess demonstration and subbasement secret lair made some sense, Lou could not put them into context. His efforts to understand the man’s speech and to learn more of his strength and how he managed to get it together to come to work each day, had all at once been dwarfed by these new revelations.

Humphrey glided over to him.

I know what’s infecting Cap. It’s a bacteria developed by some sort of terrorist organization. I don’t know the name of this organization, or what their goal is. They could be Al-Qaeda or an offshoot. They could be U.S. radicals. But what I do know is that the germ is real.

Lou could only stare at the screen.

“Please explain, Humphrey.”

“From beginning?”

“The temperature’s a little below my comfort zone, but I’ll tell you if I want you to cut corners.”

Two out of every one thousand births end up to a greater or lesser extent like me. The numbers haven’t changed in forty years or more, even with advances in obstetric care. It used to be that poor obstetric care was considered the leading cause of cerebral palsy, but epidemiological studies have largely refuted that assertion. Some studies have suggested maternal bacterial infection as a causal factor. This interested me. Was it bad luck, bad genetics, or some environmental factor? I wanted to know the history of me. How I’d come to inhabit this crippled body. As I explored this question I fell in love with microbiology as a scientific discipline.

“You’re doing great, Humphrey. Go on.”

My parents were embarrassed by me. They pretty much left me to my own devices so long as I stayed in my room with my computer, or went to special classes at special schools. Their expectations of me were zero or less than zero.

“They couldn’t have missed by much more,” Lou said, aching for the man’s early years.

It probably comes as no surprise that growing up I lacked confidence. I knew what my brain was capable of doing, but my body always held me back.

To maintain his composure, Lou looked away from the screen briefly and glanced around at the cartons. There were towers of boxes, some stacked like matryoshka dolls, the largest on the bottom perhaps containing pipettes and glassware, the next size labeled shakers, and at the top, a vacuum pump.

“The Internet rescued you,” Lou said finally.

It was wonderful. There were forums and blogs and bulletin boards where researchers exchanged all sorts of information. In that virtual world, without my body to hold me back, I could keep up with the most advanced minds out there. When I was sixteen, I was answering questions some top research scientists and mathematicians didn’t even know to ask. My reputation spread online and I became a bit of a celebrity within this very small cluster of intellects. That’s how I came to the attention of Dr. Nazar Farooq from Stanford. Very brilliant.

Lou checked the time. An hour and a half had passed.

“I’m going to nudge you ahead a little,” he said. “Connect the dots to Cap, and then we need to go back upstairs.”

Dr. Farooq and I became more or less colleagues. We spoke online as many as several times a week. Then one day, Farooq disappeared. Just like that. Gone. I couldn’t find a word about him except that he had vanished one night, and the police were involved. Several months passed before I heard from him again, but not as Dr. Farooq. He called himself Ahmed Kazimi. It took me months to figure out who he was, and he did his best to keep his identity from me.

“How did he say he learned about you?”

He said he got my name from notes found in Farooq’s files. He swore me to secrecy and claimed to be the head of a government project tasked with creating workable defenses for fictitious biological terrorist attacks. I didn’t say anything after I realized Kazimi and Farooq were one and the same. He never told me why he disappeared or needed an alias. For my part, I was happy to be a member of this cutting-edge virtual team.

Fascinated, Lou barely breathed during the account. The deep chill in the room stopped affecting him.

“And you never told him about yourself?” he asked.

I used my real name at the very beginning of our online connection, so I kept that. But then I changed all the other details of my life. There were times when I couldn’t remember the story I had told. I made myself a hermit, who had shunned academia after my Ph.D. thesis was rudely and crudely rejected.

“It’s incredible you were that ashamed when you were so accomplished. What about Stephen Hawking?”

Humphrey sneered as though he’d played that argument out countless times and always to the same conclusion.

“Hawking known at school as Einstein,” he said. “ALS not begin until twenty-one. Already premier intellect then.”

“Point taken,” Lou said, raising his hands to defuse what he perceived as escalating tension.

Humphrey required a moment to regain his composure.

“Kazimi not entirely honest with me, or rest of team.”

“In what way?”

He told us our work on an antibacterial treatment for a germ that fluctuates between a Gram positive and Gram negative state was a fictitious scenario. There was no way for him to know that I worked in a hospital that had actually encountered a real case.

“The older lady with the foot ulcer.”

“Exactly.”

Thoughts of the woman’s horrible demise segued to Cap’s situation. Lou had to look away.

I said nothing to Kazimi about this. I didn’t want to jeopardize my role on the project. But I knew we weren’t part of any theoretical think tank. We were under attack by a real terrorist organization that had developed this potent biological agent capable of resisting any antibacterial treatment we could throw at it.

“So you and Puchalsky are both working on a treatment?” Lou asked.

Humphrey scoffed and visibly exhausted himself with the vehemence in his verbal response.

“Puchal arrogant joke. Kaz’s team already working on germ when he started research. Heard him talk once. Totally misdirected. Don’t think Kazimi ever made him part of think tank.”

“And your role in the project?” Lou asked.

“Removed,” Humphrey replied simply.

“By Kazimi?”

“Yes. My mentor … my friend. Just like that.”

“Why would he remove you from the project?”

“I suggested alternate approach—new theory I’d developed.”

“And the theory goes?”

Lou, completely transfixed by the man, crouched low to get at his level, and focused on every syllable. Was this Floyd Weems, stepping from the dense undergrowth of the Chattahoochee forest at the moment he was most sorely needed?

“My work uses bacteriophage,” Humphrey said. “Three strains, actually. You know about phage?”

“Some. I know they are viruses that infect a specific bacteria, and as often as not, kill it. There are many different kinds.”