The Gemini Virus (11 page)

Public schools in northeastern Jersey’s six main counties—Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Passaic, and Union—were ordered closed until further notice. The Department of Health and Senior Services also considered shutting down all restaurants in the area, then decided this was unnecessary since most were closing on their own. Other public places, such as parks and nature trails, were abandoned. Swings and seesaws stood unused, parking lots empty. Shopping malls were desolate, and people began using their sick days until they had to tap into their vacation time … then their personal time … then time they really didn’t have.

In spite of all precautions, the virus continued to find its way around; there was always someone willing to help out. A widow from Riverdale who hadn’t missed a Mass at Christ Church since the Reagan administration decided to disregard all official warnings and attend services in spite of feeling feverish, fatigued, and more arthritic than usual. One sip from the chalice during the Eucharist was all it took to infect the eleven parishioners who used it next.

One of those eleven worked night shift in a convenience store. The following day, just after 1:30
A.M.
and while the store was empty, she experienced her first sneeze while making two fresh pots of coffee. Ten minutes later, a truck driver in filthy jeans and a flannel shirt came in. He was hauling a load of unpainted furniture from North Carolina to a warehouse in Maine. He hadn’t heard about the outbreak, because he didn’t listen to the radio on the road and didn’t watch the news in any of the cheap hotels along the way. He hated people as a general rule and tried to have as little to do with society as possible. He poured himself a large cup of the infected coffee, didn’t acknowledge the woman when she smiled and handed him his change, and climbed back into his rig. He was the first person to import the disease into the state of Connecticut.

A teenager visiting her boyfriend at college brought it into Pennsylvania.

A father of four who had been recently laid off carried it with him to a job interview in Delaware.

Hundreds of New Jersey commuters took it to work with them in Manhattan.

And so on.

*   *   *

The main chamber of the White House Situation Room could pass for a high-tech conference center in any large American corporation. It is long and narrow, with cream-colored walls, a white drop ceiling, and bright lights, all working in unison to create the illusion of greater space. It is rumored the easy colors and copious illumination were intended to lift the mood of the occupants; the incarnation prior to the 2006–2007 renovation, with its navy carpet and walnut paneling, was often compared to a dungeon. The modernized version also has six recessed flat-panel monitors, adjacent glass-encased booths for making and receiving secure phone calls, and ceiling sensors to block all unauthorized signals in and out. Colloquially known as the Sit Room, it is located in the White House basement beneath the office of the president’s chief of staff.

Barack Obama sat at one end of the long table with a pile of briefing memos in front of him. There was also a three-ring binder opened to the first page, upon which he had jotted some notes in his elegant-but-still-legible script, and a half-full bottle of his beloved organic green tea.

Several members of his staff and cabinet were seated around him, but his attention was focused on the woman talking from the large monitor at the far end of the room. CDC director Sheila Abbott was dark-haired and pretty in a way that was somehow mature and girlish at the same time. She wore square-framed glasses and an Italian Cavalli business suit. Her preference for high living was well known to the public, and her detractors—the media included—felt it created an air of vanity and excess. They didn’t realize she was not only aware of this perception but cultivated it on purpose. On a personal level, she genuinely enjoyed the finer things and the pride they inspired. But more important, it made people underestimate the devastating intelligence that percolated behind those pretty eyes. She had learned long ago that it was better to be underestimated than overestimated.

“What’s the fatality count now, Doctor?” the president asked. He was leaning back in the chair and swiveling gently, but his plain expression gave no doubt as to the solemnity of the occasion.

“As of twenty minutes ago, two hundred ninety-seven confirmed deaths. That includes six teachers and sixty-two children; twenty-one physicians, thirty-four nurses, and sixteen EMTs; forty-nine law-enforcement officers and eleven firefighters. The high rate among law-enforcement and firefighters is due to responding to emergency calls without proper protective equipment. When the outbreak first occurred, of course, they didn’t know what they were dealing with. In one instance, all but three police officers were infected on the same force when the virus was brought back to the station after a local call.”

“And how many more citizens, of any demographic, have been infected?”

“It is impossible to give an exact count, Mr. President. New cases are being reported every few minutes. At present, I would say between six hundred fifty and seven hundred. And it has a mortality rate of ninety-three percent, with the other seven percent either deeply comatose or with severe brain damage and physical disfigurement.”

“My God,” mumbled Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security.

Abbott nodded. “We’ve never dealt with anything this potent before.”

“Has it spread beyond New Jersey?” the president continued.

“Yes, sir. It is now established in New York and Connecticut, eastern Pennsylvania, and northern Delaware. We’ve tried to restrict movements of citizens within the epicenter of the outbreak in northern New Jersey, but to keep all people confined to their homes is virtually impossible.”

… without a presidential order
, was the unspoken sentiment that lingered in the air. Obama didn’t react to it, as he didn’t believe Abbott was either baiting or insulting him. She had proven herself to be a dedicated, objective, and focused individual, which was why he appointed her to the top of the CDC in the first place. But he was not yet ready to intercede with the executive order she had been advocating for the last few days.

“What about our continental neighbors to the north and south?”

“No cases reported yet in either Canada or Mexico, and that’s probably due to a combination of our efforts to keep the public informed and educated and, strangely enough, the media’s efforts to keep the public frightened. Nevertheless, it is my belief that the outbreak will cross an international border sooner or later.”

Obama nodded. “Do we have any idea what we’re dealing with, Sheila? I’m talking about the causative agent now.”

Causative agent …
The president had taken the time to educate himself on the subject at hand rather than rely purely on the support of his advisers. This habit, born of an insatiable curiosity for all things as well as the belief that well-informed leaders made the best decisions, had earned him a great deal of respect; even the begrudging variety of his most determined opponents.

“Not nearly enough,” Abbott said. “Based on the samples we have taken from the victims, we know it is a spherical virus rather than elongate. We also believe it to be reverse transcribing, which means it has an RNA template that the virus feeds into a host cell, forcing that cell’s DNA to replicate the virus’s characteristics. In essence, this means—”

“The virus hijacks a person’s cells in order to create copies of itself,” Obama said flatly, “like any other virus.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“But you have not yet been able to identify exactly which one this is?”

“No, sir. We are examining samples here in Atlanta, and we’ve sent more to the National Institute for Medical Research in London. We’re hoping to come up with a match or something close to one of the roughly six thousand known viruses worldwide, but so far no luck.”

“Do you feel it is a mutant? Maybe something entirely new?”

“At this point, I’m not prepared to make that claim. If it
is
new, that may only mean it’s new to us. For all we know, it could have existed in nature for millions of years, and we’re only seeing it in humans now. Whether or not it is a true mutation remains to be seen. The probability is very high, though, since viruses mutate all the time. It could be a recombinant between two other, more common strains. It could even be another case of a virus that’s common in animals migrating to humans and becoming more virulent as it adapts, as we’ve seen before in recent years.”

“And you’re sure this is not smallpox? Not even a previously unknown variant?” This question came from the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs.

If there was one word the media was getting good mileage out of, it was
smallpox
. It seemed to be set in a larger font every day. The fact that there was no evidence thus far of the virus being a new strain of either
Variola major
or
Variola minor
—the only two contagions responsible for smallpox—didn’t seem to matter.

“We are, of course, looking into that. Some symptoms are similar, but then others are not.” She replied. “That said, it’s inaccurate, not to mention irresponsible, for news outlets to report that this is a smallpox outbreak. Of course, some are saying the end of the world is upon us. So I don’t know how much responsibility we can really expect.”

“Could it be a new smallpox variant?

“I don’t consider that a very strong possibility.”

The president and his people had been harping on the smallpox angle for days, in spite of assurances that the odds of this outbreak being related were slim to none. Abbott couldn’t help but wonder if they had some intelligence data leading them to believe some terrorist cell had gotten their hands on samples of the virus and successfully integrated it into a workable, deliverable weapon. Since the World Health Organization declared smallpox globally eradicated in 1980, the government had stuck to the official story that the only remaining samples of
Variola
were sitting in locked freezers in two labs around the world—one at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, the other in the WHO repository in Moscow—and kept for the purpose of benign research. But anyone who took the trouble of investigating further, even via the few reliable sources on the Internet, would know that this was far from the truth. Rumors abounded of loose stocks being taken from the Moscow supply in the handbags and briefcases of defecting scientists. Also, Russia’s bioweapons program, supposedly dismantled on several occasions, continued with the development of a particularly virulent strain of the virus in direct violation of the Biological Weapons Convention, of which they were a leading signatory. In April of 1992, then-president Boris Yeltsin confessed to several of these violations and, in a show of good faith, ordered that further research be discontinued. This included a deep slash of funding, which left the weapons labs virtually deserted—and leftover strains of
Variola
and other weapons-grade bioagents ripe for the taking. By the second half of the year, only a handful of guards remained, poorly paid when they were paid at all. Intelligence communities around the world screamed that this provided an open invitation for terrorists, but their cries fell on deaf ears. Abbott could not help but wonder if Obama’s staff was worried that the current outbreak was somehow related.

The president turned to Gibbs and said, “Tell the press that there is no evidence of a connection to smallpox at this time, and add Sheila’s point that to imply otherwise is irresponsible and dangerous—emphasize dangerous—to the public’s interest. People are already panicking everywhere; the press has to stop throwing fuel on the fire.”

“That won’t stop them from writing about the situation.”

“No, but hopefully the salient facts will get through.”

“Very good, Mr. President.”

Obama turned his attention back to Abbott. “Sheila, where are we with treatment at this point?”

“There are tailor-made drugs for other viruses, called antivirals, that interrupt the virus’s replication or release process. Ribavirin, for example, when used with interferon medication, has proven an effective nucleoside analogue. But there’s no such drug for this virus because it’s new, and it often takes months or even years before we understand a specific virus well enough to design an effective medication. Obviously we are already working on this, and hoping for some luck to fall our way. It does happen from time to time. Remember that AZT, also known as zidovudine or Retrovir, was first introduced in the 1960s as a cancer treatment when it was believed cancer was a viral condition. When it didn’t work, it was put on a shelf and forgotten. Then someone decided to try it in the mid-’80s as a combatant against AIDS, and suddenly we had the first HIV ‘wonder drug.’”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could replicate that kind of good fortune,” the president said.

“Indeed.”

“So how are patients being handled in the meantime?”

“For the time being, we’re relying on sedation to keep them comfortable during the early stages of the infection. In the later stages, when they begin to experience dementia, heavier doses are necessary. Sometimes a patient has to be restrained.”

“And containment of the outbreak? Steps are being taken, of course.”

“Yes. We have over a hundred people in the field—basically walking around the epicenter—looking for people with early symptoms.”

“That’s a bit primitive, isn’t it?” someone seated in the middle of the table grunted.

“It is, but it works. And we have no better options. If this
were
smallpox, we could at least set up vaccination sites. But this is something new, which means a whole new set of rules and procedures, some of the latter being very ‘grassroots’ in their approach. Beyond that, we are also posting flyers everywhere—not just at hospitals but in every public place you can imagine—urging people to report any case they happen to see or even suspect. The flyers have an easy-to-remember number for the CDC Emergency Operations Center, for which we’ve hired two hundred extra people to man the phones. We are working fully in conjunction with health officials in New Jersey, and soon in other states I’m sure, to support their local and state emergency plans. But truly, there’s only so much that can be done at this stage. To
completely
contain something that spreads this fast and with this kind of virulency … a lot of luck would have to be involved, too. That’s just the ugly truth of the matter.”