The Virus (34 page)

Stephanie put him out of his misery. She smiled a broad smile. “We didn’t fail, Lowell, we succeeded!”

She began to undo the fastenings on the leather briefcase.

“For the last five years,” she continued, “Irma Matthofer was secretly working on a vaccine as the basic protection against the Marburg virus. A few months ago she found what she was looking for.”

She opened the case. Inside was a green baize tray with separate segments for storing phials and syringes and other items of medical equipment.

Stephanie picked up one of the phials. “This is the vaccine, full strength.” She picked up a second phial. “This is the vaccine, half-strength. Frau Matthofer told me that she gives a second half-strength vaccination three days after the first. It seems to give better protection.”

“You mean she has experimented already with the vaccine?”

“Oh yes, all the villagers from Bugambu who have been in contact with her or the green monkeys have been vaccinated.”

Kaplan whistled. “And can we replicate it? Can we put it into commercial production? We’re going to need millions of units of vaccine within a very few days. This has to be a crash programme if ever there was one.”

Stephanie Verusio picked up the notebooks. “It’s all in here,” she said. “As long as you can read German, you can know the secret of the vaccine. And there’s enough material in the briefcase for the first multiplications to be made.”

“What’s the medium?”

“Frau Matthofer told me she used chicken embryos for multiplication purposes and that this was perfectly satisfactory. She kept chickens at the hut.”

Suddenly, Kaplan felt as though a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. They were going to come through after all. Thanks to a half-crazed old woman living alone in the forest, they were going to come through.

But still he didn’t understand it all.

“But why should she have told you all this, Stephanie? Why should she have given you the vaccine and told you its secrets? I realize you were a woman companion, a friendly voice. But if she was working for the Russians, why didn’t she give the vaccine to the Russians? If she had done that, it would be game set and match to the Russians. They would not only have the virus itself as well as ample supplies of serum, they would have had the vaccine too.”

Stephanie Verusio took her time replying. “I’m not sure I know the whole answer. As I explained, we never discussed Frau Matthofer’s relationship with the Russians. My own guess is that a few years back Irma Matthofer began to be disillusioned with her political masters. She was a woman to whom professional achievement was of paramount importance. Her first disillusionment occurred when her early work in Marburg was not given the recognition which she thought it deserved. Indeed that may have been one of the principal reasons which inclined her to communism in the first place — a bitterness born of a sense of injustice. Then, during her Africa period, she saw it happening again. There’s absolutely no doubt that her work with the green monkeys was of enormous scientific interest — after all, there she was living with a tribe of the animals on a day-by-day basis over an extended period of time. No one had done that before Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees. But I believe Matthofer was even closer to the monkeys and she certainly lived with them longer. I say nothing of the other aspect, the toxicological aspect. But in reality, at least until she discovered the vaccine, Matthofer showed remarkable courage in maintaining the kind of contact with the animals that she did. Maybe she was one of those rare persons who have a natural immunity.”

“But, surely, she must have realized that, in the circumstances, she could never achieve the scientific recognition that she sought. There was no way the Russians were going to publish, or let her publish, a paper on her work in the forest.”

“Agreed. But the old woman was really schizophrenic. She was more professional than political and she could never quite understand or accept that one sphere of her life could interfere with the other.”

Kaplan looked across Stephanie and out of the window. He saw that the plane was beginning to lose height. Down below, the edges of the Rift Valley began to stand out in bas-relief. Shortly they would be coming in over the game-park to land at Nairobi. And then the machine would take over. While there was still time, he wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery.

“All right, I understand all that. I think you are probably correct in what you say. But what did you promise her, Stephanie? You must have promised her something for her to tell you what she told you and for her to have shown you the vaccine and explained it all to you.”

Stephanie Verusio looked at him cannily.

“How do you know I promised her anything?”

“I just know.”

Stephanie sighed. “You’re right, Lowell. I did promise her something. In fact, I promised her two things. Somehow that old woman moved me. In her own way, she probably acted according to her lights.”

“What did you promise?” Kaplan repeated his question.

“First of all,” Stephanie replied, “I promised her recognition. I told her I personally would guarantee that one day men would speak of the Matthofer vaccine and its cure against Marburg disease in the same way and with as much reverence as people talk of the Salk vaccine and its use against polio. You’ll help me here, won’t you? Even though the old woman’s dead now, I owe this to her.”

Kaplan nodded. “Of course, I’ll help. I’ll see Irma Matthofer’s name is published in all the scientific journals. I’ll get some rich man to endow a Chair in her honour.”

Stephanie smiled. “That’s what I told her. I said I had friends who could do these things and she believed it. The Russians would never have delivered anything of the kind, whatever promises they might have made. At bottom, she knew this.”

“Okay,” said Kaplan, “so you promised her eternal fame. What else? You said there were two things.”

Stephanie looked out of the window. They were quite close to the airport now. She could see the animals in the game park below.

“Yes,” she spoke quietly, “I did promise her something else. I told her of the conversation I heard that day when I was hiding outside the hut, and how Victor Mtaza had said that the green monkeys would be utterly destroyed once the operation was finished. I promised I would try to see that the monkeys were safe if anything happened to her. She knew she hadn’t long to live anyway. She told me she was dying of cancer. That bullet was a blessing in disguise. Better that way, than a slow lingering death. You see,” Stephanie added simply, “the old woman cared about the monkeys. Those green monkeys — so beautiful, so deadly. To her they were like children. That’s why I promised to help.”

“Won’t the fire have destroyed them?”

“Perhaps it will. Perhaps it won’t. We may find that some have escaped the flames and are still living in the forest.”

“And you want to make sure that, if any have escaped, they are protected. In spite of the fact that they carry the virus?”

Stephanie turned to him. “Oh, Lowell, sometimes you brilliant men can be so blind. The green monkeys have to be protected
because
they carry the virus, not in spite of it. That’s where you and your WHO people were wrong, right at the beginning. You blundered into Zaire determined to eradicate the monkeys and you succeeded. Only you picked the wrong monkeys. Now you again say that the monkeys must be destroyed. But don’t you see that the green monkeys are no longer a threat now that we have the vaccine? Any more than the mosquito is a threat now that we have quinine. But what would be disastrous, would be to deprive ourselves of the protection which the reservoir of living virus offers.”

Kaplan saw what she was driving at.

“You mean one day a new disease, like Marburg but not identical, might be discovered and our vaccine might prove ineffective. And that in this case we might need the living monkeys as a source of viral material with which to experiment for the production of a different, more effective vaccine.”

“Exactly. It may happen like that. Or it may not. What I’m saying is that all species, even apparently deadly species, should be allowed to survive.”

The wheels of the airplane hit the tarmac. Kaplan glanced out of the window and saw that there was quite a reception party on the tarmac of Nairobi airport. A large black limousine flew the Stars and Stripes — that was probably the U.S. Ambassador. There was a detachment of U.S. marines as well as local Kenyan troops. When they knew about the vaccine, he thought, they would rate a 21-gun salute.

“Stephanie,” he said. “I’m not a romantic man. I’m a scientist and I know you think I’m rather a stupid scientist. But I just want to tell you that I appreciate what you’ve done. I appreciate the way you called me from Burundi when you saw how big this thing was. I’m glad that you trusted me in the end and I love you for it.”

“Oh, Lowell. What a silly formal speech.” She leaned across and kissed him on the mouth.

18

Isaac Reuben sat in the old, worn arm-chair in front of the fireplace in the living-room of his brownstone house just on the edge of the Bowery, and smiled benignly at his visitors.

“So you’re thinking of getting married, are you? Good luck to you!”

Stephanie smiled back at the old man who, for so many years, had been a family friend as much as a family doctor.

“We’ve both got your blood in our veins, Dr Reuben. That’s a link, if nothing else is.”

“You two were pretty much on opposite tacks for a while there, weren’t you?”

It was Kaplan’s turn to speak. He was looking younger and fitter than he had for months. It was as though his life had suddenly turned a corner and was now headed in the right direction.

“That’s my fault, not Stephanie’s,” he said. “I should never have gone along with that WHO scheme. It had a certain logic but it was morally wrong and aesthetically wrong. And I couldn’t see it at the time.”

Stephanie leaned over and touched him lightly on the arm.

“Never mind, Lowell, there’s more joy in heaven over the sinner that repents than over the ninety-nine who need no repentance.”

They all laughed together.

Reuben poured drinks for the three of them.

“You know,” Kaplan said when they were seated, “I don’t think the Russians planned or intended the original outbreak of Marburg disease in New York. I’m convinced that Diane’s death was a genuine accident. There’s no question that she was investigating the illegal trade in wildlife; she had focused on Brussels as one of the main entrepôt stations. It’s almost certain that she was poking around in the cargo shed at Zaventem when she was infected by a green monkey then in transit for the Soviet Union. She came back to New York and you know the rest of the story.”

Reuben saw the tears begin to glisten in Stephanie’s eyes. The memory of her sister’s death was still fresh. He moved the conversation ahead.

“But why did all the evidence indicate Zaire, rather than Burundi, as the provenance of the green monkeys?”

“That was quick thinking on the part of the KGB,” Kaplan explained. “They saw that there had been an outbreak of Marburg disease in New York which miraculously we had been able to contain. They reasoned — correctly — that U.S. epidemiologists would be trying to track down the source of the disease, which might interfere with their own plans. They tried to forestall that. At the same time, they saw a golden opportunity to promote their own objectives.”

“How so?”

Kaplan sipped his drink and then placed it on the table beside his chair.

“Don’t think I realized all this at once. I was pretty slow off the mark. But I did eventually understand that the reference to monkeys living in the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire was entirely erroneous. It was fed to us, or more precisely to me” — here Kaplan coughed apologetically — “by the Russians with the deliberate intention of misleading us.

“I should have realized of course — as I said to Heidi Schmidtt when I went to see her in Germany for the second time — that the business of finding that old record-book in the dungeon of Marburg castle was altogether too neat to be plausible. I should have suspected Paula of being an agent then. And I should have been suspicious when that little SABENA fellow — what was his name? Delgrave? — turned up with precisely the right information about the more recent shipment. And then when we were in the camp in Zaire, I should have smelt a rat when the trapper showed up and offered to take us straight to the valley where the monkeys supposedly were. I should have kept a closer eye on that Russian, Leontiev, who was Rodriguez’ deputy at WHO. He was certainly in it up to his neck. But somehow my blood was up. The hunt was on. I was only seeing what I wanted to see and I didn’t pay enough attention.

“I believe that from the Russian point of view it was a salvage operation,” Kaplan continued. “Once we knew about the Marburg virus, their best plan was to try to trick us into believing that the disease had been totally eliminated so that we put the problem from our minds. Their original strategy was to ship a large number of green monkeys back to the Soviet Union where they would have been held as a source both of the virus and of the serum. In addition the supplies of serum from immune monkeys which had been stockpiled over the years by Irma Matthofer were being transferred to Russia. The Soviets would then have had a whole new weapon, more lethal than the nuclear bomb. And because they possessed the supplies of serum they would, as it were, have had a kind of anti-ballistic missile system too. The Soviets could have decided when and where to deploy this weapon. It would certainly not have been done through one isolated contact, like Diane or like that zoo-keeper in the Bronx. They would probably have gone for a systematic release of the virus in several major U.S. cities and our defences, which were virtually non-existent anyway, would have been overwhelmed. Of course, the release of the virus would never have been traceable to the Soviet Union. They would have blandly denied all knowledge of it, while offering vodka and sympathy.”

“Go on. This is interesting.” For some reason, Reuben avoided looking Kaplan directly in the eye.