The White Plague (10 page)

Lepikov shifted his gaze to Foss’s large, well-formed breasts. Such a body! He nurtured a secret yen for large women and wondered if… perhaps…

“I would appreciate it if you would not stare at my chest,” Foss said.

Lepikov jerked his attention to Hupp’s gentle smile.

Foss was not through with him, however. She patted her curly ringlets. “I’m aware, Doctor Lepikov, that I’m the biggest baby doll in all creation.”

Lepikov refused to look at her.

Undeterred, she said: “Don’t let that give you any ideas, please. My husband is bigger than I am. That’s unimportant, too, because I can take him out any time.”

Lepikov was not familiar with this idiom. “Take him out?”

Foss shifted to earthy Russian in which she berated him for his inadequate grasp of English. He might know white hats and black hats, but little else. She then favored him with a colorful description of what she would do to his sexual organs if he ever again stared at her in a boorish fashion.

This brought peals of laughter from Godelinsky.

In Russian, Lepikov admonished: “Act more in keeping with your position!”

Godelinksy shook her head in helpless mirth, then, in Russian, said to Foss: “He’s one of the new breed in the Soviet Union. They breed them for fat and unswerving devotion to power and sexual accomplishments.”

Beckett intervened: “There are those of us here who do not speak Russian and we do have work.”

Still in Russian, Godelinsky said: “He’s right. You two behave yourselves. You, Sergei! I know stories about you that you would not want told here. Be warned. And you, Mrs. Foss! That a beautiful woman should know such language!”

Foss grinned and shrugged.

Lepikov tried to appear amused. “It was only a joke.”

Beckett began pulling papers out of his briefcase, assembling them on the table in front of him.

Still simmering, Lepikov realized he had been maneuvered into a secondary position here. He wondered if Foss and Godelinsky had done this deliberately? Or perhaps Danzas? And Hupp, he looked so smug! The Soviet dossier on Hupp said he was a prime target for subverting. Was that possible? Hupp had been a student at UCLA, where he often had been mistaken for Latin-American and had even joined a Latino political club. Hupp was a skinny whipcord of a man, the very type Lepikov distrusted most – that dark skin and those soft brown eyes. The eyes of a cow!

“He is a socialist with susceptibilities of the flesh,” the Soviet dossier said.

The account said he had been almost irresistible to young blond UCLA coeds imbued with a fanatical drive to fuck for peace. Lepikov glanced at the aging Godelinsky, then at the monumental Foss. Was there more here than met the eye?

Beckett glanced at a page in front of him and, in that moment, took over leadership of The Team. “I have been ordered to tell you,” he said, “that we are not the central investigative team.”

Godelinsky said: “But we were told…”

“Why not?” Foss demanded.

“There are now fifty-eight major research teams working on this problem worldwide,” Beckett said. “We are on telefax and closed-circuit TV communications via satellite. By tomorrow afternoon, we’ll have a twelve-man clerical and communications team in here plus at least thirty lab technicians. There will, however, be two central clearinghouses for communications: one in East Berlin for all Europe and the other in Washington, D.C.”

“Politicians!” Foss barked.

Beckett ignored the outburst. “Our first order of business is to tackle the problem of a psycho-physical profile for our Madman. There is now convincing evidence that it was this John Roe O’Neill.”

“What evidence?” Godelinsky demanded.

Hupp raised a hand. “Everything fits: the names of his children and wife, the particular expertise in molecular biology.”

“We haven’t pinpointed his lab,” Beckett said, “but there’s growing evidence that it was somewhere near Seattle.”

“Not in Kansas?” Danzas asked.

“That was a first report,” Beckett said. “It’s been disproved.”

“Do you have the new background summary?” Hupp asked.

Beckett distributed duplicate sheets to the others from a stack in front of him. “You’ll note that his parents died in a car accident the year he graduated from high school,” Beckett said. “He was raised by his maternal grandparents. The grandfather died while O’Neill was in college. The grandmother lived to see O’Neill graduate at the head of his class. She left him a moderate legacy and the McCarthy family business.”

“So many deaths,” Lepikov muttered, looking at the page in front of him.

“An unlucky clan,” Beckett agreed. “Only that aunt in the nursing home in Arizona. Half the time she thinks they’re asking about her dead husband.”

Hupp said: “We are being asked to determine how far we can move against this Madman without turning him against the rest of the world.”

Silence greeted this observation.

“You’ve read his threats,” Beckett said, presently.

“A dead-man switch,” Lepikov said. “A device or arrangement that would loose a new plague upon everyone should this Madman be captured or killed.”

“Are our hands tied?” Godelinsky asked.

Hupp said: “Surely, O’Neill must know we cannot totally ignore what he has done.”

“We have a certain amount of freedom,” Beckett said. “This facility – secret, superbly equipped.”

“But he warns us not to do exactly what we’re doing here,” Lepikov said. “We will ‘feel his wrath’ if we disobey.”

Danzas spoke, his tone mild: “That is why we remain hidden here.”

Lepikov said: “My associates in the Soviet Union believe this… this DIG was chosen because it is not in Europe where the plague is most likely to spread.”

Danzas splayed his big hands on the table and addressed himself to Beckett. “I came here in the belief that this was the ideal place for a secret and coordinated assault on this plague. I was told this would be the central coordinating facility.”

“The plans were changed,” Beckett said. “I did not change them.”

“Goddamned bureaucrats!” Foss said.

Beckett’s expression remained bland and amiable. He said: “The DIG may very well become the center of the world’s combined medical effort.”

“But first we prove ourselves, eh?” Hupp asked.

“First we try to understand our enemy – the man and not the plague,” Beckett said.

“Where was this decision made?” Godelinsky asked.

“At the highest levels,” Beckett said. “Most of the other groups, so I’m told, are also working in this way as well as on the question of how he spread his plague. That is the highest priority. Can we cut him off and go after him openly on all fronts?”

“Tomorrow, we start the medical work, hein?” Danzas demanded. “When the technicians come?”

“That, too,” Beckett said.

“Too!” Foss said.

“I have received no such orders,” Lepikov said.

“There’s a telephone in your room,” Beckett said. “You’re free to use it.”

“And who will listen?” Lepikov demanded.

“Our secret police and yours,” Beckett said. “Who cares? Call your boss and get your orders.”

“Secrecy is our only hope,” Godelinsky said. “If he is insane, we cannot predict him.”

“Who doubts he’s insane?” Foss asked. “He’s driven the whole world nuts. Including the politicians!”

It must certainly be more dangerous to live in ignorance than to live with knowledge.

– Philip Handler

W
ITHOUT ANY
particular pride, John thought his lab in the basement of the Ballard house a marvel of ingenuity. The centrifuge that he had improvised out of tire-balancing equipment had cost less than a thousand dollars. His freezer was stock home bar equipment turned on its back and with a calibrated thermostat added. It was accurate to within one degree Centigrade. He had improvised peristaltic pumps from scuba equipment. His cell disrupter was adapted from a used yachting sonar. The electron microscope, a dual-stage thirty Angstrom resolution ISI model, cost him the most time and considerable money. It was provided as a consignment-theft item by the San Francisco underworld at a cost of twenty-five thousand dollars.

And so it went with the entire lab. He fashioned the negative-pressure research rooms out of plywood and plastic film. The airlock was sealed by two small boat hatches, which forced him to crawl into and out of the rooms. It was the only major inconvenience. 

Before the lab was completed, John was at work with his computer, setting up the full-color graphics of the molecular models upon which he would center his attention. In parallel computer storage circuits, he filed away everything he could ferret out about the ways existing drugs functioned in the body. He paid particular attention to known data on enzymes and specific DNA receptors.

It gratified him to discover that many of the most important requirements for his molecular maps were available in “canned” form – on computer discs or in storage programs that could be bought or stolen. By the time the lab was completed he had his computer loaded with the elemental building blocks of his project.

There was a hypnotic fascination in sitting before the cathode display, watching the double spirals of the primal helix turn and twist at his command. The red, green, purple and yellow lines took on a life of their own. His mind and the display fell into a kind of unified space within which it was difficult to separate which was in his mind and which in the screen. It seemed at times as if his hands on the computer controls created the images in his head, or the image would be in his head and then appear as if miraculously on the screen. There were moments when he thought he was actually speaking in the language of the genetic code, talking to specific sites on DNA molecules.

During these periods, the actual flow of time vanished from his consciousness. On one occasion, he crawled from the airlock hatch, staggered to his feet and found it just dawn outside. Investigation revealed that he had been working steadily for thirty-seven hours with only an occasional sip of water. He was achingly hungry and his trembling hands could not even deal with solid food until he drank almost a full quart of milk.

The structure he needed to see and understand was slowly revealing itself, though, both on the screen and in the computer-monitored outputs of his lab. He knew it was only a matter of time until he fitted the proper molecular key into the biological lock. The answers were here in the lab and in his head. They merely had to be opened out into their own reality. The nucleotide sequences of the DNA encoded all of the genetic information for every biological function. It was a code-breaking problem.

Without the computer he would have been lost. At any given moment he might be working with four thousand to twenty thousand genes. The mapped arrangements of these genes and the DNA codes within them could project into more than a million genes. He did not need all of those genes, though – only the key ones whose coding lay in the particular nucleotide sequences.

By disruption, by enzyme fractionating and temperature-controlled separation with collimators and centrifuge, he sought out the bits and pieces that his mind/computer images told him were there.

Before long, he was fashioning ribosomal RNAs and messenger RNAs from his own DNA templates, selecting and discarding, seeking out the control sites in the genomes. These and the regulatory proteins were his first targets.

Some two months into the project, John realized he would need a special supply of natural DNA for the polymerization cycle. The DNA had to be biologically active and it had to carry the templates he required. There was no escaping the fact that the DNA material transferred in pairs, one of each pair being a mirror of its opposite number.

His head ached with thinking about the problem, but he could not avoid the immediate necessity. It would risk exposure. It was dangerous… but he could see no alternative.

A session with his forging kit gave him a passable identification as a John Vicenti, M.D., Public Health Service. He had bought a small hand press early in fitting out the equipment for his project. This now produced some quite adequate letterheads. On these he typed letters of authorization, scrawling big signatures of officials at the bottoms. He bought a dark wig, toned his skin olive and all the while kept watch through the newspapers for a school immunization date. It came within the week, announcement of an immunization program in West Seattle Junior High School for the following Monday. 

Wearing a white jacket with stethoscope protruding from a side pocket and a name tag on his lapel identifying him as John Vicenti, M.D., he showed up early at the school. It was a cold winter morning and the halls were crowded with students bundled into heavy jackets. He moved through the shouting, jabbering throng without attracting more than casual notice. In his left hand he carried a carefully arranged wooden kit box containing racks of sterile slides and covers and all of the neatly assembled tools for blood sampling. In his left hand was the briefcase with his authorizations.

He bustled officiously into the school nurse’s office, noting her name on the door: “Jeanette Blanquie.”

“Hi,” he said, all innocence. “I’m Doctor Vicenti. Where do I set up?”

“Set up?” Nurse Blanquie was a slender blond young woman with a permanently harried expression. She stood behind a long table upon which the immunization kits were set out in orderly rows. There was an empty chair at the far end of the table with two stacks of forms in front of it. The wall behind her displayed a calendar and two bowdlerized anatomical charts, one labeled “male,” the other “female.”

“For the blood samples,” he said. He put his wooden box and briefcase on the table and showed her his identification and authorizations. Nurse Blanquie merely glanced at them while her expression became even more harried.

“Blood samples,” she muttered.

“We’re supposed to get them right along with your immunization program to minimize the upset of school routine,” he explained.

“I was supposed to have two clinical technicians here this morning to help me,” she said. “One of them just called in sick and the other one has some kind of emergency at Good Samaritan. Now you. This is all I need. What are your samples for?”