The White Plague (9 page)

“I must be going, Stephen. Do whatever you must to get her in that tank. Get in with her if necessary. Connect the telephone. I’ll call you there later. Will you do it?”

Stephen took a deep breath. “This plague…”

“It’s already killed a number of women. We don’t know where else the madman may have spread it. Get your friend into that tank!”

Peard broke the connection.

Violence endured too long leads to moral anesthesia. It degrades even religious leaders. Society is separated into sacrificial lambs and those who wield the knives. High-sounding labels mask the bloody reality: phrases with words such as “Freedom” and “Political Autonomy” and the like. Such words have little meaning in a world without morality.

– Father Michael Flannery

A
LL BUT
twenty of John Roe O’Neill’s letters had been mailed before FBI agents entered the Los Angeles drop with a warrant. The drop was a tiny office room in a brick building on Figueroa near downtown LA. It was operated by a Miss Sylvia Trotter, a bony woman in her fifties with hair of a wild henna and heavily rouged cheeks. The two young agents, as alike as clones in their neat blue suits, flipped open their wallets to give her a flashing glance at the identification cards then, like synchronized dancers, returned their wallets to their pockets and demanded to know about the O’Neill letters.

What had been her contact with the author of those letters? Had she seen the contents of any of the letters? Not even one letter? What address had the author of those letters given her?

They examined her records and took away a copy of her ledger, leaving Miss Trotter in damp and nervous confusion.

The agents, trained as both accountants and lawyers, were disgusted with Miss Trotter’s laxity. She had not even photocopied the check from the Henry O’Malley who had set up this arrangement! O’Malley, with a false address in Topeka, Kansas, had paid by cashier’s checks on a Topeka bank. Even before they investigated, the agents knew Topeka would be a dry well. There was no one at the bank who even remembered this O’Malley’s appearance!

The twenty letters they collected with Miss Trotter’s ledger included five that suggested the author had anticipated an official visit from investigators. The five were addressed to prominent religious leaders and were headed: “Warning to the authorities!”

They explained that the Madman was hooked to a “dead-man switch” that would automatically flood the world with more and different plagues should “anyone interfere with me.”

Photocopies of all the letters from the Madman were among the first pieces of evidence studied at the Denver Isolation Center by The Team, as they came to be known. The Team’s first meeting came twenty-nine days after the Achill demonstration, a delay caused by political indecision in high places, an indecision which was put aside only after chilling developments worldwide.

O’Neill’s disease, now being called
the white plague
because of the pallor of its victims and white blotches that appeared on the extremities, obviously was not being contained in Ireland, Britain and Libya. Looseness of the first quarantine had been largely evaded or ignored by high officials, by the wealthy trying to get their loved ones to safety, by financial messengers, criminals and investigators and others. White Plague outbreaks were being reported all around the world. There was a pocket of it in Brittany. It contaminated a corridor in the United States from Boston almost to Weymouth. The western slopes of the Cascades from well into British Columbia south into California and to the Pacific had to be cordoned off under a brutal quarantine. The World Health Organization’s list of “hot spots” included Singapore, Perth (Australia), New Delhi, Santa Barbara, St. Louis, Houston, Miami, Constantinople, Nairobi, Vienna… and these were just the most prominent places.

The Team had the current list of “hot spots” and the O’Neill letters when they sat down for their first meeting at the DIG. They met in an underground room, its walls paneled in dark wood. They had a choice of cold, indirect lighting or warmly intimate illumination focused only on the long table around which they gathered. A psychoanalyst probably could have derived deep significance from the fact that they chose the revealing wash of indirect lighting for that first meeting. All six members of The Team knew they were there to study each other as well as the problem.

Selection of The Team’s members had cost long hours of searching questions in sound-insulated rooms and by people who raised their voices only for emphasis. The six were divided by nationality – two each from the Soviet Union, from France and from the United States. It had been planned to introduce other nationals later, but circumstances intervened.

William Beckett of the United States pair, who was to become nominal chairman of The Team, came to the first meeting with a particular worry that had been ignited by the devastating plague outbreak on the West Coast of his nation. Had the area been contaminated by disease fractions that had escaped from an insecure laboratory? (It already was suspected that the Madman had set up his laboratory in the Seattle area.)  The others were too busy measuring each other, however, and he saved his concern for later.

Ruckerman, who had been Beckett’s professor at Harvard, had experienced little difficulty putting his prize pupil on The Team. The selection board had been awed by Beckett’s talents and accomplishments: public health consultant on bubonic plague; world-class skipper of racing sailboats; commercial aircraft pilot’s license with jet training (a major in the Air Force Reserve); a hobby of creating and solving “brain-twister” puzzles; a consultant on the military code system, “Diascrambler”; a distance swimmer and a generally respected handball player.

“A molecular biologist second to none,” Ruckerman had said. “A Renaissance man.”

Beckett was a sandy-haired descendant of Scots-English religious refugees. He had the pink skin and pale eyes to go with this ancestry, but features that a college date had described as “latent course.” Beckett had been a college football linebacker until discovering that the constant jarring collisions of football might scramble his proudest possession – a mind to which most puzzles submitted after a skirmish more exciting than any on the gridiron.

The college date’s prediction had proved accurate: Beckett had large, heavy features, but the mind had improved.

Within minutes of meeting Francois Danzas of the French contingent, Beckett had known it would be difficult working with the Frenchman. Danzas was a tall, slender and dark native of Peronne with traces of Celt, Roman, Greek and Viking in his genes. His obviously dyed hair was swept back in two raven’s wings over a face that often appeared blank and empty except for the large brown eyes. These stared out in constant incredulity at a world of caprice, now glaring, now withdrawn beneath their heavy black brows. Whenever Danzas closed his eyes, his face emptied, leaving only that long nose and a narrow, almost lipless mouth. Even the dark brows seemed to fade. As the Brittany expression had it, Danzas was as tough as an old saddle. Seasoned by much use, weathered and shaped, he was now a visible repository of valuable experiences. Danzas relied on Danzas. He knew himself in jeopardy only when traveling or when eating foreign food. Foreigners, especially the English and, by language association, the Americans, were to be distrusted as fundamentally unsound, capable of evil and would cooperate only under duress. The White Plague, for Danzas, merely represented the present duress. In spite of the fact that he looked down his long Gallic nose at Americans, Danzas was recognized in his homeland as an expert on all things Yankee. Had he not endured four interminable years on an exchange-research program in Chicago? Where better to learn Yankee ways than in the Hog Capital of the world?

Danzas could understand the capriciousness of life where this touched on his living arrangements, but not in his laboratory. In the lab, Danzas always expected to be eyewitness to the virgin birth if not the immaculate conception. Certain responsibilities fell upon such an eyewitness. Two observers of the event could not come up with two different stories. Thirty eyewitnesses must produce the same account. It was an infallible rule. A pope could rely on no better.

The joke in France was that Danzas had been put on The Team as contrast to his French companion, Jost Hupp. Hupp’s horn-rimmed glasses, the slightly bulging eyes, the youthful insouciance of his features, all conspired to a totality that invited sharing. Those who called Hupp a romantic failed to focus on the underlying strength of his fantasy world. He used romance as Beckett used a concealed anger. Where Beckett’s muse led him to a raging intellectual striving, Hupp’s muse was endearing and promoted a gregarious sharing of everything – successes, failures, joys, griefs… everything. Threaded through this complex personality was an Alsatian tenacity compounded of both French
and
German ancestors. It was in part a hangover from early influence by the Roman Catholic Church. Mephistopheles was real. God was real. The White Knight was real. The grail remained the eternal goal.

There was a pattern in this deeply satisfying to Hupp. Without it, he would have been merely a researcher, a man in a white coat, not white armor.

Beckett thought Hupp was okay. A little weird but okay. Danzas, however, was a scientific prig of the worst sort. What the hell difference did it make where this team assembled just so long as the facilities were acceptable? It angered Beckett that he would have to work with this prig for God alone knew how long. He kept the anger sufficiently under wraps that only Hupp suspected.

Many people had worked with Beckett for years without realizing that he operated on regular anger fixes. He could find something to anger him almost anywhere and, thus charged up, went headlong into the problem confronting him. The White Plague was made to order for Beckett. That son-of-a-bitch! That fucked-up Madman! What right had he to disrupt a world that, admittedly not perfect, was stumbling along in its usual fashion?

Little of this anger escaped an amiable mask. He seldom spoke harshly. If anything, he was even more amiable with Danzas, which brought out the Frenchman’s most correct and stiffly proper courtesy. It was a matter of mutual fury that amused Hupp.

The other member of the U.S. contingent, Hupp observed, was the real surprise package, especially to the two from the Soviet Union, Sergei Alexandrovich Lepikov and Dorena Godelinsky. They kept looking speculatively at Beckett’s companion, Ariane Foss.

At six feet six inches and 288 pounds, Foss was easily the largest person present. The French dossier on Foss judged her one of the five or six best medical heads in the United States on what her country-doctor grandfather had called “female complaints.” Both the French and the Soviets suspected she was with the Central Intelligence Agency. It was noted that she spoke five languages fluently – including French and Russian.

Foss had rather small but even features framed in golden hair kept trimmed to tight, natural curls. Although large, her body was well balanced.

At the moment, Lepikov and Danzas were verbally sparring for dominance, a matter of revealing credentials as though they were card players turning up their cards, each aware that the other reserved powerful aces.

Lepikov, short and stocky with bushy gray hair over a flat face with a touch of Mongol in the eyes, appeared the peasant to Danzas’s aristocrat, a fact that each noted, thinking it a personal advantage.

Dorena Godelinsky, the other member of the Soviet contingent, showed increasing signs of irritation at the male contest. A slight, graying woman who walked with a limp, she had been cursed, as she often complained to close friends, with an aristocratic face, “a barrier to advancement in the Soviet hierarchy where heavy, peasant features are more favored.”

Abruptly, she interrupted the two men with a coarse Russian curse, adding in English: “We are not here to play little boys’ games!”

Foss chuckled and translated the curse: “She just called Sergei a country stud. What do we have here – black hat and white hat?”

Lepikov scowled at Foss, then forced a smile. He had done the mandatory tour as an
observer
at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., and understood Foss’s jibe.

“It is I who wear the white hat,” he said. “Am I not the foremost expert on epidemiology in my nation?”

Foss grinned back at him. The United States dossier on Lepikov had him abnormally concerned with the workings of his liver, a paradox considering the quantities of vodka he was known to consume. These alcoholic indulgences, however, were always followed by bouts of self-loathing, an anguish approaching the pathological during which he dosed himself not only with specifics to which his medical standing gave him access but also with nostrums and massive doses of vitamins carefully concealed in bottles marked for more ordinary contents.

Godelinsky, hearing the boast, muttered: “Peasant!”

She spoke in English, which brought the attention of the others to her.

Beckett cleared his throat and hitched himself closer to the table. Godelinsky, the dossier said, was a renowned code breaker in the Soviet Union as well as being a medical researcher in her country’s space program. She was considered a top-ranked diagnostician and her laboratory techniques were rated “superb.”

“We have been introduced,” Beckett said. “We’ve all read the secret service dossiers on each other. Perhaps those dossiers contain accurate information. Who knows? I suggest we will learn more important things about each other in the days to come.”

“I would like to see your dossier on me,” Lepikov said.

“Unfortunately, I was not allowed to keep it,” Beckett said.

Godelinsky nodded. Beckett had taken exactly the right tack with Sergei. Spies were everywhere. Admit it and go on. Beckett had intuition, then. Godelinsky knew this was her own strength. She knew her Soviet colleagues considered her unpredictable, but did not understand this. The reasons for her decisions always seemed perfectly clear to her. It was the intermediate steps that the “mud heads” around her failed to understand because their minds could not leap, plodding instead like aged workhorses.