I REALLY don’t care if we only have four hours, Ms. Sumner. We don’t slow down at this point.” He was addressing her on the speakerphone.
“I understand, Mr. President.”
The president had allowed Kara to stay in the White House, where she’d observed the chaos from as close as she dared, which was mostly in the halls and on the perimeter. Until Thomas’s plane arrived in a few hours, she was out of her league.
The president had asked her to come in with Monique an hour earlier while they hammered through the antivirus issue for the hundredth time. They’d been on the phone with Theresa Sumner for the last ten minutes. None of her news was good. Par for the course—none of the news Kara had heard over the past twenty-four hours, since the phone call from Thomas, had been good. Defense, intelligence, health, interior, homeland security, you name it—they all were crawling the walls.
To make matters worse, Senate Majority Leader Dwight Olsen was reportedly behind a protest outside the White House. At last report over fifty thousand campers had vowed to wait the White House out in a silent vigil. It had turned into a spiritual gathering of the strangest kind. A sea of somber faces and shaved heads and robes and those who wanted shaved heads and robes.
They’d burned candles and sung soft songs last night. The swelling crowd was flanked by several hundred reporters who’d managed to put aside the normal clamor for this silent waiting of theirs. Give us some news, Mr. President. Tell us the truth.
Front and center was the grand master of ceremonies, the CNN anchor who’d first broken the story. Mike Orear. With less than ten days to go, he’d become a prophet in the eyes of half the country. His gentle voice and stern face had become the face of hope to all whose religion was the news, and to many more who would never admit such a thing.
Reporters called it a vigil for all men and women of all races and religions to pray to their God and appeal to the president of the United States, but anyone watching for more than an hour knew it was simply a protest. The crowd was predicted to swell to over two hundred thousand by tonight. By tomorrow, a million. It was turning into nothing less than a final, desperate pilgrimage. To the headwaters of the peoples’ troubles and hopes.
To the White House, where at this very moment the president and his government were running on fumes, trying to put out a thousand fires and turn over a thousand stones, desperate to head off disaster and find that elusive solution.
At least that was how Kara saw it.
She looked around at the ragged men in whose hands the world had been forced to put their trust. Secretary of Defense Grant Myers was still bleary-eyed over the nuclear exchange between Israel and France. They’d persuaded Israel not to launch and to play along with France’s offer for an open-sea exchange, but the Israeli prime minister was taking a whipping in his own cabinet for that decision. None of them knew Thomas, Kara thought. The recommendation to play ball with France was precipitated by information from Thomas Hunter.
Phil Grant, director of the CIA, listened intently, slowly massaging the loose skin on his forehead. Another headache, perhaps. Within ten minutes he would get up and take more aspirin. She wasn’t sure what to make of Phil Grant.
The chief of staff handled most of the communication coming to and going from the president, a steady flow of interruptions that Blair handled with a split mind, it seemed. The rest gathered there were key aides.
Kara couldn’t imagine a man better suited to deal with a crisis of this magnitude than Robert Blair. How many people could juggle so many issues, maintain their overall composure, and also remain completely human? Not many. She didn’t think any president could truly shed the political skin that earned him the office, but Blair seemed to have. He was genuine to the bone.
President Blair stood and spoke to Kara. “I need Monique with Thomas, at least long enough for us to flesh this thing out. She’ll be at your full disposal the minute she’s free. Jacques de Raison is on a flight from Bangkok now with several hundred promising samples, as you know. I need those samples in the right hands. As it turns out, I can’t think of anyone more qualified to coordinate this than you. Do you disagree?”
“No, Mr. President. But I’m exhausted.” Her voice sounded as if it were in a drum. “And to be perfectly honest, I don’t share your optimism. I’ve spoken to Mr. de Raison about the samples, and they would require a month to analyze—”
“I don’t care if you need a year to analyze them! I need it done in five days!”
The president’s outburst was uncharacteristic but not surprising. Not even startling.
He closed his eyes and took a calming breath. “I’m sorry. If you think someone else is better qualified to handle this, tell me now.”
“No sir. Forgive me. It might help to have Monique here.”
President Blair glanced at Monique. “I understand.”
Monique had been shuttled to the Genetrix Laboratories in Baltimore yesterday and flown back this morning to continue working with Theresa through a dedicated communications link. Nearly every laboratory with a genetics or drug-related research facility had been connected to Genetrix Laboratories after the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization’s facilities had proven inadequate. A staff of twenty-five screeners with PhDs in related fields scoured thousands of incoming threads and passed on any that fit the primary model that Raison Pharmaceutical had established to ferret out an antivirus.
Although her backdoor antivirus proved to be insufficient, Monique had brought one critical piece of information back with her: the gene manipulations she’d designed when creating the Raison Vaccine were at least one part of the antivirus. She’d explained the entire scenario to the president minutes ago. Valborg Svensson never would have kept her alive as long as he did unless he needed the information she gave him—namely, the genetic manipulations that completed his antivirus.
Blair rolled his neck and paced. “So am I to understand by your earlier statements that even if we do find an antivirus in the next five days, manufacturing enough and distributing it may be a problem?”
“Monique?” Theresa said, deferring.
“That depends on the nature of the antivirus, but you do understand that people will die. Even if we found the answer today, some will die. Isolated individuals, for example, who have wandered into the wilderness to find peace.”
“I understand. But let’s take a broader scenario. Our best estimates are that the first catastrophic symptoms of the Raison Strain could manifest in as few as five days, correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“But we may have as many as ten days. And the rollout of the disease will take a few days—not everyone was infected in the first days.”
“A week for complete rollout—that’s correct.”
“So we may have over two weeks before some people show symptoms.”
“We may. But the incubation period is likely shorter. We may begin to see symptoms in as few as three days in Bangkok and the other gateway cities.”
“And we have how long until people begin to die?”
“Best estimate, forty-eight hours from the onset of symptoms. But it’s only an educated—”
He held up his hand. “Of course. All of this is.” He faced Monique directly. “If we were to receive the antivirus from Armand Fortier in five days, assuming that’s the onset of first symptoms, could we manufacture and distribute it quickly enough to save most of our people?”
“It depends—”
“No, Monique, I don’t want ‘It depends.’ I want your best estimate.”
She set her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. “Six billion syringes—”
“We have twenty-eight plants in seven countries manufacturing syringes around the clock. The World Health Organization will supply the syringes it requests in the event you come through.”
“Millions who live in Third World countries won’t have immediate access to those syringes.”
“They were also the last to be infected. We’ll have every plane that can fly loaded with the antivirus within an hour of it rolling off the line. We have worked out a detailed distribution plan that will deliver an antivirus in a syringe to most of the world within one week. It’ll be a race—I know that—but I want to know who will win that race.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s possible that a fast-acting antivirus could reverse the virus if administered within forty-eight hours of the first symptoms.”
“So if we start with the gateway cities, like New York and Bangkok, and flood the market with an antivirus five days from now, we would have a chance of saving most.”
“Assuming the virus waits five days, yes. Most.”
“Ninety percent?”
“That would be most, yes.”
“Ms. Sumner?”
“I would concur,” she said over the speakerphone.
The president walked to the end of the room, hands grasped behind his back. He looked up at a television that showed a riot in progress in Jakarta, triggered by the news that the supposedly contained outbreak in Java hadn’t really been contained at all.
“We are holding the world together by a string,” President Blair said. “Our ships are scheduled to hand over most of our nuclear arsenal in three days’ time. Our only hope of getting the antivirus from the New Allegiance is to disarm ourselves and open ourselves to nuclear holocaust. Even then, I don’t believe that France intends to deal with us, or the Israelis for that matter, straight. They will give what they have to the Russians, the Chinese, but not to us.”
He faced them. “We cannot afford to deal with Fortier. Our only real hope rests in you.”
His position seemed extreme to Kara, but she no longer trusted her own judgment of extremity. For all she knew, their only hope didn’t rest in Monique or Theresa or anyone from the scientific community, but in Thomas. There had to be a reason that all of this was happening.
“Join me when Thomas arrives,” the president said. “You may leave.”
They left without a word. Ron Kreet was telling the president that he had a call with the Russian premier in two minutes.
“Doesn’t sound promising,” Kara said to Monique as they walked the hall.
“It never was. I can’t imagine this being solved from this end.”
This end? “Thomas?”
Monique nodded. “I’m not saying it makes sense to me, but yes. You were there, Kara. It’s real, isn’t it? I mean, it felt so real when I dreamed of it.”
“As real as this. It’s like Thomas is a window into another dimension. He lives in both, and our eyes are opened through his blood.”
“But I felt more like Rachelle when I was there. Monique to me was only a dream.”
“This can’t be a dream,” Kara said, looking around. “Can it?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to—they both knew that they weren’t going to figure it out now.
“Do you think of him?” Kara asked.
“All the time,” Monique said.
Kara glanced at her watch. “He’s probably still sleeping. That means he’s with the Horde right now. If he’s not dreaming with the Horde, there’s no telling how many days will pass before he wakes up.”
“In that reality.”
“Yes.”
“How would he not dream?”
“The Horde may know about the rhambutan fruit.”
Monique blinked. “Then we should wake him now! What if the Horde executes him?”
“It doesn’t matter if we wake him. The time that passes there is dependent on his dreaming there, not his waking here. Trust me, it took me two weeks to wrap my mind around that one. A week could pass with the Horde in the next few minutes of his dreaming on the plane.”
They turned into a small cafeteria.
“He’ll be here soon enough,” Kara said. “Let’s hope he has some answers.”