1.10 P.M.
The police department pilot used the roof of the New York Police Museum as his horizontal reference as he settled the helicopter onto the helipad on Pier 6. A police escort whisked Dr Kim Scholler, Professor Samuel Ghent and Dr Charles Steelman back to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Response Plan, the country’s all hazards approach to managing domestic incidents, had been activated. Washington would now coordinate the response on all fronts, to include Homeland Security, emergency management, law enforcement, emergency medical services and public health. The Manhattan team had been asked to return to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and to keep Washington updated on casualties. They were to return to the Pentagon that evening, to attend the next meeting. Kim Scholler’s face went a deathly white as she scanned through the printouts from hospitals in New York and adjoining states, which were laid out on the conference room table.
‘Gentlemen,’ she said to the other doctors, ‘we are now at over one hundred thousand dead. And the influx of new patients is rising.’
*
As Dr Scholler broke the latest devastating news, Detectives Wyse and Cabrini were returning south along the Hudson Parkway from the meeting with Maria Cabrini. Wyse was deep in thought and Cabrini knew better than to interrupt him. The police radio told them that streams of heavily laden cars were beginning to back up from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel toll. Wyse spotted that some of the drivers were wearing surgical facemasks. Looks like we may have the beginning of an unofficial evacuation here. They were suddenly flagged into the kerb by a motorbike cop.
‘What’s this about?’ said Cabrini. The answer was clear as soon as a convoy of over one hundred army trucks crossed the George Washington Bridge in front of them, coming from New Jersey into Manhattan. Once across, the convoy turned south for Central Park.
The cop waved them on again but, just after Cabrini crossed the junction, Wyse shouted, ‘Stop!’ and slammed his hand on the dashboard.
‘Sorry, Mike,’ he said to the startled Cabrini. ‘Quick, turn around and go back to your sister.’
Maria Cabrini was concentrating hard, peering down the lens of a microscope, when she was distracted by a rapid knocking on the glazed partition.
What the hell now? She sighed and went back out through the double doors, removing her facemask as she went.
‘Look, guys, I’m kinda busy –’
‘Sorry, Maria,’ interrupted Wyse. ‘Just one thing.’
‘Okay.’
‘You remember when we came in here first?’
‘I’ll never forget it.’
‘Why did you say that you had got a batch of samples from Chinatown?’
‘Cos that’s where they’re from, presumably?’
‘But why? Surely you get the samples from the nearest hospitals? Mount Syracuse and Elm Park are right beside you. Chinatown’s way down the island.’
‘Well, they’re all Chinese, the samples we got.’
‘How do you know?’
‘From the DNA fingerprinting. All the bacteria samples we got contain human DNA from Chinese people. So I guessed we got Chinatown.’
‘Could they be Japanese?’ asked Wyse.
The researcher frowned. ‘I suppose they could,’ she replied. ‘They’re definitely all Asian – I just assumed Chinatown. It’s unusual.’
‘Could you tell Japanese from Chinese DNA?’
‘Not too sure. I could check up on that. It’s easy to distinguish, say, Asian from Caucasian or African, but differentiating Japanese and Chinese might be tough. Not my area. It would be a break though from endlessly confirming e-coli in stool samples. Why do you say Japanese?’
‘Just a hunch. What are you working on at the moment?’
‘Like I said earlier, if this e-coli bacterium has learned how to fight off antibiotics, and we lose cephalosporin altogether, we’re in big trouble. We may be already. I’m starting to think about options. Above my pay grade, though.’
‘So, is there no way to make antibiotics work again?’
‘It’s trial and error really. A good example is penicillin. When penicillin became available after the war, it was seen as the “miracle drug” – the answer to all our problems. But after years of overuse of penicillin, some staph and strep bacteria appeared that could resist penicillin. But scientists discovered that by adding clavulanic acid to penicillin, it became effective again against the bacteria. So, these days, one of the most popular antibiotics prescribed is called Augmentin – which is simply penicillin plus clavulanic acid, which allows it to outflank the bugs.’
‘Gotcha. And do you have something that could make cephalosporin work again?’
‘I may do,’ Maria said cautiously. ‘I’ve been experimenting with a prototype over the last few months and my tests are showing a new effectiveness for cephalosporin, when I add a particular combination of acids. But it needs months more testing.’
‘If your hunch is right, we don’t have months. Can it work immediately?’
‘Perhaps, but it’s a gamble.’
‘Can it be mass produced?’
‘Yeah, simple enough,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the formula – any lab can do it.’
‘I think you should be dusting it down, Maria,’ said Wyse, frowning as he shook her hand and turned to leave. He looked back at her.
‘Thanks, Maria. Can you please keep your cell phone on after hours?’
*
2.05 P.M.
He’s rigid with shock, thought Dr Conrad Jones.
Dr Peter Phillips was staring blankly at the bedside curtains around his wife’s bed. Conrad Jones had pronounced Sandra Phillips dead five minutes earlier. One hour before that, in a ward three floors lower down at the Patrick J. Brock Memorial Hospital, Conrad Jones had watched as Peter Phillips lay on his son’s bed, hugging Jonathan’s small, dead body and stroking his sweat-matted curls. The little boy’s hand was still clutching a black Superhero toy dragon.
‘I’ll leave you here for a few minutes, Peter,’ he said, standing up. Peter Phillips didn’t even notice him leave. Dr Conrad Jones, too, was reeling from shock and exhaustion. He had been working around the clock. He stepped out into the ward, closing the curtains behind him. The ward looked like something from a battlefield. The hospital had reluctantly taken the decision to double up the number of beds in each ward, accepting that this increased the risk of cross infection. The ward now contained sixteen beds, packed together. Three other patients had been shoved into the ward on trolleys. All patients were on IV cephalosporin and IV fluids. And all appeared to be dying. Struggling to get between two trolleys and a bed were two maintenance crew, pushing a curtain on wheels.
Jesus, what’s the point in banning visitors from the hospital to reduce the risk of infection and still let maintenance guys in to fix curtains?
Annoyed, he strode to the nurses’ station at the end of the ward, picked up the phone and paged Irene Sefton, the hospital administrator. She came on the line after about twenty seconds.
‘What’s up? Any good news?’ she said wearily.
‘No, but I’m wondering why we have a maintenance crew in here fixing curtains when we hardly have room to breathe?’
‘We don’t have a maintenance contract for the curtains. Old Joe does that.’ Old Joe was the legendary seventy-four-year-old janitor, the only person still working in the hospital who had been there from its opening day in 1969.
‘Old Joe does it? Then why are there two people banging curtains around my ward?’
She responded irritably. ‘I have no idea, but it doesn’t seem like the biggest problem in the world right now.’
Conrad Jones turned around to face back down the ward. The maintenance crew had vanished.
*
As they drove their white van out of the hospital’s service yard, one of the curtain swishers turned to the other. ‘So you’re okay for another run this evening?’
‘Yeah. Turns out I’m free tonight. We can go back to some of the same ones we did today. They’re in such a state they’re never gonna notice us.’
‘Yeah, you’re right. But you know what, there’s a lot more going on here than we know about. All these people dying. Tonight’s run, I’m gonna bring my gun. Just in case.’