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HARPER WAS GIVING HIM more and more solid data all the time. “I’m confident on the person-time rate now.” It was Friday, late in the morning, and everyone else was out catching birds or interviewing patients or talking to doctors or clinics or funeral directors.
“Hit me with it,” he said.
“From exposure to first symptom is 90 hours, with a tentative 50 hours until the person is contagious. First symptoms to either recovery or crisis, five days, 120 hours. Full recovery, we don’t know yet.”
“At two days, they’re passing it on. At four days, they feel—what?”
“Feverish, achy, sore throat.”
“And at nine days, they die or turn the corner.”
“That’s right.”
“And we have patients who have been hospitalized but did turn the corner?”
“Roy says yes, at each hospital there’s one.”
Two getting better. And over sixty dead. “Treatment?”
“Didn’t even have the one guy on antivirals. He wasn’t ever in ICU either, just on a medical floor.”
“Really?”
She raised her eyebrows at him.
“I wasn’t questioning you. It was rhetorical. It’s interesting, I mean.”
“We also must have cases where the person never got very ill. Some people have a powerful immune system, right? They’ll fight it off.”
“Indeed they do. Mine isn’t half-bad, but my mother said her grandfather never had a symptom of anything, ever. He survived the Spanish flu without a sniffle, despite his whole town being down with it. But it’ll be a rare person who fights off a brand new flu.”
“It’s H5N1 still though, right? No change on that.”
“Yeah.” He understood her point. If you had a powerful natural immunity against the H5—that’s the protein that bored into the cells to infect them—it might just work to keep you from getting dangerously ill with this one.
Harper said, “So we have to get the vaccines on hand out there, right? They might do something.”
“On their way. Monday or Tuesday.”
“It’s shocking it takes so long to get them here.”
“Yeah. Bureaucracy. And shipping, and labor laws. We can’t just do a genie eye-blink and get them here.”
“I wish we were better at this.”
“We’re among the best in the world.”
“I know,” she said. “But it’s like a...I don’t know. Like a big long train filled with steel, and only one engine is trying to get it started up a hill.”
“Good analogy. It is very much that. At least we didn’t have to beg, borrow, or bribe to get vehicles to take us to the infected village, as I’ve had to elsewhere.”
“One day, maybe you’ll tell me about all your adventures.”
“You’ll hear plenty of stories before you’ve been with EIS for a year.”
“Give me just a crumb now.”
“Okay. Flying out in an airplane literally held together with duct tape—bright blue duct tape so you couldn’t even pretend it wasn’t there—flown by a guy drinking quarts of malt liquor he held between his knees, in a thunderstorm, just ahead of a surge of teenage soldiers, while holding a box of Ebola samples on my lap. That kind of thing?”
“Really? That happened to you?”
“Really. And it’s more fun to talk about ten years later than it was to live through, believe me.”
“Can’t wait.”
“You want something more exciting to do with this one?” He felt a twinge of guilt for keeping her at this work. She was just so damned good at it.
“No, I’m settled happily with this task for now. Maybe next time.”
“I’ll remember that. Now let’s get back at it. Work your statistical magic some more, and I’ll call Alverez again.”
Mid-afternoon, Javer and Mindi came back with more bird samples to mail off.
He got a call from the superintendent of schools as those two were unpacking and filling containers for shipping. The school superintendent said, “I was thinking, and then I was talking to Mr. Alverez. You’re still using the hotel as a base of operations?”
“We are,” Glenn said.
“I have a bunch of closed schools. I was thinking maybe a high school. You’d be able to spread out. And there’s even chemistry labs, and you could haul in equipment you need but have the sinks and so on already in place.”
“That’s really generous of you. But you know, I couldn’t promise you that we wouldn’t need to decontaminate the place if we used the labs. That might take months. But for admin work? I might take you up on it at some point. Can you make the decision unilaterally, or is there a board you need approval from?”
“Dr. Stevens, I own that board. They’ll rubber stamp whatever I tell them to.”
“Glad to hear it. I’ll let you know.”
“They’re empty now, so any time.”
“Again, thank you. It’s a kind offer.”
After he hung up, the phone rang immediately.
It was Emile. “Glenn, if I weren’t already married, I’d propose to you.”
“Okay. What did I do right?”
“The samples from the gas station.”
Glenn shot out of his chair in excitement. “Really?”
“Not the excreta swab itself. But the rag, which probably has mixed species.”
“You must have really rushed the lab on it.”
“We did. Had people working all last night. So there is some bird out there in your area that is carrying one form of H5N1, and we hope to tease out the species by Monday. Is the H5N1 in the sample your strain, the one these patients have? Not sure. We’ll know that Monday too. If it is, we’ll have the vector, and maybe the host, and in less than a week.”
“They’re shipping more bird swabs right now.”
“Whatever it costs to get them here fast, spend it.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“It doesn’t matter. The Director has the lab on overtime trying to isolate the RNA in the excreta. We want to know this. And we’ve coordinated with Fish and Wildlife, and they’re sending you two more people tomorrow to help with capture and sampling. This is really good work, Glenn. If we’re lucky enough to grab the right bird, you may have set a record for finding the vector.”
“Well, I doubt that,” Glenn said. But it had taken decades to discover Ebola’s animal host, with thousands of animals captured, euthanized, and tested before they were able to ID the right bat, and that bat still might not be the entire story. “Maybe a sick human wiped his nose on the rag. We aren’t to the vector yet.”
“We’ll get there. How many bird species can there be in New Jersey?”
Later on, before the staff meeting, over a dinner of carry-out Indian food, Mindi gave him an answer to that question. “Four hundred seventy-five bird species, plus escaped parrots and other exotics, plus whatever might be at a zoo.”
“I guess we have some work to do tomorrow, then. Or you do. I won’t be out there netting birds.”
Roy said, “So far, nobody has a sick pet bird. It’s going to be a wild bird.” Everybody was psyched about the preliminary lab results on the rag from the gas station.
“I’d like to get all the Laridae soon,” Mindi said, “as we know already that gulls can carry flu.”
“Laridae is what?” he asked.
“Family of seabirds,” she said. “Gulls, terns, the brown noddy, the black-legged kittiwake.”
Glenn enjoyed being around experts and knowing that they knew their jobs so well. “We have the two Fish and Wildlife people coming tomorrow, so you coordinate that, right?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. They were all calling him “sir” now, except Roy, who just wasn’t the type to “sir” anyone.
Glenn said to Mindi, “Excellent job. And that goes for Javer, and for everyone else. Also, everyone, as new people come in, I want to make sure I get their email address, phone number, and everyone keep that list updated on their own phones. If you ever hear someone say, ‘I didn’t get that email,’ make sure they’re added to the list, all right?”
Nods all around.
“Everybody takes a day off this weekend to attend to family matters or just relax. People with last names A through M, Saturday. Everyone else, Sunday. Trade off-days if you need to. Put your houses in order because I think it’s going to get crazier, and it might be a few weeks before you get another day off. Pay your bills ahead of time.”
“Gosh, Gramps,” Roy said, “everybody’s on automatic bill pay these days. It’s the 21st century.” His grin made it no kind of real insult.
“Speaking of my geezer tech abilities, if any of you is a brilliant technophile and knows of something new, some communications app or whatever that will help us stay in touch better, see me after the meeting and walk the geezer through it, please.”
Most of them smiled at that. A few were older than he, but not many. These were the best and brightest of their generation, and he felt a fresh wave of gratitude to have them as colleagues. He checked the time. “Now let’s finish the meeting.”
The meetings were starting to take on a rhythm. If there was a big piece of news, he told it first and credited whoever did the good work behind it, though today he had avoided mentioning his own part in the discovery of the rag at the gas station—the lab back in Atlanta got all his praise. Then Harper presented up-to-date statistics graphically. And then after that, he put up a projection of an agenda, and people reported one by one as they went through that list. As people were tired by the end, most of them sagging at the end of a twelve-hour workday, he saved the least important topics for last and a general “what else” at the very end when people were starting to pack up.
Tonight, the “what else” gained him something interesting. “I have something,” someone from Philadelphia said, a man whose name Glenn could not call immediately to mind. Darin, that was it. McCormick. “I’m linked in to the CDC stream that crawls the news and Twitter for disease reports that aren’t coming in directly to them. Sometimes, it gives me a head-start on seeing the big picture. Anyway, there’s increase in noise about summer colds, plus a report today on a cluster of illness from an oil rig in the Gulf. Could be anything, but either could be our virus. The oil rig thing sounds a lot like it.”
“Thank you,” Glenn said. “I’ll make sure they follow up on that back in Atlanta. And thanks to everyone.” He saw Mindi go over to Darin and ask him something. He realized that if it was another cluster of the same disease—the oil rig cluster—that might mean sea birds were the first place to look. Though he supposed all sorts of birds might fly out over the ocean. Actually, he had no idea how far something like a blue jay might fly over the ocean. He’d have to look it up one day. He should have a spare moment again in about two years.
He helped clean up the worst of the smelly food, though the hotel cleaning staff would come through later. He added another note to his to-do list to tip them and one particularly helpful hotel clerk—the one who had brought him menus a few days back—for the extra hassle and mess they were creating. He couldn’t expense that, but if it helped everything go more smoothly, it was well worth a couple hundred bucks out of his own pocket.
Saturday morning, he donned wrinkled civvies and went to a Walmart to buy shorts and a T-shirt to sleep in, so if someone knocked on his door in the middle of the night, he could answer it without embarrassing them. They would serve to wear while he did his laundry today. His only other choice was to go to a Laundromat in dress blues, which would be bizarre.
He was back at his hotel room, trying to bite through the plastic bits that held the new clothes’ price tags, when his cell rang. It was Nurse Ellis.
“Ellis, good to see your name on my phone again.”
“I wanted to tell you, we lost the little girl last night. Jasmin Washington.”
“Damn.” He sat on the bed, feeling the morning’s energy drain right out of him.
“I’m sorry. We’re up to forty-two here.”
“Dead? Of this?” That didn’t count the other hospital or the pneumonia deaths from the prior weeks that could be from this flu.
“Yes, and admissions are way up. We’ll run out of beds soon.”
“How is your nursing staff holding up?”
“Nervous. Understandably.”
“Yes,” he said. “How about you? Are you holding up okay? Sounds like you’re working seven-day weeks too.”
“I was just headed home for the day, in fact. And I wondered.”
She didn’t say anything for long enough that he finally prompted her. “Yes?”
“If you have time today, I was hoping I might take you out for lunch.”
“Like a date?” He regretted the phrasing the instant it was out.
“Well, not like a date. A date exactly.”
That made him chuckle.
“If you don’t think it would be inappropriate or weird, considering the circumstances.”
“No, it’d be nice. My only hesitation—and that would be hesitation plus a regret—is that I was only going to take a half-day off today to take care of personal things, and then I have to get right back to work after those chores are done.”
“Ah, I see.”
“I really am sorry, but if I don’t get cash at an ATM and do my laundry today, I’ll regret it. And so will anyone else who has to sit next to me, regarding the laundry.”
“Okay, not to be pushy, or to take away your excuse if that’s what it was, but I have a washer and dryer here. I can make us lunch instead. Come over, do your laundry while we eat, relax a bit in a regular living room.”
He looked down at the chewed-up plastic loop holding the tag to his new t-shirt, which he had been unable to bite through. “You don’t have a pair of scissors, do you?”
She laughed. “One or two.”
“Oh, good. Yes. I’d like that—even without the added enticement of the scissors.”
She gave him an address, and after he saw that his phone map was happy with it, he agreed to show up at noon.
He caught up on paperwork, checked in with six of his people, and then gathered his laundry in a borrowed pillow case from his hotel bed, donned his dress uniform because the new clothes were too casual for a date, and took off.
Ellis had a nice house, furnished with a mix of antiques and new furniture. “Looks like you do a lot of work sitting in the recliner.” There was a pile of old nursing magazines and what looked like statistical printouts on a table next to it.
“I do, and there’s one in my bedroom. I could probably live in an efficiency apartment with a good recliner, a table by it, and nothing else.” She led him into an office and said, “I laid out a pair of scissors on the desk there.”
Back in the living room, he cut off the tags. “I was trying to chew them off, and it didn’t work.”
“Surprised someone in your field would put anything in your mouth that someone else might have touched.”
“Good point. I was thinking more about my mother lecturing me about ruining my teeth by doing it, and not about the contagion.”
“It looks like we’re headed for something really bad.”
He nodded.
“Is there any way to put a stop to it?”
“Tonight, I’m going to meet with Alverez and suggest a much more strongly worded warning to the public. Stay at home unless you have to.”
“Is it showing up other places than here?”
“Looks like it. I heard this morning of the first possible cases in New York. The city, I mean.”
“That’ll spread faster than wildfire.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, you might not want to talk shop.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“We’ll put it aside while we eat. One more question before we do. If this thing holds up with this sort of case fatality rate, and if everyone infects just two other people, this might be The Big One, right?”
“Yeah. The only thing we have going for us is infection to death is only ten days. If we could get everyone to stay home and lock their doors for ten days, it’d burn out like a candle going out.”
“What’s the national plan for this? Is there one?”
“Yes. You can see the general outline at flu dot gov. Doesn’t New Jersey have one? It should.”
“I don’t have the foggiest.”
He stifled a sigh.
She said, “Is the plan specific? Does it say, ‘Executive order on quarantine?’ ‘Recall troops from overseas to enforce quarantine?’ Like that?”
“The federal government can only enforce quarantine—or isolation—at the borders. It’s up to the states to do it within the US. And it’s up to locals to discourage public gatherings. The problem is getting municipalities to do that, especially when they only have a handful of cases. Would the mayor have shut down every church service in town five days ago?”
Her laugh was wry. “I see your point. What about vaccines, antivirals? There’s a national reserve, I know.”
“The strategic stockpile, yes. But it doesn’t begin to cover the need we’ll see. Please don’t pass this around, but we’ll get your workers vaccines maybe as early as Tuesday. I honestly doubt they’ll work. If I were you, I’d have your pharmacist order antivirals now, to get ahead of the rush, and set aside a quarter of them to treat staff. If this becomes the worst-case scenario, the whole country will run out of antivirals before summer is done.”
“If you know there’s going to be a rush, why isn’t it all happening now? Ordering troops home, inoculating healthcare workers, all that?”
“We’re a big unwieldy nation, with a bunch of bureaucracies to navigate. We haven’t even decided as an agency what to say on Monday’s news releases—and won’t until we compile today’s figures. And you heard me about the stockpiled vaccines probably not working, right?”
“I know. Okay, enough shop talk. I hope you like chicken salad.” She smiled again. “Despite the whole avian flu connection. I did cook it through.”
“I love it. Show me to your laundry, and then let’s eat.”
After a pleasant lunch date, with no trade talk allowed for an hour, he gathered up his clean and dry laundry. She brought him a couple of hangers for his khakis and dress shirt. Glenn said, “This was nice. I have to go. I’d kiss you, but you know, since we both might have been exposed....”
“I suppose sex is right out then.”
He laughed in surprise. “A tempting thought, but yeah. Probably not the best idea right now.”
“You must think I’m terribly forward. And clumsy at seduction.”
“You’re lovely enough that you get to be clumsy at seduction and it still works fine.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“It was a compliment. Obviously, if that wasn’t clear, I need to work on my own skills at seduction.” He thought he might be blushing. He also thought that there was a possibility one or the both of them would catch this and die, and then he’d regret not making love with an attractive and willing woman one last time before the end. Well, that was a regret to fixate on when he was on his death bed. Right now, he had to get back to work.
She stood at the door and watched him leave. When he had his laundry arranged in the back seat of the car, he looked up. She was still standing there, her feet bare, and she gave him a little wave.
Yep, I already regret saying no. But he drove away nonetheless.
The afternoon brought a shipment of more respirators. Good. He’d have every new staff member on them from here on out.
His evening meeting was shorter with only half the staff working. Alverez also attended.
Afterward, Alverez said, “Man, you guys are really on top of it.”
“Remember that you thought so when it gets worse and people complain that we didn’t act fast enough.”
“I don’t know what else you could have possibly done.”
“We’re adding staff all the time. At this point, it’s what you can do that’s important. We’ll have an official press release on Monday, but until then, here’s what I want you to say tomorrow to the media. First, discourage people from going to gatherings, even church, or a bar, or a family reunion or anything where strangers gather. Second, tell people to stock up on tissues, throat lozenges, masks, and have a thermometer. If they feel at all sick, they should wear a mask any time they leave their homes. They need to shop once, get plenty of canned broth, mashed potato flakes, other easy to swallow foods, and food enough for two weeks even if they aren’t sick yet. Third, they need to stay off planes, buses, and trains.”
Alverez took notes as Glenn continued to make recommendations, and he nodded the whole time. He had a few questions, but they were reasonable ones. He didn’t argue, and he didn’t protest, and he didn’t try to talk Glenn out of any of these suggestions. This made him better than five-sixths of the locals Glenn had dealt with in almost twenty years of investigating disease outbreaks.
“I appreciate how cooperative you’re being. You understand, I hope, that nothing I’m telling you—asking of you—has the force of an order. By law, it’s your job to respond, and my role is only advisory.”
“I know. But I visited the ICU of the hospital with the most cases today. And I took a look at a video of an autopsy. The lungs were just full of liquid. He cut into one and it literally squirted. I thought of one of my kids ending up like that. That made it easy to listen to you. Now Trenton’s mayor, that’s another matter. He’s dragging his feet.”
“I noticed he’s been conspicuous in his absence from the news shows. Do you have any suggestions for how to get him on board?”
“Just that you should leave it to me. I know these people. He and I are in the same party. He’ll take it better from a local than from you guys—no offense.”
“No offense taken. I really appreciate it. You phone me if you need any other information to convince him, okay?”
“The thing is, he’s going to care about economics, and he’s going to care about public perception of the city. Like they named Ebola after the river. If this gets named the Trenton Flu....” He shook his head.
“We don’t do that any more. Place names, I mean. And just for that reason. It’s like...scapegoating a region or a demographic. Scapegoating only slows down sensible response. We could have beat AIDS in the US without that, cut it off at the beginning were it not for crazies trying to pretend it was anything other than a virus that could infect anyone. It’s why we’re seeing names like SARS and MERS and MRSA now.” He pronounced it “Mursa,” as most people did.
“Not that the name ‘AIDS’ saved us from the bigots. Well that’s good about naming conventions, at least. So it’s going to be economics the mayor cares about, once he hears that reassurance.”
“Dead people are notoriously bad at paying taxes.”
“Though they can vote, from time to time.” Alverez gave a wry smile. “Don’t quote me on that.”
“Never,” Glenn said. “I really appreciate it—appreciate you. Your community owes you a debt of gratitude too. If you don’t hear it immediately, as they balk at your recommendations, as they look for someone to blame, remember that. History will point to you as a hero in this.”
“Well, that’s not important, if I ever do get praised or not. Keeping my kids—and everyone else’s—safe. That matters.”
“I wish everyone was more like you.”
“Eyes on the prize,” Alverez said, as he rose. He started to offer his hand for a handshake, shook his head at himself and accepted an envelope of printouts from Harper instead.
Harper had been in contact with Communications at Atlanta and now knew how to print out charts and graphs in a way to make them easiest for television news to use. Alverez left with a stack of those, and Glenn told Harper she could take off until Monday morning.
“No I can’t. You need me.”
“Monday’s decision in Atlanta will be based on the data we have compiled by right now. Sunday’s figures won’t go into the mix. You need time off.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m ordering you to take time off, lieutenant.” He frowned. “You are a lieutenant, right?”
“Not telling.”
“Good God, we’d all be bounced out of the Army with this half-assed attitude to orders. Court-marshaled.”
“Does the HPS even have courts-marshal?”
“You’d better look that up—on your day off, which starts right now.”
“I’ll take off until five tomorrow. I’ll come back for the meeting and to gather up the data for the day. That’s almost twenty-four hours off.”
Glenn caved to the compromise. “Fine. But until then, you take care of yourself. Eat a good meal. Walk around a park. Do your laundry. Read a book. See a movie. I mean, rent a movie on pay-per-view—do not go to a movie theatre.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re off work as of now.” He checked his watch. “I don’t want you to even open your laptop from now until bedtime. And I don’t want to see your face until five tomorrow afternoon.”
