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“COME IN,” GLENN SAID to Nydia. “Is he domestic? Foreign? Do you have him in custody?”
“We don’t know his nationality, and no, he’s not in custody.”
“Who is it? What’s his name?”
“We don’t know that, either.” Nydia’s hair was coming out of its clip and she looked a little wild-eyed.
He had the sense she wanted to pace but lacked the space to do it. He said, “Where is he now?”
“We’re not sure yet, but not here. Europe somewhere, we think.”
“Okay, so you don’t know who he is, where he is, or anything else about him, but you think you have him?”
“We have a—a point of entry. Like with a crowbar. We have the tip of the crowbar in a crack now, and it’s just a matter of time before we tear his whole structure of secrecy apart.”
“If he’s foreign, don’t you have to hand over the work to the CIA?”
“Part of it,” she said. “But he wrote an email to someone here. So now we have someone new to look for. And that guy, the guy in the U.S., the FBI has jurisdiction over.”
“Who? Where?”
“We don’t know either of those answers yet.”
He was growing frustrated. “Well, what do you know?”
“That we’ll get there. Very soon.”
“Well, that’s good. I’d hate to be woken up for anything less.”
“Did you go to bed early? I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
He went to get his phone and tapped it on to check the time. “It’s twelve-fifty, the middle of the night for me. As we usually have breakfast at seven, it seemed a reasonable time to be asleep.”
She looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it had gotten that late. I’ll leave.”
“No, please, stay. I’m teasing you. It is exciting, I suppose. That is, if you tell me it is, I believe you. Have a seat. Water? Coffee?”
“No, I really should go. I honestly lost track of time.”
He didn’t want her to go. He liked looking at her, especially like this, excited about something, her cheeks flushed, her black hair less tidy than usual. “Please, no. Sit and tell me more.” He sat on the edge of the bed and pointed to a chair.
She perched on the edge of the dresser instead. “There isn’t much more. First indications suggest the emails came from somewhere in eastern Europe, bouncing through several false ISPs to disguise the source. But we will narrow down the original location. If he’s smart, that’ll be a public computer, or a series of them. Cafes, libraries, universities—somewhere like that. At worst, we’ll know a country of origin, probably within twenty-four hours.”
“What did the emails say?”
“What we have found is vague, and other bits are in code. It will help us decode those terms if we find all his other emails, and we will, very soon.”
“I’m sure how you will do that is all much too complicated for me to understand.”
“It’s much too complicated for me. But our experts in this are terrific. And with the national crisis, there’s as much cooperation between agencies as there ever has been, so the NSA is actually giving us information for a change. But don’t quote me on that in front of my colleagues.”
“Never. Your secrets are safe with me,” he said.
She smiled vaguely, and then looked at him and the smile faded.
He had the sense she was really seeing him for the first time since she had appeared at the door. “Are you sure I can’t get you coffee or something?” he asked gently.
“No. I should go. I hope you can get back to sleep.” She pushed away from the dresser and went straight to the door. “Goodnight.”
Monday afternoon, they went to Tufts. In a week, they’d be done with the most likely labs on the East Coast. Nothing had come of the interviews, and Glenn was worried that he was entirely wasting his time, except for indulging his personal desire to be near Nydia. There was no excuse for doing that in the middle of such a crisis.
His mind kept drifting as he wondered about what he might be doing at the CDC instead. Chicago’s infection numbers were growing rapidly and would peak in ten to fourteen days. He could be there—or at least on the phone to there, talking someone through new protocols, or even listening with sympathy as some hospital administrator or city official had a stress meltdown. He was fairly good at listening and at getting frightened people refocused on taking the next step, moving them on to something that they had control over.
His attention shifted back to the here and now, and he realized Nydia had asked him a question. “I’m sorry. I faded away there.”
The female lab worker they were interviewing looked from Nydia to him, and back.
Nydia said to Glenn, “I just said, ‘Do you have other questions?’”
“No. Thank you for talking with us,” he said to the lab worker.
“Did I have a choice?” the woman said. She wasn’t the only resentful person they had interviewed here.
Over a lunch of vending-machine sandwiches, he said, “I wonder if we’re not doing more harm than good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“For one thing, this is no way to keep secret that we suspect an act of terrorism. These people will go home and talk about being interviewed, and even when we don’t use the ‘t’ word outright, they understand why.”
“People are speculating about bioterrorism anyway, even the biggest idiots on the lowest sorts of news shows. That can’t be halted. And if it was intentional, when we make an arrest, everyone will know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just frustrated. And tired. I haven’t had a day off since the first part of May.”
“You should take this Saturday and Sunday off.”
“That’s when I plan to catch up on what’s been happening at the CDC. My emails, voicemails, everything I push aside during the week.”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t thought, but I’m making you work two jobs.”
“That’s okay. I wouldn’t have said yes to this if I didn’t think it would be a good use of my time. But I’m frustrated that we’re not getting anywhere.”
“It’s hard during this phase of an investigation. But like you’ve told me more than once, you’re an investigator too. You know there’s a lot of pursuing dead ends before you luck upon the real line of investigation, right?”
“That’s true. Contract tracing, finding hosts, hunting for patient zero, nailing the vector. Plenty of dead ends, and it can all be time-consuming.”
“What’s the longest it’s taken to find something you’ve hunted for?”
“If you count every disease I’ve ever been involved with investigating, decades. And when it comes to identifying hosts, I’m not necessarily the one to find it. Usually not, in fact. At best, I’m a part of a team of a dozen scientists and a few local laypeople with good observational skills who finally figure it out.”
“So you know the drill. You keep plugging away, and eventually something pops up, right? Or you go home and review notes, and you put two facts together and see an important connection.”
Glenn remembered his own moment at the gas station, way back when this began, the eureka moment. “It seems like this started so long ago. But it isn’t long at all.”
“A month and a half or a little more.”
“I guess that means the worst is over in Trenton now. I should call the public health director there and ask how he is. Tell him he did a good job.”
“Did he?”
“At the beginning, definitely. But I haven’t kept up. I’m sure he’s feeling devastated and hopeless about the totals, and he could probably use someone telling him it wasn’t his fault. But I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.” Or Ellis, whom he’d not checked on for fear of what he’d find. “I’ll make some of those calls this weekend.”
“So you aren’t taking a break, then.”
“I guess not. I can’t.”
Sunday evening, he had made some headway in the backup in his inbox when Lorraine called him. “I need a favor of you. A big favor.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“You need to do an interview on national TV. One of the morning shows.”
“Oh, Lorraine. Please, no.”
Lorraine said, “I’m sorry, but we’re running out of people. Especially in the northeast, some CDC people in regional offices are ill. Some are dealing with family emergencies. And you wouldn’t believe the demand. Every newspaper and TV station and radio program wants to interview a CDC epidemiologist. Some have asked specifically for the one who identified the disease. That’s you, in large part.”
“Then give me to a newspaper or a radio station, please. Not a nutso radio show, but a real one, like Science Friday. Newspaper is best of all. But regular TV? Really, that’s the worst.”
“TV is how people get their news these days. You can get on there and tell them the truth, Glenn, deny rumors, correct misunderstandings. I know you’re frustrated you haven’t been on the ground, saving lives. Doing this can save lives. Think of it that way.”
“That’s—damn,” he said, knowing she was right. “I know it might save a few lives, if someone can hear me out of all the useless noise they broadcast before and after me.”
“Worse than useless, much of it. You’ll get no argument from me on that point. So get on there and say something correct for a change.” She sounded stressed.
He sighed as he gave in. “Okay. When, where, and who?”
“Tomorrow morning about six-fifteen.” She named a network. “In their New York office. Studio, whatever they call it.”
“Between the recipe and the pop psychology book, eh?”
“I think they’re doing more real news right now. And someone here mentioned that their recipes are about how to make something interesting of canned food and bags of rice.”
“Gotta give them credit for that, I suppose.”
“There’s the cheerful attitude we need,” Lorraine said, in a fake-happy voice. Back to serious, she said, “Pretend you like them when you’re there, would you?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll even press my uniform.”
“I’m sure you’ll be swoon-worthy.”
“Not sure about that. Will I need graphics of any sort?”
“I’ll have Communications coordinate with the producer, and copy you in on everything so you’ll know what people are going to be looking at when they put up the graphics. When you’re there, there are monitors, so you can explain as they come up on monitor.”
He apologized to Nydia for abandoning her for a day, but she said she wanted to spend time with paperwork, and see what the searches had come up with so far to see what else she might learn.
“So interviews are off?”
“I’d like to hit every facility that works with flu virus that’s within driving distance of where the first dead crows were found.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that’s what you were thinking. I thought it was just geographical convenience.” He’d have to explain to her that it might not be right to focus on the Northeast, but that could wait until later today, after the interview was over and he’d driven back.
The television interview began well enough. But there was a tag team of reporters, and one, the man, clearly was meant to take a “bad cop” role.
“I understand you were there at the initial outbreak. Dr. Stevens, why weren’t you able to stop it?” he asked.
“By that point, it was unstoppable.”
“Couldn’t you have quarantined the whole town?”
“That’s not something we can do.”
“Not even when lives are at stake?”
“Not in a democracy. I’m sure some of my colleagues in certain countries have that power, but here, we do not. People here have freedom, and it can’t be taken from them without due process of law.”
“That seems crazy to me,” said the good-cop reporter, a bleached blonde. “Can’t something be done to fix that?”
“If you think so, might I recommend writing your senators? Laws might be changed. But I’m not sure that the courts might not overthrow them because of the constitutional right of assembly. Not my area of expertise.”
Bad cop reporter said, “What is your area of expertise?” Something in his tone implied Glenn probably didn’t have one.
“Epidemic diseases. Most of those I’ve dealt with around the world have been viral, as this one is.”
“Have you ever cured a disease?”
“I’m not in the curing business. I’m an investigator. I can make recommendations to hospitals about protocols, I can get on television news programs like this and beg people to stay home from work and wear masks if they must go outdoors. But mostly I investigate outbreaks.”
“Investigate what, exactly?”
Glenn ticked off some points on his fingers. “In this case, the questions at the beginning were typical: What is this, something old or new? Where did this disease come from, what we call the host, the animal it might have been hiding in? How did it spread from that animal to people, and how quickly? What percent of people does it infect? What percent does it kill? Are children or the elderly more susceptible? How many people does the average sick person infect? Over how many days? What’s the incubation period? Who—”
“Isn’t it more important to save lives?” the man said.
“That does save lives. Until you know what it is, you can’t treat it. Until you know where it comes from, you can’t stop people from becoming infected with it. Until you know how infectious it is, you can’t begin to tell people how to stop its spread. If you tell people to stay home, they won’t believe you until you have hard facts to back up your advice.”
“As I understand it, it was you who determined the host—the original host—was crows,” said the blonde.
“It was my original team in New Jersey, plus the lab back in Atlanta testing saliva and blood from a hundred different birds confirming it.”
The blonde leaned forward, either interested or faking it well. “How did you do that?”
“There was some luck involved. But it’s an avian flu, so we were suspicious of birds from the outset, of course. And a young man—I don’t remember his name, I’m sorry to say—from the state park system in New York phoned with a tip that helped us zero in on crows.”
“What about chickens? Now chickens are spreading the flu?”
“No, there are no cases of that. It’s more that outdoor chickens—in backyards, free range farms, and so on—are catching the flu, probably from the crows. In factory farms, where the meat and eggs most of us eat come from, they don’t come into contract with crows so can’t catch it from them.” He decided not to explain the risk of those chickens catching it from their human handlers, lest he start a panic. For factory chickens, humans were the vector.
“So chicken is safe to eat?”
“Cook it through, and it definitely is. Same with eggs. No over-easy. No raw egg drinks. Cook them through until firm.”
The blonde made a little joke and turned to a camera and said, “Stay tuned, and after the break Dr. Glenn Stevens of the CDC will have more for us.”
A make-up person ran up and powdered good cop and bad cop both, took a look at Glenn and gave his nose a swipe with powder, using the same fluffy tool as she had used on the other two, which Glenn kept himself from lecturing her over. Bad-cop interviewer walked over to take a tablet device from someone. Good cop said, “Dr. Stevens, you must have done this before.”
“Not often. It’s not my favorite task, I admit. I admire you for being able to do it every day.” A polite lie.
“Four hours, five days a week, almost every week of the year.”
“Wow,” he said, trying to sound impressed by a half-time job.
Someone called out, “One minute.”
Someone by a camera counted down the last few seconds, and the blonde greeted viewers and explained what was happening.
Bad-cop reporter said, “Dr. Stevens, I understand that the vaccines for this flu will be ready in about five months. Why so long?”
“That’s how long it takes to make vaccines.” Glenn explained, briefly, how fertile eggs were infected, the viruses removed and manipulated, then purified before being turned into vaccines.
“I hear that medical workers will be the first to get them?”
“Yes,” Glenn said, ignoring for now that politicians and troops and police and fire fighters would also be high on the list. “You want people well enough to take care of you if you get ill, right? And while you could easily avoid being infected by having taken a month off work when the flu arrived in New York and staying inside, healthcare workers don’t have that luxury. We ask them to risk their lives to help us, so they get vaccines first. When that’s taken care of, children will be next, as they are more vulnerable.”
“Putting aside for a moment the argument of if that’s fair or not,” he said, “Americans want to know. Will these vaccines be safe?”
“Yes,” Glenn said.
“You can guarantee that?”
“Seventy years ago, when vaccination was in its infancy, there were problems with a couple of lots of polio vaccine. But today, with modern methods, those problems are a thing of the past. There might be side-effects, as there are with any vaccine, for roughly six to eight percent of the population, but none of those are fatal.”
“Isn’t it true you can get the flu from flu vaccines?”
“Not at all. People who suffer a side-effect of feeling tired and achy think they have the flu sometimes, but they don’t. That can’t happen with an injected vaccine.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard.”
“Then you’ve heard wrong. Or, most likely, you were talking to Aunt Agnes, who I’m sure is very nice, but she’s unlikely to be an expert in the field of virology.” Glenn was losing his patience. All of the information they had asked for was out there, either on the government information sites, or in articles at reputable newspapers like The New York Times, which had run an accurate piece today that he’d seen in the “green room” while waiting to go on the program. “Also, realize, if there was a one in a million chance of something going wrong with one batch of the vaccine, that it goes to medical workers first means we’d know it was a bad batch before the general populace was being inoculated.”
“And what about vaccinations and autism? You’d be asking us to take a great risk by vaccinating our children.”
“There is no connection at all between vaccinations and autism. Never was, is not today, and never will be.”
“But there are millions of people who don’t believe the scientific community when you say that.”
“They’d believe us if they read real reports rather than conspiracy theory websites and educated themselves about science and how it works.”
“What would you say to someone who refused to vaccinate their child in six or seven months?”
“That they’re a bad parent for making such a choice,” Glenn said. “That they may be killing not only their child but their neighbors’ children.” He stopped before he let himself point out what many in his field thought—that at least that was evolution in action, that people stupid enough to believe that nonsense would indeed kill their own children and that their particular stupidity gene would be removed from the gene pool as a result. Problem was, it didn’t stop there. If too many people did not vaccinate, then it compromised herd immunity. Responsible people were also put at risk by the poor decisions of a few ill-informed extremists.
Which wasn’t much different from this act of bioterror, was it? A handful of people deciding the health outcome for everyone.
“Let’s talk about the race-based choice of treatment drugs.”
“There is no such thing. Not as policy.” Glenn had wished for a sensible question next, but this was the one he had to deal with. “If some oddball doctor out there is doing it on his own, I haven’t heard of it, but that’s unlikely too. His medical support staff would notice and complain. Pharmacists would refuse to cooperate with him. If one person out there is doing it, which I strongly doubt, it’d be self-correcting within a day.”
“But there’s a national policy, some have said, to administer ineffective drugs to African Americans, Native Americans, and others.”
“There’s some understandable paranoia on the part of people who have historically suffered oppression and unfair treatment. And there are people who know such claims are ridiculous but who are no doubt repeating them for their own political gain. But there is no such selection process today. And no drug is very effective. Even our best antivirals are not working perfectly, no matter your age, ethnicity, or sex.”
“But what about the early numbers showing more African American deaths?”
“It began in a community that had an African American majority. The demographic numbers have evened out if you’ll look at them now. No particular ethnic group is more susceptible. None is naturally immune. There are individual people who fight it off relatively easily, we’ve found, but they exist across such a broad demographic, we can’t predict who will and who won’t survive it. Some people simply have good immune systems. We don’t entirely understand why, though the answer is most likely hidden in our genes.”
“Are you sure you aren’t hiding something from us?”
“I’m sure I’m not,” Glenn said. “And, quite frankly, it’s irresponsible of you to report on these rumors as if they are facts. We can save lives in partnership with the mass media—by getting the right information out there. We can prevent infection—by warning people to limit who they come into contact with, by incentivizing telecommuting with employers, by having Congress provide free healthcare treatment for our poor, by having people in the western two-thirds of the nation stock up on groceries now so that when the flu arrives, they don’t need to shop among infected neighbors. We can grow our own vegetables and develop grocery delivery systems in our communities, so that boxes of—”
“But people are concerned about race-based treatment. They are concerned about autism associated with vaccines. They’re worried that the government isn’t telling them everything.”
The government wasn’t. That the New Flu was not a natural mutation was still known to very few people. Yes, there was speculation on the news shows. How the secret of the truth had been kept for so long, Glenn couldn’t say, but so far, no one in the government had confirmed the speculation this may well have come from an act of terror.
What he said was, “Everything people need to know to protect themselves is out there at flu.gov. I would ask your viewers to get their news there. Not from interviews of extremists on the television that allow—or encourage—disinformation to be disseminated for their own ends. And that goes for the media as well when you’re researching your stories. Look at flu.gov and nowhere else.”
“Dr. Stevens, we’re doing our job here. People want to know the truth.”
“From listening to anti-vaxxers? That’s not how you get the truth. As for doing your jobs, I bloody well wish you would. By reporting nonsense along with the truth, by giving it equal weight, you are killing people. Even asking me stupid questions, you are killing people. You, personally, are killing human beings. Right now.”
“I don’t think you understand what the job of a journalist is.”
“I don’t think you understand what the job of a journalist is.” The man tried to speak, but Glenn ran right over him. “You’re trying to scare people so you can keep them tuned in long enough to buy a new car or some other crap they don’t need when they watch the next commercial. Now don’t mistake me. People should be scared—but scared rationally, and of the truth, not of rumor and of bizarre conspiracy theories.”
“Why don’t you—”
Glenn knew he should shut up, but he was out of patience with this. “Why don’t you pretend you’re a real journalist, a responsible journalist acting in the public’s best interest for a change rather than someone merely in pursuit of the almighty dollar. I’m asking you—no, I’m begging you, you and all your colleagues—to put aside the business of selling controversy and fear, for just the next six months, and do your jobs. Practice real, responsible journalism. Help your fellow citizens stay alive.”
“And it’s time for another commercial break,” said the blonde, sounding not quite so cheerful as before. “When we come back, Chef Luc-Henri will show us how to spice up that lentil soup with some yummy herbs, ones you can grow on your windowsill.”
Glenn’s mood swung between elation and shame on the drive back to the hotel in Boston. His phone rang several times and he finally pulled off at a rest area and checked the messages. Emile, six times.
Oh, boy. Here it comes. He dialed the CDC main number and asked to be put through to Emile.
“Emile. How are things? Anything new?”
“Yes, something is new, how kind of you to ask. I’ve lost some hearing in my right ear due to Lorraine screeching into it this morning.”
“I warned her I wasn’t the man for the job.”
“But still, Glenn.”
“I do feel a little bad about it. And, truth be told, a little good.”
“I’ll deny it if you quote me, but I have the same mix of feelings about your very public shit fit. Overall, the coffee room gossip is positive, I hear from my assistant. You’ve said what many of us think. But the higher you climb up the hierarchy, the less pleased you will find people are. Ending with Lorraine, who is not pleased at all.”
“So I should expect a call from Lorraine, I take it.”
“No, this is that call. She said she doesn’t trust herself not to call you a—well, I won’t repeat the term. She said you’re only making her job harder.”
Then Glenn really did feel bad. “I didn’t mean to cause her any more problems. She has enough, I know.”
“And yet you did.”
“Ah, fuck me. I’m sorry, Emile. I’ll email her that I am regretful, for all the good it will do.”
“And, when you get back here, you’ll have a mandatory retraining session with Communications on how to handle the press.”
“It’d be easier to simply keep me away from them in the future. I’m probably untrainable.”
“Agreed. Just like one of Lorraine’s deaf dogs. And, for the record, this conversation is a severe reprimand, in case anyone asks you.”
“Duly noted.”
“And you’re on the Secretary of HHS’s shit list too.”
“I’m sure I am.” He forecast a future for himself in which any disease with the symptom “severe diarrhea” would become his to investigate until the date of his retirement.
“Enough. Conversation over. Reprimand issued. Now, what else is happening with you?”
Emile and Lorraine were the only two at CDC who knew what he was doing. “We’re nearly done at Tufts. We haven’t found anything—not a single suspicious person, in my opinion, and I detected no signs of guilt about bad lab procedure at Detrick or Boston or any other lab, so I think they’re all clear.”
“Yeah, same thing Compliance said.” That was the CDC department that made sure labs kept to safety standards.
“Anything new from your end? And anything new that pertains, for instance if Chanchal decided it’s a natural mutation and this hunting for a guilty party is all tantamount to chasing our tails out here?”
“No, that hasn’t changed—and it won’t. Our biggest news is the number of treatment trials that are being launched.”
“Good. Makes sense. There might be something out there that works. I’d like to get that fatality rate down in the U.S. before the second wave hits.”
“At least the infection rate curve isn’t quite as steep. People are listening to the advice to stay home, so something is going right. Of course, that has severe negative economic impact, so not everyone is happy about it. Some are. I read somewhere that movie streaming income has almost tripled in a month.”
“People who survive can go back to work in three months, buy consumer goods, go to concerts, and pay taxes. Dead people can’t attend concerts. Sorry. Of course you know that.”
“Write that one down for the next TV interview you do. I like the cheerful bit about dead people at concerts. There’s a calming image.”
“I had worse to say. I actually was controlling my mouth a few times. Until the very end.”
“You were on the verge of maroon, you were so angry when you were tearing that interviewer a new one. I didn’t know you could flush that color.”
“Ah well, water under the bridge.”
“It is. Or over the bridge is more like it—a disaster.”
With that, they hung up. Glenn tapped out an apology email to Lorraine. It was short and to the point. He really hadn’t meant to make her job harder.
And he felt ashamed of the little kernel of relief he still felt that he’d never be asked to do that again. For the rest of this pandemic, at least, he was free of the obligation to deal with the press.
