Atlanta
Mason Williams unlocked and entered the conference room at CDC headquarters his Wildfire Team used whenever they had a thorny problem to discuss. Stifling a yawn, he threw his “go-bag” packed with the clothes and toiletries he’d need for two weeks in the jungle in the corner and proceeded immediately to the rear table holding the most important equipment in the room, a coffeepot.
Minutes later he was sitting at the head of the long burl wood conference table and drinking the wake-up juice while he went over the notes he’d taken while on the phone with Dr. Matos. From the doctor’s description of the sickness, he felt sure it was some form of hemorrhagic fever, but he was damned if he could think of anything endemic to Mexico that would produce those symptoms.
He finished his coffee and was just getting up to pour another cup when he saw two of his team members entering the door.
Lionel Johnson and Shirley Cole walked in side by side, looking like Mutt and Jeff as they tossed their go-bags into the corner with Mason’s.
Lionel Johnson, MD, PhD, was six feet four inches in height, tipped the scales at 250 pounds, and was an easygoing African American who was the world’s foremost authority on fungi and mycobacteria. Although he’d gone to Duke on a football scholarship and had been a fierce competitor on the field, he was very shy and gentle in everyday life and spoke so softly that he often had to repeat himself in meetings. His features were, like the rest of him, large and coarse. His most prominent attribute were his ears, which stuck out like Clark Gable’s and were often the subject of fond teasing by the other members of the team.
In contrast, Shirley Cole had a PhD in Microbiology, was only five feet two inches tall, and was almost that wide. At forty-four years of age she was the oldest member of the team and was slightly matronly. She had been extensively involved in army biological and chemical warfare secret laboratories prior to coming to work at the CDC. She was the unofficial den mother of the team and spent most of her off time baking cookies and muffins, which she brought to all of their meetings. Usually calm and centered, she could still get quite testy if her conclusions were questioned but then usually felt guilty and baked even more goodies to make up for her temper.
They smiled when they saw Mason standing next to the coffee machine as Shirley approached, handing him a platter of banana nut muffins. “Try these, boss,” she said. “They’ll get that bleary look out of your eyes.”
Lionel nodded, smiling around the crumbs on his lips. “Yep,” he mumbled. “Mighty tasty all right.”
Mason grabbed one and motioned to the coffee machine. “Better drink up, guys. I have a feeling we’re gonna need all the coffee we can get to handle this case.”
Before he could continue, the other three members of the team came hurrying through the door, all jabbering about what could be so important to yank them out of their beds at this ungodly hour.
Mason stepped back so Sam Jakes, Suzanne Elliot, and Joel Schumacher could gather around the coffeepot and get their fair share of caffeine and muffins. As he sipped his coffee and watched them mingle and tease back and forth he thought back to the amazing changes each of them had undergone since joining the Wildfire Team. Once highly independent loners who were all at the pinnacle of their fields, they were now members of a team that required the most intimate cooperation imaginable . . . not only their very lives depended on it, but the lives of thousands of others, also.
It had been just a few years before when he had been tasked with finding and recruiting the best medical and scientific talent available. He was told to form a rapid response group that could be ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice to travel anywhere in the world to attack and defeat any disease threats to the country and the world.
Mason remembered the first to join his team was Sam Jakes, who had an MD and PhD in virology and had been doing cutting-edge research at Columbia University. When Mason first approached the irascible gnomelike man, he found his personality was perfectly suited to New York City—he was brusque, rude, and totally convinced of the unassailability of his giant intellect.
About five feet five inches tall and weighing over two hundred pounds, Jakes was sensitive about both his short stature and his pudgy profile and was quick to take offense at the mention of either. The fact that he was balding with flyaway frizzy hair and bushy caterpillar eyebrows and an ugly blot of a nose didn’t help his self-esteem issues regarding his appearance.
In spite of that, he was also supremely arrogant about his abilities and rarely respected anyone else’s feelings or intellect and was both condescending and argumentative on almost every subject.
However, since he knew as much about virology as anyone on earth, Mason ignored the fact that he wasn’t a team player and overlooked his faults and convinced him to join the team by promising him the chance to see and treat firsthand diseases most doctors only read about.
Mason had then traveled to New Orleans and recruited Lionel Johnson from Tulane University, where Johnson was doing research on resistant strains of tuberculosis that had showed up following the recent AIDS epidemic. Unlike Jakes, who tested Mason’s patience daily, Johnson’s shy manner and sly, understated sense of humor made him a joy to be around.
His next trip was to Maryland and Fort Detrick, the home of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He’d heard of Dr. Shirley Cole, who had a PhD in Microbiology and whose research on disease-causing bacteria was the talk of the CDC. He was initially concerned about taking on a middle-aged woman who was not in the best physical condition, but in time he’d found his fears to be unjustified. She’d fit right in with the group from the very first day. Her acceptance by the group was helped along by her wizardry with baked goods.
Shirley had told Mason he had to see if he could recruit Suzanne Elliot, an RN with a master’s degree in epidemiology who’d traveled all over the world tracking a number of elusive causative factors in the spread of disease in a dozen different countries. Shirley and Suzanne had crossed paths on a joint army and United Nations task force fighting a cholera outbreak in Haiti, and Shirley had been very impressed with the nurse.
When Mason approached her, he found a medium height, about five-foot-five-inch-tall woman who was slim and strong but not masculine. Suzanne was in fact entirely average, neither pretty nor ugly, and dressed rather blandly, as if not wanting to draw attention to herself. When Mason explained the reason for his visit, she was more than happy to join the team and work once again with her old friend, Shirley Cole.
The last member of the team to be recruited was Joel Schumacher, a computer specialist who was in charge of the CDC’s Special Pathogens database, which contained information on all previous outbreaks of infectious diseases and plagues, as well as the locations of all “hot zones” where dangerous organisms were known to be endemic. He was a top man in computer science analysis in medical applications and had developed several of his own programs so highly specialized that no one else could understand them, but he could make them sing. He was of average height and slightly dumpy, the picture of a typical geeky nerd, and very Jewish, wearing a yarmulke at all times. He liked to joke that he would gladly join the team since the frequent travel would enable him to escape the women his mother was continually trying to set him up with, who were usually daughters of friends of hers. Early on the other team members began to tease him about still being a virgin, which made his ears and cheeks blaze crimson, but he maintained he was saving his virtue for just the right woman.
Mason felt a welling of pride in his chest as he observed his team getting ready to deploy, knowing he had the best and brightest in the world who could face whatever horrors the jungles of Mexico were about to throw at them.
* * *
As the group took their chairs around the conference table, all of the muffins and most of the coffee having been consumed, Mason stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed on his chest as he addressed them.
“I know you’re all wondering just what I’m about to get us into with this middle-of-the-night expedition, but I have to admit, I don’t know just yet.”
When they all started to protest at one time, he held up his hands. “Wait a minute, and I’ll tell you what I know and maybe together we can figure out what we’re going to be going up against.”
Sam Jakes raised his hand and asked irritably, “Why don’t you first tell us where this latest hot zone is located?”
“In the jungle just south and west of Mexico City,” Mason answered.
“Oh shit!” Jakes exclaimed. “Don’t tell me we’re gonna be traveling all the way to Mexico to treat some travelers who’ve developed Montezuma’s revenge and need the experts from the CDC to come cure their diarrhea?”
Mason laughed. “You may be closer to the truth than you think, Sam. This may in fact be Montezuma’s revenge, but the disease we’re gonna be facing is a little bit more serious than diarrhea.”
Shirley piped up, “Diarrhea can be pretty serious, Mason, especially if it’s caused by cholera or bacterial dysentery.”
Mason again held up his hands for quiet. “Okay, guys, why don’t you listen while I tell you a story?” He paused until he had everyone’s attention. “There once was a group of thirty professors and students from the University of Texas who traveled down to Mexico to find and excavate the ancient tomb of Emperor Montezuma in a tiny, remote village named Tlateloco.”
Jakes smirked, spread his arms, and glanced around at the group. “See, I told you . . .”
Mason’s face became serious. “Now, according to what I’ve been told, all thirty of the group and an unknown number of Mexican laborers are dead.”
The team became quiet, all eyes on Mason. “How’d they die, Mason?” Suzanne asked.
“The symptoms sound like hemorrhagic fever and shock, exact cause unknown.”
“Bullshit!” Jakes said, slapping his hand down on the table. “It can’t be hemorrhagic fever ’cause there are no known human pathogens that cause this particular constellation of symptoms extant in the Western Hemisphere.”
Suzanne Elliot frowned and glared at Jakes. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Sam, and let Mason tell the story before you get your panties all in a twist?”
“Why . . . you . . .” Jakes sputtered, his face flaming red.
“That’s a good idea, Suzanne,” Mason intervened before the argument could get out of hand. He sat down at the table and leaned back in his chair. “Here is what I’ve been told . . .”
He went on to relate the early morning phone call from Julio Cardenez and his subsequent discussion with Eduardo Matos, head of the Mexican Archaeology Society. He explained how Professor Charles Adams had called one of his colleagues in Texas and told her about the deaths and how he had described the symptoms exhibited prior to dying.
Lionel shook his head, his eyes worried. “So, all of this information, including the descriptions of the symptoms, is not only thirdhand information, but it is coming from nonmedical personnel . . . archaeologists?” he asked in his soft voice.
Mason nodded. “That’s right, Lionel. But even though the symptoms are described by nondocs, they are spot on for hemorrhagic fever and shock, and in follow-up phone calls none of the students or teachers are answering their cells.”
“Well,” Suzanne said, looking around the table. “Regardless of the possible cause, if there are thirty deaths, then we are certainly looking at a hot zone of some sort.”
“Mason,” Shirley Cole said. “I’ve been thinking about what Sam said. There is a pathogen extant in Mexico that could cause symptoms similar to those of hemorrhagic fever—anthrax.”
“Oh Jesus,” Jakes said. “Even a virologist knows that woolsorter’s disease, which is the only form of anthrax that is airborne, has never been shown to be transmitted from person to person.” He shook his head at her. “In addition, hemorrhagic shock is only caused by viruses, not bacteria. So unless you think that thirty different people could somehow have simultaneously inhaled enough anthrax spores to all go into shock at the same time and each and every one die from the disease when the normal death rate is only four or five percent, then I doubt that our pathogen can be anthrax.”
Now it was Shirley’s face that turned red. “I didn’t say that, you arrogant asshole,” she stated firmly. “I know anthrax doesn’t cause hemorrhagic shock, but it does cause extensive internal hemorrhage and major bleeding into lymph nodes of the lungs and stomach, so the hemorrhagic symptoms could simply be caused by coughing and vomiting up blood. Nonmedical observers would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.”
Jakes snorted. “What about the abnormally high mortality rate of this hot-bug?”
She shrugged. “That I can’t explain.”
To make peace, Mason asked, “How about one of the Ebola or Marburg viruses, perhaps imported to the site by one of the local workers?”
Jakes shook his head irritably. “No, no, that is just not possible!” He then launched into a pedantic discourse on the origins of Ebola, reminding them that the Ebola virus is named for the Ebola River, which is the headstream of the Mongala River, a tributary of the Congo, or Zaire River, and its endemic area is ten thousand miles from Mexico City and would therefore be a highly unlikely explanation for the deaths described in Tlateloco. “Hell,” he said smiling, “even if someone contracted Ebola in Africa and then traveled directly to Mexico City, by the time he could get from there down to Tlateloco, he would already be dead from the virus and unable to infect anyone else, let alone thirty additional people.”
Suzanne was staring at Jakes. Finally, she asked, “Sam, are you forgetting about the hantavirus and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome? It can certainly cause hemorrhagic shock, and the rodents that carry the virus are known to live all over North and South America.”
Jakes raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Very good, Suzanne. Of course, you are right, the symptoms could be from HPS, except that the virus is primarily found in dry, arid areas such as Arizona and New Mexico in the United States, and in Mexico it’s usually found in desert areas.” He scratched his chin, “I seriously doubt the virus could survive in a humid, jungle environment, but I will keep your excellent suggestion in mind.”
Further discussions among the group considered other possible pathogens such as dengue fever, bubonic or pneumonic plague, and other rare causes of the symptoms Matos had described to Mason.
Each and every one was eventually shot down as the possible culprit for one reason or another.
Finally, as dawn was breaking, Mason concluded the meeting. “As we have been given no empirical evidence that would enable us to come to a definitive diagnosis of the cause of these deaths, I feel an on-site intervention is justified. As team leader, I am declaring this a ‘Wildfire Emergency. ’ ” He stood up. “I will contact the Mexican government for permission to mount a full-scale incursion into the area as soon as travel arrangements can be made. I suggest the rest of you get together and make a list of the equipment each of you will need to do a full diagnostic workup on the bodies of the victims, including full Biohazard Level Four precautions.”
“Shit,” Jakes mumbled as he got up from the table. “I hate those fucking Racal suits.”
Joel Schumacher said, “While you guys are figuring out what lab equipment you’ll be needing, I’ll run a database search on all entities that can cause the symptoms we’re looking at. That way we’ll have a list to work against when we start doing diagnostics.”
Mason grinned and patted his shoulder. “Great idea, Joel.”
He looked around at the group. “Now, get a move on. We’re burnin’ daylight.”