82

Building 52, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Mark Augustine seemed almost feverish in his triumph. He laid the pictures out for Dicken and slipped the videotape into the office player. Dicken picked up the first picture, held it close, squinted. The usual medical photo colors, strange orange and olive flesh and bright pink lesions, out-of-focus facial features. A man, in his forties perhaps, alive but far from happy. Dicken picked up the next picture, a closeup of the man’s right arm, marked with roseate blotches, a yellow plastic ruler laid alongside to indicate size. The largest blotch spread over a diameter of seven centimeters, with an angry sore at the center, crusted with thick yellow fluid. Dicken counted seven blotches on the right arm alone.

“I showed these to the staff this morning,” Augustine said, holding out the remote and starting the tape. Dicken went on to the next few pictures. The man’s body was covered with more large roseate lesions, some forming huge blisters, proud, assertive, and no doubt intensely painful. “We have samples in for analysis now, but the field team did a quick serology check for SHEVA, just to confirm. The man’s wife is in her second trimester with a second-stage SHEVA fetus and still shows SHEVA type 3-s. The man is now clear of SHEVA, so we can rule out the lesions are caused by SHEVA, which we wouldn’t expect at any rate.”

“Where are they?” Dicken asked.

“San Diego, California. Illegal immigrant couple. Our Commissioned Corps people did the investigation and sent this material to us. It’s about three days old. Local press is being kept out for the time being.”

Augustine’s smile came and went like small flashes of lightning. He turned in front of his desk, fast-forwarding through scenes of the hospital, the ward, the room’s temporary containment features — plastic curtains taped to walls and door, separate air. He lifted his finger from the remote and returned to play mode.

Doctor Ed Sanger, Mercy Hospital’s Commissioned Corps Taskforce member, in his fifties, with lank and sandy hair, identified himself and droned self-consciously through the diagnosis. Dicken listened with a rising sense of dread. How wrong I can be. Augustine is right. All his guesses were dead on.

Augustine shut off the tape. “It’s a single-stranded RNA virus, huge and primitive, probably around 160,000 nu-cleotides. Like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We’re working to match its genome with known HERV coding regions. It’s incredibly fast, it’s ill-adapted, and it’s deadly.”

“He looks in bad shape,” Dicken said.

“The man died last night.” Augustine turned off the tape. “The woman seems to be asymptomatic, but she’s having the usual trouble with her pregnancy.” Augustine folded his arms and sat on the edge of the desk. “Lateral transmission of an unknown retrovirus, almost certainly excited and equipped by SHEVA. The woman infected the man. This is the one, Christopher. This is the one we need. Are you up to helping us go public?”

“Go public, how?”

“We’re going to quarantine and/or sequester women with second-stage pregnancies. For that kind of violation of civil liberties, we have to lay some heavy foundations. The president is prepared to go forward, but his team says we need personalities to put the message across.”

“I’m no personality. Get Bill Cosby.”

“Cosby is signing off on this one. But you…You’re practically a poster child for the brave health worker recovering from wounds inflicted by fanatics desperate to stop us.” Augustine’s smile flickered again.

Dicken stared down at his lap. “You’re certain about this?”

“As certain as we’re going to be, until we do all the science. That could take three or four months. Considering the consequences, we can’t afford to wait.”

Dicken looked up at Augustine, then moved his gaze to the patchy clouds and trees in the sky through the office window. Augustine had hung a small square of stained glass there, a fleur-de-lis in red and green.

“All the mothers will have to have stickers in their houses,” Dicken said. “Q, or S, maybe. Every pregnant woman will have to prove she isn’t carrying a SHEVA baby. That could cost billions.”

“Nobody’s concerned about funding,” Augustine said. “We’re facing the biggest health threat of all time. It’s the biological equivalent of Pandora’s box, Christopher. Every retroviral illness we ever conquered but couldn’t get rid of. Hundreds, maybe thousands of diseases we have no modern defenses against. There’s no question of our getting enough funding on this one.”

“The only problem is, I don’t believe it,” Dicken said softly.

Augustine stared at him, strong lines forming beside his lips, brows drawing inward.

“I’ve chased viruses most of my adult life,” Dicken said. “I’ve seen what they can do. I know about retroviruses, I know about HERV I know about SHEVA. HERV were probably never eliminated from the genome because they provided protection against other, newer retroviruses. They’re our own little library of protection. And…our genome uses them to generate novelty.”

“We don’t know that,” Augustine said, his voice grating with tension.

“I want to wait for the science before we lock up every mother in America,” Dicken said.

As Augustine’s skin darkened with irritation, then anger, the patches of shrapnel scars became vivid. “The danger is just too great,” he said. “I thought you’d appreciate a chance to get back into the picture.”

“No,” Dicken said. “I can’t.”

“Still holding on to fantasies about a new species?” Augustine asked grimly.

“I’m way beyond that,” Dicken said. The weary gravel in his voice startled him. He sounded like an old man.

Augustine walked around his desk and opened a file drawer, pulling out an envelope. Everything in his posture, the small, self-conscious strut in his walk, the cementlike set of his features, evoked a kind of dread in Dicken. This was a Mark Augustine he had not seen before: a man about to administer the coup de grace. “This came for you while you were in the hospital. It was in your mail slot. It was addressed to you in your official capacity, so I took the liberty of having it opened.”

He handed the thin papers to Dicken.

“They’re from Georgia. Leonid Sugashvili was sending you pictures of what he called possible Homo superior specimens, wasn’t he?”

“I hadn’t checked him out,” Dicken said, “so I didn’t mention it to you.”

“Wisely. He’s been arrested for fraud in Tbilisi. For bilking families of those missing in the troubles. He promised grieving relatives he could show them where their loved ones were buried. Looks like he was after the CDC, too.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, and it doesn’t change my mind, Mark. I’m just burned out. It’s hard enough healing my own body. I’m not the man for the job.”

“All right,” Augustine said. “I’ll put you on long-term disability leave. We need your office at the CDC. We’re moving in sixty special epidemiologists next week to begin phase two. With our space shortage, we’ll probably put three in your office to start.”

They watched each other in silence.

“Thanks for carrying me this long,” Dicken said without a hint of irony.

“No problem,” Augustine said with equal flatness.