a virus had only one or the other. It lived, somehow, in a dormant state until it came in contact with a living cell. Once there, it came to murderous life, like some sort of alien monster waiting its chance, able to live and grow and reproduce only with the help of something else, which it would destroy, and from which it would try to escape, then to find another victim.
Ebola was elegantly simple and microscopically tiny. A hundred thousand of them, lined up head to tail, would scarcely fill out an inch on a ruler. Theoretically one could kill and grow and migrate and kill again. And again. And again.
Medicine's collective memory wasn't as long as either physician would have liked. In 1918, the 'Spanish flu,' probably a form of pneumonia, had swept the globe in nine months, killing at least twenty million people—probably quite a few more—and some so rapidly that there had been victims who went to sleep healthy and failed to wake up the next day. But while the symptoms of the disease had been fully documented, the state of medical science hadn't yet progressed to the point of understanding the disease itself, as a result of which nobody knew what that outbreak had actually been about—to the point that in the 1970s suspected victims buried in permafrost in Alaska had been exhumed in the hope of finding samples of the organism for study; a good idea that hadn't worked. For the medical community, that disease was largely forgotten, and most assumed that should it reappear, it would be defeated with modern treatment.
Specialists in infectious disease weren't so sure. That disease, like AIDS, like Ebola, was probably a virus, and medicine's success in dealing with viral disease was precisely—
Zero.
Viral diseases could be prevented with vaccines, but once infected, a patient's immune system either won or lost, with the best of physicians standing by and watching. Doctors, as with any other profession, frequently preferred to ignore that which they didn't see and didn't understand. That was the only explanation for the medical community's inexplicably slow recognition of AIDS and its lethal implications. AIDS was another exotic pathogen which Lorenz and Forster studied, and another gift from the jungles of Africa.
'Gus, sometimes I wonder if we'll ever figure these bastards out.'
'Sooner or later, Ralph.' Lorenz backed away from the microscope—it was, actually, a computer monitor— and wished he could smoke his pipe, a vice he didn't really want to break, though working in a government building made it hard for him to indulge. He thought better with a pipe, Gus told himself. Both men stared at the screen, looking at the curlicue protein structures. 'This one is from the kid.'
They walked in the footsteps of a handful of giants. Lorenz had written a paper on Walter Reed and William Gorgas, the two Army doctors who had defeated Yellow fever with a combination of systematic investigation and ruthless application of what they had learned. But learning in this business came so slow and so dear.
'Put up the other one, Kenny.'
'Yes, Doctor,' the intercom replied. A moment later, a second image came up alongside the first.
'Yep,' Forster said. 'Looks pretty much the same.'
'That's from the nurse. Watch this.' Lorenz hit the button on the phone. 'Okay, Kenny, now hit the computer.' Before their eyes a computer image of both examples appeared. The computer rotated one to match the other, then overlaid them. They matched exactly.
'At least it hasn't mutated.'
'Hasn't had much of a chance. Two patients. They've done a good job of isolating. Maybe we were lucky. The kid's parents have been tested. They seem to be clean, or so the telex says. Nothing else from his neighborhood. The WHO team is checking around the area. The usual, monkeys, bats, bugs. So far, nothing. Could just be an anomaly.' It was as much a hope as a judgment.
'I'm going to play with this one a little. I've ordered some monkeys. I want to grow this one, get it into some cells, and then, Ralph, I'm going to examine what it does on a minute-by-minute basis. Get the infected cells, and pull a sample out every minute, slice it down, burn it with UV, freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and put it under the scope. I want to look at how the virus RNA gets going. There's a sequencing issue here… can't quite say what I'm thinking. The thought's kind of lurking out there on me. Damn.' Gus opened his desk drawer, pulled out his pipe, and lit it with a kitchen match. It was his office, after all, and he did think better with a pipe in his mouth. In the field he said that the smoke kept the bugs away, and besides, he didn't inhale. Out of politeness, he cracked open the window.
The idea for which he had just received funding was more complicated than his brief expression, and both men knew it. The same experimental procedure would have to be repeated a thousand times or more to get a correct read on how the process took place, and that was just the baseline data. Every single sample would have to be examined and mapped. It could take years, but if Lorenz were right, at the end of it, for the first time, would be a blueprint of what a virus did, how its RNA chain affected a living cell.
'We're playing with a similar idea up in Baltimore.'
'Oh?'
'Part of the genome project. We're trying to read the complex interactions. The process—how this little bastard attacks the cells down at the molecular level. How Ebola replicates without a proper editing function in the genome. There's something to be learned there. But the complexity of the issue is a killer. We have to figure out the questions to ask before we can start looking for answers. And then we need a computer genius to tell a machine how to analyze it.'
Lorenz's eyebrows went up. 'How far along are you?'
Forster shrugged. 'Chalk on a blackboard.'
'Well, when I get my monkeys, I'll let you know what we develop here. If nothing else, the tissue samples ought to shed a little light.'
THE FUNERAL WAS epic, with a ready cast of thousands, howling their loyalty to a dead man and concealing their real thoughts; you could almost feel them looking around and wondering what came next. There was the gun carriage, the soldiers with reversed rifles, the riderless horse, the marching soldiers, all captured off Iraqi TV by STORM TRACK and uplinked to Washington.
'I wish we could see more faces,' Vasco said quietly.
'Yeah,' the President agreed. Ryan didn't smile but wanted to. He'd never really stop being an intelligence officer. Jack was sure of that. He wanted the data fresh, not massaged and presented to him by others. In this case he got to watch it live, with his color commentators at his side.
In America, a generation earlier, it would have been called a happening. People showed up and acted out because it was an expected thing. A literal sea of people filled the square—it had a name, but nobody seemed to know it—and even those who couldn't see… oh, a new camera gave the answer to the question. Big-screen TVs showed everyone what was happening. Jack wondered if they'd do an instant replay. Two lines of generals marched behind the gun carriage, and were keeping step, Ryan saw.
'How much farther you think they'll walk?'
'Hard to say, Mr. President.'
'It's Bert, right?' the President asked.
'Yes, sir.'
'Bert, I can call in one of my NIOs to tell me he doesn't know.'
Vasco blinked, as expected. Then he decided, what the hell? 'Eight out often, they bug out.'
'Those are betting odds. Tell me why.' 'Iraq has nothing to fall back on. You don't run a dictatorship by committee, at least not for long.
Not one of those people has the stones to take over on his own. If they stay put and the government changes, it won't change into something nice for them. They'll end up like the Shah's general staff did, backs to a wall, looking at guns. Maybe they'll try to fight it out, but I doubt it. They must have money salted away somewhere. Drinking daiquiris on a beach may not be as much fun as being a general, but it beats the hell out of looking at flowers from the wrong side. They have families to worry about, too.'
'So we should plan on a completely new regime in Iraq?' Jack asked.
Vasco nodded. 'Yes, sir.'
'Iran?'
'I wouldn't bet against it,' Vasco answered, 'but we just don't have good enough information to make any kind of prediction. I wish I could tell you more, sir, but you don't pay me to speculate.'
'That's good enough for now.' Actually it wasn't, but Vasco had given Ryan the best he had.
