Pandemic (14 page)
Authors: Daniel Kalla
"How can you be so sure?" Streicher asked.
"Because that pandemic swept the planet in four months in an age before commercial air travel," Haldane said. "One billion people were infected. Greater than fifty percent of the world's population at the time. If we were dealing with the same bug, the genie would already be out of the bottle. Clearly, ARCS is not as contagious."
"How do you know that the infection control measures haven't been better this time?" Streicher asked.
"Or maybe the last time, the Spanish Flu banged around some remote Chinese province for a few years before going global." McLeod pointed a bony finger at Haldane. "Could be the same with ARCS? Like some Australian teenager, it might just be chomping at the bit to head out and party around the world."
Haldane shook his head slowly. "It's already been in this city for almost a week and they've seen fewer than two hundred cases. The Spanish Flu would have swept the city like wildfire by now." He tapped the table. "What's more, even in 1918 the mortality rate for the Spanish Flu was only two percent. Whereas ARCS is far deadlier. It's killing twenty-five percent of its young, healthy victims." He shook his head. "Twenty-five percent!"
"So ARCS is not the Spanish Flu?" Streicher asked.
"Could be closely related, though." Haldane shrugged.
McLeod nodded. "Maybe this is the Spanish Flu's long-lost meaner but antisocial sister."
"I think we can find out," Yuen said quietly.
"How so?" Haldane asked.
She looked down and shuffled the papers in front of her, needlessly. "The U.S. military pathology labs have saved tissue samples from the 1918 Spanish Flu victims. We have a partially sequenced genome for the virus. Now that we know ARCS is a member of the influenza family, we will be able to sequence this virus with DNA probes. Then we can compare the two."
"All good and bloody well, Milly," McLeod said with a sympathetic smile to her. "But sequencing the virus doesn't help the people who are dying of it today, or those who will acquire it tomorrow."
People around the table nodded.
Haldane snapped his fingers. He whirled to face the two Chinese health officials. "How are you controlling the spread in the countryside?"
Huang looked away. He picked up his pen and started twirling again.
With Yuen translating, Choy answered for them. "We have the same strict quarantines in place in all the towns and farms for two hundred miles around the city. There is no travel allowed into or out of any areas that have had an active case within the last ten days."
"But the livestock!" Haldane said.
Choy shrugged, confused.
"As with the Spanish Flu, ARCS is almost certainly a product of zoonosis, or species intermixing." Haldane leaned forward in his chair, tapped the table, and spoke so urgently that Yuen had difficulty keeping up with the translation. "The pig is the usual mixing vessel. Inside the porcine bloodstream, viruses from birds like chickens meet their human equivalent and mutate. We call it a 'massive reassortment of genetic code.' Since pigs are the usual intermediary, most of these mutated viruses are forms of swine flus."
"I see." Choy nodded. "But what does that mean in terms of our quarantine?"
"It means," Haldane said, "that you have to slaughter the livestock. Like they did last year in Vietnam and Korea for the Avian Influenza outbreaks."
"Just the pigs?"
Haldane shook his head. "No. Birds are the natural carriers of influenza. They develop the most profound viremia, or highest blood levels, without becoming sick. The chickens--in fact, all the livestock--must be sacrificed."
Choy glared at Haldane and his face crumpled in dire concern. Yuen translated Choy's frantic, squeaky response. "But farming is one of the province's essential industries. Gansu's economy would be devastated if we slaughtered all the livestock."
"And the alternative?" Haldane held his hands out in front of him. "Imagine what would happen to the economy if ARCS broke free of here and stormed across China and beyond, killing one in four of the healthy people who stood in its path?"
Haldane glanced around the table. The others, even Choy, nodded in agreement, but Dr. Kai Huang refused to meet his gaze. Instead, he stared at the table and frantically twirled the pen in his hand. Haldane wondered why the youthful hospital director looked more fearful than anyone else at the table.
Haldane grappled with the door to his small hotel room. Once opened, he took two strides and lunged for the ringing phone. "Hello?" he said, hearing his breathless anticipation echo back in his ear.
"Noah?"
He felt a pang of disappointment, recognizing that it wasn't his wife's voice. "Oh, Karen, hi," he said.
"Well, hello to you too, stranger," said his secretary, Karen Jackson.
"What's going on, Karen?"
"Tell me everything," she said excitedly. "How's China? What's the Great Wall like?"
"I don't have a clue," Haldane said irritably. "I'm not over here on the AAA's Great Chinese Bus Tour. We're kind of working against the clock."
"Excuse me," Jackson murmured. "I forgot how busy saving the world must keep you."
Haldane chuckled. "Sorry, Karen, I haven't caught up from my jet lag yet. But in all honesty, all I've seen so far is the hotel, the hospital, and city hall. None of which are anything to write home about."
"No, it was a boneheaded question." She laughed. "Of course, you're too busy for all that." Then she asked in a hushed voice: "What is it like over there, Noah? Scary?"
"Yeah. A little."
"You keeping safe?" Jackson demanded with her usual maternal protectiveness.
"It's not me I'm worried about," he said, sitting down on the bed and resting his back against the headboard. "This virus is some piece of work."
"That's what they say," Jackson said.
"Who's they?" Haldane asked.
"The news folk," she said.
He hit the bed with a fist. "Damn it. This has made the news?"
"Small print, back page stuff so far," she said. "I came across a small article in the Post. Wouldn't have even seen it if I wasn't looking for the crossword."
"That's better, I guess," he said. "Is that what you called to tell me?"
"No," she said. "Someone is looking for you. She said it was important."
"Who?"
"Dr. Gwen Savard"
"Why is that name so familiar?"
"She sounds like a bigwig," Jackson said. "Her title's a mouthful, anyway. Director of Counter-Bioterrorism for the Department of Homeland Security."
"Sure. I met her at a conference." He remembered her fiery intensity as much as her California-girl good looks. "What does she want?"
"She wouldn't tell little old me," Jackson said. "But she left about forty numbers for you to call her at."
Haldane patted around the nightstand until he found a pen and a pad. "Give me the first two," he said.
After she recited the numbers, she asked, "When are you coming home?"
"Soon as I can, Karen."
"Good," Jackson said. "I know that little girl of yours is missing her daddy."
Not as much as her dad is missing her, Haldane thought as he hung up. With the phone still in his hand, he dialed the operator.
On the second ring, someone answered. "Hello, Haldane residence."
He experienced another rush of disappointment as he realized he was talking to his mother-in-law, Shirley Dolman, not his wife. "Hi, Shirley, it's Noah."
"Oh, my goodness, I'm talking to China," Dolman said as if the entire country had called her. "How are you, Noah?"
"Fine," he said. "How is everything back home?"
"Things are well," Dolman said in her syrupy tone. "Chloe is asleep. And I'm afraid Anna is out with a friend."
"With a friend," Haldane repeated. He checked his watch, and recalculated. It was after 10:00 P.M. in Maryland. "Did she say whom?" he asked.
"No, matter of fact she didn't," Dolman said. "But she said she wouldn't be home until after midnight. They were going to a late movie, you see."
"Oh."
"She left her cell phone on in case of something with Chloe. I'm sure you can reach her on that, Noah."
"Great, thanks, Shirley. You take care."
Haldane dropped the phone back on the cradle. He had no intention of trying his wife's cell. Why interrupt her movie? he thought. Not that he believed she was at the theater, but movie or not, Haldane couldn't shake his absolute conviction that Anna was with her.
It was near dusk by the time the officials arranged for a car to take Haldane and McLeod out to the site of quarantine in the northeast section of Jiayuguan City.
Staring out the window of the car, images of Tiananmen Square from the student uprising in 1989 popped to Haldane's mind. The sight turned his stomach. He had once dabbled in student activism during his undergrad days. While the students at Tiananmen had to face firing squads or the caterpillar tracks of tanks rolling toward them, all Haldane got out of his activism was a security escort back to his dorm.
There were no tanks in Jiayuguan, but trucks and military vehicles were plentiful. Masked soldiers patrolled the streets, rifles slung prominently over their shoulders. Several muscular German shepherds strained at leashes. A barbed-wire fence snaked around the far side of the street, isolating an entire section of the city.
"These lads don't mess around when it comes to quarantining," McLeod said, his wide eyes surveying the scene outside the window.
"What the hell are they doing?" Haldane said.
McLeod nodded. "They're doing it right, Noah."
Haldane frowned at his colleague. "You don't honestly believe that?"
"How else do you stop it from escalating?" McLeod pointed out the window, as if identifying individual viral particles standing behind the barbed wire.
"You set up a real quarantine with reasonable checks and balances," Haldane said. "You don't create a concentration camp for victims!"
Their driver waved a hand and pointed ahead as the car approached a break in the barbed wire. "See, the people come in and out through there."
With a makeshift hut, a swing gate, and numerous masked guards, it resembled a sci-fi version of one of the old Cold War checkpoints between East and West Berlin. Their car pulled up across from the checkpoint. Before the driver had switched off his engine, Haldane and McLeod hopped out of the car and headed for the action.
With back doors wide open, two empty ambulances had pulled up in front of the gate. Among the official personnel milling about, Haldane recognized the chief health officer, Yung Se Choy. His uniform resembled something the police or fire brass back home wore to formal occasions. It changed Choy's appearance, filling him out and making him look more important than the nervous bureaucrat he had earlier seemed. But the tousled mop of hair and barely concealed cleft lip scar were unmistakable.
Haldane caught up with Choy in front of the gate. "Hello, Dr. Haldane," Choy said with a slight bow.
"Mr Choy, what is all this?" Haldane indicated the barbed wire and guards.
McLeod and their driver joined the two of them at the gate. The driver began to translate Haldane's question, but Choy answered in English before he could finish. "A quarantine," Choy shrugged, appearing amazed that it wasn't self-evident.
"This is not a quarantine," Haldane shook his head angrily. "This is a siege."
The setting and uniform had influenced Choy's attitude, too. Though he spoke through the translator in Chinese, his high-pitched voice was more authoritative and certain. "We are doing what your own WHO team recommended. What is necessary. We are controlling the spread of this virus. The people inside"--he pointed beyond the barbed wire--"are being looked after. We are sending food and supplies. And our doctors and nurses are monitoring them. If they require medical attention, we transport them to hospital."
As Choy spoke, two ambulance attendants in HAZMAT suits appeared at the gate. Once the arm of the gate rose, they pushed their stretcher unhurriedly toward him. The attendants moved without any urgency. As soon as they passed by, Haldane understood why. The patient on the stretcher was wrapped in a black body bag.
Haldane nodded his chin at the corpse on the stretcher. "This is what you mean by looking after the people?"
Unfazed, Choy answered through the translator. "This woman was found dead in her apartment. Apparently, she refused the neighbors' help. She was too scared to go out even after she became sick."
"I wonder how many others are going to be scared to death in there," Haldane grunted.
Choy held up his hands. "What is the alternative, Dr. Haldane?" he asked through the translator. "Would you rather we allow this virus to escape from here and sweep across China and beyond, killing one in four who stand in its path?"
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