Sector C (23 page)

“The thing is,” Mike said carefully, “they may be right.”

He expected a violent reaction from the vet. What he didn’t expect was for her to cave, her shoulders slumping and suddenly choking back tears.

“Once the priority hosts are eliminated,” he continued, “the ZVED guys will concentrate on the secondary hosts. They just need to find evidence of how far this thing can jump.
Dogs?
Cats?
Mice and rats?
Birds?”

“Alfie.

“What?”

“My dog.
Alfie.
She died last night.
Of VTSE.”

Mike winced, understanding now why she’d seemed so reserved all morning. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Think of the thousands, maybe millions, of
animals
people will put down ‘just in case.’ Or when the Guard’s done shooting every last cow and pig, are they going to turn their guns on dogs and cats and horses?”

“To keep people safe, yes they will, if they have to.”

“But don’t you see
,
there’s nothing that will keep any of us safe. Not if we have to kill everything around us. Not if we have to kill everything we love.”

She looked so lost with her bruised heart so uncharacteristically vulnerable on her sleeve. Instinctively, Mike knew that just as her clients weren’t prepared to hear from her that theirs was a wrong choice where their children were involved, no amount of logic would console her in this state. 

Not sure how receptive she would be but knowing at a gut level it was something he had to do — wanted to do even — he wrapped his arms around her.

Without thought, Donna responded to the base human touch. She put her hands on the backs of his shoulders and drew him close. Then she buried her face in his shirt and cried — for the ranchers, for Chad, for Alfie.
But mostly for herself.

NEARLY EVERYONE WAS LATE to the board meeting but, under the circumstances, the fact that everyone made it to the room within fifteen minutes of the start time was a feat unto itself.

Walt Thurman himself was nearly ten minutes late and, to the surprise of many, he arrived smiling. As he worked the room waiting for the last of the stragglers, he sipped a diet soda and even made a few small jokes. Far from defeated, Walt Thurman seemed energized, invigorated.

When he called the meeting to order, only one board member was noticeably absent: Helen Marsh. 

Walt noticed the worried looks people were giving her empty chair and winked. “Wondering where Helen is? I’ve busted her down to answering phones.” He grinned. “You’ve all heard the president’s address and you’re wondering where we go from here. Helen is working on that now. Before Del Campo announced that we’re in a crisis, we weren’t getting the kind of response our drug research deserved. The major companies didn’t want to partner with us over some hypothetical therapy and the smaller companies didn’t have the resources to fund the research in the manner we thought fit. The good news is that for the past three hours the phones haven’t stopped ringing. Seems everyone wants a piece of the research pie now that there looks to be at least an epidemic and possibly even a pandemic going on. Helen is fielding those calls and qualifying possible drug partners.

“Meanwhile, in light of the circumstances, I’ve asked Dr. Volkov to give us an update on where we are with the research and potential vaccine.
Grigor.”
He nodded to his lead geneticist, giving him the floor.

Dr. Volkov looked decidedly more uncomfortable than a man about to lay out the company’s next successful venture should have. He took a sip of water and cleared his throat before beginning. “In the past four days, we have made some progress on what a vaccine will look like and how to produce it in suitable quantities in a suitable time frame. As Mr. Thurman and I discussed at our last meeting, we are looking at a new peptide that will prod mutant prions into a new configuration, rendering them, essentially, ineffectual. We find these new peptides can be grown
in vitro,
outside of animal hosts, which means it will be a relatively easy process to extract them for vaccine.”

There was a general murmur of approval at that announcement. But Dr. Volkov held up a hand. “On the down side, it is slow to replicate — not as slow as its mad cow cousin, but not nearly as fast as VTSE. We are already far behind the curve with this disease — and it will only get worse.”

“But several labs working together to turn out vaccine would surely improve the odds,” Finance Accountant Peter Carne pointed out.

“Improve, yes. Overcome?
If you mean eradicate, no.
If you mean managing to vaccinate every person in the early stages of the disease by this time next year, I would proffer a cautious yes. By then, hundreds of thousands, maybe
millions,
will be dead. And people in the late stages of the disease as well as any animal with the disease will continue to infect others. That, my dear friends, is our best-case scenario.”

He
paused,
making sure the board understood just how dire the situation had become. “Furthermore, the vaccine we are developing remains untested. Preliminary findings in animal studies continue to show a near-100 percent success rate in mutating what the CDC calls the Xs variant form into another variant we are tentatively calling Vf, to stand for ‘vaccine form’. However,
Vf
is a wholly new folding of the proteins and we have only been monitoring animal test subjects for at most a couple of weeks. I must caution, iterate and reiterate that simply being able to convert all Xs prions into
Vf
ones only means we have successfully been able to halt
this
disease in select laboratory animals. It does not mean we have a successful vaccine if the
Vf
prion causes a similar disease in humans or has no effect when introduced into human hosts.”

“Nevertheless,” Walt interrupted, “our research is months ahead of anyone else’s. While I confess to being disappointed by the timing of the president’s announcement, I can’t think of a better carrot to dangle in front of the best drug labs in the country. Yes, we’re being pushed prematurely into our next steps and we could have used another couple of weeks to better formulate our direction, but that time has been taken out of our hands. We must decide now what our best recourse is. Do we partner with a major drug lab and work with them to refine and distribute the vaccine, or do we sell our research outright?”

Grigor Volkov shifted uncomfortably in his seat and tried to catch Walt’s eye. For his part, Walt was studiously avoiding his lead geneticist. Dr. Volkov was and had been the proverbial team player since the inception of Triple E ten years ago. But selling their research outright? Not something Walt had discussed with him and the rest of the genetics team. And by not discussing the disposition of it with the very team that had created it was a decided slap in the face. As a board member he had, perhaps, a little more tolerance for Walt’s actions than his fellow researchers would. If the announcement made
him
want to strangle the CEO, he had no misgivings as to how those less loyal than him were going to react.

It was the facilities manager, David Margolis, who put the logic of the decision into perspective. “Testing, manufacture and warehousing require lab space and storage we don’t have. To build out such facilities, even temporary ones, would take far longer than what time this crisis or whatever company we partner with would demand. And distribution, even if it’s just regular samples of vaccine going out to third-party labs, requires being on or near a major artery, whether it’s a highway, rail station or airport. Triple E chose this location precisely because it is not near any of those things. We simply don’t have the physical means to support a project such as the one you’re describing.”

“Fair enough,” Walt said.
“Any opposing views?”
He waited for objections from the board. When there were none, he continued, “Then selling outright appears to be the best — and possibly only — recourse. The upside is that we won’t suffer any liability and Triple E will come out clean on the other side no matter happens. Once Helen pulls together a short list of qualified buyers, we’ll put the research up for auction.”

Unwilling to be the only voice of dissent in the room regarding the ethics of capitalizing on the existence of VTSE by selling potential patents and research designs, Grigor Volkov chose another route to possibly dissuade the decision. “After today’s announcement by the president, whoever we sell to will not be satisfied merely with the research trail. They will woo away our project leads so they can accelerate the ramp-up time for their own teams. Once the quarantine lifts, we will lose talent and knowledge.” With himself being the first to defect, Grigor was thinking
,
especially if this was how the board was going to reward loyalty. “If Triple E were to begin animal repopulation work again in the near future, it would have to start fresh.
New teams.
New research.
New processes.”

“What about the “no compete” papers everyone signed?” Walt directed his question to LaWanda Meadows, head of Human Resources. With a background in law, LaWanda was who Walt relied on to answer the day-to-day corporate legal questions in lieu of the attorney’s office Triple E kept on retainer.

“Don’t think that would hold up,” LaWanda said, “since you’re selling off the drug-related knowledge with no plans of your own to pursue. Workers would be restricted from taking that knowledge to a competitor for the year that’s written in their contracts, but you can’t prevent them taking employment somewhere if you’re not competing in the same space.”

“With substantial enough runoff, Triple E is dead.” Dr. Volkov’s prediction seemed a frightening possibility. There was a collective moment of silence around the table as the board members privately worked through the implications — both for the company and for themselves.

“We still have the museum,” Walt pointed out. “We’re expecting a high profit return there before anyone else can start showing off adult animals. That should give us at least a five-year return. Or we could sell the museum to Disney or Paramount and, in a few months when all this other has blown over, we can reincorporate under a different name and start churning out animals for zoos.
Hybrids maybe.
Or front our own exclusive zoo and keep animal production to need only.”

“We decided ten years ago we weren’t going the Jurassic Park route,” Peter said.

“Priorities change. Directions change. I’m just laying options on the table. Right now, let’s focus on what our options are today. I need a realistic dollar amount to use as our base bid. Dr. Volkov, you’ve been working on the projections I asked for — I need those in hand in one hour. We’ll all reconvene then to draft and approve our bid request. One round of bidding, companies to submit their best-and-final-offer bid only. We’ll give everyone 48 hours to respond.
Anything else?”

“They’ll want a guaranteed transaction time,” Lawanda said. “And that 48-hour bid window is already going to make a lot of people nervous.”

“A 24-hour time-to-transfer, then?
Is that something we can meet legally?”

“You mean we’re only liable to
start
the knowledge transfer within 24 hours, not have it completed by then, correct? I can draw something up in the next day, sure. I’ll need to include exactly what assets are being sold — patents, white papers, internal reports, trial vaccine, research animals, etc. — how the information will be delivered — paper, electronic, encrypted files, video, etc. — how long it will take to deliver, and whether the buyer will have access to our research site to inspect facilities, control and test animals, and so forth.”

“Work with Dr. Volkov on all that,” Walt advised with a dismissive wave. “Meanwhile, the rest of us have an auction to run.”

DONNA AND MIKE KICKED THE SUV in gear, staying one step ahead of the National Guard as they hit various client ranches in the area. Most of the ranchers were understandably bitter and angry, yet seemed resigned to their fate. The beef cattle industry was rife with disappointment — every year brought a fresh challenge, whether it was drought, a spike in shipping costs, a contamination scare or disease. Some of the men they visited — cattle ranching remained one of the few industries still nearly completely male dominated — had even taken it upon themselves and their ranch hands to ensure the slaughter mandate was carried out humanely and were hard at work burying their business when Donna and Mike arrived.