The White Plague (6 page)

“Hello, John Leo Patrick McCarthy,” he whispered.

Four days later, the first Friday in October, he moved into a furnished rental house in the Ballard suburb of Seattle, Washington. He had a one-year lease and only a bank with which to deal. The owners lived in Florida.

The Ballard house suited his purpose perfectly. The ease with which he had found it struck him as an omen. The owners had painted it a muddy brown with white trim. It sat anonymously in a mishmash row of other houses equally anonymous. The houses had been built on a long, low embankment, some sporting rockeries, some steep lawns. Most of them possessed daylight basements and garages under the main floor. John’s garage opened into the basement with ample room to unload the power wagon.

The furniture was garage-sale jumble and the bed sagged. Old cooking smells permeated the house and persisted in the draperies. There was an odor of stale tobacco in the bathroom. He flushed the toilet and caught his reflection in the mirror over the sink.

None of his old mildness had survived. This
Other
was driven from within. He leaned close to the mirror and looked at the puckering scar where he had removed the mole. In that pitted void he sensed a final break with his past, the past of Mary who had called the mole his “beauty spot.” He tried to remember the sensation of her kiss on that place; this memory, too, had gone. The shifting of his memories, the unchecked displacements, sent a shudder through him. He turned away from the mirror quickly. There were things to do.

In the next few days he made essential changes in the house – translucent film over basement and garage windows to shield him from prying eyes, burglar alarms, a substantial stock of food. The fireproof box went into a bricked-over secret cache he built behind the furnace. Only then did he feel free to start setting up the purchase routine for the special equipment his project required.

The thing that surprised him the most over the following weeks was the ease with which he acquired esoteric necessities. Telephone calls and money orders from anyone putting a “Doctor” in front of his name appeared to be the only requirement. He had everything sent to warehouse and accommodation drops, using different names, always paying cash.

While he was busy, memories remained tame and manageable. At night in bed, though, the shifting kaleidoscope in his mind often kept him awake.

It was an odd thing
, he thought,
and not easily explained
. John O’Neill had found it impossible to remember the fatal bomb’s explosion. John McCarthy remembered it in detail. He remembered the newspaper clippings, O’Neill’s screaming features in the photograph. But that person of the photo was gone. John McCarthy could remember him, though. He could recall the talks with police, the accounts of witnesses, the cadaverous figure of Father Devon, who had never corrected that initial mistake, believing that John had fallen into “a mixed marriage.”

John McCarthy found he could put it all together – the sisters at the hospital, the doctors. He could remember his Old Self standing at the bank’s window, the orange blast of the explosion. His memory replayed the scene at the slightest provocation – the little car, that brown elbow on the windowsill. There was Mary smiling and laughing as she hustled the twins across the street, the package clutched under her elbow. Odd, John thought, that they never found the package. Obviously it had contained the sweaters for the children. The cost of them had shown up on a credit card bill, Mary’s scrawled signature on the receipt.

The entire incident at the Grafton Street corner assumed in time the nature of a movie. It was locked in a sequence that he could call up at will – the crush of people around Mary and the twins, her stopping beside that old Ford… and always the orange explosion peppered with shards of black. He found that he could control the flow of it, focus upon particular faces, mannerisms, gestures and bits of personality in that macabre companionship.

And always the orange explosion, the sound thumping in his skull.

These were, he knew, John O’Neill memories, somehow removed from John McCarthy. Insulated. It was like having a television screen in his mind with descriptive pictures and voices.

“Good God! What was that?” the bank manager shouted.

They were a historical record, accurate but failing to touch anything within John McCarthy except that fierce determination to visit horror upon the authors of John O’Neill’s agony.

As he grew accustomed to this play of memory, he found it could be expanded backward and forward. The punctual bomb had exploded during their first day in Dublin after an obligatory three days in a castle guest house near Shannon Airport. The three days had put heads and bodies into Ireland’s time zone after the flight from the United States.

“Now we have our Irish feet,” Mary had said as they registered at the Sherbourne in Dublin.

John had awakened early that first morning in the city by the Black Pool. There had not been one whiff of premonition. Contrast, that was what it had been. He had begun the day with an exuberant feeling of health and happiness – all of which only amplified the later anguish. Tragedies of that dimension should be anticipated by omens, he told himself later. There should be warnings, ways to prepare.

There had been nothing.

He awakened beside Mary in one of the two bedrooms of their suite. Turning toward her, he found himself intensely aware of her loveliness – the tousled hair, the eyelashes brushing her cheeks, the soft rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed deeply in sleep.

The O’Neill thought was clear and simple:
Ahhh, the fortune of this marriage.

There had been peripheral awareness of the twins sleeping in the adjoining bedroom, the sounds of morning traffic on the street outside, a smell of baking bread in the air.

A suite, b’gawd!

The McCarthy grandfather would have been proud. “We’ll go back someday, lad,” the old man had often said. “We’ll return in style.”

We’re here in style, Grampa Jack. You didn’t live to see it, but I hope you know about it.

It had been a sad thing that Grampa Jack never made it back to the “old sod.” Back was probably not the correct word, though, because he had been born on the ship to Halifax.

“All of this for seven hundred rifles!” 

That had been the McCarthy family plaint during the “poor times.” John had never lost the memory of Grampa Jack’s voice regretting the flight from Ireland. It was a story told and retold until it could be called up in total by John O’Neill. The McCarthy silver, buried to keep it from piratical English tax collectors, had been dug up to finance the purchase of seven hundred rifles for a Rising. In the aftermath of defeat, Grampa Jack’s father, a price on his head, had spirited the family to Halifax under an assumed name. They had not resumed the McCarthy name until they were safely into the United States, “well away from the thieving British.”

In his Dublin hotel room, John O’Neill sat up quietly in the bed, aware then of how Mary’s breathing changed as she started to waken. She cleared her throat, but her eyes remained closed.

Mary O’Gara of the Limerick O’Garas.

She had loved Grampa Jack. “What a sweet old man. More Irish than the Irish.” None could sing “The Wearing of the Green” with a more stirring voice.

“From your father’s people, John Roe O’Neill, you’re descended from the Ui Neill. Ard Ri, High Kings, they were on the Hill of Tara.”

The grandfather had begun the genealogical litany the same way every time.

“And from the McCarthys, well now, lad, we were kings once, too. Never you forget it. Castle McCarthy was a mighty place and strong men built it.”

The O’Neill grandfather had died when John was two. John’s father, Kevin Patrick O’Neill, turning away from “the Irishness,” had sneered at Grampa Jack’s “McCarthy stories.” But John’s young head had been filled with Troubles and Risings and an abiding hatred of the British. He had particularly enjoyed the stories of Hugh O’Neill’s revolt and the rebellion of Owen Roe O’Neill.

“Roe O’Neill, that’s part of my name, Grampa.”

“Indeed ‘tis! And you’d be advised to live your life in a way that gives honor to such illustrious ancestors.”

“Burn everything British except their coals!”

How Grampa Jack had laughed at that.

In the Dublin hotel room bed, Mary spoke beside John: “We’re really here.” Then: “I still miss Grampa Jack.”

I believe it was Tacitus who said there is a principle of human nature requiring us to hate those we have wronged.

– William Beckett, M.D.

A
N EVEN
one hundred copies of the first “Madman Letter” went out and the following letters were more numerous. The first letters, all sent from an agency drop in Los Angeles, went to government officials, newscasters, editors and to important scientists. Their message was clear: quarantine the infected areas. To that end, some of the letters carried an additional page calling on scientist recipients to explain the gravity of the situation to their political leaders.

Dr. William Ruckerman, past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, received one of the letters with the additional page. It arrived at his San Francisco home with the Monday morning mail and he opened it over breakfast. He realized at once why he had been selected to receive this letter – his own DNA researches were not exactly secret in the scientific community. This letter had been written by someone on the inside or close enough to the inside that the special nuances of Ruckerman’s project were known to him.

Ruckerman reread the references to “back translation from the protein” to determine the RNA, “thence to the DNA transcription.” That was ordinary enough, but the writer of this letter also made it clear he had used a computer “to sort through the restriction fragments.”

That was a bit more esoteric, a bit more inside.

What sent a chill up Ruckerman’s spine was the reference to using sterioisomers in translating the RNA sequences in the protein molecules.

“Superimposition to determine the patterns.”

Those were the Madman’s words.

Ruckerman suspected immediately that the man had used alkene polymerization for part of his breakdown series, conjugation and resonance… yes. The man implied as much.

“The letter shows a full understanding of purification and subunit composition techniques,” he said to his wife, who was reading over his shoulder. “He
knows
.”

There was enough information to convince a knowledgeable reader, Ruckerman realized. This, in itself, said a great deal about the author.

There had to be more to it, Ruckerman knew. The Madman fell short of revealing key facts. But he led up to those facts with chilling accuracy. That, coupled to the threats, stirred Ruckerman to action.

He thought carefully about how to handle this, then sent his wife to pack a suitcase, following her to the bedroom where he placed a call to the President’s science advisor, Dr. James Ryan Saddler. Even then, Ruckerman was forced to press his way through a barrier of secretaries.

“Tell him it’s Will Ruckerman and it’s important.”

“Could you tell me the nature of this important matter?” the secretary asked, her voice sweetly insistent.

Ruckerman took two deep breaths to calm himself, staring at his reflection in the bedroom mirror. There were new lines in his angular face and his hair definitely was going gray. His wife, Louise, looked up from the packing, but did not speak.

“Listen, whoever you are,” Ruckerman said. “This is
Doctor
Ruckerman, past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a close friend of Jim Saddler. I have important information that the President of the United States should know. If there’s any need for you to know, I’m sure someone will tell you. Meanwhile, you patch me through to Jim.”

“May I have your telephone number, sir?”

She was all business now. Ruckerman gave her the number and cradled the telephone.

Louise, who had read the Madman letter over his shoulder, asked: “You think that’s a real threat?”

“I do.” He stood up and went to the bathroom. Returning, he stood beside the bedroom phone and tapped his fingers on the dressertop. They were taking ungodly long about it. He knew they would get through to Saddler, though. Jim had laughingly explained it once.

“The presidency of the United States runs on communication. Not on facts, but on the intangible thing we like to call ‘information,’ which is a kind of bargaining token exchanged at high levels. Carriers of this information always recognize the value of it. You’d be surprised at how many official reports begin with or include ‘We have information that…’  That’s not the royal ‘we’ but the bureaucratic ‘we.’  It means someone else can be blamed or share the blame if the information proves wrong.”

Ruckerman knew he had put on enough pressure that the White House communications system, a military operation, would find Saddler.

The telephone rang. Saddler was at Camp David, a male operator informed him. The science advisor’s voice sounded just a bit sleepy.

“Will? What’s so damned important you have to –”

“I won’t waste your time, Jim. I’ve received a letter that –”

“From someone calling himself ‘The Madman’?”

“That’s right. And I –”

“The FBI’s on it, Will. Just another crank.”

“Jim… I don’t think you’d be advised to treat this as a crank letter. His postscript should convince us of –”

“What postscript?”

“The additional page where he gives some of the details about –”

“There’s no postscript on our letter. I’ll have an agent come around to pick it up.”

“Dammit, Jim! Will you listen to me? I’ve been part way down the path this guy describes. He’s no amateur. Now, I’m warning you to treat his threat as real. If I were in your shoes, I’d be counseling the President to take at least the first steps toward complying with –”