Tuesday
You had finished entering all of the data from Monday around midnight.
You were exhausted and decided to just go back to your beach front apartment, which had apparently been provided to you by Denmark’s Defense Intelligence Service (DDIS). You figured, if the Danes were as smart as they seemed, it should be fine. Right? And indeed, there were no SWAT teams waiting at the beach. The shell company in the Seychelles had kept its secret.
Leaving the next morning was a little thrilling too. And as you walked out the lobby at seven in the morning, there weren’t hundreds of FBI agents waiting with guns drawn to apprehend you. Just people jogging and biking to work.
Given a first pass, the team at the institute had decided to refine the data collection program. They had selected noon of each day as the sampling point. They wanted counts of exposed staff and running counts of total staff. The plan was to start calling hospitals on the East Coast around 9AM local time, starting with those who had reported zero cases the day prior, and working up by size, giving larger hospital systems more time to tabulate their counts.
As the low person on the totem pole, you took breakfast orders and went to collect them.
When you got back, everyone was in Dr. Khan’s office on a conference call. You tried to go in, but the door was locked. You went back across the hall to the conference room instead.
The speaker volume was high enough you were able to make out three very distinct voices on the other end of the phone. One voice seemed angry, the second was somewhat timid or fry, and the third voice was the most garbled tortured thing you’d ever heard.
Dr. Khan was the only one speaking from our side. The conversation began to get more and more heated as time when on.
“Well they at least need to be moving at this point. To be in position in time.” he yelled.
“That’s not your purview. They are not your vaccines. It is OUR stockpile. And I’d remind you that you are an immigrant speaking to a US government official.” the angry voice said.
“I’m a full naturalized citizen of the United States of America.” Dr. Khan shot back.
“I’m not hearing that you are. You need to fix your tone.” the angry voice said.
The tenor of the call became subdued and ended abruptly thereafter. It seemed Dr. Khan felt there was little more to be said.
You looked over and saw a lot of emotion on the faces of Sara and Mac. It was a mix of anger, disgust, fear and confusion. But between Dr. Khan and Katia, you did not see anger or fear. Dr. Khan merely stood up when the call ended and ushered everyone out of his office. He then closed the blinds and his office door.
Katia left.
Sara and Mac started working the phones, but they weren’t calling hospitals directly today.
Since nobody needed to physically be in the conference room to collect data, Sara and Mac had begun outsourcing data collection to graduate students on break across the country. With your map, each took a slice based roughly on latitude. They were able to distribute the task of calling individual hospitals to many people and then correlate the results in batches.
The data collection was also expanding to every major hospital systematically. By eleven local time, two hours after noon on the East Coast, the evolving system had near total coverage in the Eastern Daylight timezone, and you were catching up on Central Time. You assumed, given the population distribution of the United States, that the team would probably catch up completely in the mountain time zone and wrap up the West Coast around two thirty in the afternoon, which is about what happened.
By three in the afternoon, you all were done and double checking the data. With enough time for a late lunch.
The phone rang. It was Katia for you.
She gave you a small errand.
You went into an office adjacent Dr. Khan’s and took a key fob from an art glass bowl. You went into the basement and found Dr. Khan listening in on a phone call in the bank vault room. You pointed at the closet, he nodded, and you opened it to find four metal roll on suitcases, three black and one white. You rolled the three black suitcases out of the basement door toward the parking lot.
You hit the pinwheel on the key fob and saw the four ways on a large white sedan flash. You put the three suitcases in the trunk before going to get sandwiches for everyone.
You arranged the soup and sandwiches on the console under the television.
You picked up a paper entitled Smallpox as a Biological Weapon by D.A. Henderson and read the second paragraph of the introduction,
If used as a biological weapon, smallpox represents a serious threat to civilian populations because of its case-fatality rate of 30% or more among unvaccinated persons and the absence of specific therapy. Although smallpox has long been feared as the most devastating of all infectious diseases, its potential for devastation today is far greater than at any previous time. Routine vaccination throughout the United States ceased more than 25 years go. In a now highly susceptible, mobile population, smallpox would be able to spread widely and rapidly throughout this country and the world.
Geeze, that sounds pretty bad.
You flipped to the next page, to see the guidelines were first drafted in 1998. Since a lot more time has passed, our remaining immunity must be even lower now.
You flipped to the Summary,
… Unfortunately, the threat of an aerosol release of smallpox is real and the potential for a catastrophic scenario is great unless effective control measures can quickly be brought to bear.
You flip to a section titled Post exposure Infection Control,
Vaccination administered within 4 days of first exposure has been shown to offer some protection against acquiring infection and significant protection against a fatal outcome.
You look at Sara and ask, “So if this is what we can’t say it is, and nurses don’t get vaccinated within four days, is there like a treatment?”
“There are about two million doses of treatment, but it’s somewhat unclear how effective it will be, given that we’ve never used it.”, Sara said.
“They need vaccines.” Sara punctuated.
“Is it really 30% fatal without a vaccine?” you ask.
Sara paused for a long moment.
“That guide was written for a attack involving classical smallpox. That was the worst possible threat we suspected when that paper was written. We learned the Soviets had a bioweapons program producing metric tons of virus after the Soviet Union collapsed, but we didn’t get a glimpse of the virus they were producing could be until 2002.” Sara said.
She continued, “There are many people who say that Doctor Henderson saved the world from the scourge of smallpox by leading the global effort to eradicate it. There’s a smaller set of people who say Dr. Henderson saved the world from smallpox twice, by creating a stockpile of vaccines as a deterrent against a bioweapon attack. The truth may be, Dr. Henderson likely saved the world twice, but the virus his vaccine stockpile stopped wasn’t smallpox. It was something a bit worse.”
“What was the other virus?” you ask.
“Now is not the time for speculation.” Sara said.
Dr. Khan burst upstairs with a cry: “Okay, in or out!”
“I’ve got us four jump seats on a GlobeMaster leaving Travis at nineteen hundred. Sara? Mac? are you in?”
“Like ALL IN? Are we actually doing this?” Mac asked.
“All in, it’s now or never.” Dr. Khan said.
“I’ve got to be in.” Mac said.
“Sara?” Dr. Khan asked,
“From all enemies foreign and domestic,” Sara said, “I’m all in.”
“Jody! Jody we need you to stay here and hold down the fort. Answer the phone, keep collecting the data.” Dr. Khan said.
“Where’s Katia?” Dr. Khan asked.
“What time is departure?” Katia asked.
“The wheels on the bus go up at nineteen hundred with or without us.” Dr. Khan said.
“My car is out front, your bags are in it.”, Katia said.
The five of you moved toward the front entrance as Katia gave the travel itinerary.
“I’ve got Monterey County Sheriff to escort us up Highway One and a CHIP waiting as a pace car up the 101. We’ve got three hundred miles of range, it’s a hundred and fifty miles to get there. It should be two and a half hours without traffic, but it’s 4:15 now which means we’ll have to make it up if we hit anything.” Katia said.
“Are you coming Katia?” Dr. Khan asked.
“I go away from evil Sir. Travis Air Force Base is as far as I can take you.” Katia said.
“JODY!” Sara yelled as you all cleared the lobby.
“Go to the store and buy N95 masks and hand sanitizer. Do you like vaccines Jody?” Sara asked.
“Yes” you say.
“Take whatever vaccine is available. Wear a mask in crowded places at night. Avoid large gatherings. Avoid capture at all cost and stay THE FUCK AWAY from all hospitals and clinics.” Sara said as she held open the door of the sedan.
The light bar on the Monterey County Sheriff cruiser spun up as Sara ducked into the sedan.
“Where are you going? Are you coming back?” you asked.
“We’re going to get your mom a vaccine or we aren’t coming back.” Dr. Khan said.
“Feed my dogs!”, He added.
“Katia will watch over you.” Sara said as you heard her seat belt click and watched Katia flash a peace sign at the police cruiser lurching forward blasting an erratic siren.
The motor of the cruiser roared, the electric motors of the white sedan whirred.
And they were off.
You made your way back inside the institute to take your place at the foot of the conference table.
Data collection was done for the day, and there weren’t going to be any more errands.
You looked at the papers strewn about.
There was a copy of a microbiology journal from 2003. You saw a bound booklet about a 1971 outbreak of smallpox in Aralsk, Kazakhstan. You begin to flip through it.
There was a map.
You saw a dotted line on the map tracing the voyage of the Lev Burg, July-August, 1971. Twenty stops in the Aral sea around “rebirth island” to collect fish and seaweed samples, to survey the ecological impact of a major river diversion for irrigation.
‘All epidemics should only take place on boats’, you think to yourself. They’d be so much easier to analyze that way.
But the official reports from the time were full of many scenarios where Patient 1 in the outbreak contracted the disease off the boat or from someone who had gone ashore.
But when interviewed in 2002, the report from the institute said:
Patient 1 insists that she did not disembark from the Lev Berg at any of the ports of call along its route. … Patient 1 noted that official policy allowed only the male members of the crew to leave the ship, and that this rule was strictly enforced.
Why were there so many scenarios in the official report claiming the index patient disembarked, or purchased items at markets, or was infected by a fellow crew member, but when interviewed decades later, she said she never got off the boat and no one else on the boat got sick?
Why would official contemporaneous reports try to muddle or confuse something so simple?
Your stomach growled.
‘The monsters must be hungry by now’ you thought to yourself. You put the paper back on the conference table and headed over to feed Dr. Khan’s dogs. They seemed to be warming slightly to you each time you fed them. Thor’s act was still fairly scary each time, but you were getting less afraid of his show.
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