Several people laughed. Even Savard had to bite her lip. Roberts glared at Clayton with undisguised contempt.
"Correct me, if I'm wrong," interjected Jack Elinda, a weedy balding man from the Department of the Environment. "But this is a form of influenza, true?" He cocked his finger and thumb into an imaginary gun at Gwen, which he had a tendency to do whenever he was trying to make a point.
"A mutated form," Savard said. "One that has undergone massive reassortment of its genetic code. Effectively, it's a virus that man has never seen before."
"Still, if it's an influenza virus we should be able to use a vaccine, true?" Elinda pressed.
"The current flu vaccine would be useless," Savard said.
"But we could manufacture a new vaccine for this particular strain, true?" Elinda cocked his finger at Gwen again.
"Theoretically." Savard nodded. She turned to the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. "Any thoughts, Dr. Menck?"
Dr. Harold Menck was an epidemiologist in his early sixties. Of medium build with a slight paunch and a tight crew cut, he always wore the same blue suit and white shirt with a rotation of bland ties. He rarely spoke at the Bioterrorism Preparedness Council meetings. Gwen had the suspicion that in spite of his high-profile appointment Menck was biding time while awaiting the golden parachute of retirement.
Leaning back in his chair with his hands folded on top of his head, Menck said, "I tend to agree with Ms. Roberts."
"That wasn't the question," Savard said.
"I know." Menck shrugged. "But I have no idea how long it will take to create a vaccine. I hear scientists have started to look into it, but remember they are still nowhere near a SARS vaccine."
"This is influenza, though," Savard said.
"That should make it easier," Menck said with as much interest as if they were talking about genetically altered peaches. "But even if they had already developed the vaccine, it would take several months to produce enough of it to immunize the country. And I think we should be careful not to overreact. Young lady, you probably don't remember the Swine Flu fiasco, but I lived through it."
"I remember, Dr. Menck," Savard said coolly.
"Well I don't." Clayton shot her a playful smile. "Then again I'm way younger than Dr. Savard."
Gwen rolled her eyes, but chuckled in spite of herself.
"In 1975, a nineteen-year-old recruit died on a Louisiana army base after developing flulike symptoms," Menck said. "Tests confirmed he had acquired a strain of Swine Flu, thought to be closely related to the original Spanish Flu. Everyone panicked. The then president, Gerald Ford, authorized production of 150 million doses of vaccine against Swine Flu. Six months later no one else had died of the virus. They even began to wonder if that first soldier had died of heatstroke. But by then, Ford was into an election year and he didn't want to admit a costly mistake. So he listened to the CDC advisors and let them proceed with a mass-scale immunization. Problem was the vaccine started to kill people. A couple hundred people died of vaccine complications before they stopped. It turned into the most costly class-action lawsuit in medico-legal history. And for what?"
"No offence, Dr. Menck." Savard shook her head. "Three hundred people in China did not die of heatstroke in November."
"I understand," Menck said, resuming his disinterested pose with hands on top of his head. "I am merely suggesting we should consider all options, but balance our response. No point in people throwing on gas masks and climbing into backyard bunkers, like we did in the fifties every time the Soviets got out of sorts."
"With all due respect, Dr. Menck," Savard said evenly. "A man-made pandemic is the one occurrence that could make a nuclear event look tame by comparison."
After the meeting broke up, Clayton lagged behind with Savard. Standing at the doorway, he asked, "What happened to your foot?"
Gwen shrugged. "Just a little sprain."
Clayton flashed his openmouthed GO smile. "I was kind of hoping you had broken it on the ass of a certain unnamed deputy director of the FBI."
She laughed. "Who knows? Maybe, she's right," Gwen said, taking the weight off her foot by leaning against a chair. "Maybe I am overreacting."
Clayton shook his head. "You're doing your job, Gwen."
She nodded. "Something very strange is going on with this bug, Alex. I know it. I wish I were closer to the action."
He laughed. "Hey, that's my line! You sound like a washed-up ex-field operative."
"I just wish I had more to go on." She frowned. "Speaking of which, anything new on that missing lab equipment in Africa?"
"Our people are still looking into it, but I wouldn't hold my breath." He snapped his fingers. "I think it's gone."
"I don't like the sound of that," she said. "Any more cell chatter?"
"Just the usual." Clayton reached forward and brushed his hand against her wrist. In spite of the light contact, Gwen sensed his strength and confidence. She couldn't deny the sexiness of the gesture. It had been too long since she experienced anything akin to physical warmth.
"We still on for tonight?" he asked.
"Alex, I would love to--"
"Oh, no! You're canceling, aren't you?" Clayton covered his face in mock mortification. "It's prom night all over again. I'm going to wind up taking my mom out for sushi, aren't I?"
"Alex, I want to," she said. "But I'm not going to be in town tonight."
"I should have guessed." He shook his head and laughed. "You're flying to London, aren't you?"
YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
Clayton had it almost right. Gwen was going to London but not until the next morning. In the meantime, she had one interstate trip to make before heading overseas. The Lear jet flew her from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to Tweed-New Haven Airport in less than thirty minutes. The waiting car drove her directly to the Yale campus.
It was after six o'clock when the car pulled up in front of the pharmacy research laboratory, but even in the dark the sight conjured up a wave of memories. Gwen hadn't been back to the lab in more than fifteen years, but like everything else she had seen of Dr. Isaac Moskor's life the building hadn't changed in the interim.
Most of the building was dark, but behind the top row of translucent windows, the lights of Moskor's lab burned brightly. After clearing security at the front door, Gwen headed up the stairs to the fifth-floor lab. She rang the doorbell. The metal door opened, and on the other side stood her mentor, looming larger than life. His white hair was tousled, and his thick-framed glasses askew. His lab coat had black streaks and patches on it. He looked as if he had just slid out from underneath a car whose transmission he had been adjusting. Gwen recognized the disheveled appearance and the burning determination in his eyes. It meant Moskor had been wrapped up in an experiment of one kind or another. It meant he was happy.
"I get to see you twice in a month?" he grunted in his low-pitched Jersey accent. He shot her a crooked grin. "You get yourself fired or something?"
She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around the bear of a man. "Isaac, it's always a pleasure to see you."
"You too, kid," he said, breaking off the embrace. "Come see the old lab."
She followed him down a corridor into the main room of the laboratory. Along the back wall a row of cages rattled when she stepped into the room. Gwen remembered how the male rhesus monkeys always used to hoot and shake the cages when strangers, especially females, entered the room.
She might as well have stepped back into her postgraduate days of the late eighties. Most of the equipment was the same--lab tables, fridges, animal cages, and incubators--but there were new computers and other high-tech pieces of equipment scattered through Moskor's large lab. The sights, sounds, and smell of the place made Gwen realize how much she missed the milieu. The rewards of being a top-level government scientific administrator suddenly paled in the presence of the indescribable rush that came with the search for scientific truth, or even just the possibility of it, palpable in the air of her old research lab.
Moskor led her over to a row of microscopes on the table. "Gwen, you got to see this!"
Gwen leaned over the first microscope. She peered through the eyepieces and rolled a knob until the slide came into focus. The field lit up like a fluorescent green fireworks display. Between the luminescent areas were several dark cells. "African green monkey kidney cells?" Gwen asked without looking up.
"Yup."
African green monkey kidney was one of the best culture mediums for growing viruses in the lab. She recognized the bright green as direct fluorescent antibody or DFA staining, which meant that fluorescent-labeled antibodies had latched on to virally infected cells and lit them up in radiant green.
She stood up from the microscope and pointed at the slide. "Influenza?"
Moskor nodded. "An overwhelming infection, as you can see. Now look at the next slide. Same DFA stain. Same source blood."
Gwen moved down one microscope and looked into the eyepieces. The color was gone. Only the dark kidney cells floated in the field. She glanced up at Moskor. "What happened?"
"That blood came from the same monkey forty-eight hours later. Difference was he had been treated with our new drug," he said with a hint of pride. "A36112."
She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Moskor again, catching him off guard. He stumbled back a step before regaining his balance. He laughed. "I'm not willing to take a hug even from a beautiful girl like you if it's going to cost me a broken hip."
Gwen released her grip. She gaped at him with a huge smile. "That's amazing, Isaac! No trace of infection at forty-eight hours."
"Not all of the subject cases turn out this well," he said. "But this is fairly typical of what we've been seeing with A36112."
"Do you know what this means, Isaac?"
"Yeah." He shrugged. "It means we've got a decent treatment for the flu in lab monkeys."
"C'mon, Isaac," she pressed. "It means a lot more than that."
"Don't get ahead of yourself, kid," Moskor said. "I'm as excited as a boy who just got the complete set of Yankees' ball cards, too. But I've learned better than to assume you can take this"--he pointed at the microscopes--"and replicate it in the real world."
"There's no reason to think you can't," Savard said.
"We're only in phase one testing on humans," Moskor pointed out.
"And?"
"So far the side effects have been mild, like with the monkeys. A bit of diarrhea. Not much else."
Savard nodded. "See."
"Gwen, even if everything goes off without a hitch," Moskor sighed. "You know how it works. We're minimum five years away from commercial production."
"Unless you're talking about compassionate release," she said, referring to the Food and Drug Administration clause that allows drugs to be released before finishing clinical trials in cases where the prognosis is otherwise hopeless.
"Compassionate release for the flu?" Moskor's face crumpled into a grimace. Then his eyes went wide with realization. He shook a finger at her. "You've come about that Gansu strain of influenza! That's why you're here, isn't it?"
"It's spreading, Isaac. London and Hong Kong."
"And I'm genuinely sorry about that," Moskor said. "But you're not seriously thinking about treating real patients with A36112."
"Why not?"
"Gwen, have you lost your mind?" he said. "This is a research lab drug. Nothing more as of yet."
"Isaac, we don't know of any currently available drugs to treat this infection."
He shook his head so vehemently that strands of his white hair fluttered above his head. "No. No. No."
Gwen put a hand on her hip. "Isaac, do you know what this Gansu strain is capable of? It's an indiscriminate killer."
Moskor sighed. "I don't doubt it, but that doesn't change anything."
"Twenty-five percent of its victims die," Gwen continued. "Most are under fifty. So far, sixty children in a remote area of China died in one month, Isaac. Imagine what will happen if it sweeps the States?" She paused. "And we would have no treatment to offer."
"So you're willing to throw some untested drug at everyone and just hope for the best?" Moskor glared at her. "What of the seventy-five percent people who recover without treatment?"
"What of them?"
"What if my drug kills some of them?" he demanded. Then he added in a hushed tone, "That would be a fine legacy for my life's work."
"You said yourself that the side effects were mild in phase one testing," she countered.
"In a hundred healthy volunteers!" Moskor said. "We have no idea what it would do to thousands of already sick patients."