Bio-Strike

SIXTEEN

When Roger Gordian’s personal physician, Dr. Elliot Lieberman, reviewed his case report Tuesday morning, he was left puzzled and dismayed.

Gordian was undoubtedly a sick man, but the cause of his illness was a mystery. The flulike symptoms that hospitalized him Sunday afternoon had shown an appreciable improvement soon after his admission, continued along that positive trend throughout Monday, and then had taken a sharp, unexpected downturn over the past several hours. At around midnight he’d called the duty nurse to his room because of renewed difficulty breathing, chills, and a stabbing headache severe enough to have awakened him from sleep. His temperature had spiked to 103°, its highest since his arrival in the ER, and at last reading hadn’t dropped from that elevated mark. And although his respiratory distress was relieved by oxygen given through a face mask, Lieberman had heard a threadiness in his exhalations during a stethoscopic exam he’d performed a couple of hours ago, and he immediately ordered an X-ray series, which showed pulmonary shadows that hadn’t been evident in radiographic images taken the previous day — a typical sign of fluid buildup in the lungs. Lieberman asked for additional pictures at twice-daily intervals and regular updates on Gordian’s condition, thinking that any further decline would likely require his patient be transferred to the intensive care unit. Then he had retreated to his office to examine the charts and laboratory results.

The bewildering thing was that the early suspicion of influenza had been ruled out, as had its most serious complication, viral pneumonia. A rapid-culture nasal swatch test to detect A and B type flu antigens — molecular components of the viral strains that stimulated defensive reactions by the body — had shown the specimens to be negative. A second type of quick diagnostic on a mucus sample from Gordian’s throat produced identical results within twenty minutes. Both methods were considered 99 percent reliable, an analytical certainty for all intents and purposes.

Sighing with frustration, Lieberman sat leafing through the papers on his desk for the third time, seeking any clues he might have missed. His grandmother, rest her soul, could have catalogued Gordian’s symptoms with a touch to his forehead and a look down his inflamed, blistered throat with a flashlight, instructing him to open wide in Yiddish. And despite the framed sheepskins and certificates on his office wall, Lieberman’s present insight into his condition went little deeper than that. Examination of Gordian’s blood under a microscope had eliminated the common bacterial pneumonias — primarily pneumococcal, but also staphylococcal, and the even rarer Legionella strains responsible for Legionnaires’ disease. There was no sign of related chlamydial and mycoplasmal organisms. The serological workup had shown a raised level of lymphocytes, the white helper cells in the bloodstream that responded to an attack by foreign microbes. This was basically confirmation of Grandma’s home diagnostic method — clinical evidence that infection was present and the immune system was sending out scent hounds to scout for antigens, just as the swab tests had done. But while the lymphocytes were evidence that a virus was breeding inside Gordian, they would do nothing to establish its identity.

Lieberman had checked San Jose Mercy’s databases for similar undiagnosed cases reported within the last forty-eight hours and found none. An expansion of his computer search to include the past week, then the past month, also drew blanks. He had next contacted associates at nearby hospitals by phone to see whether they might have recently encountered anything that resembled Gordian’s illness. Again, nothing. However, something had to be done to find out what Gordian was up against. His body was at war with a stealth invader and clearly flagging in its battle. Unless and until its identity was specified, an effective course of medical treatment to aid him would be impossible.

Lieberman inhaled, exhaled. He ought to know what he was confronting here, and he did not. That alarmed him tremendously. He needed to consult with someone who could provide some guidance and specialized expertise.

Lieberman lifted the receiver off his phone to get the chair of the virology department on the line but then decided that call could wait a bit and hung up without punching in his extension. There was another person he wanted to speak to first. One of his oldest friends and colleagues, Eric Oh was an epidemiologist with the California health department who had performed some of the principal research on molecular methods for the identification of unrecognized and emerging pathogens and been a celebrated virus hunter for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta before marrying a hometown girl who’d insisted he stop fiddling with BL4 pathogens, and move back West to settle down. It was a downright breach of protocol to involve Eric before consulting with a senior departmental head in this hospital. And the criteria that would normally warrant contacting government officials — a cluster of reported cases distinguished by symptoms akin to Gordian’s or data suggesting a full-scale outbreak of an infectious disease in the community — were absent. A single patient with an ailment that had stumped his humble general practitioner for less than forty-eight hours did not constitute a public health hazard, even if that patient was somebody of Roger Gordian’s prominence.

But Lieberman was getting gut radar signals. The kind you grew to credit more and more with age and experience. And insofar as he was concerned, an informal meeting of the minds with Eric could hardly be considered reproachful professional conduct.

His lips compressed to a barely visible stitch on his long, careworn face, Lieberman retrieved Eric’s phone number from his pocket organizer and once again reached for the telephone.

“… can’t believe I was so thoughtless… so stupid… spent three Sundays in a row building a pen for my dogs… all I did… give Dad a hard time…”

Julia’s voice penetrating his sleep, Gordian stirred, opened his eyes. She was sitting with Ashley near the foot of his hospital bed, back out of the way of the tubes and electronic monitors connected to him.

He lifted his arm from his side and weakly pulled the loose-fitting oxygen mask down below his chin. The women noticed he’d awakened and turned to face him, starting to their feet.

“Get me a drink of water, everything’s forgiven,” he managed. The inside of his mouth felt dry and clotted. “Deal?”

Julia was at his bedside in a snap, her mother behind her. “Dad, I don’t know if you should be taking off the mask—”

He moved his hand.

“Breathing’s fine right now.” The words scraped out of him. “Just thirsty.”

Ashley was already lifting the pitcher from his rolling tray. She filled a paper cup halfway, passed it to Julia, and then pressed the button to raise the upper part of the bed.

Gordian reached for the water as Ash straightened the pillows underneath him, but Julia shook her head.

“Let me hold it for you,” she said. “Better take it slow. Little sips, okay?”

Gordian nodded. He wet his lips, rinsed the water over the sticky film on his tongue. Then swallowed. The coolness going down the hot, reddened lining of his throat was indescribably welcome.

“Thought you two were going out to grab a bite,” he said.

“We did,” Ashley said. She stepped closer and touched his cheek. “You were asleep when we got back.”

He looked at her.

“How long was I out?”

“A while… I’m not sure…”

Gordian shifted, checked his beside clock. Almost two in the afternoon. He’d been sure he had drifted off for fifteen, twenty minutes at the longest. Make that a couple of hours.

He shifted his gaze back to his wife. Ash had put on her face, as she liked to say. Not that she needed to wear much makeup. So many years of marriage, she looked like the photos taken of her when they were newlyweds. But he could see dark crescents under her eyes. Small lines at their corners that hadn’t been there before.

“Do you feel like having lunch?” she said, gesturing toward his tray. “The nurse left some lunch. There’s a turkey sandwich. Jell-O, naturally—”

He shook his head.

“A little later, maybe,” he said. “My legs are cold. Air-conditioning’s turned up kind of high, don’t you think?”

He saw Ashley give Julia the briefest of glances. Maybe not so high, he thought.

“I’ll go ask for another blanket at the nurse’s station,” she said.

“Count on me waiting right here.”

She gave him a wan smile and went out into the hallway.

Gordian took down some more water, thanked Julia, then eased back against his pillows. The window shades were drawn, but the daylight seeping in around them seemed too bright. He let his eyes close for a second.

When he opened them, Julia was watching him on the bed.

“You aren’t at work,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“It’s a new job,” he said. “I’d hate for you to have any trouble.”

She sat gently on the edge of the mattress.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I used the old parent-in-the-hospital scam.”

“Good one,” he said. “Let’s play it to the hilt.”

She took hold of his hand, still watching him intently.

“You hear anything new from Dr. Lieberman?” he asked.

“Not since early this morning,” she said. “He was supposed to look over your information and meet us here, but got called off on an emergency.”

Gordian nodded, felt the tender swellings under his jaw. It reminded him of when he’d had the mumps as a kid.

“Dad…”

He looked at Julia, noticed that her eyes had suddenly moistened.

“Honey?” he said. “Something the matter?”

She was shaking her head, but at some unspoken thought rather than in answer to his question.

“What you heard me saying when you woke up… I’m sorry. About how I’ve been treating you. About the way I acted the other day when you were over at the house.” She squeezed his fingers more tightly, swiped away a tear with her free hand. “I’ve been such a self-absorbed jerk since the divorce…. God, Daddy… I don’t know why I keep taking things out on you….”

“Might be because we’re two of a kind,” he said. “Good at not being good with our emotions.”

Julia tightened her grip on his hand, her eyes glistening.

“It’s like I keep my feelings inside until they fill me up, you know?”

“I know.”

“Like they’re all mixed together, and I don’t have a clue how to deal with them, and instead try to push them somewhere deeper inside. Convince myself they’ll go away. And then the pressure only gets worse—”

“I know,” he said. He smiled at her. “Doesn’t make it easy on the people we love. Just ask your mother.”

They were quiet for a moment, hands joined at Gordian’s side.

“You’ll sort things out,” he said finally. His throat was on fire, the temporary relief from the water he’d sipped long gone. “It takes time. You’ve been through changes, difficult ones—”

He was interrupted by a soft knock on the open door.

They both turned their heads toward Dr. Lieberman just outside in the corridor.

“Julia, Gord,” he said. His face was drawn. “I hope you’ll excuse my lateness; it’s been one of those days.”

“Tell me about it,” Gordian said in a ragged voice. “Hello, Elliot.”

Lieberman’s eyes made a quick tour of the room as he entered. “I was hoping to find Ashley—”

“I’m right behind you.”

He glanced over his shoulder, saw her standing in the hall with a folded blanket draped over her arm, and stepped aside to let her move past him.

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad the three of you are here.”

They looked at him. It went through all their minds at once that neither Lieberman’s tone nor his expression remotely approached gladness, his chosen figure of speech aside.

He reached back and closed the door, then stood silently for what seemed a very long time.

“We have to talk about my findings,” he said. “Talk very seriously.”

“Here’s what little I know,” Megan said. “The boss’s condition hasn’t improved since this morning, and the tests aren’t showing what’s wrong with him. His doctor, I think his name is Lieberman, has put in a call to an epidemiologist at the Department of Health in Sacramento.”

She was looking at Pete Nimec and Vince Scull, the three of them seated in Nimec’s office at UpLink headquarters, their meeting hastily convened minutes after Ashley Gordian phoned to update her from the hospital.

Nimec’s eyes held steady on her face. “That’s it?”

She nodded.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Scull said. “A case gets kicked up to state level, it means there’s either gotta be a rash of ones like it or a suspicion that whatever’s hit Gord is contagious… and a threat to the public welfare.”

Megan shook her head.

“That’s what I assumed, too,” she said. “But Ashley explained the contact’s strictly unofficial. Lieberman has a personal relationship with the government man, and he’s reaching out.”

They were silent for a while.

“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Nimec said. “And don’t tell me to wait and pray for the best.”

Megan regarded him gravely.

“Pete,” she said, “sometimes you can’t charge to the rescue.”

He expelled a breath.

“Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn.”

More silence.

Scull frowned, rubbing a hand back and forth over his smooth, hairless expanse of scalp. Then he looked at Megan.

“I’m thinking maybe we ought to investigate,” he said.

“Investigate what?” she said.

“Same things as the white coats,” he said. “You look at a whole bunch of dots and try to draw in the lines that connect them. I mean, if you get right down to it, this wouldn’t be any different than what’s SOP at my job.”

“I don’t follow.”

Scull rubbed his head again.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m in another country conducting a risk analysis from a corporate perspective, I first pretend I’m from Mars, throw every preconception I have from my mind. Make like a sponge and soak up everything I can. You with me so far?”

She nodded.

“Now I’ve been there long enough to get a sense of what the place is about, and I notice a potential problem. Some political, economic, or social instabilities that could threaten our company interests,” he went on. “I examine the cause or causes, trace their origins. It can be complicated. There are always buried issues and agendas. But I focus on the ones that are exposed. Follow their threads. Most often, they’ll lead to others that aren’t so visible. And then I follow them. And when I know everything I can within whatever time frame’s imposed on me, I spin the threads into a regional profile and scenario plans. Then make my recommendations on what our investment strategy should be.”

“Okay, I’ve still got you,” Megan said. “Now help my chronically prosaic mind with the rest.”

Scull thought for a moment.

“Say you’re a medical sherlock. There’s a disease you don’t recognize, you want to trace its origin, same’s I’d do with some radical political movement in Frickfrackistan,” he said. “So you start looking at how the person you’re treating might’ve acquired it. Where’s he been lately? Who were his contacts? You maybe hit on another case that can be linked to him, you can pretty much surmise the sickness is communicable. The next step is to figure out its vectors. How it’s spreading. Whether it jumps from rodents to people. Or rodents to insects to people like bubonic plague. Or gets passed directly from person to person. Name your route. The main thing is that once the information’s in your pocket, you’re on the way to finding your germ. And then you can maybe come to terms with it. Figure out how to deal with the thing.” He looked from Megan to Pete. “You see where I’m coming from?”

The other two were nodding, Megan with her eyebrows raised.

They sat in pensive silence again.

Then, from Nimec: “Where do we start?”

Scull turned sideways in his chair and rapped his fist on the wall.

“Right here, Petey. UpLink HQ,” he said. “Where the hell else but the boss’s home away from home?”

Palardy was dreaming he was in the hospital. Or at least he thought it was a dream. It was hard to tell sometimes what was real and what wasn’t. Like the day he’d gone into Gordian’s office with the syringe. That had seemed as if it was a dream, too. He remembered how he’d seemed to be floating in space as he walked through the door, his sense of unreality. Of being inside and outside himself at once. And that was how he felt now. So maybe it was all in his mind. Not just the bad things that had happened to him lately, the things he’d done, but everything since Brazil. The gambling, his selling those blueprints to the space station facility to make his vig, his wife leaving him… and then back to the U.S.A. and more bets, more shylocks, more betrayals demanded of him and carried out. All a dream, every minute of it. Every hour, day, week, and month, right up to and including his coming down with the sickness. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life was…

Life…

Was life. Or something like that.

In the dream he’d been slipping into and out of tonight, these latest installments of his dream of life, or life of dream, whatever, he was in a hospital bed, tucked between clean sheets, feeling loads better. The fever was gone. Gone, the glands in his throat swollen to the size of golf balls. And the heaves and coughs and the blood that had started coming out of him with the coughing, red streaks in his phlegm, then clots, streaking the sink when he spat into it, darkening the water of his toilet, staining the bowl even after he’d flush and flush and flush…

Gone, all gone. Pain and trouble down the drain. The doctors had treated him, the nurses were tender and attentive, and he was comfortable, on the way to being cured. And whenever he opened his eyes and found himself back in his apartment, lying alone in his bed, twisted up in his soiled, wet, stinking sheets, his head on a pillow soaked with bloody discharges from his nose and mouth, whenever he’d opened his eyes and seemed to wake alone, so alone, Palardy would force himself back into that other place, that place of comfort, where the physicians were skilled and the nurses were kind, and he was getting better, so much better, in a warm, clean bed. And then the only thoughts to disturb him would be about the message in a bottle, the riddle sent to himself and not to himself, so people would be able to figure out what happened to him in case anything bad did happen.

That message, that payback, that whopping fuck-you to his betrayers… the problem was that it could come right back at him, be a disaster for him if things turned out okay and he recovered, if it was found before he got released from the hospital to intercept it.

Definitely a thought to intrude on his peace of mind, intrude on his dream, jolt him back to the lonely reality of the apartment where he lay wretched and shivering and very possibly dying in his own bodily filth.

In fact, it was pulling him back there right now, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Because in the present snippet of his dream of sweet mercy and healing, a nurse had been about to care for him, quietly entering his room, softly coming around his bedside, and oh, and oh, and oh, although he couldn’t quite see her features, Palardy was sure she was beautiful, like his wife on their honeymoon, when they’d made their first baby, beautiful like his wife, and he didn’t want to leave her, he didn’t want to…

Palardy opened his eyes. Unsure of his bearings, his sense of place confused. He seemed to be back in his apartment, in his moist and jumbled bed. Sometimes it was hard to be positive on awakening. The shades were drawn to keep the sun from lancing into his eyes. The lights were out for the same reason, that terrible pain in his eyes. The room was so dim, it was hard to know. But he thought he was in his apartment. Awake now. And yet he still had the feeling somebody was with him, near his bed.

He blinked rapidly. If this was his own place, if he was no longer in the dream, then nobody belonged inside it except him.

Who could be…?

Suddenly afraid, Palardy struggled to lift himself on his elbows, craning his head from side to side.

Initially, he thought the man standing to his left was disfigured. His face smashed and flattened. Then he thought his eyes still might be blurry with sleep, and blinked some more to clear them.

And then he realized the man was wearing a mask.

A stocking mask.

His fear mounting exponentially, Palardy summoned what little strength remained in his body and raised it higher off the mattress.

And was shoved back down by a black-gloved hand on his chest.

The hand held him.

Pressed hard against his ribs.

Kept him from moving at all.

He tried to speak but could only groan through his scaled, blue lips. Then tried again as the man’s free hand reached into a pouch or a bag on his belt… reappeared with something that finally unlocked his vocal cords…

“Who?” he managed. “Why…?”

Palardy would die without an answer to the first question.

As for the second, his conscience had already answered it for him.