Bio-Strike

EIGHT

Margaret René Doucette lived alone in a three-story ancestral townhouse in the heart of New Or-leans, attended by her servant of long years, an aging Creole woman named Elissa, who occupied the detached slave quarters out back. Engaged by Margaret René’s parents when she, their only child, was just nine or ten, Elissa had stayed on as caretaker of the house after it was willed to Margaret René as part of a large inheritance upon their sudden, untimely deaths.

At the time of the automobile collision that killed them in 1990, Margaret René was thirty-two years old, recently married to a financial consultant with a carriage trade brokerage firm, and three months expectant. Though she and her husband had purchased a new riverside home in Jefferson Parish, they decided to put that property up for sale and move into the Vieus Carré residence.

Despite her grief, Margaret René had found solace knowing the family she planned to raise would be embosomed in a place so full of sentimental attachments for her, where the spirits of her forebears seemed still to inhabit the high-ceilinged bedrooms and parlors, the graceful interior courtyard with its terra-cotta tiling and bowers of lush, tropical greenery, imbuing them with a healing and supportive warmth.

Since those days, a decade gone now, the hope of renewal that eased Margaret René’s sorrow had been peeled away from her like bloody strips of skin under a torturer’s flaying knife.

Her son — christened Jean David, after her father — had seemed a normal, if colicky, infant for the first six months of his life. But ominous signs of problems far worse than simple cramping had soon manifested. He’d had difficulty swallowing, and his food often would not stay down. There would be unpredictable spikes and dips of body temperature that could not be associated with common pediatric illnesses. When he was ten months old, Margaret René noticed an odd jerkiness to his movements and a gradual loss of previously acquired physical skills. His balance would fail even when he was holding the bars of his crib, and he would be unable to sit straight in a high chair. Playthings would drop from his straining grasp, his fingers sometimes clenching around his thumb as in a newborn — a fist that would lock tightly shut, the fingernails digging into his palm until it bruised, and on one occasion bled profusely.

In precautionary tones, the child’s doctors had recommended a blood sample be taken and sent to a laboratory specializing in the detection of lysosomal disorders, a term unfamiliar to Margaret René and her husband until then, broadly explained to characterize a range of defects in a type of cellular membrane. When clinicians at the lab noticed an almost total deficiency of galactosylceramide B, a bodily enzyme vital to the development of the brain and nervous system, they hastily forwarded the specimen to yet another medical facility in Philadelphia for further testing. More frightening, alien terms such as leukodystrophy and DNA mutation and myelin sheath were mentioned to the parents during this tensely waitful period. As Margaret René struggled to understand them, she had often felt as if she were listening to the indecipherable chants of the voodoo priests who had been said to wander the narrow streets of the Quarter in her girlhood.

The final diagnosis was devastating. Jean David was found to have globoid cell leukodystrophy, or Krabbe’s disease, a rare genetic disorder transmitted by a pair of carrier parents. The enzymic compound surrounding his nerve fibers was decayed, like insulation that had been eaten away from electrical wiring, causing the nerves themselves to degenerate and die. While the disease’s symptoms could be managed and possibly slowed, there was no cure, no stopping or reversing its progression. It was terminal in virtually all infantile cases. Only the length of its course was uncertain.

For Jean David, the slippage was rapid. As his first birthday approached — a joyous occasion for the parents of healthy children — the breakdown of his motor system led to paralysis and near blindness. There were bed sores that went to the bone. He would burn with fevers for days, growing weaker with each prolonged episode. He soon lost the ability to take solid foods and had to be nourished through entubation.

As the pressures of coping with Jean David’s steady decline had escalated in her, Margaret René had tried reaching out to her husband for support, but his private suffering had plunged him into his own downhill slide. He became uncommunicative and began drinking heavily. Problems at the office led to his having to accept a forced sabbatical. He would rise from bed in the middle of the night, leaving the house without notice, his mysterious departures lasting from a few minutes to several hours. At times he was gone until well after daybreak. When he arrived home after the first such absence, he’d claimed to have taken a long drive to clear his head. Later on, he would not bother with explanations.

Margaret René supposed his affairs should have been obvious to her, but all her thoughts had been turned toward her waning son. Everything else had seemed peripheral to giving him whatever comfort she could.

Finally Jean David developed a severe case of pneumonia from which he was not expected to recover. By then, Margaret René’s anguished prayers at his crib side were no longer for a miracle to spare him but for God to put an end to his ordeal, to grant him a compassionate surcease.

Her pleas went unanswered. Jean David lingered for weeks.

He was just sixteen months old when he passed away.

Margaret René’s marriage survived him by less than a year.

Was it possible to feel guilt over a flaw in one’s own biology? For that guilt to be transferred to the person with whom you, by chance combination, produced a doomed, tormented offspring? Margaret René did not know how else to explain the resentment and seeming aversion her husband developed toward her. In bed his back would be turned. He had refused to seek marital counseling, and in the heat of an argument confessed to having met another woman. He was in love with her, he said. He wanted a fresh start, he said. A divorce, he said.

And then he had left her.

This was ten years ago.

A decade, gone, since Margaret René had retreated into solitude. Still vigorous at seventy, Elissa maintained an atmosphere of old-world elegance, seeing that the expensive silk upholstery and antimacassars on the chairs and sofa were neatened and mended, the antique rose-wood furniture polished to a rich gloss, the crystal chandeliers, ivory statuettes, and antique china bric-a-brac regularly dusted. When required, professional help was called for servicing and repairs. But for Margaret René, the townhouse had become a cold, somber fortress. After returning from her son’s funeral ceremony, she had placed the urn containing his cremated remains on the fireplace mantle in the grand salon, then draped the gilt framed mirror above it with a heavy cloth, not wishing to see her pain reflected; there at her insistence it hung to the present. And these days, the oil portraits of ancestors that had once given her consolation seemed to gaze severely down from their places on the walls as she wandered the silent rooms and hallways, thinking of poisoned hope, of love turned to ashes.

On rare occasion, Margaret René would step onto the balcony overlooking Royal Street and lean over the wrought-iron rail to watch the residents of the city pass below, imagining their conversations, trying to guess which ones had been seared by life’s bitter lessons and which had yet to learn them. But otherwise she rarely went outside, leaving Elissa to order the groceries and take care of her various needs.

Margaret René did not, however, consider herself to be uninvolved with the world. Her parents had entrusted her with guardianship of their financial wealth, amassed over generations, and the inheritance had to be monitored and protected. She remained in intermittent contact with lawyers, estate managers, investment counselors, and a select handful of others. Old money came with old secrets, some quite dark. Margaret René had always understood this, as had her parents and their parents. Throughout the years, she had met men who could arrange certain things, perform certain services, discharge certain requests that people of common extraction might deem illicit or forbidden. Facilitators, her father had called them. Their names were neither spoken in public nor ever forgotten, and Margaret René had been mindful of keeping her ties with them… one such individual in particular.

Shunning direct personal interaction, ill at ease on the telephone, she had purchased a desktop computer and, quickly becoming proficient with it, would routinely attend to her correspondences over the Internet. Late at night, she would sit at her desk reading and responding to E-mail. And when she had finished with this, Margaret René would remain on-line to engage in another increasingly consuming pursuit.

With her browser she had located and assembled an extensive directory of Web sites relating to human genetic diseases, most of them with hyperlinks to associated resources, many providing message boards and E-mail addresses through which the families of the afflicted could network to share information and advice based on their personal experiences.

A curious, unrevealed visitor prowling the boards, Margaret René would crawl down the lists of postings about care options and treatments, about experimental therapies, about advances in genome research that might someday lead to cures. And as she pored over them, reading one message after another, deluged with their preponderant optimism, a bitter juice would rise into her mouth.

And she would think of her own poisoned hope.

Of her love turned to ashes.

And with what she told herself was sympathy and goodwill, Margaret René decided to break her silence and send E-mails of her own to those she felt had been betrayed by false encouragements.

Realizing her motives might be misinterpreted, might even elicit feelings of enmity, she established an account with an encryption remailer that would deliver her messages anonymously, stripped of any data their recipients could use to respond to them or trace her identity.

To the mother of an infant daughter with GCL about to begin treatment with an experimental drug, she wrote, Kill the child now. She will never improve.

To the parents of a young adult with a related neurological disorder seeking donors for a bone marrow transplant purported to stay the progress of his disease: The surgery will be futile. Spare yourself unnecessary pain and be resigned to your inevitable fate.

To the parents of a child in the advanced stages of still another leukodystrophy: Prepare for what comes after the end. You have seen the awful fruit of your passion, and it will drive a wedge of revulsion between you. Dissolve your marriage amicably before the faith is breached.

To a doctor offering palliative advice: Your lies are transparent. You are a filthy vampire who seeks to capitalize on the suffering of others.

At first the E-mailings had been a periodic activity, reserved for those unsettled nights when memories would churn inside her and rest would not come. But in recent months Margaret René had grown increasingly preoccupied with them. Heedless of the clock, she would write her notes into the emergent dawn with an absorption that was nearly trancelike. It was not until the light of full morning came streaming through her lace curtains and over the èvantails lataniers near the window behind her, the palmetto leaves stenciling fan-shaped patterns of shadow across the room, that she would at last go to bed. Having found she needed less and less sleep as time passed, she would awaken shortly before noon and eat the light breakfast Elissa prepared, anticipation building in her breast as she began thinking about her next session at the computer.

When darkness arrived, Margaret René’s consistent practice was to first check her unfiltered E-mail application for messages relating to financial affairs, hastily reply if necessary, then switch to her anonymous account and type out the dispatches of compassion she had mentally composed during the day.

Until tonight.

What happened tonight had changed everything.

Margaret René sat staring at her computer display now, openmouthed. Just minutes ago she had completed her usual log-on to the proxy server and noticed that a ciphertext E-mail had arrived. Instantly her eyes had widened. She had provided only a single person with the digital key code that would allow him to send a message to her via the anonymous account. A facilitator of matchless capabilities, with whom both her father and her former husband had dealings.

Her hands shaking with excitement, she’d typed in her decryption key.

The E-mail simply read:

Margaret René’s pulse quickened. Perhaps a year before, in a private chat room over an encrypted link, the originator of the current message had posed a question to which she’d replied with complete straightforwardness, although interpreting it as a mere hypothetical.

She could recall their exchange verbatim.

“What would you give to terminate all children with leukodystrophies while they were still in the womb?”

“I would give anything.”

“And if it meant the death of the carrier parents?”

“That would be for the best.”

“And if it meant your own death as well?”

“Better still.”

And that was the end of it. He had cut the virtual link, and Margaret René had heard absolutely nothing more from him for a considerable while. But his probing inquiry had kept drifting in and out of her mind. What had been the reason for it? As much as she’d wished for an explanation, she had known better than to ask for one, known he would inform her in his own time.

Months passed before stunning notification of the Sleeper Project had arrived in the form of an E-mail attachment. Reading it with a mixture of eagerness and incredulity, Margaret René had at last understood what he had been leading toward in his prior communication.

What he claimed to have achieved had seemed beyond imagining. Beyond yearning.

Margaret René was advised to await future word of the specific date and terms of the offering and refrain from any interim contact lest it become void. Somehow, she found the will to comply. And as days turned to weeks without another announcement, she had nearly convinced herself that his assertion of success had been premature. While he had never before failed to deliver to her family, she had wondered if perhaps this time he had overreached.

And then tonight…

Tonight…

Her thin face bathed in the ghostly radiance of the computer screen, her heart thumping in her chest, Margaret René felt as if she were poised on the threshold of a dream.

Yes, tonight, everything had finally changed.

The Arab mind is prone to express itself in a pragmatic and concrete way, and as Arif al-Ashar, the Sudanese minister of the interior, sat reading the E-mail attachment on his computer screen, his thoughts immediately took the shape of an unambiguous proverb: “In any vital activity, it is the path that matters.”

His dilemma was that each of the paths before him gleamed with fabulous inducements, as if paved with sterling silver.

Where, then, to place his forward foot?

For decades his government in Khartoum had been engaged in civil war with rebels in the nation’s south, their opposition fanned by Dinka tribesmen of black African origin who had resisted acceptance of shari’a, the strict Islamic code of law and conduct imposed after the revolution. Instead, the infidels clung to the barbaric spirit worship of their ancestors or the Christianity spread by missionaries in centuries past, calling for partial autonomy or complete separation, it all depended on which of their many factional groups one chose to heed, and when a particular group made its demands — for they seemed to change as often as the rebel leadership.

The situation had been a morass as far back as al-Ashar could remember. There was a period when the Dinkas had formed an alliance with the Nuer, a bordering tribe with whom they shared — and often feuded over — livestock grazing areas and water resources in the riverine plains around the White Nile. Taking strict measures to suppress the guerilla activities, Khartoum had deployed military land and air elements to the region, sealing it off to UN observers and representatives of the so-called humanitarian aid organizations that were plainly tools of the American CIA-Westerners who in their ignorance, presumptuousness, and mongrel weakness would have been quick to condemn a nation for exercising its right to preserve internal security and engage in a cultural cleansing that would bring about a politically unified and devoutly virtuous society.

Indeed, al-Ashar felt his government had shown the southerners greater leniency than was warranted by their anarchic conduct. Upon eradication of the villages that gave support to rebel garrisons, women, children, and the elderly were spared execution. Mercifully gathered from their crude thatch huts in what their people chose to term kashas, or roundups, they were sent to relocation camps in which ample attention was given to their welfare. Boys certain to be indoctrinated into rebel bands if left to hear the lies and distortions of family members sympathetic to their cause were transferred to separate facilities — the southern refugees who had fled to Ethiopia, Kenya, and Eritrea chose to call these abductions or kidnaps—where they were given suitable Arabic names, taught the holy ways of Islam, and trained to be loyal members of the national militia upon reaching the age of conscription. Was this not generous? Did it not show commendable restraint?

In spite of Khartoum’s efforts to impose order, the rebels persisted in their defiance, but a political dispute had flared between the Dinka and Nuer commanders and left their Sudan People’s Liberation Army divided and weakened. Old tribal conflicts over land and water rights were revived, and soon the former confederates were firing Kalashnikovs at one another. Government forces capitalized upon this by moving into the breach and seizing enemy base towns where the opposition troops were in disarray. With drought and famine spreading across the countryside to further devitalize the rebellion, Sudan’s lawful ruling establishment — the National Congress Party to which Arif al-Ashar belonged — had been encouraged that it might finally be subdued. Partly to silence international cries of outrage that had resulted from the propagandizing of Dinka refugees to gullible representatives of the American and European media, airdrops of water, grain, and medicine had been allowed into the southern part of the country.

There was a second, tactically advantageous reason for the admission of relief shipments, however.

Also struck by drought, the Nuba Mountains in the north had presented a distinct problem for the government. Infiltrating their high notches and passes, SPLA bands had become entrenched in pocket strongholds near remote villages inhabited by Nubians, an indigenous people that had by and large refrained from participation in the civil war, sharing neither the southern tribes’ desire for independence nor the Arabic population’s devotion to Islam. In allowing food and other supplies to reach the plains, the government had gambled that the rebels in the Nuba range, who were low on provisions, would be lured from their hideaways in attempts to replenish their stockpiles. And while the Nubians presented no armed threat in themselves, their refusal to accept shari’a, and their racial kinship with the SPLA, made them an undesirable and potentially destabilizing presence. Khartoum’s hope had been that they, too, would be coaxed from their villages into the relocation camps and government-held towns.

With attack helicopters and army raiding parties lending it impetus, the initiative had produced estimable results.

Then, as Allah would have it, another set of complications arose.

Over the past three years, a series of intertribal councils initiated by Dinka and Nuer elders had led the squabbling rebel factions toward reconciliation. Simultaneously, America and its UN allies had exerted increasing diplomatic pressure on Khartoum — directly as well as through Arab-African intermediaries — to allow relief drops into the Nubas and arbitrate a peace agreement with the southerners, backing their demands with the ever-present threat of trade sanctions. Sharing a long border with Sudan to the north, its commercial shipping and agricultural health dependent on the Nile waters flowing through both nations, Egypt in particular had no great wish to see the southern Sudan split off into a non-Arab, potentially antagonistic sovereign state — but neither could it risk losing American economic and military support. Thus, it had encouraged a compromise settlement to the extended civil war.

Weary from decades of struggle and natural disaster, facing a resolidified insurgent movement that was liable to keep the fighting at an impasse, torn by rifts between religious conservatives and secular reformers in its own parliament, Khartoum had capitulated to mounting demands and entered into a peace dialogue with the rebels, the stated agenda of which was to grant the southern provinces an as-yet-unspecified level of self-determination.

Displeased with the government’s acquiescence, Arif al-Ashar and a small group of his fellow conservatives had at that juncture committed to secretly hunting for a more palatable alternative. Arif al-Ashar himself had contacted a one-stop provider of black market arms, technology, and mission personnel with whom he’d had a long-standing affiliation — and the upshot was the message that had just appeared, then dissolved, on his computer display.

Now the question for al-Ashar remained: Which shining path to take?

Without official government approval, funds for his venture would have to be secured through clandestine means, and there were limitations to what could be funneled from existing budgetary appropriations before the drain became noticeable. The wealthier members of al-Ashar’s parliamentary cabal were certain to pledge additional monies, but the product’s high price tag was still restrictive, and hard choices needed to be made.

He clucked his tongue against his front teeth, watching the file attachment devour itself on his screen. A single disease trigger capable of leveling the Dinka and Nuer without causing a pandemic that would affect all the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa had to be keyed to a gene or gene string unique to those tribes, did it not? Yet even assuming an exchange of such genetic markers had occurred through racial ancestry and generations of living in close proximity to one another, intermarriage between tribal members was traditionally discouraged, and the number of individuals who shared a unique hereditary trait — and were likely to be susceptible — would be fewer than al-Ashar wished. A minimum of two triggers, obtained at a cost of a hundred million dollars, would therefore be necessary to ensure satisfactory results.

But what if only one of the tribes — say, the Dinka — were targeted? Arif al-Ashar’s brow creased in thought. That could prove to the best advantage. The infection would still be sweeping in scale, decimating their population, while claiming significant casualties among Nuer of mingled bloodlines. In the short term, this would mitigate the impact of a brokered treaty granting the south full or partial independence, leaving the survivors too ravaged by their losses to pose a foreseeable threat to the north. At the same time, Khartoum would have presented a moderate face to the world by having shown a willingness to reach a negotiated solution to the civil conflict. And as long as the triggers were available, dealing separately with the Nuer remained an option.

The third path al-Ashar saw before him seemed less appealing initially, but he would not dismiss it out of hand. Were the outbreak to occur among the Nubians, the Sudanese north would be purged of ethnic and cultural impurity to a highly acceptable degree. Foreign aid to the stricken mountain dwellers might be allowed to demonstrate the government’s new charitability and to blunt criticisms of its supposed indifference to human rights. As talks with the south commenced, international mediators would be tacitly made to understand that a hard-line prosouthern stance could once again lead to a cutoff of access to relief providers. The humanitarian issue that the Westerners had been using as a political lever against Khartoum would become a mallet poised to swing down from above them.

His brow creased in thought under the white wrappings of his emma, al-Ashar reached for the cup of spiced tea called shai-saada that had been steeping beside his computer. Eyes closed, he inhaled the steam curling up from it before taking his first sip, savoring the feel of its moist warmth on his cheeks, the aroma of cloves and mint, the pleasurable tingle it left in his sinuses.

Safety was in caution, regret in haste, he mused. Time remained for him to confer with his brothers in the ministry and arrive at a decision.

For the moment, al-Ashar would relish his sense of wide-open possibility, of roads that glowed with their own bright silvery light stretching out to even brighter crossings yet unglimpsed.

Wherever it led him, the journey was going to be memorable.