Natural Causes

CHAPTER 35

IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON WHEN MRS. ANNIE FRUMANIAN knocked on Rosa's door.

"It's that charming Mr. Mulholland calling from Atlanta," she twittered.

Mulholland, who had flown home shortly after the visit to BIO-Vir, had spent his one night in Boston at her bed and breakfast. He was an almost legendary insomniac, and had made inestimable points with Mrs. Frumanian by staying up until well past midnight listening to stories of her life. He later told Rosa that no prescription sleeping pill had ever worked as well on him.

"Ken, have you got anything?" Rosa asked, once she was certain the landlady had hung up the extension.

"An address from three years ago is the best we've been able to do so far," the virologist said. "If you find our Mr. Fezler, maybe you should let him know that, assuming the social security number we used is the right one, we have inadvertently alerted the IRS that he hasn't filed a tax return in four years."

Fezler, the creator of the CRV113 virus, was almost certainly the skittish, stuttering little man who had tried to make contact with Sarah. However, although the old-timers at BIO-Vir remembered him as having been there for at least five years, none of them knew anything about his personal life, and there was no record in personnel that he had ever worked for the lab. From what little their inquiry around BIO-Vir turned up, Rosa and Ken had formed a picture of Fezler as an extremely solitary, very bright, and strikingly overweight man, perhaps in his late forties or early fifties. While in BIO-Vir's employ, he lost an enormous amount of weight. He also lost an enormous number of monkeys. And much to the dismay of animal supervisor Cletus Collins, the record of those primates, like Fezler's personnel file, had vanished.

It was Mulholland's idea to use FASTFIND to locate him. The FASTFIND computer network had been implemented in 1981 by a commission secretly appointed by the President. Its purpose, purely and simply, was to track down individuals for the government. It cost over $12 million to install, but in its first year of operation, the tax evaders alone that it located more than paid that bill. It functioned by rapidly integrating data from the IRS, FBI, military, police, social security administration, passport office, immigration and naturalization service, credit bureaus, unemployment offices, motor vehicle licensing offices, and a dozen national mailing lists. Rosa's department had used the system a number of times to locate people who had been exposed to infectious processes and dangerous toxins.

"The address I got for Fezler is in a place called Brookline," Mulholland said.

"I know where Brookline is."

"Three thirty-one Beech; apartment two-F."

Rosa wrote down the address and then located it on her street map.

"I found it," she said. "Another cab ride. I don't know which frightens me the most with all these taxis I've been taking: the fares or the drivers. Maybe it's time to think about renting a car."

"Or borrowing one. Remember, you're on sick leave. No charging rentals to Uncle. Rosa, listen, there's one more thing of interest. While I was in Boston, one of my people here was sneaking in some more tests on Lisa's serum. We're getting a little above normal blip in her level of interferon."

"Interferon?"

Rosa took some time to process the development. Interferon, a naturally produced antiviral protein, was well known and extensively studied, but still little understood. In high doses, it had definite anticancer effects. In the lower amounts produced by the human body, it almost certainly played a role in keeping chronic viral infections like herpes and chicken pox in check.

"Ken," she said finally, "walk me through your thoughts on this."

"Well, the way I see it right now, Lisa's got a subclinical, no-symptoms infection with CRV113. The growth of the virus is held in check by her own interferon, antibodies, or more likely both. Sort of a biological Mexican standoff. I suspect we all have dozens of different viral infections smoldering in our bodies like that. Some of them may even be ones that cause certain forms of cancers. Anyhow, here's this smoldering CRV113 infection, not getting any worse, not getting any better. Then some specific stress comes along to upset the delicate balance…"

"Like labor."

"… And bam! The virus gets the upper hand."

"And begins doing more and more of whatever thing its DNA tells it to do. In our cases, inappropriate activation of the clotting pathway."

"Exactly. Then the stress is removed and the body summons up more interferon and more antibodies until balance is restored."

"But are there ever any knockouts? I mean of the virus."

"Maybe some," Mulholland said. "Maybe lots. But the herpes simplex model-the one we know the most about-suggests that there are lots of draws. Anyone who has ever had cold sores or sun blisters pop out over and over again can attest to that. The whole field of chronic viral infections is still too new to know precisely how it all works."

"Ken, this is beginning to come together."

"Perhaps. There's still a load of questions."

"Only now we know who probably has the answers."