The Rationing

15.

SO THERE WE WERE. THE SEVEN PEOPLE IN THE WORLD who appreciated the magnitude of what was happening: the President, his Chief of Staff, the President’s Strategist, the Majority Leader, the Secretary of Defense, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and me—the person who supposedly knew more about lurking viruses than anyone else in the world. The President was sitting at his desk reading papers as we filed in. He was wearing reading glasses; I had never seen him in glasses before. I later learned that he did not like to be photographed with his glasses on because he felt they made him look old.

There was no grand plan for this first meeting. No one spent hours figuring out exactly who should be in the room. The President convened a small group of people with relevant expertise, and, more important, whom he trusted. The Secretary of Health and Human Services should have been there, but she had become embroiled in a scandal involving her private investments in a pharmaceutical company. She would resign two days later. The Attorney General should have been involved from the beginning, but he was attending a conference in South Africa on post-conflict justice and could not be called home without attracting undue attention. The head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) would later claim, rightfully, that he was excluded for political reasons from the early White House deliberations. He was a holdover from the previous administration whom the President never fully trusted (mostly because he had a habit of leaking self-serving information to the press). And so on.

Meanwhile, there were some people in the room who literally did not know the difference between a virus and a bacterium. The Majority Leader was there because the President wanted some representation from the legislative branch. He and the President had developed a strong working relationship. The Senate Majority Leader, a former funeral director from central Illinois, looked much less impressive in person than on television. He was short and fat—not middle-aged heavy, but fat. When he put on his suit jacket, one did not notice as much, but when he took off his jacket and sat down, his prodigious paunch sometimes made it hard for him to pull his chair all the way to the conference table. Funeral directors are often pillars of the community. The Majority Leader had started his political career on the school board before making the leap to the state legislature and then to Washington. He never finished college; no one in the Senate had ever confused him for the resident intellectual. If anything, he was quick to criticize the “pointy heads.” For all that, the Majority Leader was a brilliant politician, in the sense that he had a keen sense of the fears and hopes of people on the street. He was plainspoken, hardworking, and honest. In four decades of public life, he had made a lot of enemies, but no one had seriously accused him of breaking his word. Neither his friends nor his enemies ever doubted that he would use every tool in the legislative toolkit: flattery, bribery (the legal kind—a stadium here, favorable tax treatment there), persuasion, and threats (never idle).

The Majority Leader was a relatively new member of the Senate in 2024 when the final spasm of political realignment swept away what was left of the Republicans and Democrats. He was quick to jump on board with the New Republican Party, helping to shape it into the pragmatic, Main Street party that it is today. He could speak effectively, if not eloquently, about the needs and desires of small businesses and working people. “I don’t have much use for books, other than political history,” the Majority Leader told me once over a coffee break.

How does one respond to that? I was tempted to say, “If you read more books, you might understand the difference between a bacterium and a virus.” Or that when someone mentioned Willa Cather in the course of discussion, you would not ask, “Who is he?” The Majority Leader was also a big fan of simple solutions for complex problems. He was skeptical of “fancy studies,” as if there were some logical alternative for advancing the frontier of human knowledge.

The Majority Leader was an unabashed patriot, so much so, he said, that he never felt the need to leave our beloved country. When he was younger, he made one trip with his high school Spanish class to Mexico City. “That was enough,” he told Rotary Clubs and New Republican Party conventions. He said it in a way that made people cheer. Don’t get me wrong: He was no buffoon. You do not get elected to the U.S. Senate three times—not anywhere, not ever—without some prodigious talents. He could talk in an informed but vague way to Chicago business groups about “oppressive taxes and regulations.” He would rattle off some examples of wasteful federal spending that were both telling and humorous, such as the earmark in the farm bill to study the mating habits of potbellied pigs. That always got a chuckle. As the laughter faded away, he would say, “I can tell you how they mate for a lot less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!” The audience would roar again.

He was not scary on social issues, so the suburbanites were attracted to him. That was part of the Republican divorce. The New Republicans got the low taxes, pro-business planks in the platform and the Tea Party got the social issues: opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and the like. (They had joint custody of guns.) The settlement was lopsided, at least with someone as politically adroit as the Majority Leader atop the New Republican Party. “Let me see if I can explain the difference between the New Republicans and the Tea Party,” he would tell his audiences. “Our number one New Republican priority is making sure that hardworking people can earn a decent living.” He would pause, making eye contact around the room, big or small. “Sometimes that means a little help from the government.” Another pause, more eye contact. “Sometimes it means keeping the government out of your business.” Pregnant pause. “I believe that honest people deserve to make an honest living, and that we should do whatever we need to do to make that possible.”

There would be enthusiastic nods of approval—not whoops or cheers, but heartfelt agreement. And then he would go in for the kill. “Now, the Tea Party, they are going to work just as hard. I do not doubt their passion or commitment, not for one second. I agree with them on a lot of things. These are good people, many of them, at least.” There would be some chuckles. “The difference is priorities. They are going to spend every waking moment trying to get Washington to tell you what you can and can’t do—in your bedroom, in the hospital, in the bathroom, at school—sometimes even in the bathroom at school.” Lots of laughter. “I’m pro-business, they are all up in your business!” This last line did typically provoke cheers of approval. It was a brilliant strategy, allowing him to transcend the social issues that had previously been a political fault line. He could tell the social conservatives that he shared their beliefs. They were tired of being mocked and disrespected by the liberal establishment. Yet he could also tell libertarians and liberal suburbanites that he was not going to politicize those same social issues.

The Majority Leader eviscerated the Tea Party in Illinois, and later marginalized them nationally when he became Majority Leader and de facto national leader of the New Republicans. After he delivered high-speed rail to the Midwest and found federal funding for a third airport in Chicago, he was untouchable. He and the President had a better relationship than one might expect. True, they did not share a political party, but they both were creatures of Washington. The President envied the Majority Leader’s ability to connect with Main Street, even as he mocked his lack of sophistication. The President frequently referred to him behind his back as “Lyndon,” as in Lyndon Johnson, because of his coarse manners and savvy political machinations. “Tell Lyndon we need to get this out of the Senate without any amendments,” he would say at the end of a staff meeting. The irony, of course, is that the Majority Leader would have considered the LBJ comparison nothing but a compliment.

The relationship was made easier by the fact that the Majority Leader had no designs on the presidency. “I’m too fat and too short,” he would tell people who asked. It was a brilliantly disarming answer, mostly because it hewed so closely to the truth. He had seen the polling data (as had the President and others): most Americans were willing to elect a president without a college degree, but they could not get past his body type. Focus groups would hem and haw when asked to explain why the Majority Leader “did not look presidential.” If the discussion went on long enough, or if the participants were asked to write comments anonymously, they would just come out and say it: “He’s fat,” then adding some tortured reasoning as to why a man who had functioned brilliantly for seven years as the leader of the U.S. Senate would not be able to serve effectively as Commander in Chief because he weighed too much.

Unlike the real Lyndon Johnson, the Majority Leader did not lust for what he could not have. He had a love and appreciation for politics—not just winning elections, but also the legislative give-and-take. He had a long memory but also a thick skin. He never forgot a political defeat, but he was not apt to take the setbacks personally. Instead, every loss, big or little, was a lesson on how to do it better next time. “This isn’t powder puff,” he would tell his audiences, whether it was a Rotary lunch or a group of CEOs. His one intellectual passion was political history and he could recount in detail, more accurate than not, the political failures that had brought great civilizations to their knees.

Others have written in great depth about this unlikely “bromance” between the Majority Leader and the President; there is not much for me to add, other than underscoring that the two of them got along well because they had so little in common. There was no margin on which they viewed themselves in competition with one another. The President called frequently on the Majority Leader to chat informally about the political viability of various ideas. “How can I sell this in the Midwest?” the President would ask earnestly. For his part, the Majority Leader was flattered to be so important to the White House.

The Secretary of Defense was in the room because he had been at the White House for a different meeting and the President asked him to stay for a few minutes. Like I said, no grand strategy—not at the beginning. The Secretary of Defense had spent his career making tough decisions in the face of uncertainty. He and the President had a respectful if somewhat guarded relationship. The President had not served in the armed forces; he recognized that as a weakness and did what he could to remedy it. Still, there was more to the relationship between the two men than that. The Secretary of Defense was a straight shooter who often saw the world differently than the President and did not hesitate to speak candidly to his Commander in Chief. He was loyal, too. The President had come to appreciate the honesty and loyalty in a town where both virtues are oddly rare. “Can you stick around for a few minutes?” the President asked the Secretary of Defense as a meeting on the newly restarted North Korean nuclear program was breaking up. “We’ve got some problem at HHS with our stock of Dormigen.” One has to appreciate the innocence of that moment, because that is really all the President knew: “some problem at HHS”—seemingly just like all the other little fifteen-minute annoyances that made up each of his days at the White House. A treaty here, an angry African leader there.

“I don’t know anything about Dormigen,” the Secretary of Defense replied.

“Neither do I. But if you don’t mind, I’d like you to sit in, just fifteen minutes or so.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

There were pleasantries as the participants filed into the Oval Office. The President and the Majority Leader, taking advantage of a moment together, conferred briefly over some matter. The Majority Leader took a pen and small blue notebook from his breast pocket and made a small notation, a note to himself, presumably. The technology was so old that I found it striking at the time. “Okay, where are we on the lurking virus thing?” the President asked, trying to call the meeting to order.

“One minute,” his Chief of Staff said, looking at her phone. “Are we going to invite Prime Minister Abouali to the White House while he’s in D.C.?” She was a petite, athletic-looking woman with short dark hair that was going gray in streaks. She wore dark-rimmed reading glasses that she put on when she consulted her notes or her phone and then took off as she spoke to the President, almost like a nervous habit. She could have passed for a school librarian, albeit in a very well-funded school district.

“Sure. Why not?” the President asked.

“The Jordanians have asked that we not grant him a formal meeting,” the Chief of Staff explained. Her tone with the President was respectful but far from obsequious.

“How about a walk-through?” the President said.

“That will have to be end of day Thursday—”

“Fine,” the President said, cutting her off.

“Remember, I won’t be here,” the Chief of Staff said, prompting the President to look at her quizzically. “It’s Maddie’s lacrosse banquet,” she explained. “The whole family will divorce me if I miss this one.”

“I’m sure the Prime Minister will understand,” the President said sarcastically. I don’t know if he was attempting humor; if so, it fell flat. The two of them seemed oblivious to the rest of us standing awkwardly in the Oval Office. I felt like I was watching my parents squabble over whose turn it was to walk the dog.

“I put it on the schedule eight weeks ago,” the Chief of Staff said firmly.

“I understand,” the President replied. His tone, however, suggested that he could not fathom why anyone would leave work—at the White House or anywhere else—to attend a high school lacrosse banquet.

“I’ll let the Prime Minister’s people know,” the Chief of Staff said.

The President looked up at the rest of us, as if he were noticing us standing there for the first time. “Do we really have to spend time on this lurking virus thing?” he asked. He was not being insouciant. He had no sense of the crisis at that point. The Chief of Staff had put this briefing on his daily calendar, over which he had less control than one might think. At the end of every day, as he headed up to the family quarters, he would get a single typed card with his schedule for the next day, neatly divided into fifteen-minute increments. In the President’s mind, there was no crisis, not yet. Yes, a high proportion of the government’s Dormigen supply had been destroyed, and now the contingency stock was compromised—but in three weeks everything would be back to normal. Might the situation spin wildly out of control during that window of vulnerability? Of course—but that was true of nearly every fifteen-minute headache on the President’s schedule, day after day. The impending Dormigen shortage did not feel like it was a crisis because it was impending. If you are wandering in the desert and I tell you that your water supply will be cut off next Tuesday, you will not feel thirsty, even if you should be panicked.

Most of the matters brought to the President’s attention involve problems that are already manifesting themselves: a bridge collapses, a leader is assassinated, a police officer shoots an unarmed black man. The problem is lying there on the ground—literally, in some cases—for everyone to see. In the Oval Office that first day, however, no one was feeling thirsty. Not yet.

The situation—this sense of calm in the face of something that would inevitably go wrong—reminded me of a time I ran out of gas on an interstate in the middle of New Hampshire. I had flown into Boston after midnight and picked up my car in the remote parking lot. I opted not to get gas as I left Boston; I figured I might need a break from driving after an hour or two. I discovered—too late—that the gas stations along I-89 were closed after midnight. Not a single oasis. The gas light on my dashboard had been glowing orange since the New Hampshire border. The trip computer, one of those fancy gadgets I rarely paid attention to, was counting down the miles left until my tank was empty: forty, thirty, twenty. Then I saw a road sign; the next exit was forty-two miles away. I could not beat the math: I was going to run out of gas.

But the car was running fine. That was the thing. I was moving along a beautiful New Hampshire highway at sixty-five miles an hour on a clear night with a bright moon and almost no traffic. It was a lovely time for driving. A passenger in the backseat would have had no sense that a problem was imminent, that the math would inevitably catch up with us. Everything would be fine—for fifteen miles, or thirteen, or seventeen—at which point the engine would cut out and I would end up stranded on the side of the road. That was what I could see coming. So it was on that first morning in the White House. The people in that room were the first ones who would get a glimpse of our equivalent of the trip computer. The math.

Many of my NIH and CDC colleagues knew what was happening with the lurking virus—but they had no idea the country might run short of Dormigen. For them, Capellaviridae was a curious intellectual puzzle. Meanwhile, over at Health and Human Services, the Secretary and several of her deputies were aware that the nation’s surplus Dormigen stockpile might run low for a few weeks—but they had no idea the nation might need those stocks. It was surplus, after all. When Centera Biomedical Group failed to produce its twenty million doses after the Long Beach warehouse fire, the department set in motion several contingency plans. Federal prosecutors were notified so that civil charges could be filed against the company and criminal charges against its top executives. The missing doses would be replenished in three weeks. The HHS models predicted that even with the warehouse fire and the Centera debacle, the doses on hand would be sufficient. Canadian health officials offered to transfer up to two million doses to cover any shortfall. Nobody at HHS had ever heard of Capellaviridae. They looked out the window and saw a warm, sunny day—perfect for a picnic. No one told them that a hurricane was bearing down, so they continued to plan for their picnic.

Five minutes into that first meeting, those of us in the Oval Office—and only those of us in the Oval Office—could see the totality of what was happening, the confluence of the Dormigen shortfall and whatever was happening with Capellaviridae. We could see the trip computer counting down: forty, thirty, twenty. “The numbers are not looking good,” the Chief of Staff said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” the President asked. “And why don’t we have someone here from HHS?” he asked.

“We are trying to keep the number of people involved small at this point,” she replied. “This is starting to look like a potential public health crisis.”

“If it’s a public health crisis, then we need definitely someone from HHS,” the President said sharply.

“I will brief the Acting Secretary,” she said. The Chief of Staff quickly outlined the situation: the Dormigen stocks were running low; the Capellaviridae virus presented a potentially fatal threat to a significant percentage of the population in the absence of Dormigen. There had already been 171 deaths in cases where the virus had been left untreated, usually because the victim had not sought medical attention. She read from her notes: “Thirty-one in New England. Twenty-five in the New York metro area. A handful in Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota—”

“How does it spread?” the President demanded. We were sitting on sofas. He was at his desk, signing documents of some sort. I noticed for the first time that he was left-handed. No one answered. “How does it spread?” the President repeated impatiently, looking up from the papers he was signing, as if to say that we were wasting some of the precious fifteen minutes we had been allotted. The other participants on the couches looked at me.

“It doesn’t spread, actually,” I said. “That’s what’s so curious. The virus is very common. Most of us are probably carrying it now. It’s just that for some people, under some circumstances, it turns lethal.”

“Which people and under what circumstances?” the President asked.

“We don’t understand that yet,” I said.

“Jesus, what the hell else is there to understand?” the President said, tossing his pen onto the desk. “That’s pretty much all that matters.”

“We have a team of people working on this around the clock,” the Director of the NIH interjected.

“How quickly is it spreading?” the President asked.

“We don’t like to use the word ‘spread,’” I answered. I did not feel comfortable correcting the President of the United States, but this was a crucial point. I continued, “It implies that there is some kind of contagion, that people catch it from one another. That’s not really how this thing works. You have it or you don’t. And it turns deadly or it doesn’t. It’s more like cancer than the measles.”

“But it’s a virus?” the President asked.

I answered, “Yes, it’s a virus, but—”

“People are not going to understand that,” the President’s Strategist interrupted. “No fucking way. There is no way we can explain to the public that there is a virus killing people but that it’s not contagious.”

“I just explained it,” I said.

The Strategist laughed dismissively. “Twenty percent of the country does not understand that the earth rotates around the sun. This is going to be fucking mayhem.”

“It seems to me that we need to stockpile more Dormigen,” the President directed. “And we need to figure out what the hell is going on with this a cappella virus.”

“Capellaviridae,” I said. The President did not dignify my correction.

The Director of the NIH said, “We’ve reached out to all the OECD countries to borrow enough Dormigen to cover our gap until our stocks are replenished. But, frankly, we’re getting a little pushback because most of these countries are either seeing the same increase in Capellaviridae-related illness, or they’re afraid they will soon. They’re hesitant to make a firm commitment.”

“So what’s the number?” the Strategist asked of no one in particular.

“What number?” the Chief of Staff replied.

“How many people will die?” he asked.

“It’s not that simple,” I offered.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “We have some estimate of the rate at which this virus turns fatal, right?”

“A guess,” I said. “It’s pretty rough.”

“Well, it’s going to get less rough as we get more data,” the Strategist said, indignant that this had to be explained. “For now, we have an estimate?” he asked. I nodded yes. He continued, “Okay, based on that estimate, we can project what the demand for Dormigen is likely to be and when our stocks will run out, if they will.” He looked around the room. “Am I not speaking English here?”

“These are all very inaccurate projections,” the Director of the NIH said, visibly annoyed by the Strategist’s reductionist logic.

“For fuck sake, people, an inaccurate projection is better than nothing. We need to know what might happen here, even if it’s just our best guess.”

“He’s right,” the President said. “We need to put some numbers against this. What kind of problem are we talking about?”

“There are a lot of variables,” the Director of the NIH explained. “What is the rate at which the virus turns fatal, how much Dormigen will we need for other health issues around the country, how much Dormigen can we borrow—”

“Obviously,” the Strategist interrupted. “So we build a model with our best estimate for each of those variables. Then we update the model as our information gets better.” He looked around the room as if he were teaching fractions to fourth-graders. “Yes?”

“That’s exactly what we do,” the Secretary of Defense agreed. “We’ll never have all the information we need, but there is no excuse for not making a plan with the best information we have at any given moment.”

“Thank you,” the Strategist said. He was not being sarcastic or deliberately mean. He simply felt relieved when others finally caught up. “That model is going to spit out one number that counts: How many people die from this sleeping virus, or whatever the fuck it is, because we run out of Dormigen? That’s it, one number, that’s what matters here—like I said five minutes ago.”

“Right now that number is zero,” the NIH Director said, trying to reassure the room. “We have likely commitments from enough OECD nations that we should be able to cover the Dormigen deficit.”

“What exactly is a ‘likely commitment’?” the President asked.

“Sounds to me like a military treaty with the French,” the Secretary of Defense offered.

“We’re still working that out,” the Chief of Staff said. “The disruption at HHS has made things more difficult.”

“That’s why we need somebody from HHS in this group,” the President repeated.

The Secretary of Defense offered, “In my experience, commitments become wobbly when the shooting starts. I think the relevant number here is how much Dormigen we have in our possession, not what’s been promised.”

“I agree,” the President said.

The Chief of Staff nodded, making notes on a legal pad in an elegant leather case with the White House logo on it. Yes, I was sitting in the Oval Office, but the meeting felt like every other meandering group discussion I had been a part of—until this point. “Okay, then,” the Chief of Staff said, “I will brief the Acting Secretary at HHS. We need to firm up the Dormigen commitments from OECD allies. The Capellaviridae task force needs to speed up their work and get us an estimate on the rate at which this thing is spreading—or whatever we want to call it. We’ll use that to build the model we discussed.” As she ticked off each item, she pointed her Montblanc pen at the person responsible, who would nod in acknowledgment. “Anything else?”

Silence. “Okay, then let’s meet again tomorrow,” she said.

“I don’t need to be in the room for that,” the President said.

“Let’s see what we learn,” the Chief of Staff replied. With that, she stood up and we followed her out. The President did not look up as we left. From that point on, we were talking about “the number.”

16.

THE PRESIDENT WAS TALL AND THIN, HANDSOME IN A POLITICAL kind of way. He had good hair. He kept it long to emphasize that, I suspect. He had been a high school basketball star in Virginia, where he still holds the high school record for most points in a single season. His team did not win the championship that year, as many commentators have pointed out. “He’s the kind of guy who yells at you if you don’t make a shot,” one of his teammates said years later. (In my limited experience, that is exactly what makes mediocre players clutch up and shoot worse.) In any event, the President was smart, refined, and politically savvy. He may not have had the natural political talent of the Majority Leader, but he made few mistakes. Every decision was put through a fine political filter, beginning in his early twenties. He was accepted to Yale Law School but attended the University of Virginia instead. I spent enough time pretending that I was going to law school to know that Yale is a better law school—arguably the best—but the University of Virginia is a better place from which to launch a political career in Virginia.

He married a law school classmate. She helped him run his first few campaigns for the state legislature. They divorced during his first term in the state legislature, without children. To her (Marnie’s) credit, she kept a low profile during the presidential campaign, always politely refusing to make any comments about her ex-husband. “It was a long time ago, and we grew apart. I wish him the best, both personally and professionally. He’s a good man and will make a good president,” she would say. She never deviated from that line; eventually the press left her alone. The “mainstream media” recognized that she was not really a legitimate news story. The less reputable news organizations eventually got bored. There are only so many times you can follow a plain-looking fifty-year-old woman to the supermarket while the stories that generate clicks are happening elsewhere. It would be a real journalistic fumble to follow the President’s uninteresting ex-wife as she weighs kiwis when, just across town, a drunken celebrity has crashed his car through the front wall of a yoga studio with a prostitute in the passenger seat.

The President’s political career marched steadily on. Now single, he was elected governor of Virginia and then to the Senate. Not surprisingly, he showed up periodically on the glamour blogs as one of America’s most attractive single men, that kind of thing. If you believe the rumors, Washington was his sexual playground, particularly young lobbyists and staffers, but since he was not married there was no scandal. He eventually married the CEO of Kraft Foods, a forty-year-old corporate star, who had also been divorced a decade earlier and had no children. She was a fashion icon and a strikingly beautiful woman, albeit with a reputation for ripping people’s eyes out if it would improve cash flow. The most famous bloodbath for the bottom line was the “Mac ’n’ Cheese Massacre,” a mass firing of twenty-one hundred people three days before Christmas. A ham-handed PR executive tried to minimize the damage by releasing a statement saying that laying off employees before Christmas was the humane thing to do because it would help them budget more realistically for the holidays. This became a punch line for late-night comedians, at which point the PR executive was fired, too. The President and his CEO wife became one of America’s most glamorous power couples. Their wedding gained some notoriety when two tabloid helicopters nearly collided while filming the reception at a borrowed ranch in Santa Barbara. Had the helicopters gone down in a flaming wreck on the tent below, it would have taken out some of America’s smartest, richest, and most beautiful people.

The first time I met with the President one on one, I was ushered into the family quarters of the White House. He was in his small study, dressed casually, eating a piece of toast. I was struck that I was watching the President eat. “So you’re a hotshot scientist,” he said. I felt pretty damn important. “I understand you went to Dartmouth,” he continued.

“I did,” I said. I told him the year I graduated.

“Harold Scott wasn’t still there, was he?”

“He was.” Harold Scott was a legendary basketball coach who had been at Dartmouth for three decades. He turned the program around and went to the NCAA tourney a handful of times. The Ivy League champion always gets a bid, but Harold Scott’s teams actually won a few NCAA tournament games. My senior year they bumped off Kansas State in the first round. “Do you play?” the president asked.

“Basketball? Just for fun and exercise,” I said.

“We should throw it around sometime,” he offered.

The President of the United States wanted to play basketball with me. One-on-one? Or maybe it would be a pickup game with some other White House insiders. What does one wear to play basketball with the President? I could not rush out and buy all-new stuff, or I would look like a newbie. On the other hand, I could not show up in running shoes. There I was sitting in front of the President of the United States, trying to remember if I had kept my Converse basketball shoes from graduate school. Might they be in that box of stuff I left in my parents’ basement? Because the President wanted to play basketball with me.

“I don’t know if you have a girlfriend, or anything like that, but this might be a tough stretch. I appreciate your willingness to help out,” he said.

“I am seeing someone,” I offered.

“At some point, when this is over, I’d like to meet that person to say thank you.”

I realized that the President was referring to “that person” because I hadn’t specified that I was dating a woman. “Ellen,” I said.

As if he cared. I eventually learned that I would not be playing basketball with the President. Nor would Ellen and I be dining with him and his CEO wife. Rather, the President had a unique ability to speak with a relative stranger for a few minutes and leave him or her feeling like an important friend. It is an impressive skill, though it stings when you eventually see through it. Several days later I overheard him referring to me in a conversation with his Chief of Staff as “the guy in the brown shoes.” I was wearing a black belt for that first meeting, and I had been self-conscious that my belt did not match my shoes. It was an odd thing to worry about when thousands of people might die from an uncontrolled epidemic. I do not know if the President had noticed that my shoes and belt did not match; maybe the brown shoes were just my most distinguishing characteristic. In any event, he had no idea what my name was. And I know he did not spend a lot of time thinking about whether I was dating a man or a woman.

17.

THE CHIEF OF STAFF HAD COME FROM HARVARD, WHERE SHE was dean of the Kennedy School of Government for over a decade. When I looked around during our meetings, she often struck me as the only “real” person in the room, in the sense that she had a life beyond Washington. She had kids who got sick, or had to be picked up after band practice. Obviously she had people to help her deal with that kind of thing, but she acted like someone you might run into at a school potluck. Her husband was a pediatrician, one of the nicest guys I met in Washington. They were both from Minnesota and conformed to every stereotype of the Midwest I had ever encountered, particularly the wide-eyed cheeriness and optimism. The Chief of Staff had been a star researcher at the University of Minnesota in the field of child and family poverty. Much of her work followed the effects of the 1996 Welfare Reform, and then the 2021 law that further curtailed benefits. Harvard hired her away to become dean of their policy school and she proved to be the rare academic who was also a good administrator.

When the President spent a stretch at the Kennedy School after losing a tight election for Governor of Virginia, they struck up a friendship—some said more, but I never saw any sign of that. During his second gubernatorial race (he won), she advised him on social welfare issues. Later, when he was in the Senate, she coordinated all his policy work, and when he was elected President, she became Chief of Staff. It was probably a mistake. She did not have the thick skin or the political experience necessary to operate effectively in that job. She should have been his domestic policy adviser, but the President was often accused of being a lightweight on policy, and a Chief of Staff from the Kennedy School at Harvard was supposed to address that weakness. I always found myself happy that she was in the room. Once she baked cookies. They were not great, if I am being honest, but she brought in this wobbly paper plate heaping with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. The White House staff always gave us whatever we needed, including lots of cookies, but this homemade gesture, no doubt baked after the kids had done their homework and gone to bed, was one of the most human gestures that emanated from the cabinet group during this stretch, even if the cookies were not very good.

By the time the two of them reached the White House, the Chief of Staff had already made her permanent mark on the President’s career, and also on the trajectory of American politics. She had helped him run successfully for the Senate from Virginia as a conservative Democrat. He won by huge margins in suburban areas, particularly with women and college-educated voters. The handsome senator was fiscally responsible but not scarily so. He believed in climate change (and the scientific method more generally) without ever asking voters to do anything uncomfortable about it. When he began thinking about the presidency, however, he had a problem. The Democratic Party was in complete disarray nationally, with a deepening split between the progressives, who were trying to pull the party sharply to the left, and the moderates, who believed the future of the party lay in winning the American political center.

The Democrats had developed a “Tea Party problem.” Just as the Republicans were finalizing their divorce, leaving the New Republicans free to run without pandering to the Tea Party, the Democrats were still trapped in a bad marriage. Progressive Mommy and centrist Daddy were fighting incessantly, and it was killing their White House prospects. Every national Democratic candidate would kowtow to the progressives, especially to raise money in New York and California. They would promise a $20 minimum wage, a carbon tax, and a whole bunch of other things that would then sink them in the flyover states. When Elizabeth Warren received the nomination in 2024, she went on to lose forty-nine states in the general election, even New York because she had so antagonized Wall Street. It is a special achievement for a Democrat to lose New York.

What was a smart, handsome, ambitious Democratic senator from Virginia to do? He polled well nationally, but the progressives distrusted him (rightfully). And without the progressives he could not win a Democratic primary. More irony: he could probably win a general election for president, but there was no obvious way for him to get on the general election ballot. There was talk of him switching to the New Republican Party, but voters hate that kind of opportunism; when pollsters asked about it as a hypothetical, his numbers plunged.

The Chief of Staff found a way through this political labyrinth. Her motivations were entirely altruistic; she had decent instincts for politics but no love for the political game. “I want to bounce an idea off of you,” she said one night on a private plane, returning from a dinner speech somewhere in western Virginia.

“What?” he said, somewhat rudely. He had been dozing lightly. The plane cabin was dark. The two were alone on the flight except for the pilot and copilot. The President was more introverted than most political types. Political events often left him enervated, particularly at the end of a long day.

“One term for one nation,” the Chief of Staff said.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked. He often spoke like that. He had been rude to subordinates for so long that he no longer recognized how rude he was.

“That’s the campaign slogan.”

“For the presidency?” he asked. “I pledge to serve just one term?”

She nodded. “That’s part of it. And you run without a party.”

“As an independent? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s a terrible idea. No one can win the presidency as an independent.” He closed his eyes and settled back into his seat.

“George Washington did.”

“I don’t have time for this,” he said without opening his eyes.

She had thought about it more than she let on. The two ideas in that simple slogan resonated with voters who were tired of partisan politics and organized interests. In one stroke, this campaign could transcend both: a candidate with broad centrist appeal would leave his party and pledge to serve a single term. No more fundraising once he was in office. No more obligations to a political party. One term for one nation. The George Washington comparison was not entirely spurious. One could make a reasonable argument, in 1789 or 2028, that a president should transcend political parties, representing all of America.

It was the right message at the right time. The Chief of Staff put some polls in the field to test hypothetical candidates. A candidate with the profile of the senator from Virginia did reasonably well. More important, the “one term for one nation” message tested off the charts, especially after voters were reminded that George Washington had been elected without a party. (They were not reminded that he had served two terms.)

“Have we all forgotten about the Electoral College?” the President grumbled when he was presented with the data. “I’ve seen strategies for student council elections that were more sophisticated than this.”

“I can make it work,” his Strategist said. “You will win.” Others in the meeting rolled their eyes. The Strategist did not say, “You might win” or “You can win.” He said, “You will win.” The Strategist was everything that you have probably read about, almost to the point of being a caricature of himself: rude, brilliant, abrupt, funny, socially inept, and brutally honest. But he was not mean, at least not intentionally. If anything, he could be sweet in a childish kind of way when he was not saying remarkably harsh things. I remember the first time I encountered him in a meeting in a small conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “Nice tie,” he said. I looked down at my tie self-consciously, assuming he was being sarcastic. That was the kind of thing my college friends would say if the tie had some garish paisley pattern, or if it had a giant ketchup stain. But the Strategist was entirely serious. “The green pattern makes it more interesting,” he said as he walked past and took a seat at the far end of the conference table.

I tried to remind myself of that exchange at later meetings, when he would say things like, “That’s a horrible idea,” or “You have no idea what you are talking about,” or my personal favorite, “If you were smarter, this would make sense to you.” I will leave it to others to speculate about whether the Strategist was “on the spectrum.” In any event, the President had enormous respect for his analytical abilities, both the political acumen and the policy smarts. The Strategist formulated a strategy—abetted by a healthy dollop of good luck—that delivered the President 274 electoral votes, and perhaps more impressive, a narrow majority of the popular vote. Others have written more extensive accounts of that unlikely victory. The important thing to recognize is that the Chief of Staff conceived of the audacious idea that an independent could win the White House. The Strategist developed a plan to make it happen. The President played his role without messing up the lines.

18.

I WAS DATING ELLEN AT THIS POINT, AS I HAD TOLD THE President when I was still under the impression that he might care about these kinds of things. My personal life may seem irrelevant to the larger story that was playing out, but since it would later be dragged into the open, I should put those developments in context. I first met Ellen in a bar, though that is somewhat misleading. We were both there for a Dartmouth wine-tasting event. Ellen had come with her roommate, who was a Dartmouth alumna two classes behind me. (Ellen went to Duke.) Ellen and I had a nice time that evening. We met for breakfast the following Sunday with some mutual friends. I was single. Ellen was single. Our friends knew each other. There was a certain centripetal force to the relationship; it kept moving in one direction because no force intervened to send it in a different direction.

By the time we moved in together, Ellen was doing public relations for a big firm. It was totally vapid work, if I am being honest. Why does a bean dip need a PR campaign? (She really did have a client that made bean dip, or frozen nachos—one or the other.) Ellen accused me of belittling her work, which was scary given that I had only verbalized a small fraction of my cynical thoughts. She had little or no interest in my work at the lab and not enough background in science for me to explain why my work mattered. By the time I realized that Ellen did not know the difference between RNA and DNA—and had no interest in learning—it was obvious that we were not meant to be together for the long run. I suspect she was thinking the same, but neither of us had done anything about it. We had a comfortable routine.

The Capellaviridae crisis created new tensions. I was almost never home. The White House obviously forbade us from talking to outsiders about the crisis, so when I was home, I was not able to explain what was happening. I was not even able to say that I had been to the White House for a meeting. “I’m working on something really important,” I told her one night when I came home after midnight.

“I know,” she said sympathetically. “It’s hard when we’re both this busy.”

The bean dip? I thought. You are comparing the public relations strategy for a bean dip to a deadly epidemic? “No, like really important,” I said. That was a mistake, obviously. I will not relate the balance of the conversation. We were done at that point; it was just a question of making it official. I did not have time to move out, but that was where things were clearly headed.

So when the thing happened with Jenna, it was not as bad as a handful of blowhard members of Congress made it out to be.

19.

TIE GUY HAD THREE HUGE COMPUTER MONITORS ON HIS desk. They were arranged like a dashboard, making his small dark office feel like the bridge of a spaceship with him as the captain. The light from the screens reflected off his face. “I’m not seeing anything,” he said. I was standing behind him. There was not room for a second chair in his office.

“We need to pick up the pace on this,” I said. We both knew that was a ridiculously unhelpful thing to say, like telling someone to “think harder.”

“To begin with, the data are complete shit,” Tie Guy said. We both knew that to be true. The public health community—doctors and nurses and hospitals and even coroners—had no reason to believe that Capellaviridae was anything more than a nuisance. By that point we had roughly three hundred deaths that could be linked to Capellaviridae. One big plane crash. Plane crashes happen, I told myself. Besides, those people would have been fine if they had just gone to the doctor. Nearly a thousand people had died in car accidents over the same stretch. Yet I knew there was a problem with these rationalizations. It was not just one plane crash. It was one plane crash with evidence to suggest that hundreds of other planes with the same design flaw might soon start falling out of the sky. It could even be thousands of planes.

And our problem was trickier than planes. With a plane crash, an FAA investigator shows up at the site of the crash, does a preliminary investigation, and says, “You need to ground every plane that might have a defective Y-hinge holding the rear engine in place.” Nobody panics because swapping out the Y-hinges will prevent more planes from falling out of the sky. With Capellaviridae, there was no “Y-hinge.” We had no idea what was happening. Nor was there any obvious behavioral response that would minimize the public risk (like flying less). What does that press conference look like? “Hey, everyone, we just want you to know that you are all at serious risk from a pathogen with the potential to cause a pandemic at a time when our Dormigen stocks are running low. We do not understand why or how this is happening, and there is nothing you can do to avoid it, but we felt you ought to be aware of the situation. We won’t be taking any questions at this time, because we don’t have any answers.” How would that go over?

We had a dilemma: If we did not tell the medical community how serious Capellaviridae might be, they would continue to send us the same lousy, incomplete information. They would not test for Capellaviridae. Or if they did and prescribed Dormigen, they would neglect to enter it into the database. And so on. Our public health detectives would get fewer clues and less cooperation because the public would have no idea that a serial killer was on the loose.

Or, we could do the medical equivalent of announcing that the building was on fire and cause people to run screaming for the exits—only there were not any exits.

“Look at this,” Tie Guy said, pointing at the middle screen on his desk. It was a map of the United States with yellow and green dots scattered across it with no discernible pattern.

“What am I looking at?” I said.

“The yellow dots are deaths, the green dots are cases we know of that have been treated with Dormigen. Do you see anything interesting?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Neither do I. The data are totally worthless. We know almost nothing about these people.”

“What do we know?” I asked.

“The people who are dying tend to be young and healthy. A surprising number of college students. What do you make of that?” Tie Guy asked, the frustration lingering in his voice.

“They were probably just too stubborn to go to the doctor—thought they were invincible,” I answered.

“Could be,” he said. “In that case, we don’t even know who is most at risk, we just know who is too stupid to go to the doctor.”

“We need an estimate,” I said. “How often does this thing turn fatal?”

“I saw the e-mail,” he said angrily. “You know as well as I do that we can’t begin to answer that question with any degree of certainty.”

“This could be an epidemic,” I said.

“Fine,” he snorted. “Run a public service announcement telling people to go to the doctor. Give them Dormigen. Collect real information. Then ask me what is going on.”

“What if we were to run out of Dormigen?” I asked, skating just to the boundary of what I should be saying.

“Then we’re fucked,” he said. “And if North Korea fires a nuke at California, then we’re also fucked. This is not what I get paid to think about.”

“What if we were to sample an MSA?[5] Do it right. Collect all the meaningful info for you to do some real analysis.”

He laughed. “Good luck finding a budget for that.”

“If I can find the money, how long would it take?”

He turned from the monitors to look at me. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve got people leaning on me for answers. How long would it take?”

“Well, there’s nothing difficult about the analysis if you get me decent data. A couple of days, maybe.”

I could see it in his eyes: He knew something was up. Maybe he saw it in my eyes. “Set everything else aside,” I said. “This has to be top priority.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that impression.”

“I’ll be in touch,” I said, turning to go.

“Hey,” he said. I paused in the doorway and looked back over my shoulder. “If you can really get the money to do this right, we should sample a couple of different places. And we should do it several days apart, maybe even a week or more. There’s no reason to assume the rate at which this virus becomes fatal is constant. Right? It could easily be changing, for some reason.”

“That makes sense,” I said. He held my gaze for an uncomfortably long time, until he was persuaded that I was not going to say anything more.

“Do you know why I do this?” he asked.

“Well, I asked you…”

“No, this,” he said, motioning around him to indicate the broader job.

“You like statistics, data,” I offered. I knew my answer was just filling space. He was going to answer his question for me.

“I like what the data can tell us, you know? Do police officers disproportionately target black motorists? Let’s ask the numbers. They won’t lie.”

“There is the whole lying-with-statistics thing,” I said foolishly.

“People lie with statistics,” he said. “The data scream out for us to pay attention.”

“Right,” I acknowledged. I realized in that moment that we could not keep a lid on this thing forever. There is only so long you can ask smart people to drop everything before they sense a crisis.

And information starts to leak, on purpose or even by accident. So if I had not messed up, someone else would have.

20.

I WAS DUE AT THE WHITE HOUSE AT SEVEN-THIRTY A.M. THE security process takes a while at that hour, as employees and visitors queue up at the gate. I did not want to be late, and as a result I was ridiculously early. To kill some time, I bought a cup of coffee and a Washington Post–USA Today at a kiosk on Dupont Circle. I perused the front page in one glance (a benefit of a real newspaper, as opposed to the online version that I usually read): flooding in Alabama; more evidence the Russians were violating their treaty obligations in the Arctic; a bad harvest in West Africa, probably caused by climate change; the new Afghan president vowing to expel the last American troops within two years; D.C. transit workers threatening to strike. Those are all the President’s other fifteen-minute meetings, I thought. I may have said it out loud, because a woman drinking coffee nearby looked over at me. This was what the President was going to be dealing with today, even the stupid transit strike, since funding for the system was federal and a strike would effectively shut down the capital. I wanted to tell that woman, who was still looking at me, “This is just the stuff that is public. It’s even worse than you know!”

Those first White House meetings had settled into a pattern. The President, usually preoccupied with something else, would say, “What do we know?” The rest of us would report out on our designated tasks, usually prompting the Strategist to declare that we had fallen short in some way, or that we failed to understand something, or that we were not asking the right questions—all usually valid points, but exasperating nonetheless because he seldom had any assigned responsibility himself. It was like the Strategist showed up to these meetings with a pin, relentlessly popping the balloons that the rest of us had spent the previous twenty-four hours working to inflate. Pop, pop, pop. Then the President would say, “He’s right,” and we would be left with even more difficult tasks before the next morning meeting.

The Acting Secretary of Health and Human Services had joined us. He had the least formal power of anyone in the room but often projected the largest presence. His boss, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, owned stock in some company that supposedly got preferential treatment in the drug approval process, or something like that. It had none of the allure of a good sex scandal. The HHS Secretary owned only a hundred shares of the stock in question, meaning that if the sordid accusations were true, she made at most $642 in illicit profits, before taxes. No matter. Once the blowhards in the House began using the phrase “principle of the matter,” she might as well have started packing up her office. The President hung her out to dry, like some kind of human sacrifice to placate his most rabid political opponents on the right. When the scandal reached its apex (among the three hundred people inside the Beltway who were following it), the President released a statement: “I am grateful for the service that the Secretary of Health and Human Services has provided to my administration and to the people of the United States.” There was no mention of “confidence” or “continued service” and she resigned almost immediately—tossed out of the boat. As any Washington insider might have warned, the effect was not to placate the President’s critics, but rather to encourage them with blood in the water.

The President appointed one of her deputies to take over as Acting Secretary. He had been briefed on the Capellaviridae situation. The Acting Secretary was a black man, probably sixty-five or so, with an infectious laugh. He weighed about 250 pounds, with the build of the former football player that he was. The Acting Secretary was strikingly impervious to politics—not oblivious, just mentally resistant, as if the sordidness of Washington rained down around him but he somehow stayed dry. He just did not care, or he managed to project that impression. The Senate was not going to confirm him as Secretary—for reasons that had nothing to do with his qualifications and everything to do with a small group of Tea Party senators who were in an ongoing pissing match with the President. The Acting Secretary’s wife—not him, but his wife—had run a state chapter of Planned Parenthood, twenty or thirty years ago, and apparently that was enough to make the whole family toxic to the political right forever. A group of five senators had vowed to use every procedural tool in the Senate rule book to prevent a confirmation hearing.

“I can’t help you on this one,” the Majority Leader told the President. Of course, he could help him. He could go to bat for the nomination. He could use the tools at his disposal to wreck those five intransigent senators politically. The President did not call him “Lyndon” for nothing. But it would not be a wise move in the long run, and the Majority Leader always played the long game. The President, too, played political chess, and he knew well enough not to press for this favor, so the Acting Secretary was bound to remain “Acting” for the foreseeable future. What did he tell the Washington Post–USA Today? He said, “It won’t affect my pension.” That’s it. That was the only thing he said for attribution. The cub journalist writing the story thought it was a great quote, but almost certainly for the wrong reason. Anyone outside the Beltway reading that story would think the Acting Secretary was some kind of bureaucratic functionary, watching the clock every day and counting down the years—including a bonus for accrued vacation—until he could retire at a small ceremony (on government time) and move to a sad little condo in Florida. In fact, the pension quip to the Washington Post–USA Today was a rifle shot at the political establishment. This was a guy who spent forty years working in many ways to make people’s lives better; whether you called him “Secretary” or “Acting Secretary” did not make a whit of difference to him.

The beautiful thing about the Acting Secretary was that the political types could not bully him. Even the President did not intimidate him. The Acting Secretary was respectful of the President, even deferential, but never cowed. He was fond of saying, “I have six grandchildren, a pension [always the pension], and a decent set of golf clubs. What do I need this nonsense for?” Every time he said that I got a little thrill because it was really a polite way of saying, “Fuck you.” Do you remember in middle school when some jackass would make fun of you for something, and your parents would say, “Don’t let him get to you”? The logic is that no one can make fun of you—for anything, really—if you have no respect for his or her opinion. They cannot injure you by not inviting you to the party if you genuinely have no interest in going to it.

Middle school works that way, and so does Washington. There is a certain gravitas that comes from being able to stand apart from the day-to-day politics. The Acting Secretary of HHS had that figured out. If the President fired him tomorrow morning, he would be on the golf course with his grandchildren by afternoon—a point he repeated often, and to good effect. In fact, he would periodically elaborate on how much better his golf game would be if he had more time to practice chipping and putting. “It’s all short-game,” he said to me after one of these soliloquies. I recognized this comment as the finale to his public drama, so I nodded in agreement.

The Acting Secretary attended his first working group meeting on a Sunday morning. I remember it was a Sunday because the D.C. streets were sleepy as I walked out of the Metro (no transit strike yet) and toward the White House. The morning was sunny and already warm. Several cafés had set up outside tables that were crowded with young professionals having brunch outdoors before the day turned oppressively humid. In these days before the Outbreak became public, I was always struck with some variation of the same thought: They have no idea. Most of these people laughing over their eggs Benedict are carrying Capellaviridae. I am walking to the White House because we know the Dormigen stocks are going to run out. If we do not come up with a fix, some of you are going to die. Enjoy your eggs and wish me luck.

In the Oval Office, the principals were dressed casually, including the President, and I remember thinking that was strange, too. So arbitrary. The same people doing the same work in the same place, but one day a week none of us had to wear suits. It was the first time I had seen the Secretary of Defense out of uniform. The Strategist was wearing an interpretation of casual that one would have to see to believe: the pants from a pin-striped suit with black leather dress shoes and some kind of short-sleeve floral Hawaiian shirt. He had shaved, but not well; there was a small strip of whiskers running down one cheek.

The President was more engaged than usual, probably because he had nothing else on his schedule. He sat on one of the couches rather than at his desk. “Okay, where are we?” he said.

“The Canadians shipped us five hundred thousand doses,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Good,” the President said.

“Didn’t they pledge two million?” the Strategist asked.

“They’re monitoring their own situation and will release more if conditions allow,” the Chief of Staff said, consulting her notes.

“That sucks,” the Strategist said.

“India? Australia?” the President asked.

“They’re both saying they need parliamentary approval to ship Dormigen out of the country,” the Chief of Staff explained. “It takes time, and obviously it would be public. We’ve cobbled together some smaller contributions from a number of countries: Israel, Mexico, Colombia, Latvia—”

“Jesus Christ, did you just say Latvia?” the Strategist interjected. He was eating a Danish, and he chewed several times, though not quite enough, before continuing. “Latvia? If any part of our response depends on Latvia, we are completely fucked.”

The President shot him a look, as if to say, “Dial it down.”

“But seriously, Latvia?” the Strategist said, calmer for the moment. He took another bite of Danish.

“It all adds up,” the Chief of Staff said. “It’s a numbers game.”

“Latvia,” the Strategist mumbled, loud enough for those of us close enough to him to hear.

“Speaking of which, where are we?” the President asked. He meant “the number.” We had bandied this concept around for several days, but the data were still trickling in, so for all the urgent talk we did not actually have a figure yet, much to the ongoing annoyance of the Strategist. Perhaps subconsciously we did not want to put such a fine point on the situation. It is hard for me to convey the surreal nature of the crisis. This was the opposite of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, when tragedy struck and the public demanded a response. We were watching the planes in flight, reckoning what would happen when they reached their targets. But nothing was burning yet. The public was having brunch on a sunny spring day. So rather than being forced to action, we had to press ourselves ahead when the natural impulse was to do as little as possible and hope the planes turned around.

“We are pulling a model together,” the Chief of Staff said.

“It’s not that hard,” the Strategist said. “There are only a handful of variables. I can do it on an Excel spreadsheet.”

“We are doing some in-depth sampling to learn more about Capellaviridae,” the Director of the NIH offered.

“Great, but you must have some assumptions now,” the Strategist said, more calmly than usual. “My understanding was that we were going to build this model right away—take our best guess at the situation and then update it as we get better data.”

“That’s what we agreed to,” the Secretary of Defense said.

“So why aren’t we doing that?” the Strategist asked. He was genuinely perplexed.

“Let’s have that done for tomorrow,” the President suggested.

The Secretary of Defense said, “With all due respect, sir, we are going to run out of ‘tomorrows.’ If we have the information, let’s put it together. I appreciate that we are dealing with a lot of unknowns here, but that’s always the case. I’ve never met a military planner who felt he’d started planning for anything too early.”

“All we need is an Excel spreadsheet,” the Strategist repeated. He was sitting on the couch opposite me. As he spoke, he grabbed a laptop from a coffee table in front of the Chief of Staff, who was sitting next to him, and flipped it open. I could see her shocked expression. “What’s the password to unlock the screen?” he asked, oblivious to the strange looks around him.

“White House one two three,” she said. “No capitals, all strung together.”

“Wow, the Chinese will never figure that one out,” he said, typing. “Okay. When can we expect the next batch of Dormigen to be done?”

The Chief of Staff looked at her phone. “April sixteenth,” she said.

“I don’t care what the date will be. Just tell me how many days from now,” the Strategist said, shaking his head in exasperation.

“Twelve.”

He walked the room through the other variables: the doses remaining; the doses on hand solicited from other countries; the expected demand for Dormigen to deal with other illnesses. “Okay,” he said. “We’re reasonably confident of all that, yes?”

“I think we can expect far more help from the international community,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Fine. This will be a conservative estimate. Now I need some estimate of the number of Capellaviridae cases we are going to need to treat in the next twelve days, right?” There were nods of approval all around. “So what’s that number?”

“We don’t know yet,” the Director of the NIH said. “We’re doing intensive sampling. We’ll have those numbers in two days.”

“What’s our best guess now?” the Strategist said in a tone that bordered on mockery.

“It would just be a shot in the dark,” I said.

“Then give me a fucking shot in the dark!” he spluttered. “Come on, people, am I the only one who sees icebergs floating out there?”

I said, “We can have our stats guy do an estimate tomorrow, maybe a couple of scenarios: best-case, worst-case, and so on.”

“Tomorrow? Am I talking to myself here?” the Strategist asked the room. “Call him now.”

“It’s Sunday morning,” I replied. “I have no idea how to reach him.”

The Strategist ripped a sheet of paper from his legal pad. He thrust it at me. “Write his name down and whatever else you know about him.” I did as I was told. The Strategist took the paper from me without saying anything and walked out of the room. Even now I am not sure where he went.

The rest of us looked at each other until the President broke the awkward silence. “He’s right. We can’t wish this thing away.”

The Director of the NIH shifted somewhat uncomfortably in her seat. She and I made eye contact, acknowledging to each other that it would be more sensible to wait for better data. I raised an eyebrow, as if to say, “What should we do?”

The Director of the NIH, to her credit, pushed back against the President. “We’ll have to treat this number with skepticism,” she warned.

“We know that,” the Secretary of Defense said. “This number is not going outside this room. It’s a start. We’ll build a more sophisticated model when we get better data. For now it’s something, and something is better than nothing.”

The Strategist walked back into the room. He handed the piece of paper back to me with a phone number scrawled on the bottom. “It’s a cell phone,” he said.

I looked at the number, trying to make out the last four digits. The writing was tiny and childlike. “You can use my small office,” the President offered as I was trying to decipher the handwriting.

“Is that a one or a seven?” I asked the Strategist, pointing at the penultimate digit.

“Sorry,” he said, genuinely apologetic. “It’s a seven. Four-zero-seven-nine. Sorry.” At that moment, I had what I can only describe as a burst of awareness. There were many other times when the gravity and bizarreness of the situation struck me: the first time I walked into the Oval Office; the first time the working group looked to me for an authoritative opinion. But this was different—less intellectual and more emotional, like looking up at the stars on a clear New Hampshire night and feeling the incomprehensible size of the universe. Of course, any middle school graduate understands that the universe is enormous and expanding, but there is something about those special moments when a bright night sky makes one appreciate emotionally what it really means. And then the feeling passes, as quickly as it arrived.

So it was as I tried to read the Strategist’s handwriting. His chicken-scratch penmanship was so banal, yet the reason he had written down the number was so significant. The combination of the comic and the scary gave me this momentary emotional sense of what was happening. “You can use my small office,” the President repeated.

I called what was apparently Tie Guy’s cell phone. It rang four or five times and then went to voice mail. I left a short, cryptic message telling him to call me back immediately. The White House operator had given me an outside line. I did not know whether the number would show up on caller ID as “White House” or “blocked” or maybe something else. On a hunch, I waited a few moments and dialed again. Tie Guy picked up this time. “Hello?” he said. I had not woken him up, but his tone suggested surprise, or maybe wariness. I tried to walk the line between urgency and panic, explaining that I needed him to give me some estimates for the likely trajectory of the Capellaviridae epidemic. “That’s why I’m doing the sampling,” he said. “I told you, I’ll have numbers on Tuesday.”

“I need something now,” I said.

“It’s Sunday morning,” he answered, more perplexed than annoyed.

“I know. I’m in a meeting and I need our best estimate for the number of Capellaviridae fatalities if the virus were not treated with Dormigen.”

“Why?” he asked.

“That’s not important,” I said with faux-authority.

“Well, it’s obviously important to someone.”

“The Director. She’s in the meeting. She wants numbers. Now.”

“Is this some kind of terrorist thing? Is that what’s going on?” he asked.

“No,” I said firmly. “It’s a lurking virus that has turned virulent. That’s what they do.”

“Yeah, but a terrorist group could have figured out how to trigger the virus.”

The thought had occurred to me, but there was no country, let alone a terrorist group, with that kind of scientific expertise. “No,” I said, with real authority this time. “Look, I’m in a meeting. The Director is literally in the other room waiting for me to get off the phone. I need you to give me your worst-case scenario, your best-case scenario, and what you think is the most likely fatality rate. Give me those three numbers.”

“You want me to make something up?”

“No. I want you to give me an informed inference based on what you have seen so far.”

“Okay, can I think for a second?” he asked. His tone had turned modestly more cooperative.

“Of course.”

There was a brief silence. “But we have Dormigen, right?” Tie Guy asked.

“Yes,” I lied. “We’re just trying to get our mind around the virus—to isolate what’s happening there. So give me your best estimate of what would happen without Dormigen.”

Tie Guy gave me his numbers. I wrote them down on the same sheet of paper, right below where the Strategist had scrawled the phone number. I did not really process the numbers as I wrote them down. The conversation had meandered, and I was feeling pressure to get back to the meeting. Also, I was not privy to the Dormigen supply calculations (mostly because I had not asked), so the figures Tie Guy gave me had no context. I walked back into the Oval Office and handed the sheet to the Strategist. He looked at them, betraying no emotion, and then typed them into the spreadsheet.

The Strategist read out the results with a similar lack of emotion, which is eerie in hindsight. “Worst-case: three-point-two-five million. Best-case: seven hundred thousand. Most likely: two million.” The room was silent, until the Acting Secretary of HHS asked, “I’m sorry, I’m the new guy here. Two million what?”

“Two million deaths,” the Strategist said.

“No, that’s not right,” the NIH Director said quickly. “Those figures have no basis in reality.”

The Strategist looked at her. He started to say something and then stopped himself. The room went silent again. I had a feeling that the President was the only person who could speak next, which turned out to be correct. “We have commitments for enough Dormigen to deal with any of those scenarios,” the President said.

“Commitments,” the Strategist said.

“Mr. President, you need to start working the phones,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Clear my schedule tomorrow. I’ll make the calls.”

The Acting Secretary of HHS looked around the room. He had an uncharacteristically dazed expression. After a moment, he said, “Again, I know I’m the new guy here, but if I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing…” He paused to gather his thoughts. “Well, we’ve got a serious situation.” The rest of us had become desensitized to what was happening, the policy equivalent of the frog being slowly boiled alive. One meeting had led to the next, and while each one was serious, the progression left us oddly inured to the magnitude of what was going on. The Acting Secretary had just given the room a collective slap in the face. In that moment, I felt both terrified and relieved—terrified by the number of planes that might fall out of the sky, and relieved that I was no longer the only one seeing it.

“These numbers are nonsense,” the NIH Director said.

“Do you have something better?” the Strategist asked.

“We will on Tuesday.”

“What if Tuesday’s numbers are worse?” the Strategist replied.

“You are creating needless panic,” the NIH Director said.

“I would argue the opposite,” the Strategist replied calmly. “Now we know how bad this could get.”

The Strategist and the NIH Director were slowly developing an antagonistic relationship. The Director was the heart of the group, always offering up an optimistic spin, even when the facts did not necessarily support her case. The Strategist was all brain. If anything, he tended toward pessimism. “Everything in this town turns out worse than you think it will,” he once told me during a break. We were standing at adjacent urinals. He turned to me and said that, apropos of nothing, and then went back to his business. I could not think of an appropriate response. I don’t think he was looking for one.

The Acting Secretary was visibly shaken. “With respect, I’m the new guy here,” he repeated. “But I hope we can agree on a couple of things.”

“Go ahead,” the President said.

“First, I think we need more people in the room. Is this it?” he asked, looking to his right and left. “Are we the only ones who know what’s going on here?”

The Chief of Staff answered, “We have several groups working on different pieces of the situation. There is a large team from the CDC and NIH working on Capellaviridae. We are learning more by the hour. And we have a team at the State Department who are gathering Dormigen commitments from across the OECD, India, other countries. But yes, the people in this room are the only ones who have a complete understanding of the situation.”

“Given the magnitude of what I just heard, this just doesn’t feel right,” the Acting Secretary said.

“I take your point,” the President said. “On the other hand, we can’t afford mass panic.”

“What about the Speaker?” the Acting Secretary asked. The President leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, visibly frustrated, and then quickly regained his composure. I knew from reading the newspaper that the President’s relationship with the Speaker of the House was notoriously bad, sometimes openly hostile. His reaction suggested it might even be worse than that.

“We’ll take that under consideration,” the Chief of Staff said.

“What was your second point?” the President asked.

“Maybe you’ve already discussed this, but it seems like somebody—maybe all of us—needs to think about what happens if we don’t have enough—enough Dormigen.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now?” the President asked.

“No, I mean if we come up short—”

“That’s not going to happen,” the NIH Director said sharply. The Strategist exhaled loudly, causing everyone else in the room to look in his direction, at which point he rolled his eyes.

The Acting Secretary continued, “Yes, I understand we’re going to do everything we can, but in the event we were to come up short… well, who gets what we have?”

The question just kind of hung there.

21.

THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE. WHERE TO BEGIN? HOW ABOUT: She was the meanest, most calculating person I have ever met. I know some nasty people, but most of them are a little thick and not particularly strategic. They are impulsively mean, often because they do not know any better. The Speaker of the House was mean in a strategic, long-term, highly intelligent kind of way, like one of those predators on the Discovery Channel that tracks its prey for hours before seizing exactly the right moment to leap from behind a bush and sink its teeth into the jugular. She rose in California politics as “a Latina small business owner.” There is nothing about that phrase—not the Latina part, not the small business owner—that was true in spirit. Both descriptions were technically accurate, I suppose, but I am shocked the media did not push back more aggressively on her political narrative. She grew up in suburban Connecticut, born to upper-middle-class parents. Her maternal grandfather, a Harvard Law School graduate and prominent appellate court judge, was Colombian. The Speaker of the House took from him a gift that kept on giving: a Hispanic surname. As a twenty-two-year-old graduate of UC Berkeley, an age when most of the rest of us are hoping to find some reasonably steady form of income, a rental apartment without roaches, and a roommate who is not psycho, she changed her last name from Ryan to Rodriguez. How many people are planning a political career at age twenty-two with that degree of seriousness?

The small business part was arguably bogus, too. She and a business partner bought a large chain of California health food stores. The businesses were already up and running; she spent her days at the corporate headquarters, not behind the counter selling fish oil. Yes, each store was a small business, but to describe the Speaker as a small business owner was like saying that Henry Ford tinkered with cars. Everything she did was political, and I mean everything. The President could not stand her, and it was mutual. The Speaker had entered the 2028 presidential primary as the solid favorite of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She had California locked up. She built a solid organization and was a terrific fundraiser. The polls were saying that she could steamroll any centrist opponent in the Democratic primaries. Meanwhile, the Republicans had just split into the New Republicans and the Tea Party, leaving them without a candidate who could unite the two. The Speaker was convinced, not unreasonably, that she had a clear path to become the first female president, and, if you buy the narrative, the first Hispanic president, too.

Then the President declared he was running as an independent—the whole “one term for one nation” campaign. The Speaker’s well-laid plans imploded. The centrist wing of the Democratic Party abandoned her for the independent Virginia senator, since he was far more likely to win the general election. Meanwhile, the New Republicans figured he was almost as good as anyone they could field, so they tossed him their support, too. And so on. Yes, the Speaker won the early Democratic primaries handily, but the polls showed her getting trounced in the general election. Rather than face humiliation, she dropped out before Super Tuesday.

After the election, the Speaker and the President tried to patch things up, but it was a superficial effort. To her mind, he was sitting in the seat that should have been hers. The animus was compounded by genuine ideological disagreements. She was coming from the California left; he was coming from the Virginia center. There was plenty of potential common ground, of course, but the first one hundred days—what the President believed should have been his honeymoon—turned into a pissing match with the House of Representatives, for lack of a more accurate description. The Speaker introduced two explosive bills, one proposing a $22-an-hour minimum wage and the other setting aside $100 billion for slavery reparations, a fund that would be dispersed (somehow) among the descendants of American slaves. Neither bill had even a remote chance of passing the Senate, but the President was forced to oppose both of them, which infuriated progressives on the hard left. The Speaker clearly designed the whole effort to strangle the President’s support among her progressive base, and she succeeded brilliantly. To what end? That is what infuriated the President. It was not like low-wage workers or African-Americans emerged from this legislative charade any better off. It was just a lot of political churn to get nowhere.

“She’s not decent,” the Chief of Staff said at one point, almost rhetorically. The Chief of Staff was always more grounded than the others in the room, going home every night to a husband and two teenagers who had homework, acne, boyfriends. More important, she had a heartfelt desire to make the world better. Politics was a way of doing that, but not an end in itself. The Chief of Staff used the word “decent” in a way I had never heard it used before. To her, it was a binary measure of whether one was using government for good or for ill, regardless of ideology or intelligence or political circumstances. The Chief of Staff might meet with a right-wing legislator whose views were completely out of sync with her own, particularly on social issues, but she would return to the White House and say, “He’s decent.” She did not mean it in a begrudging or half-hearted way; it was a serious compliment. What she meant was that this person was intellectually honest and committed to making the world better, even if his or her definition of “better” was not one she shared.

Conversely, she might walk out of a meeting with a lawmaker or lobbyist—even those ostensibly “on her side”—and declare, “He’s not decent,” which meant this guy could not be trusted, or his motives were impure, or for some other reason this person had not come to Washington with the intention of making Americans better off.

The Speaker of the House was not “decent” in the eyes of the Chief of Staff, but come Monday she would be sitting in the Oval Office with us.

22.

MONDAY FELT LIKE SOMEONE TURNED UP ALL THE DIALS. Everything was going faster, bordering on panic for the first time. Because of time zone issues, the President had been up much of the night speaking on the phone with Asian and European leaders. At a “meeting before the meeting,” set up primarily so we could speak among ourselves before the Speaker arrived, the Chief of Staff briefed us on the calls. “It’s not good,” she said. “Most of the countries with meaningful stocks of Dormigen have some Capellaviridae issues of their own, or they’re convinced they might. They’re not going to ship Dormigen out of the country until they have a better sense of what’s going on. Honestly, I don’t blame them. The only countries with enough stock to close our gap are India and China.”

“It’s a shit show,” the President said. He looked paler than normal, with dark circles under his eyes. His body language suggested he really needed a nap. India and China, with over a billion people each, had enormous stocks of Dormigen. Meanwhile, neither country was seeing the same Capellaviridae trends that we were. Either one of them might be able to cover our shortfall.

But, as the Strategist cleverly put it, “India and China are the opposite of Latvia.” What he meant was that Latvia had offered up a paltry quantity of Dormigen as a gesture of solidarity and goodwill. The country was too small to do anything more. On the other hand, India and China were big enough to make all the difference, but the Dormigen donation would not be about solidarity or goodwill. Each was looking to exact a pound of flesh, or, more accurately, a metric ton. Our initial concern about India was that their Parliament would have to ratify the deal, making everything public. We had now reached a point where we could deal with the publicity if it would solve our shortage; our concern about bad publicity felt quaint. The problem was that India’s populist Prime Minister had thrown down a new roadblock. “He wants $100.4 billion,” the President explained wearily.

“My goodness,” the Secretary of Defense said, with a little whistle afterward.

“That’s an oddly precise number,” the Strategist said.

“The licensing deal,” the President said. His comment meant nothing to me, but the Chief of Staff and the Strategist both nodded in recognition. The Chief of Staff explained to the rest of us. Dormigen was still governed by a patent held by an American firm. The drug itself is strikingly cheap to produce. A lifesaving dose of Dormigen can be manufactured for less than the cost of a large cup of coffee. But that is not what the pills cost to buy—not even close. A full dosage was typically priced between five thousand and seven thousand dollars. The economists had no problem with such an extraordinary markup. The pills may cost just a few dollars to produce, but the intellectual property—the research and development that made this medical miracle possible—cost billions. Somehow the pharmaceutical company had to earn back that overhead. If we deprive them of huge profits now, we will not have blockbuster drugs in the future, the economists explained.

But a 250,000 percent markup? The ethicists were not so sure. Politicians in developing countries like India were apoplectic. Here was a drug that could transform their public health systems, potentially wiping out diseases ranging from tuberculosis to malaria for just a few dollars a pill. The U.S. patent holder had denied these poor countries the right to produce the drug without paying a hefty licensing fee. When the Indian Prime Minister had declared several years earlier that India would violate the patent and produce the drug without paying the licensing fee, the U.S. government had threatened to levy huge economic sanctions. The Indian Prime Minister accused the U.S. government of “going to bat for big pharma” (true). The President, who was in the Senate then, justified the huge licensing fee as “necessary to protect intellectual property and future innovation” (also true). In the end, the Indian government was granted a steeply discounted licensing fee to produce Dormigen, but the dispute obviously still rankled. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated that the economic sanctions threatened against India (but never implemented) would have cost the country $50.2 billion—exactly half what the Indian Prime Minister now was asking for the Dormigen doses.

“What a prick,” the President said.

“He’s got a point,” the Strategist said. “If you look at it from his perspective—”

“Yeah, I get it,” the President snapped. The Indian Prime Minister had been swept into power atop his party as a populist, railing against elites within the country and the perfidy of the “club of rich countries” beyond the borders. He had been a pain in the President’s side ever since. He backed out of several treaties, expelled a handful of U.S. diplomats, and even canceled the license that had allowed the U.S. Embassy to import liquor duty-free. The last one had delighted the Indian press because the U.S. Embassy was subsequently required to document all of its liquor imports in customs—right down to the vermouth—for public scrutiny. “Americans Drink Martinis as Indian Economy Stumbles,” one headline screamed.

“What about China?” the Secretary of Defense asked. His tone suggested he knew the answer would not be any better.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” the Chief of Staff asked.

“It’s all bad,” the President interjected.

“They’ll give us two million doses free,” the Chief of Staff explained.

“Nothing with the Chinese is ever free,” the Defense Secretary said.

“Of course not,” the Chief of Staff replied. “They will ship the doses tomorrow if the President cancels his trip to Australia.”

“That can’t happen, sir,” the Defense Secretary said quickly.

“I know that,” the President snapped. He was as ornery as I had seen him. Several of us looked to the Chief of Staff, who explained the geopolitics of what was going on. The administration had been working for months to reinvigorate an alliance of Pacific nations—Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, and a host of small countries—to push back against Chinese encroachment in the region. The President was scheduled to fly to Australia later in the week to sign the agreement. But it would not be just any flight. The U.S. Navy would be sailing the Sixth Fleet through international waters into the South China Sea—an area illegally claimed by China, according to the U.S. and its allies—where the President was going to land on an aircraft carrier. The leaders of the other nations would join him on the carrier, at which point they would all sign the agreement. It would be the clearest, boldest, and broadest effort to push back against China’s persistent encroachment in the region. “Am I even going to be able to make that trip?” the President asked.

“You have to, sir,” the Secretary of Defense said. “If you don’t show up, the whole thing will collapse.”

The President had already canceled a short trip to Mexico. There were no diplomatic repercussions, but it had raised the antennae of the White House press corps. Word had also leaked out that the President was meeting daily with the Senate Majority Leader and the Secretary of Defense. These three were known to have a close relationship, so their regular meetings were not necessarily newsworthy, but now that the Speaker was joining them, the press corps would quickly figure out that something big was happening. “Where are we on Capellaviridae?” the President asked. As news turned sour among the Dormigen donors, our focus naturally turned in a different direction. Maybe the scientists would rescue us.

“I’m headed to meet with the working group after this meeting,” I answered.

“Tell them to pick it up over there,” the President said. “It’s time to figure out what the hell is going on.” He was tired and cranky and under enormous pressure. Still, I was reminded of the description of him as the kind of guy who would yell at you when you missed a shot—something that rarely helps the next time down the court. Telling scientists to “hurry up and discover something” is not generally a recipe for success, either.

23.

I HAD ACCESS TO THE WHITE HOUSE MOTOR POOL, ONE OF the many strange rituals to which I was becoming slowly accustomed. I signed my name in the log and a Secret Service agent called up a car for me. When the Town Car pulled into the driveway, I told the driver to take me across town to an office building where the NIH had a suite of offices. I slid into the backseat and tried to digest everything I had just heard. My Town Car privileges are relevant only because of an unfortunate coincidence. As my car pulled up in front of the NIH offices, Tie Guy was also arriving. He waited for me in front of the building and we went in together. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll know a lot more tomorrow.” He did not ask why a mid-level scientist had arrived in the backseat of a black sedan, but he was a guy paid to draw inferences from patterns and was starting to see one. We took the elevator up to the third floor, where the task force had set up camp. I was, in theory, returning to my comfort zone—back with the scientists. I had left behind all the talk of “projecting strength in the South China Sea” and other concepts entirely foreign to my experiences. Except that at the NIH office I still felt alien, as if I were staring at the scene from outside a window on a dark night. Yes, I recognized most of the task force members sitting in cubicles and conference rooms arrayed across the floor, but their body language and the pace of their work made me feel estranged from them. Two of the younger staff members were laughing at something on a screen; when I walked closer I could see it was a YouTube video of baby giraffes. This was just another workday for them. Yes, it was an urgent task force, but these kinds of “urgent assignments” come and go. These people would all head to the health club after work, or maybe go out for drinks. They had no idea what was happening. I did, and that set me apart from them, almost like a physical separation.

Justman wandered up to me and shook my hand. “Guess what?” he asked cheerily.

“What?”

“Dust mites.”

“What about dust mites?” I asked.

“That seems to be the transmission mechanism for Capellaviridae.”

“Why didn’t you text me?”

“Sorry, I didn’t want to bother you over the weekend,” he said apologetically. “Yeah, it’s dust mites. They don’t usually bite, but there is a subspecies of the American dust mite that apparently does. And it’s a host for Capellaviridae—”

“That’s the transmission mechanism?”

“Yes. Man, you wouldn’t believe how many animals we’ve been testing: deer, squirrels, five species of mosquito—”

“But we still don’t know what triggers the virus to turn fatal,” I said.

“No,” Justman replied, visibly disappointed that I was not more excited by his news. “But now we know the vector. That’s huge. At least we know where this thing is coming from. It explains the patterns we’re seeing—why everyone has it in some places, no one has it in the tropics, that kind of thing.”

He was right. Understanding the “vector”—the mechanism by which a virus is carried and spread—is a huge deal. Because viruses cannot live independently, they must have a host. For smallpox, that was humans, and only humans. No other animal carries the smallpox virus, which is why we were able to wipe out the disease. On the other hand, a disease like Ebola is much harder to contain because bats and monkeys are also hosts. Even when we stop an Ebola outbreak in humans, as we did in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 2010s, and again in the Congo in 2018, the virus still resides deep in the jungle, ready to leap back to the human population the next time some poor soul eats flesh from an infected monkey (“bushmeat”) or gets bitten by an infected bat. So yes, in Justman’s world, the dust mite discovery was a huge, exciting, relatively speedy development. In my world, we had a spreadsheet telling us that a lot of people were going to die if things did not move much, much faster.

One of the executive assistants clapped loudly to get the attention of the room. Justman and I paused our conversation to see what was going on. “Okay, everyone,” the young woman said, projecting her voice across the open work area. “Today is Saurav’s birthday.” There were some claps and cheers from the room. “We have cupcakes in the kitchen, if you are hungry.”

“Do you want a cupcake?” Justman asked. “They’re really good. They come from a little bakery around the corner.”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Look, we need to know why Capellaviridae turns fatal for some people and not others.”

“I know, I know,” Justman assured me. “We’ll get there, but this is huge progress. I’ve got people working around the clock here.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that.”

“Tomorrow we’ll have all the sampling data analyzed. You’ll be at that briefing, yes?”

“Of course.”

“That will be another piece of the puzzle,” Justman said confidently. “We’ll figure this thing out. We just need a little time.” He gave me a little encouraging pat on the shoulder.

“I understand,” I said.

“Are you sure you don’t want a cupcake?” he asked.

“No, I’m fine, thanks.”

24.

WE MET IN THE OVAL OFFICE AGAIN THAT AFTERNOON. There was no new information, but it was the first official meeting with the Speaker of the House present. We started nearly forty-five minutes late because the President had to do a short news conference. An ex–police officer had shot thirteen people in a Cleveland shopping mall and then killed himself. The motive was not yet clear. Because the shooter was African-American and a former cop, it did not fit the pattern of previous shootings. The President made his statement, extending his condolences to the victims and their families, offering up all available federal resources, and so on. When he arrived back at the Oval Office, we already had a problem. The Speaker had been briefed that morning on the Capellaviridae situation and was told to keep all the information in the strictest confidence. Yet she turned up at the White House with her top aide. “He knows everything,” the Speaker declared. “He might as well sit in.” And so it began.

The President, already emotionally spent from dealing with the Cleveland shooting, was apoplectic. “We ought to just arrest her,” he spluttered when the Chief of Staff told him what was going on.

“None of this information is technically classified,” the Chief of Staff replied. “The intelligence agencies are not involved.” She had a calming effect on him; that was part of her job.

“Okay, fine,” the President said. “She can bring her mother if she wants to. Let’s go.”

The tenor of the meeting was entirely different from previous days. There was an odd mix of formality and passive aggression, with periodic bursts of comic interruption by the Strategist, who liked the Speaker even less than the President did. “We’ll know a lot more tomorrow when we get the results of the NIH sampling,” the Chief of Staff said, directing the remark to the Speaker.

“Yes, I got the briefing,” the Speaker said. “Aren’t we neglecting the real elephant in the room here?” she asked. The rest of us looked at her blankly until she continued. “The Health Research and Infrastructure Bill?”

“Just tell us what you’re talking about,” the Strategist said impatiently.

The Speaker continued, “That was the bill that outsourced our production of lifesaving drugs to private companies like Centera Biomedical Group.”

“Okay, that was a mistake, obviously,” the Strategist said. “But the horses aren’t just out of the barn on this one, they’re shitting up and down Main Street.”

The Speaker fixed her stare on the President. “You supported it.”

“Probably,” the President answered, throwing up his hands. “That was, what, eight years ago?”

“Seven.”

“Okay, what’s your point?” the President asked.

“We knew that bill was a bad idea at the time,” the Speaker said.

“Who’s ‘we’?” the President asked. We were five minutes into the meeting and he already sounded beleaguered.

“The progressive caucus,” she answered stonily.

The Strategist started to clap, slowly and loudly. “Cut it out,” the President snapped. He turned back to the Speaker. “Do you realize what we’re dealing with here?”

“Of course I do. I’m just saying that some part of our response must involve facing up to how we got here.”

“A government warehouse caught on fire in Long Beach,” the Chief of Staff said.

“And?” the Speaker prompted.

“We’ve already arrested the Centera executives,” the President said. “Obviously we can’t publicize that.”

“What about those of you who entrusted America’s health to a greedy pharmaceutical company?” she asked.

“Oh, for fuck sake,” the Strategist blurted out. This time the President did not cut him off. “Is there anything with you that is not political? Anything?”

The President was calmer. Perhaps he had been bracing himself for this. He turned to the Chief of Staff and asked, “What’s the number?”

“We’re still waiting for the NIH data, so it hasn’t changed—”

“I know. What is it?”

The Chief of Staff opened up her laptop and looked at the screen. “Actually, several big Dormigen shipments have come in from Europe. One from Brazil.”

“What’s the number.” It was not really a question, the way he said it.

“Just over 1.3 million.”

The President turned back to the Speaker. “Do have any comprehension of what that means?” He spoke slowly. His voice was tinged with anger and disrespect.

“My understanding is that the Chinese have offered enough Dormigen to cover the gap,” she said.

“Yes, if we want to abdicate our foreign policy to them for the next fifty years,” the President replied with just a hint of sarcasm. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“You’re not going to let 1.3 million Americans die, I assume,” the Speaker replied confidently.

“That’s why we’re here!” the Chief of Staff yelled. “That’s what we’re doing right now. That’s why we’ve been meeting every day for hours on end. We’re looking for a way forward.” She grew calmer as she spoke, but I could see that her hands, still holding the laptop, were shaking slightly.

“Of course, I understand,” the Speaker said, offering up her best impression of sincerity. “Thank you for all your hard work on this.”

The President, provoked by the patronizing tone, shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Can we just cut to the chase here? What is it you want?” he asked.

“This is not about me,” the Speaker said calmly. “Can’t you see what is happening here? The country is in the midst of what may become the worst crisis of the twenty-first century, and you have locked yourselves in this room, as if the rest of the government has no say in what’s happening.” She looked slowly around the room before continuing. “You cannot possibly think this is okay.”

The Chief of Staff said, “We have a tough balancing act. We are trying to deal with the situation without causing a panic.”

“Maybe you’ve convinced yourselves of that,” the Speaker said. “Here is what I see: A small group of people trying to cover up a crisis that the President and all the other corporate lapdogs in Congress set in motion. You put the health of the nation in the hands of a greedy pharmaceutical company, and now here we are.”

“Very nice,” the Strategist said. “Have you run that language by a focus group? I bet it tests very well.”

The President said, “Let me ask again, because time is really important here: What do you want?” He enunciated each word in the question slowly and clearly.

“It’s not what I want, it’s what needs to happen. This is not about me,” the Speaker said, prompting smirks around the room. The Strategist laughed out loud. The Speaker turned to him and said sharply, “I’m not seeing the humor here.”

The President stared at the Speaker stonily, waiting for her to continue, which she eventually did. “Two things need to happen,” she said. “First, Congress needs to be involved. This is a matter of national importance. The people in this room should not be making these kinds of decisions alone. Also—”

The Secretary of Defense interrupted, “With all due respect, Madam Speaker, nothing that we’re discussing here falls within the purview of Congress. Health and Human Services manages the Dormigen stock. That’s an executive agency. The President has complete authority to negotiate with other governments. Congress has no authority over any of this.”

“You are completely missing the point,” the Speaker answered sharply. “Congress is the elected representative body of the American people.” She turned suddenly to look at the Strategist, who had begun humming “God Bless America.”

“Seriously?” the Speaker asked incredulously.

“Congress can’t paint a hallway in less than a month,” the Strategist said. “And five hundred and thirty-five people cannot possibly keep anything confidential. We are running out of Dormigen and a million people could die if we don’t figure out what the hell to do. One million people. We invited you here because we want and need your input. But there is no way that Congress can make these decisions. It’s just not realistic.”

“Congress needs to be meaningfully involved,” she said.

“I appreciate that,” the President offered noncommittally. “What was your second point?” I had long since forgotten that she had a second demand.

The Speaker continued: “When this situation is resolved, there has to be a public accounting of how we got here.”

“What does that mean exactly?” the Chief of Staff asked.

“It means that if we dodge a bullet here, as I fully expect we will, the American people need to know how close we came to complete disaster. And who was responsible, obviously.”

“I’m glad you think we’re going to dodge the bullet,” the President said.

“One phone call to Beijing and it’s all over,” the Speaker said.

“It’s that simple, is it?” the President asked facetiously.

“Okay, thank you, everyone,” the Chief of Staff said. “We’ll know more tomorrow when we get the NIH data. Thank you, Madam Speaker. We will take all this under advisement.”

As the participants filed out of the room, the Strategist pulled the President and the Chief of Staff aside. “We need to get our legal counsel on this,” he said.

“I know,” the President acknowledged. “And the National Security people, if there is any chance we may be doing some kind of deal with China.”

“I’ll set up the meetings,” the Chief of Staff said.

The Strategist nodded toward the door of the Oval Office, where the Speaker was talking to the Secretary of Defense. “You know what she’s going to do with this,” he said. “This is one big political gift for her. It’s what she’s been waiting for her entire life. She’s going to ride in on a government-issued horse—”

“Yeah, I picked up on that,” the President said tartly.

“I’d say we have about twelve hours before this starts leaking,” the Chief of Staff said.

“That will be a complete clusterfuck,” the Strategist said.

“We need a communications strategy,” the Chief of Staff answered, a new level of weariness creeping into her voice.

“There are already too many people involved,” the President said.

“I know,” the Chief of Staff agreed. “But if this thing leaks and we’re not prepared, the public reaction will be a complete disaster.”

The Strategist chuckled sardonically. “I’ve got our message: ‘Don’t worry, America, only one million of you are at risk of dying.’ Or maybe we should put a more positive spin on it: ‘Three hundred and thirty-nine million Americans probably won’t die.’”

The President smiled, grasping at the humor. “Or we can just loan the Chinese the Sixth Fleet for a while. How bad could that be?”

“I’ll work up something with the Director of Communications,” the Chief of Staff said.

The President nodded in acknowledgment. After a moment he asked the Strategist, “Did I really vote to privatize the Dormigen production?”

The Strategist shrugged. “I can’t remember. It was a huge bill. I have no idea what all was packed in there, but I suspect the Speaker did her research on this one.”

“Yeah.”

25.

AS THE PARTICIPANTS FILED OUT OF THE MEETING, THE President walked to the window of the Oval Office that looked out on the Rose Garden. He did that sometimes, separating himself from the group but not yet ready to sit down at his desk and get back to work. The Majority Leader paused in the doorway and then walked back and joined the President by the window. “Welcome to my world, Mr. President,” he offered. The President looked at him somewhat quizzically, neither welcoming his presence nor sending him away. “The Speaker,” the Majority Leader continued. “I have to deal with her more often than you do. Just about every goddamn day, and sometimes she still amazes me.” The President nodded and smiled slightly, implicitly welcoming the Majority Leader’s presence. “Can I offer you one piece of advice?” the Majority Leader asked.

“About the Speaker?” the President replied.

“Mm-hmm,” the Majority Leader confirmed.

“Wrap her in a carpet and drop her off a boat twenty-five miles out to sea,” the President suggested.

The Majority Leader gave a deep, genuine laugh. “Oh, I’ve felt that urge,” he said, still chuckling. “But I’ll give you a different nautical metaphor. You’ve got to let her run away from the boat.”

“I have no fucking idea what that means,” the President said, albeit with an odd warmth for him.

“You’re not a fisherman?” the Majority Leader asked.

“My idea of fishing consists of going to Whole Foods and buying whatever is on sale,” the President replied. “Now I can’t even go to Whole Foods,” he added.

“If you’re fishing for game fish, like tuna or swordfish,” the Majority Leader explained, “they can take hours to land after you’ve hooked them. If you try to wrestle them into the boat too quickly, you’ll wear yourself out, or break the line.”

“One more reason to buy tuna at Whole Foods.”

“True enough. But if you like the fight, what you learn is that you have to let the fish wear itself out. Sometimes it dives deep, or swims away from the boat. That’s what I mean by letting it run. It doesn’t feel right, to let the fish get farther away from you, but eventually that fish is going to exhaust itself. That’s when you reel it in.”

“I like the idea of putting a hook in the Speaker’s mouth, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Other than that, I still have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” the President said. His tone was not hostile; rather, it invited the Majority Leader to continue.

“One thing I’ve learned about people like the Speaker is that sometimes it’s better to let them talk than to try and shut them up,” the Majority Leader explained. “We had this nasty fellow back in Pekin. He was an out-and-out racist, but he was generally smart enough to dress up his repugnant thoughts in respectable clothing. He was making all kinds of trouble at the high school—stuff about how our kids needed to be taught by teachers who were ‘culturally similar,’ which was really just veiled talk about race. He didn’t want any black teachers. The problem was, people were starting to listen.”

“And?” the President asked with genuine interest.

“I was president of the school board and I kept trying to figure out how I could shut him up. One day over Sunday supper, my dad says, ‘If you let him talk long enough, people will see him for what he is.’ So I invited the guy to address the Rotary Club, to make a recommendation about what kind of teachers would be most appropriate for Pekin High.”

“That was bold.”

“The first fifteen minutes, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. He had fancy slides and test score data. Everyone in the room was nodding along. But then he kept going. He started talking about how some races are genetically inferior and should be relegated to certain low-skill professions.”

“He was running away from the boat,” the President offered.

“You’re telling me,” the Majority Leader said, pleased that the President had embraced his metaphor. “I could feel the room turning. The longer he talked, the more mortified they became. I could see it in their eyes. I didn’t even have to offer a rejoinder. At the end of his talk, I just said, ‘Thank you for coming today. I’m pleased you all could get a deeper understanding of Mr. Mason’s views on this subject.’ The guy never caused any serious trouble again.”

“Okay, but the Speaker is wily and we don’t have much time,” the President said. “She could really do a lot of damage here.”

“I agree. But you have to resist the impulse to try to muscle her into the boat,” the Majority Leader warned.

“You’ve caught a lot of tuna in your day, have you?” the President suggested.

“I do pretty well.”

26.

I ARRIVED AT THE NIH OFFICES BEFORE DAWN. SOMEHOW I had lost my key card, and I had to search the lobby for a security guard to buzz me in. “Something’s going on up there,” he said as he tapped his pass on a pad beside the elevator. “They’ve been working all night.” Tie Guy met me at the elevator. He had not shaved in several days and his face had an oily sheen. He was not wearing shoes. “Do you want me to get you a cup of coffee or something?” I asked.

“That’s the last thing I need,” he said. “If I have any more caffeine I might have a heart attack.” I looked around the floor. A few people were working at computers, but most of the people I could see were loitering happily, as if they were working on a group project in graduate school—which, as far as they knew, was broadly similar to what they were doing. A young woman walked toward us, typing intently on her phone. When she noticed Tie Guy she said, “Hey, we’re going out for breakfast. You want to come?”

“No, thanks. I need to review the slides,” he said. We had agreed that Tie Guy would brief me as soon as he was finished analyzing the new data. At eight, the NIH Director would arrive and we would do a more formal briefing for her. The Director and I would then do a briefing at the White House later that morning.

“How does it look?” I asked.

“The data are pretty good,” he said. “The numbers are more or less what I expected. No huge surprises, but there are some quirky patterns. We might be able to exploit the patterns to get some traction.”

My phone beeped, not my normal phone, but the secure TransferPhone that the White House had given me a few days earlier. It was text from the Chief of Staff: “Please keep briefing to four or five slides, eight tops.” I looked at my watch. It was five-fifteen in the morning. How long had she been up?

Tie Guy nodded at my clunky black device. “So you’re carrying one of those now, are you?” he said.

“So it would appear,” I replied, hoping to defuse the situation with humor. “Looks like we’ll need a short version of the presentation, maybe five slides.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked incredulously, almost yelling. “I’ve been up all night. My deck has one hundred and seventeen slides.”

“We need a summary,” I said.

“Who is ‘we’?” he asked.

“It’s a working group the Director pulled together,” I said.

“Five slides?”

“Yeah. Maybe seven or eight, if you really need them.”

Tie Guy looked at me, shaking his head as he processed the request. “Either these people are really, really important, or they’re complete fucking idiots.”

“They’re not complete fucking idiots.”

“Then I’ve got work to do,” he said, walking away angrily.

“Show me what you have,” I said, following him. “I can help you winnow the slides.”

Tie Guy walked into a small conference room littered with the detritus of meals past. He moved a half-empty coffee cup out of the way and opened his laptop. Without looking up from the screen, he motioned to an open pizza box with one slice left in it, the cheese hardened and congealed. “There’s pizza if you want it,” he said.

“I’m good, thanks.”

Tie Guy projected his presentation on the white wall, clicking quickly through some introductory slides: the team members, a mission statement, and so on. “Cut all that,” I said. He nodded, still refusing to make eye contact with me. He clicked through a few more slides, stopping at a map of the United States with a purple blotch running across the northern part of the country from west to east, starting at the Rockies and stretching all the way through New England. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

“No clue,” I answered.

“That’s where you find Dermatophagoides mensfarinae. Dust mites. A subspecies of the American dust mite, to be exact.” He advanced to the next slide, which was a highly magnified image of a dust mite. It looked like some nasty invader from outer space in a bad horror film. “That’s it,” he continued. “Endemic to North America.”

“The dust mite is the vector.”

“Okay, but now watch this.” He clicked to the next slide, which had the same map of the United States with the purple band, only now there were large green patches that roughly overlapped with the purple. “Those are your counties where more than twenty-five percent of the population tests positive for Capellaviridae.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Where you find the dust mite.”

“Okay, now watch this.” He advanced to the next slide, which had the map of the United States, the same purple band, and myriad red dots spread randomly across the map with no obvious pattern. “Do you see a pattern?” he asked.

“With what, the red dots?”

“Yes.”

“What are they?”

“Just tell me, do you see a pattern?”

“Well, the red dots—whatever they are—seem to be pretty random,” I said.

“Exactly,” Tie Guy agreed. “I ran the numbers, and there is actually a negative correlation.”

“You still haven’t told me what I’m looking at.”

“Sorry,” he said, growing more excited. “The red dots are the deaths and serious cases: the people who died of Capellaviridae or became sick and were treated successfully with Dormigen.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I protested. “There is no obvious connection with the dust mite.”

“I know, crazy, isn’t it? The people most likely to get sick don’t live anywhere near the dust mite that transmits the virus—except for five or six places where there seem to be concentrated outbreaks.”

“That can’t be right,” I said. “It makes no sense. Are you sure you have the right vector? Maybe it’s a coding error. You guys have been working all night—”

“Watch this,” Tie Guy said, now nearly squirming in his seat with excitement. He tapped a key on his computer, though as far as I could tell, the next slide looked exactly the same: the map of the United States, the purple band, and the red dots. “Just watch,” Tie Guy said, sensing my puzzlement.

Slowly the red dots began moving on the map, one at a time, from their random locations into the purple band. The pace picked up; the red dots moved more quickly into the purple band. After a few seconds, the motion stopped, with nearly all the red dots in or near the purple band. “Not so random anymore, right?” he said. “That’s where those people lived for an extended period of time before moving away.”

“So they were infected before they left?”

“Presumably, yeah. Remember the cluster at the College of Charleston?”

“No.”

“There were two deaths and three or four people who got really sick. Charleston is five hundred miles from anywhere you’ll find that kind of dust mite, but each of those students came from somewhere else—Michigan, New Hampshire, upstate New York.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to digest what he was telling me. “So they acquired the virus at home, and got sick in Charleston. That’s indicative of the pattern we’re seeing.”

“Yes.”

“Go back two slides,” I told him. Tie Guy tapped aggressively on the computer and once again we were looking at the red dots strewn randomly across the map. “But if I’m seeing this right,” I said, “people are not getting sick in the places where the virus is most common, other than a few clusters.”

“Right.”

“How can we possibly explain that?” I asked.

“No idea,” Tie Guy said, shaking his head. “One of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.”

“And what about those clusters—the few places where the virus is common and people are getting sick?”

“Nothing,” Tie Guy conceded.

In all the excitement over the utterly bizarre pattern of disease, I had forgotten to ask him for the other crucial piece of information: the incidence rate. “So how bad is it?” I asked. “What’s the incidence rate?”

“That’s modestly good news,” he said. “It’s a little lower than I predicted.” He clicked quickly through several slides. “There. About two million new cases per month. If anything, I would expect it to fall slightly over time. It’s a big number, but totally manageable. Dormigen works everywhere. The deaths are all people who didn’t seek treatment, or for some reason didn’t get Dormigen.” He waited for my reaction, adding, “It’s not a crisis, if that’s what you want to know.”

“About five hundred thousand new cases a week,” I said.

“Yeah, two million a month—five hundred thousand every week. It’s leveled off.”

I did the math quickly in my head. We would still be about three hundred thousand doses short based on the last numbers I had seen.

“Right?” he asked.

“Right what?”

“It’s not a crisis,” he said. “We can manage the disease for now and then either deal with this dust mite or work up a vaccine. As long as people are smart enough to go to the doctor, we’re fine.”

“Sure,” I said. “This is good news.” After a moment, I asked, “Who is most likely to get sick?”

Tie Guy leaned back in his chair and stretched. “No pattern at all, as far as I can tell,” he said. “I looked for every possible correlation: young, old, black, white, preexisting illness. I have no clue who gets sick from the virus, or why. The people who die are the ones who are too stubborn to get treated, but we figured that already.” Tie Guy was in a better mood now, pleased with his work. He said, “I’ll trim it down to five or six slides. Can I at least put in the photo of the magnified dust mite?”

“If you want,” I said.

“It’s a sick photo.” He looked up at the food and other garbage spread across the table. “I’ll clean this up before the Director gets here.”

“I don’t think she’ll care,” I said. It felt like the first completely honest thing I had said that morning.

27.

THE DIRECTOR ARRIVED ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER, AS planned. The office was nearly abandoned; most of the team members who had been working all night had gone home. Tie Guy went through the same slides, still excited by the work he had done. “Do you have a slide with the incidence of Capellaviridae outside the United States?” the Director asked.

“I’ve got a couple of things like that,” Tie Guy answered. After a few seconds of flipping quickly through the slide deck, he stopped at a slide titled “Dermatophagoides mensfarinae Endemic Areas” with a map of the world. There was the familiar purple pattern in the U.S. and a few purple patches in other countries with similar latitudes: Canada, Northern Europe, a few places in Russia and China. “Those are places where you find the vector, the dust mite. It’s just not that common outside the U.S.” I knew why the Director was asking: How much Dormigen was the rest of the world going to need? The less they needed, the more they could give us.

“What about incidence of Capellaviridae?” I asked.

“It’s about what you’d expect,” Tie Guy answered. He projected another slide with a map of the world and red dots randomly distributed across it. The only obvious clusters were in major population centers. “The international data are not great, but it seems to be the same pattern as in the U.S. The people who get sick are the ones who have spent time in an area where the dust mite is endemic and then moved to a place where it’s not.”

The Director asked Tie Guy to assemble his team in the bigger conference room. People were beginning to trickle back into the office, looking showered and somewhat refreshed. The Director (or more likely her assistant) had ordered a catered breakfast, which was being set up hurriedly by two young guys wearing brown shirts that read GILLIAN’S CAFÉ. It was not the usual stale muffins and not-from-New York bagels; there was a tray of nice-looking breakfast sandwiches and a huge bowl of fresh raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries—not even watered down with tasteless chunks of unripe honeydew and cantaloupe. The Director saw me eyeing the food. “Grab a plate,” she said. I had not had breakfast. I could not remember if I had eaten dinner the night before. I had fallen into the habit of eating whatever food the White House put out during our meetings, whenever that happened to be.

As the last few task force members filled plates at the makeshift buffet, the Director called the room to order. “I don’t want to ruin your breakfast with a long speech,” she said, prompting modest laughter. “Thank you. Thank you. That’s really all I have to say. I know how hard all of you have been working. I really appreciate that effort. The American people thank you—or they would if they knew how important this work is. Fifty years ago, a disease like this could have been devastating. Thanks to the work of people like you—steady progress at every turn—science is making our lives safer and better. Too often this kind of work is overlooked, especially the little discoveries and insights, but those little insights add up to huge discoveries over time. I’m here this morning to tell you that the work you are doing is really important. So thank you. Now eat!” There was some awkward applause and then a collective attack on the breakfast sandwiches.

I was impressed, not just by the Director’s foresight in ordering the breakfast, but by the poise she brought to her talk. It was not the Gettysburg Address, but I could tell looking around the room that her words mattered. She was what my mother would describe as “put together,” though it sounds less patronizing and sexist when she says it than when I write it. The Director was fiftyish and fit, if not necessarily thin. She wore a nicely tailored navy-blue skirt and jacket and a gold necklace of some sort. She looked professional, which I mean not in the bland, meaningless sense of the word, but rather that the people in the room looked to her and believed that she was someone who should be in charge. I had never thought much about leadership, but in that moment I had a sense that I had just seen it, and it felt different than what I had previously envisioned.

The free food mattered, too, not because the people in the room could not afford a good breakfast sandwich, but because they spent their days doing work that most of their friends and family could not understand, getting paid far less than their dafter college classmates who went to Wall Street or Silicon Valley. Finally someone had shown up and explained to them convincingly that what they were doing really mattered. It never would have dawned on me to do that. I was even more impressed when we climbed into the back of the Director’s car. She slumped against the seat and exhaled audibly. For the first time, I could see how much effort she had mustered to give her little breakfast talk. After a moment I said, “It’s reasonably good news, don’t you think?”

“I suppose,” she said quietly. The tone of her response ended the conversation for thirty seconds or so. Eventually she continued, “There’s no way to prepare a vaccine in the time we have?”

“Anything is possible,” I said. “But, yes, it’s hard to imagine how that would happen. We have no handle on who is most likely to get sick, so we would have to vaccinate everyone. That would be logistically difficult in ten days, even if we had a vaccine.”

“That’s what the CDC people said.”

“It’s still worth working on,” I offered.

“There is a team doing what they can.”

We pulled into the portico at the White House and made our way to a small West Wing office to get ready for our briefing. The Director sat down and immediately began responding to e-mails on her phone. After fifteen minutes or so the Strategist appeared in the doorway, unshaven and looking somewhat harried. I distinctly remember wondering how anyone could look so disheveled before nine-thirty in the morning. “We have a situation,” he said. “The briefing is going to have to wait.”

“A situation?” the Director asked in amazement. “Are you kidding me? This is the situation.” The Strategist did not reply. He just turned and left.

28.

THIS SOON BECAME ONE OF THE MOST FRENETIC DAYS OF the crisis. We sat in our conference room for more than an hour, like two patients in a dentist’s office wondering if our appointments had been forgotten. The door was open and we could see a flurry of officious staffers passing briskly by. At one point, the Chief of Staff appeared in the corridor and the Director leaped out of her chair to ask what was happening. “I’m so sorry,” the Chief of Staff said. “The President is in the Situation Room. Everything is backed up. Maybe an hour or so?” As always, I was impressed by her courtesy and grace amid the craziness.

It would be closer to three hours before we filed into the Cabinet Room. Only later was I able to infer what had been going on. There had been a coup attempt against the Saudi royal family early that morning by a surprisingly well-organized Islamic extremist group. The President and his team found themselves walking a fine line between protecting the Saudi government, a dependable if oppressive ally in the region, and being seen as a prop for yet another illegitimate regime. The Israelis, who often found common cause with the Saudis because they shared a common enemy (the Iranians), were pushing aggressively to put American troops on the ground in Saudi Arabia to protect the monarchy. The President had refused to commit troops; he had also warned the Israelis against any involvement other than intelligence sharing. According to one account, the President ended up in a shouting match with the Israeli Prime Minister. But I read about all this much later, at the same time everyone else did. For us, on that day, it just made for a lot of waiting.

The Chief of Staff eventually showed up at the door to our small office and invited us into the Cabinet Room. Our slides had already been loaded and were projected on small screens in front of each participant. The NIH Director walked quickly through the presentation, six slides including Tie Guy’s highly magnified photo of Dermatophagoides mensfarinae. (I was eager to tell him that his “sick” photo made the final cut.) The group had grown larger. I recognized the White House Director of Communications and the National Security Adviser from photos. As we waited for the President to appear, my cell phone beeped with a text. I would have ignored it, but we were just waiting anyway, so I checked. It was from Justman, head of the Capellaviridae task force, and said simply: “Call me.” I got the attention of the Chief of Staff to ask if there was a place where I could make a call. Before she could answer, the President walked in. The participants around the table stood up quickly.

“Sit down,” the President said sharply. It was not a “Thank you for standing up but now please be seated.” It felt more like he was annoyed that we had stood up in the first place.

“It’s the task force,” I mouthed to the Chief of Staff. She pointed to a door behind where I was sitting and motioned that I should make the call from there. I got up, drawing a look from the President, and walked out of the room into a small corridor. Justman answered right away. “You told me to call with news,” he said apologetically.

“Of course. What is it?” I asked.

“I think we finally have a little good news,” he said. “The fatality rate seems to be lower than we thought. We got another wave of data last night: public health clinics, a sampling of government workers—”

“Sorry, I’m in a meeting here. Can you just summarize for me?”

“A lot of people are fighting this thing off on their own,” he explained.

“So what’s your best guess on the fatality rate?” I asked.

“Best guess—probably three to five percent,” he said.

“Is there a pattern as to when it’s most likely to be fatal?”

“That’s about what you’d expect,” Justman said. “It’s most likely to be fatal for people who are weak or immunocompromised to begin with.”

“But there is no pattern as to when, where, or why Capellaviridae turns fatal in the first place?”

“Not yet,” Justman answered. “That could be more or less random. For now, it probably makes sense to think of it like the flu. You don’t really know who is going to get it, but among those who do get sick, it’s those who are weak to begin with—the very old, the very young, that kind of thing—who are most likely to succumb.”

“What about the college students?” I asked. “The UVM athletes?”

“If they don’t seek any treatment at all, this is still a pretty nasty illness,” Justman reminded me.

“Right,” I said. I was becoming aware of how long I had been away from the Cabinet Room. “I’ve got to go. I appreciate this. Please text me again if you learn more.”

“No problem.”

I turned the knob on the door to the Cabinet Room as quietly as I could, hoping to slip back into my chair without drawing undue attention. That was not to be. The Speaker of the House was asking something about Ohio when I walked in; the President turned to me and said acerbically, “Thank you for joining us.”

I instinctively looked to the Chief of Staff, who gave me a look that said, “Just ignore it,” like my dad turning around from the front seat of the car and admonishing me to ignore my sister’s repeated jabs in the rib cage. The NIH Director was briefing the room on our meeting with Tie Guy that morning, working her way through the six slides. I never did figure out what the Speaker had been saying about Ohio.

“We’re still looking at a huge number here,” the President said.

“It could be much worse,” the NIH Director said.

“I have some good news on that front,” I interjected. I explained what Justman had just told me.

“We’re still looking at a huge Dormigen shortfall,” the President said. “Where are we on that?”

“We’re stalled, Mr. President,” the National Security Adviser said. She was a black woman, surprisingly young-looking, who had risen through the ranks of the military. She was teaching at West Point when the President asked her to join the administration. Perhaps it was my imagination, but everything about her seemed slightly more impressive than the rest of us: she was fitter, she spoke more forcefully, she even sat straighter in her chair. “With regard to India, sir, we have moved backwards.”

“India?” the Strategist asked, genuinely perplexed. “They wanted a hundred billion dollars. How can we move backwards from there?”

“Now they are not even willing to do that,” the National Security Adviser said.

“They’ve taken that offer off the table?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir. They claim they have many untreated illnesses. The Prime Minister feels it would be inappropriate—”

“Politically stupid,” the Strategist interrupted.

The National Security Adviser looked at him sternly, clearly annoyed at being interrupted. She continued, “The Prime Minister believes it would be inappropriate to ship Dormigen out of the country at a time when there is still unmet need within the country.”

“Come on,” the Strategist said. “There is unmet need because the Indian health system is corrupt and inefficient, not because they don’t have enough Dormigen. They just can’t get it to where they need it.”

The National Security Adviser looked at the President as she answered, “Be that as it may, we cannot count on receiving any Dormigen shipments from the Indian government.”

“Not even for a hundred billion,” the President said.

“No, sir.”

“Isn’t this just a negotiation?” the Secretary of Defense asked. “Like hiring a taxi in Delhi?”

“Perhaps, sir,” the National Security Adviser said. Her speech was as crisp as her white, starched shirt. She spoke in perfect sentences. “However, my sense is that the Prime Minister is not willing to take the risk of putting the interests of the United States ahead of those of his own people. In fact, if we do enter into some kind of negotiation, there is a risk, knowing the man, that he might walk away without consummating a deal and use the whole situation to his own political advantage.”

“He’ll walk away and make the whole thing public?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir. It would be a huge publicity coup for him. He would be seen as standing up to the United States on behalf of the people of India.”

“That’s his shtick,” the Strategist said.

The National Security Adviser continued, always addressing her comments to the President, “As you know, there is an ongoing corruption investigation in India into military contracting. Several ministers have resigned. The opposition has seized on the situation to go after the Prime Minister. He’s on the political ropes. This would be a great distraction for him.”

“Okay, where else? What are our other Dormigen options?” the President asked.

“We need to discuss China, sir,” the National Security Adviser said.

“Not yet,” the President said. “I want to know what our other options are.”

“We’ve hit a wall,” the Chief of Staff said. “There are a few more loose commitments, but in terms of Dormigen shipments, there aren’t any more big ones to report. We’re about where we were yesterday.”

“How about Latvia?” the Strategist asked, deadpan.

“Latvia shipped us seven hundred fifty doses,” the Chief of Staff answered, trying to suppress her annoyance.

“I don’t understand,” the Speaker of the House said. “We’re looking at a massive epidemic and we can’t get our allies to loan us a week’s worth of Dormigen? Have we pointed out to them that we invented the drug in the first place? If it weren’t for us—”

The President interrupted, “Look, I’ve made fifty phone calls in the last few days. It’s hard to get any responsible leader to ship a meaningful quantity of a lifesaving drug out of the country, especially with the Capellaviridae epidemic out there.”

“Most of these countries are not seriously affected by Capellaviridae,” the NIH Director said.

“That could change tomorrow,” the President answered. “Then they go down in history as the leader who shipped their Dormigen to the U.S. just as a major epidemic hit. No politician wants to take that risk.”

“So they’re afraid of the politics?” the Speaker of the House asked. It was like she was wearing different glasses from the rest of us, with special lenses that saw only politics, wherever she looked.

“I don’t think you heard what the President was saying,” the Chief of Staff said. “I’ve listened in on a lot of the calls. They’re afraid of making a huge, deadly mistake.”

The National Security Adviser spoke up forcefully: “There’s one other thing, ma’am, if I may be frank here.”

“Of course,” the Chief of Staff said.

“There’s a lot of anger out there, a lot of pent-up frustration with the United States.”

“We invented Dormigen!” the Speaker interjected. “The United States is the only reason they have any Dormigen at all. Billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money for all the research and development. What exactly are they frustrated about?”

“Well, Madam Speaker, they are frustrated by a lot of things,” the National Security Adviser responded. She turned slightly to face the Speaker and spoke in complete sentences, even when she was angry. “They are frustrated that we withdrew half of our funding for the United Nations. They are frustrated that we shut our borders to immigrants from Yemen and Syria and Turkey. They are frustrated that we are the richest country in the history of civilization, but we refuse to allow the world’s poorest countries to sell us their products.” The National Security Adviser paused for effect, and then finished her delicately crafted paragraph. “Those would be a few examples.”

She might as well have reached across the table and slapped the Speaker across the face. Even I—with a political knowledge gleaned mostly from the Internet while searching online for more interesting things—was aware that the Speaker had spearheaded all of the policies the National Security Adviser had ticked off, along with several others that could have made for a second paragraph. After Donald Trump’s political success with his “America First” agenda, opportunistic politicians across the political spectrum had rushed to create their own knockoffs, the policy equivalent of those fake handbags spread across the sidewalk in New York City. Who cares who designed the original product if people like it? The Speaker had asserted her leadership of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in large part by dressing up the Trump agenda in left-wing clothing. She had argued, for example, that we could not help the poorest Americans if we were shipping “a huge chunk of our tax revenues” to corrupt countries overseas. She said it was unreasonable for Americans to make sacrifices to deal with climate change while “the most polluting countries in the world are doing nothing.” And so on. Her relations with the Tea Party were frigid but when it came to votes in the House, they often voted together, a new voting bloc of the populist left and right. The President had run for the White House in part to fight against this new isolationism. Like so much else he had done, the Speaker considered it a personal affront and a political assault.

“What about privatizing Dormigen production?” the Speaker asked defensively.

“Yes, that came up in a few of the conversations, but no one seems to care why we have a shortage,” the Chief of Staff answered, somewhat ruefully. She looked at the President. “Do you remember what Cedrek told us?”

“The French President,” the National Security Adviser interjected for the benefit of the rest of us.

“No, I don’t remember,” the President said.

The Chief of Staff continued, “He said—I even wrote it down…” She flipped through a legal pad and then continued, reading from her notes: “ ‘The Americans have been stealing our lunch money for fifty years and now you come asking to borrow some change.’”

“Stealing their lunch money?” the Speaker said incredulously. “That has no basis in reality. Half these countries have been free-riding off of our military for the last century. South Korea? Please tell me that South Korea has shipped us Dormigen.”

“South Korea has been very generous,” the Chief of Staff said.

“They should be, given all we’ve done for them,” the Speaker declared.

“I’ll mention that to them,” the President replied.

The National Security Adviser said calmly, “With all due respect, Madam Speaker, many of these countries perceive that the United States has been insensitive to their needs, especially in recent years. Whatever the objective reality, their perception is what matters here. You are welcome to tell them they should feel more grateful, but I suspect that will just make the problem worse.”

“What about killing them with kindness?” the Senate Majority Leader said. He had been largely silent since our early meetings. In the Cabinet Room, he sat with his jacket buttoned, his huge paunch creating what looked like an Olympic ski jump onto the table. But now his inner LBJ had been activated. “Everybody is willing to make some kind of deal, if we sweeten it enough.”

“I’m not sure that’s true in this case,” the Chief of Staff said. “This is more about national pride.”

“It could actually make things worse,” the National Security Adviser added. “If a leader is seen as taking a big payoff from the U.S., and then they come up short on Dormigen in their own country, even just a few deaths, it would be a political nightmare. Why take the risk?”

“Maybe we make them a deal they can’t refuse,” the Senate Majority Leader said. “These countries don’t really want to be on the wrong side of the United States.” The room was silent as the participants around the table absorbed the Majority Leader’s thought. He continued. “They’ve got a surplus of Dormigen—”

“Maybe they have a surplus,” the Acting HHS Secretary interrupted. “They can’t be sure exactly what they will need.”

“Okay, fine,” the Majority Leader continued. “They are likely to have a surplus and we need what they have. With the resources of this government, I find it hard to believe we can’t make some kind of deal happen.” He shook his head in mock amazement, as he had done so many times to such great effect at Rotary Club speeches and sports banquets and Fourth of July parades.

“Remember, we’ve already collected over a million doses,” the Chief of Staff answered. “Our allies have contributed what they think they can afford to do without. Now it gets harder.”

“Then isn’t this really just about China?” the House Speaker asked, though it did not really sound like a question. “Isn’t that what we should be talking about? That offer is on the table. That one solves our problem in one stroke.” We had been briefed that morning on the President’s upcoming visit to the South China Sea. If he was going to make that trip—land on the carrier, as our Pacific allies were expecting—he needed to leave in about forty-eight hours. One meeting in Hawaii had already been stripped from the schedule; there were briefings in Guam and the Philippines that could be canceled as well, buying more time. But two days was the max before Air Force One had to be wheels-up to make the South China Sea Conference, the culmination of America’s effort to build a bulwark against Chinese meddling in the region. The South China Sea Agreement had been in negotiation, on and off, since the Obama administration: nine signatory nations; 711 pages, including addendums on fishing, mineral rights, endangered species, even fighting piracy; and one high-profile landing by the U.S. President on an aircraft carrier to put a fine point on it all. No wonder the Chinese were willing to give us a million doses of Dormigen to ditch the whole thing.

The President slapped the conference table, somewhere between a tap and a bang, and said, “Why are we not making more progress on the virus? I don’t understand that. That’s where we need to beat this thing. We should not be begging the rest of the world to fix this problem. I need better options.”

The NIH Director answered quickly, perhaps a tad too defensive: “Mr. President, we’ve got three teams working around the clock on this thing, and they’ve made remarkable progress in a short amount of time. Usually it takes decades to confront a disease like this. We have weeks.”

“Then this is when you need to dig deeper, think differently,” the President demanded. “Can you not see the stakes here? What we need is the Manhattan Project and what we’re getting is a government task force.” The President looked around the room as he made his motivational speech, or whatever it was. He never made eye contact with me, but I could feel my neck and face flushing. I was, after all, the only one in the room specifically because of my purported expertise on viruses.

The Strategist said, “To be fair, the Manhattan Project took at least a couple of years.” He typed quickly on his phone. The President ignored him. After a moment of silence, the Strategist read from his phone, “Yeah, four years, one hundred and thirty thousand people. You got to love Wikipedia, right?”

“Maybe we should take a short break,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Fine,” the President agreed. “But I’m telling you, these options are not good enough.”

“One thing,” the Acting HHS Secretary said, raising his hand slightly. “I’ve said this before, but I think we need to discuss what happens if we come up short on Dormigen. I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but I think we need a plan.”

“I agree,” the Secretary of Defense said.

“That’s for Congress to decide,” the House Speaker said.

“No, actually, it’s not,” the President said.

The Speaker replied, “Since when does Congress not have a say—”

The Chief of Staff cut her off: “I’ll put it on the agenda for this afternoon.”

“One more thing,” the Communications Director interjected, speaking for the first time I could remember. Mostly he just sat at the end of the table checking his phone, reading and typing messages. He was a former cable news political correspondent, trimmer and younger than the others in the room, with a full head of hair and a nicer suit. He and the President were the only two who consistently looked good on television. “The blogosphere is starting to heat up,” he said, looking at his phone. “I’m getting some inquiries.”

“What exactly?” the Chief of Staff asked.

“The President canceled the Hawaii meetings, the Speaker has been at the White House for three days in a row, that kind of thing. They’re starting to smell a story.”

“Are there any leaks?” the President asked.

“Not yet.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?” the President asked in the same impatient, ornery tone that he had been using for most of the morning.

“I’ve got some ideas,” the Communications Director assured him.

“Like what?” the President asked.

“We don’t need the whole group for that,” the Chief of Staff said, closing her leather legal pad holder. “Okay, everyone, let’s come back in twenty minutes.”

The participants stood and whipped out their phones and other devices. I got up and wandered over to a table with cookies and coffee, more out of a need to do something than because I needed cookies or coffee. The President’s comments had struck a chord. Were we really working as aggressively as we might on Capellaviridae? For all the effort, we still had no new insights on lurking viruses. We had no clue what triggered Capellaviridae to turn fatal, not even any decent theories. I was the one who was supposed to be making progress on that front.

I made one call during that break and sent one text. The call was pure genius. The text turned out to be a complete disaster.

29.

DURING THE BREAK, THE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR USED his phone to show the Chief of Staff a short video clip of the Speaker of the House arriving at the White House. “CNN is running this over and over,” he told her.

“Do you think she tipped them off?” the Chief of Staff asked.

“Maybe. It makes her look presidential. Why else would a camera crew happen to be there when she arrived?” the Communications Director suggested.

“We can’t prove it,” the Chief of Staff said.

“Of course not. I just thought you should know.” The Communications Director was still looking down at his phone. “Oh, fuck,” he said.

“What?”

“Fox is reporting that there is some crisis related to the Saudi coup attempt.” He continued to read, and then said, “Where do they get this crap?” He began to read from his phone: “Sources close to the White House are reporting that Saudi Arabia’s nuclear strike force has been put on high alert in the wake of a coup attempt, prompting other nuclear powers in the region to respond in kind.” Saudi Arabia had only been a nuclear power for a handful of years. After Iran acquired the bomb, the other major powers in the region scrambled to even the playing field. The Saudis had the resources to spend freely, so they were the first to get the bomb (allegedly with the assistance of the Israelis, who believed that a nuclear Saudi Arabia would be the best counterweight to a nuclear Iran). Egypt followed soon thereafter. Given the instability of the region, there was a chronic fear of some kind of nuclear incident. A press person for the Joint Chiefs of Staff had refused to comment on the Fox nuclear alert story, which merely incited more interest.

I stood in a corner of the conference room, sipping coffee idly. The President’s admonition was replaying itself in my mind. We really did need the virus equivalent of the Manhattan Project. There was no excuse for not doing everything—anything—that might be remotely productive. With that in mind, I called Dartmouth’s Department of Biological Sciences, where I spoke to a friendly administrative assistant. Professor Huke had retired several years earlier, but he was still living in the area. She gave me his phone number. I gathered my thoughts for a moment and then dialed. Professor Huke’s wife answered. He was outside working in the garden, she said, and would call me back as soon as he came in.

I wandered over to the Chief of Staff and told her what I was thinking. Huke was not an expert on lurking viruses, but he did have an excellent grasp of the broader field. Maybe we were too deep in the rabbit hole and needed to pull our heads out and look around. Huke would be a guy who could help us do that. “Of course we should talk to him,” the Chief of Staff said. “We can bring him to Washington or we can fly you up there.”

“How do I do that?” I asked. I was still learning all the protocols.

“Go this afternoon, after this meeting,” she instructed. “We’ll get you an Air Force plane. Just let me know the closest airport.”

Huke called back just as the participants were making their way back to the Cabinet Room. He did not remember me; I had not expected that he would. I briefly explained the work I was doing at NIH and that we were facing a new threat from a lurking virus that could infect humans.

“That’s curious,” Huke said.

“Exactly,” I agreed. “It’s potentially dangerous. I’m hoping I could speak to you in person about it, as soon as possible.”

“I’m not an expert on lurking viruses,” he protested.

“I know, but we need to take a step back on this one. Our thoughts have gone stale.”

“Sure. I’m retired now, so you pick the time and place.”

Huke did not react when I asked if we could meet early the following morning. He knew enough about viruses to recognize that public health situations are often time-sensitive. I offered to meet him in a Hanover coffee shop, but Huke suggested that I come to his house instead.

While this conversation was going on, I got a surprising inbound text. It was from Sloan, my Dartmouth infatuation, whom I had last seen at a friend’s wedding six or eight months earlier. It said, “In DC. Can you get coffee?? So eager to see u.” The meeting had resumed in the Cabinet Room, so I stepped out of the room to send a quick reply. Sloan had that effect on me.

30.

I DID NOT LEAK ANYTHING. THIS WAS THE CONCLUSION OF both congressional inquiries. My answers to the commissions were entirely truthful, if somewhat misleading. (In the eyes of the law, that is not a crime.) Still, the reality is that my meeting with Sloan inadvertently set in motion a series of events that I deeply regret.

Sloan lived in New York City. We had drifted apart after graduation, but we still saw each other at weddings, reunions, and the like. We never dated in college, but we did “hook up” briefly during senior week—the week prior to our graduation from Dartmouth when classes were over, our diplomas had been earned, and we were left to do in seven days everything we wished we had done over the previous four years. Sloan and I had a long conversation after a class picnic on one of those June evenings when the sun seems to linger forever, the light getting softer and more beautiful before darkness finally falls and the temperature plunges. We were both drunk, not sloppily so, but enough to precipitate a long, meandering, lovely conversation about life’s big questions: our regrets at Dartmouth; our plans after graduation; the state of our families; the role that Turkey could play in promoting peace in the Middle East. (I said it was meandering.) Sloan leaned close to me, in part because it was getting cool, but also because our body language reflected the intensity of our conversation and the depth of the bond that we had built over four years—the kind of bond, really, that it’s hard to build at other points in life. And, as I mentioned, we were drunk. At one point two asshole lacrosse players began tossing beer at one another. I pulled Sloan out of the path of an arcing plastic cup of cheap beer and ended up with my arms wrapped around her from behind. My nose just dusted her hair and I could smell the flowery fragrance of her shampoo. I inhaled deeply.

I am a scientist, not a romance novelist. As a scientist, I can say that a hundred million years of natural selection was telling my body that I should reproduce, which tends to produce a physical reaction. A romance novelist might simply point out that my dick was harder than the pine picnic table. Sloan was wearing jeans; nothing made her look better or more alluring. When she sensed the physiological response of my reptilian brain, she pushed gently back against me, and that sensation—her clearly sexual response after my years of platonic longing—remains one of the more pleasant sensations I have experienced in life.

“Will you walk me home?” she asked.

My answer should be obvious. Our walk home has social significance because of two things that happened, which is why I have gone to great lengths to explain how the night unfolded. We headed from the picnic area toward Sloan’s off-campus apartment, but then took a detour onto a well-worn path that led through a small pine forest and up a hill to an open field that housed the college observatory. It was a lovely spot; the night was crisp and clear. The observatory was obviously there for a reason. We were hours from a major city, so the night sky was brilliantly illuminated. There is no better brew for inspiring contemplation about the meaning of life for a pair of twenty-two-year-olds than college graduation, alcohol, and the endless bright expanse of a starry night. “So tell me what you’re going to do with your life?” Sloan asked.

By then we were sitting on a bed of pine needles at the edge of the clearing. I was leaning against an old stone wall and Sloan was resting in my arms, which was both a natural continuation of what had happened at the picnic and an instinctive response to the crisp New Hampshire night. “I’m going to be a scientist,” I said. “And I want to teach at a place like this.” We loved Dartmouth. For all our griping over the years, we had talked often about some of our more inspiring professors and our unique opportunities to interact with them, rather than being treated like the academic equivalent of cattle, herded into a huge lecture hall to listen to a teaching assistant with a tenuous grasp of English.

“It’s an amazing lifestyle,” Sloan said. Only she would be prescient enough to think about lifestyle at that point. Our peers were rushing off to take jobs with hedge funds and investment banks, eagerly boasting about the ninety-hour weeks that they would work. It would take until our tenth reunion for many of them to admit that their lives were a wreck.

“What kind of lawyer are you going to be in twenty years?” I asked.

“I won’t be a lawyer,” she said emphatically.

“Does Harvard Law know that?” I asked. Sloan had been accepted to Harvard Law (and every other law school to which she applied). She had deferred for a year to travel and write columns for a small Vermont newspaper.

“I’m going to be a writer—journalism of some sort, probably political journalism,” she said. She had been the editor of the Dartmouth newspaper, so that was hardly a stretch.

“So why law school, then?” I asked.

“Because it will set me apart.” She paused, staring at the stars. “Because I’ll have some substantive knowledge, rather than just being able to write. There are lots of good writers in the world, and there are plenty of Harvard Law grads, but there aren’t many who are both.”

We sat at the edge of that clearing watching the stars for a long time. If I could relive several hours of my life, kind of like the play Our Town, these would be the hours I would choose. The night sky was indescribably beautiful. I was holding in my arms the girl I had both loved and lusted after for nearly four years, who nuzzled closer as I buried my face in her hair and ran my hand gently across her breasts. The college chapter of our lives was drawing to a successful close; we had everything to look forward to—both in the next hour or two, at least for me, and then beyond.

I held her hand as we wound our way through a narrow wooded path that led to her building. When we reached the front door she turned and wrapped her arms around my neck. We kissed—not the platonic pecks that we had exchanged a hundred times over the years—but a deep lingering kiss. Her mouth tasted of beer and spearmint gum, which I remember her popping in as we left the picnic. The moment was wonderful, and we had done something that we had never done before, but I recognize now that it was not particularly passionate, at least not on Sloan’s part. After the long kiss, during which my hands roamed up and down like some kind of time-sensitive geological survey, Sloan pulled back and gave me a peck on the forehead, a much more familiar gesture. “Good night,” she said. “This was wonderful. Perfect.” She did not invite me in.

Sloan’s career plan was uncanny, because it unfolded pretty much as she described that night. She spent two years writing and traveling (deferring Harvard for a second time) while building up a portfolio of work. She ground her way through Harvard Law while working summers in the newsroom at the New York Times. Between her second and third years, she was the personal assistant to Barack Obama, helping to draft his columns. Sloan’s postgraduation job search worked out exactly as she had planned: she was a Harvard Law grad applying for prestigious journalism jobs, setting her apart from other aspiring writers. Meanwhile, her super-smart law school classmates were slashing each other’s eyes out competing for clerkships and positions at prestigious law firms.

Sloan was clever. She was also ambitious, in the old Shakespearean pejorative sense of the word, which I did not fully appreciate until I became a victim of that ambition.

31.

WE RECONVENED AFTER LUNCH IN THE CABINET ROOM, BUT the meeting broke up almost immediately, before the President had even taken his seat. The Communications Director, tethered as always to his phone, said, “Hold on, can we have five minutes here?” He huddled in the corner with the President, the Chief of Staff, and the Strategist. Something had obviously broken in the news. I did a quick search on my phone. The top story was that teen pop star Onyx was reportedly pregnant. Obviously that was not delaying our meeting—but I clicked anyway. “Hollywood sources” were saying that Ryan Seacrest, who had to be nearly sixty, might be the father. I restrained myself from clicking on that, too.

I scrolled down. There was a study purporting to show that one donut a day could lower your blood pressure. That was not why the President was huddled in the corner, either. I scrolled further. The script for an Oscar-nominated film was allegedly plagiarized. Two convicts had escaped from a New York state prison, one of them for the second time. (According to a poll on the subject—who conducts polls about prison breaks?—a solid majority of Americans were pulling for the escapees.) And then, near the bottom of the page: “News Outlet Reports Nuclear Standoff.” Some Middle East news agency that I had never heard of, perhaps because it was really just some Arab guy sitting in his underwear in his parents’ basement, was reporting that Saudi Arabia had threatened “nuclear retaliation against the state sponsors of the recent coup attempt.” The story hinted that Iran was behind the coup and that the Saudis had Tehran in their nuclear crosshairs. Even I knew that made no sense. The Iranians are Shia Muslims; the coup plotters were radical Sunnis. Besides, the President had been with us since our morning delay, so my sense was that that situation was under control. I clicked around. Other news outlets had picked up the story from the Middle East Affairs News Outlet. All of the coverage mentioned that the President had been sequestered in the White House for days with the Secretary of Defense, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority Leader. They did get that right. A cub reporter on a high school newspaper could tell that something was afoot, even if it did not happen to be a nuclear standoff in the Middle East.

I was amazed by the speed with which the cameras were set up on the White House lawn. Each major news outlet gave the crisis a name, because every disaster of any sort must now have a name. Fox News tossed subtlety aside and went with “Countdown to Armageddon.” NBC went with “Nuclear Nightmare?,” which deserves honorable mention for inviting panic while simultaneously adding the question mark to signal they really had no clue what was happening. The nuclear story was taking on a life of its own, crowding out nearly everything else on the political page (though Onyx’s alleged pregnancy was still a far more popular story overall). Another story at the bottom of the Netflix politics blog caught my eye. The Speaker of the House had told a group of political reporters that the U.S. approach to China “may be overly confrontational.” I was still a political neophyte, but even I could see her long game on this one. China had the Dormigen; the Speaker was going to be the one to get it.

The President, the Chief of Staff, and the others had wandered back to the table in the Cabinet Room, still discussing the nuclear situation. “It buys us time,” the Communications Director was arguing.

“Great,” the President said sarcastically. “It might also set off a real nuclear conflict. The last thing we need is a bunch of unstable regimes believing that the Saudis and the Israelis are conspiring to launch an attack.”

“No government is going to take this seriously,” the Communications Director said.

“The hell they won’t,” the President snapped. “Have you spent any time in the region? Have you? The place runs on conspiracy theories, not to mention that there are twenty different groups that will use this to advance their agenda, whether they think it’s true or not. This story needs to die now.”

“Then how do we explain it?” the Communications Director said, motioning to the rest of us standing and sitting around the conference table.

“That’s your job,” the President said unhelpfully. The Chief of Staff called the meeting back to order, but no more than three minutes later the Communications Director interrupted, “Sorry, can I have five minutes alone with the President?”

“You just had twenty,” the President said. “Unless you can get me a million doses of Dormigen, we need to be right here.”

“I agree with the President,” the Speaker of the House said. “We still don’t have a grasp on what’s happening here.”

“Give me five minutes,” the Communications Director insisted. “I can kill this nuclear story right now. Can we talk with the First Lady?”

“What does she have to do with this?” the President asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Five minutes, everybody. Sorry,” the Communications Director said.

I was not privy to the subsequent meeting. I admire the First Lady for her willingness to play a role in a very clever misdirection scheme. Then again, no one ever doubted the First Lady’s toughness. The Communication Director’s plan can best be described as media tai chi. “You cannot fight a story, no matter how ridiculous it is,” he told me later. “You can only redirect the frenzy.” Buried in the news that day was another story—made up wholesale by some Internet troll—that the President was having an affair with a South American diplomat. The story had no legs whatsoever. The page had ninety-one views when the Communications Director stumbled across it. It was wedged between a headline proclaiming that a cream made from avocado pits could cure skin cancer and another alleging that the former Federal Reserve Chair had stolen two tons of gold during his tenure—purloining bars one at a time from the vault under the New York Federal Reserve Bank, hiding them under his desk (which was in Washington??), and eventually sneaking it all out in the family minivan.

Later that afternoon, the Communications Director released a statement proclaiming, “The President and First Lady have a rock-solid marriage,” and that any reports of extramarital affairs were “damaging and unsubstantiated.” Every press person immediately recognized the “nondenial denial,” which in media-speak means that the Communications Director had not denied the affair. He had merely described it as “damaging and unsubstantiated,” which means, “Yeah, it’s true, but my boss made me say something.” Over the next hour, the original South American affair story had fifty-two thousand hits, at which point the server went down.[6] At about the same time, the Washington Post–USA Today reported that a “senior White House official” had “acknowledged the possibility” that the President was embroiled in a salacious sex scandal with “a member of the foreign diplomatic corps.” The genius of this misdirection was twofold. First, the nuclear story went away. (The cameras on the White House lawn were disassembled almost immediately and dispatched to camp out at various embassies across Washington.) Second, the mainstream media could pass off this sex scandal as real news, rather than just salacious gossip, because it involved a foreign diplomat, no doubt a spy. Obviously, the public has a right to know if the President is giving up national security secrets in exchange for sexual favors.

The news “analysts” quickly pieced the story together: the nuclear situation was just a cover for the President’s sexual misdeeds, which were so serious that he had assembled the top officials in the government, including the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader, to discuss the possibility of his resignation. When this rumor frenzy was at its peak, the Communications Director leaked a photograph of a voluptuous, ethnically ambiguous, thirty-something woman to a Spanish-language television network. Much like that first iconic picture of Monica Lewinsky in the beret, this lovely Mediterranean or Arab or Hispanic woman became the face of the crisis. The press camped out at the twenty-plus embassies most likely to have a sexy spy with a vaguely olive complexion. In reality, the photo was computer-generated: a composite of several attractive celebrities, including a Lebanese jazz singer and a Brazilian soccer star, all melded together by a young computer whiz at the NSA. It was just an unfortunate coincidence that the computer-generated photo bore a stunning resemblance to Maria de la Campos Rivera, the head of the political section at the Colombian Embassy. Telemundo made the discovery, after which the press corps followed her doggedly. This turned out to be doubly tragic, since she was, in fact, having an affair with the married Cuban ambassador.

Roughly 60 percent of the American population still believes that the President was passing secrets through this Colombian mistress to the Cubans. That is ten times the number of Americans who can correctly locate Saudi Arabia on a world map.

32.

BACK IN THE CABINET ROOM, WE STILL HAD NOT ADDRESSED the two most contentious issues: China and a possible “rationing plan” for Dormigen if we were to come up short. Before we plunged into that, the Chief of Staff updated us on assorted other small developments. The U.S. military had identified a stash of Dormigen in Germany, some forty thousand doses, that would be shipped back stateside immediately. The Canadians were monitoring their Dormigen usage on a daily basis; demand was falling short of their projections, so they shipped us a hundred thousand doses and projected they might be able to donate more in the coming days. The better news came from a working group at the Centers for Disease Control. Doctors there had lowered the likely fatality rate for those sickened by Capellaviridae to a range between 0.5 to 1.1 percent—which they described as “on par with a virulent strain of the flu.” The earlier estimates were based on data from victims who had not sought treatment. Those who showed up at a hospital were likely to do better, even without Dormigen. The CDC experts wrote in a short memo, “If victims are treated with fluids and antibiotics to deal with possible secondary infections, the likely fatality rate would be appreciably lower than our earlier estimate.” The report also noted that the pattern of fatalities would be similar to a bad flu: the very old, the very young, and the immunocompromised. Our intuition was confirmed: the early fatalities—clusters of college students and young, otherwise healthy men—were not the most vulnerable populations; they were the ones who were too stubborn to seek treatment.

Despite the protestations of the Strategist, we had abandoned “the number” and were now working with a “likely range” of deaths. Experts typically use confidence intervals when projecting outcomes. “The number” had been a bizarre and artificially precise construct. Still, I would emphasize how important it was in those early days to quantify the risk we were facing. We should be grateful to the Strategist, his personal foibles aside,[7] for his unwillingness to bury his head in the sand. The dominant sentiment in those early meetings was denial, which was the worst possible response.

Our range had settled at seventy-five thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand likely deaths. “Most of these people are going to die anyway,” the Strategist said.

“So are we,” the Acting HHS Secretary said.

“You know what I mean,” the Strategist said. “Most of these people are very sick to begin with. You read the CDC memo.”

“Not the very young,” the Acting HHS Secretary replied.

“Right,” the Strategist conceded. “But we can give them the Dormigen we have.”

The Chief of Staff interrupted the exchange. “Hold those thoughts,” she said. “We need to talk about China first.”

“That Dormigen offer is still on the table?” the Senate Majority Leader asked.

“Of course it is,” the President answered. “This is the best thing to happen to them since the British left Hong Kong.”

The Chief of Staff turned to the National Security Adviser. “Can you update us on where we are on the South China Sea Summit?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she replied crisply. “We can buy ourselves another two days. I’ve spoken to most of my counterparts in the other signatory nations. Rather than landing on the carrier at the beginning of the summit, they feel it would have the same effect if the President were to leave from a carrier after the agreement is signed.”

“We just do it at the end instead of the beginning,” the President said.

“Exactly. Two things need to happen,” the National Security Adviser answered confidently. “The President needs to be there to sign the agreement. And we need to have some show of military presence in the disputed area to signal our collective resolve. Our allies feel—and I agree—that there is no substitute for an American carrier group clearly staking out international waters.”

“So we sail an aircraft carrier along the China coast?” the Speaker of the House asked indignantly.

“No, ma’am,” the National Security Adviser answered, not betraying any change in emotion. “We sail the carrier group through international waters that the Chinese government has heretofore illegally claimed to be their exclusive—”

“Okay, okay,” the Speaker said. “But we’re still talking about a big military pissing match over a bunch of islands in the South China Sea.”

“No, that is entirely wrong,” the President interjected. “This is an agreement we have been negotiating for twenty years. It covers everything from fishing rights to human trafficking. It is the cornerstone of our entire defense strategy in the region.”

The Secretary of Defense added, “I want to underscore what the President said on this. Our allies are counting on us to be the anchor of this agreement. China has not proved to be the responsible actor on the international stage that we had hoped. We need a multilateral effort to contain a variety of illegal and aggressive actions on their part.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” the Speaker said. “We’re talking about a bunch of uninhabited islands ten thousand miles from here.”

“We are talking about much more than that, ma’am,” the National Security Adviser said.

“Enough to let Americans die?” the Speaker asked. “We are unwilling to ask for the medicine that will save all those lives? That just feels like testosterone run amok.”

The President said, “If we back down on this, it will be Yalta all over again. We will pay a huge price in that part of the world—all over the world, actually—if we capitulate to Chinese aggression.”

The Speaker replied, “Yalta? You know what it feels like to me? Vietnam. Your team has some deluded notion that terrible things are going to happen if we don’t project strength thousands of miles from our borders. Are we willing to let tens of thousands of Americans die for that?”

The Senate Majority Leader, who normally sat impassively for these conversations, added, “Mr. President, I have to agree with the Speaker on this one. It would be awfully difficult to explain to my constituents back in Illinois that their loved ones are dying from a preventable disease because we’re trying to protect Vietnamese fishing rights. I can’t sell that to a Rotary Club.”

“You know this is about much more than Vietnamese fishing rights,” the President said sharply.

“I do,” the Majority Leader answered. “But that doesn’t mean I could sell it to a Rotary Club back home.”

“Here’s what you say,” the Strategist offered. “You tell them that you don’t think we should subvert America’s interests to an authoritarian regime for the next hundred years in order to save people who are likely to die soon anyway. You sprinkle in some historical references to the times when the democracies were too timid to stand up to authoritarian bullies. Then you finish with an overview of how the United States led a coalition of democracies that successfully contained the Soviet Union.”

“Maybe I’ll just have you give the talk,” the Majority Leader said, chuckling.

“This is a decision Congress should make,” the House Speaker said tartly.

The President waved the comment away with a dismissive sweep of his hand. “Congress will do whatever helps most in the midterm elections,” he said. “There is no long-term vision there. That’s why we don’t make military decisions in the legislature.”

“With respect, Mr. President, Congress will do what the American people want them to do,” the Speaker shot back.

The Strategist offered, “Roosevelt had to drag the country into World War II. We would have watched the Holocaust from afar if it weren’t for Pearl Harbor.”

“Let’s not pretend we’re dealing with the Holocaust here,” the Speaker said.

“I think the point is that popular opinion is not always a great gauge in these kinds of situations,” the Secretary of Defense interjected. “The South China Sea Agreement is very compelling. We’ve done it right. It has the backing of all our key allies. We have bipartisan support in the Senate—”

“Not if they know the price we have to pay,” the Majority Leader said.

“Obviously,” the Defense Secretary continued. “I’m just saying that if we are going to sit here tossing historical examples back and forth, this is not some unilateral muscle-flexing.”

“Like Iraq,” the President said.

“Correct. This is not Iraq. To the contrary, the world is looking to us on this one. They want us to lead in the region,” the Defense Secretary said.

“Can we just go back to India for a minute?” the President asked. “Because then we wouldn’t have the South China Sea problem.”

“We’ve hit a dead end there, sir,” the National Security Adviser said.

“I don’t understand that. The world’s biggest democracy—how are we not getting more help from them?” the President asked, almost pleading.

“The Prime Minister is in political trouble,” the National Security Adviser explained (though we had been over this ground before). “His coalition is breaking up. He thinks this would be political suicide for him. He cannot be seen as shipping medicine out of the country.”

“Saving hundreds of thousands of lives is bad politics?” the President replied in frustration.

“When we canceled the trade deal with India, it provoked enormous hostility there,” the Secretary of Defense answered. “We were their biggest export market. The perception is that the U.S. is indifferent to the country’s welfare.”

“What about the military angle?” the President asked. “We can revisit the Boeing deal.”

“Sir, we rejected that deal for sound reasons,” the Secretary of Defense answered, looking somewhat alarmed by the subject. “The Prime Minister has been very bellicose toward the Pakistanis. The Islamabad government is hanging by a string. Sending advanced fighters to India right now would destabilize the region. Pakistan is a nuclear power. The last thing we need—”

“Yeah, okay, I got it,” the President said. “You’re telling me we can’t do some kind of secret deal with Delhi? Send him money to a Swiss bank account if we have to.”

“That government is worse at keeping secrets than we are,” the Secretary of Defense said.

“Are we really talking about a Swiss bank account?” the Speaker asked. “Really?”

“It’s just an example, for fuck sake,” the President snarled. “But yes, now that I think about it, I would ship briefcases full of cash anywhere in the goddamn world if I could get the Dormigen without selling out our country to the Chinese.”

There was a brief lull in the conversation. The participants around the table instinctively looked to the President. “Give me something better,” he said.