The Nirvana Plague Read online

  The four of them filed up the stairs to the second floor apartment. Coming inside, DeStefano blocked her from closing the door behind them, as if he needed to secure his escape route. He started talking at once:

  “Your husband is ordered to stay inside the apartment. He may not go outside this door. No one other than yourself or a Board of Health officer or physician may enter the apartment. Other than yourself or a Board of Health officer or physician, he may not talk to or communicate with anyone — on the phone, out the window, through the door, or in any other way. If he fails to comply with this order, he will be taken into custody and placed in isolation at Dade County Psychiatric Hospital. An officer will phone you every three hours. If Roger fails to speak with the officer who calls, it will be considered a violation of quarantine. A video surveillance camera will be placed on the outside surface of this door, and it will be monitored by a security service. If the camera is tampered with or blocked, it will be considered a violation of quarantine.”

  Roger had lost interest before DeStefano finished. He crossed to the window and stood looking down at the street, his back to the room.

  “Does he understand this order?”

  “Does he?” Karen said. “You’re asking me? Does he?”

  “Do you understand this order?”

  “Hell no, I don’t understand this order! What is he in isolation for?”

  “I have been ordered to place him in mandatory quarantine under the Infectious Disease Control Act. If your husband does not acknowledge that he understands this order, then either you, as his legal guardian, must acknowledge the order and accept full responsibility for his compliance with the order, or we will have to take him into custody. Do you acknowledge and accept responsibility for complying with the order?”

  “For how long? What about my job?”

  “For an indefinite period. If you do not feel that you can make arrangements, then we will—”

  “Wait! Can you just wait a goddamn minute, please? What about his doctor? Can’t he talk to his doctor?”

  “A Board of Health physician will visit or call periodically.”

  “I’m not talking about a physician. What about his own doctor, his psychiatrist?”

  “That will be at the discretion of the Board of Health physician. Do you acknowledge the order and accept—”

  “Yes, goddammit! Of course!”

  DeStefano turned to the police officer. “You witness Dr. Hanover’s acknowledgement of the order?”

  The officer nodded.

  Out of a coat pocket, DeStefano retrieved a little black sphere, the size of a ping-pong ball. It was the camera. Reaching up, he snapped its flat side onto the lintel, lens pointing downward. A green status indicator lit up, showing it was active.

  Karen felt the world spinning ever further out of control.

  “What is it you think is wrong with him? Why won’t you even look at him?”

  “The physician will contact you tomorrow,” DeStefano said woodenly, and turned away.

  Knowing that Ally would be too busy to talk till the dinnertime crowd thinned, Marley waited till after eight o’clock to call.

  The first thing she said was: “So where are you exactly?”

  “I’ve got guest accommodations on the NIH campus.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s in Bethesda. You’re still at work, I assume?”

  “Have you talked to Karen yet?”

  “No. I had a fairly irate e-mail from her, which I responded to. But I didn’t feel up to calling her.”

  “Well, I had a fairly irate call from her. She thinks you put Roger into quarantine.”

  “I know. But I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even told about it until after I got here.”

  “Whether you had anything to do with it or not, she’s—”

  “—I just said I didn’t.—”

  “—she’s feeling desperate. If Roger’s in quarantine, so is she. She can’t leave him alone. He won’t stay in the apartment if she does. She can’t go to work. She won’t let them put him back in the hospital. She’s not allowed to have anyone come in to baby-sit. She can’t tie him to the bedpost.”

  “I see.”

  “She’s afraid even to go out for groceries. I volunteered to help her out with that. I’ll take some things over in the morning before I open up the shop.”

  “That’s great. I’m glad the two of you have become friends.”

  “So what you are doing there exactly?”

  “I can’t tell you any more than I already have.”

  “You haven’t told me anything really. Secret government research.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re not helping them perfect their mind-control techniques, I hope?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I assume this has some connection with IDD?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “My, what a good little soldier.”

  “Don’t.”

  She dropped her voice: “Hey, should we be talking like this? Is this line secure?”

  “You wanna give me a break?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What is your point anyway?”

  “It’s just kind of weird, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anyway, this is your big break, right?”

  “My big break?”

  “The chance you’ve been waiting for — to make a name for yourself. Run with the big dogs in the high grass. Develop a following. Acquire groupies. You know.”

  “This is serious, Ally.”

  “What is?”

  “What I’m here for.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I told you I can’t discuss it.”

  “But we are discussing it.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I apologize. I apologize for doing something. I apologize for giving a shit.”

  “You know that’s not the problem. Giving a shit. Where are you?”

  “I told you—”

  “—But where are you really? Where did you go?”

  “This is not the time, Ally.”

  “Are you ever coming back?”

  He didn’t know how to answer her. Everything was in a whirl.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. For everything. I’ll call you again tomorrow.”

  Chapter 10

  Marley sat up late poring over medical records. Assaulted by the incessant flap of helicopters ferrying in and out of the place all night, aching with discomfort on his hardened slab of a bed, and tormented by cascades of conflicting emotions and thoughts, he slept fitfully at best. Finally, around 6:00 a.m., his phone started ringing with a vicious malevolence.

  He slapped around on the bed till he connected with the tablet.

  “Yes?” he answered on speaker, hoarse.

  “Dr. Marley, Lieutenant Tennover,” the tablet replied. “Time to get up, sir. Your meeting starts at 0800.”

  “Jesus. You have to get me another place to stay.”

  “I’ll pick you up for breakfast at 0700.”

  He grunted and slapped the tablet off.

  Tennover’s knock came at 7:00 sharp — six merciless military raps.

  Marley’s corpse rolled off the slab and opened the door.

  A six-foot statue of military poise stood there. “You’re not ready, sir?”

  “Come in,” Marley muttered. “Make yourself at home,” and shuffled into the bathroom.

  The commissary was a dreary low-ceilinged white-walled hall, thick with nervous-looking physicians and pasty-faced researchers bolting down sticky doughnuts and bitter coffee.

  Tennover sat down with Marley but didn’t eat, and didn’t say six words in twenty minutes.

  Breakfast done, the laconic lieutenant chauffeured him by electric cart through the tunnels that linked all the major buildings on the sprawling campus.

  By 7:45, they were at the security c
enter where Marley produced two forms of identification for a fishlike clerk in a constrictive dress who fingerprinted, photographed, DNA-sampled, and RID-scanned him to produce yet another credential.

  “This is your temporary visiting employee security badge,” she explained, making an odd puck sound with her lips. “It must be worn on the outside of the shirt at all times while on campus.”

  Back in the cart, Tennover followed a map on the dash through the tunnels to their final destination on the northeast corner of the campus.

  “Building 33,” he said, turning into a parking area crowded with a dozen other carts identical to theirs.

  A sign on the wall next to the elevator said “NIAID Biodefense”.

  “What’s N-I-A-I-D?” Marley said.

  “National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Everybody calls it ‘nigh-add’.”

  Tennover keyed the elevator with his ID card and punched the 2nd floor button. “We’re late,” he said.

  On the second floor they had to key their way individually through a mantrap between the elevator lobby and the rest of the building. Marley’s card was already functional.

  Tennover hurried him along a series of windowless corridors. The stale monotony of featureless grey walls was punctuated at compulsively regular intervals by framed false-color prints of abstract expressionless art, which Marley supposed might have been meant to suggest the strange nano-cosmos of the average microbe.

  Tennover stopped before a heavy door marked only “Room No. 2470.”

  Tennover swung open the conference room door. Marley felt a gentle swoosh of air, and it occurred to him as he entered that the room was kept under positive pressure because elsewhere in this facility there was a level 4 biohazard research lab stocked with some of the deadliest pathogens ever engineered by natural or unnatural selection.

  The meeting was already in progress. A long glass conference table gleamed like a pool of milk under overhead downlights. Benford was sitting at the head of the table.

  “You’re late, Lieutenant.”

  Tennover gave Marley a very slight glance. Not quite an accusation.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said to Benford.

  Marley looked at his watch. So did everyone else in the room. 8:04.

  Benford gestured him toward an open seat.

  Marley took his place down the table from Benford. Tennover joined the other aides seated around the perimeter of the room.

  “Is that coffee?” Marley said.

  Benford waited while they passed the pot down to him. Not quite the picture of patience.

  The woman seated next to him introduced herself as she passed the pot.

  “I’m Xan Delacourt.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re Carl Marley.”

  “Yes.”

  “Recognized you from your dossier.”

  “Ah.”

  “I enjoyed your paper. Fascinating stuff.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ve only just started.”

  Marley liked Delacourt immediately. She was a cognitive science researcher; he’d skimmed a couple of her papers last night. He knew from her dossier that she was forty-six, but she looked like she could be any age — or any racial type. Her straight dark hair suggested east Asian, but her features looked like a mix of African and European. Even her name was unplaceable. Was “Xan” Chinese? And she had the most remarkable green eyes. He wondered if they were artificially enhanced.

  She was dressed in jeans and a sweater. Looking round the table, Marley saw that this was more or less the standard non-uniform for the group.

  He’d worn a jacket and tie.

  Benford resumed the introductory remarks his entry had interrupted:

  “As I was saying, our meetings are being recorded and transcribed.”

  Everyone looked down at their tablets again. Marley tapped up the LEAF (Local Environment / Area Functions) on his screen. The room was wired for video and tracking. He had the choice of four different camera angles from which he could observe the meeting he was sitting in. Little nametags hung over the participants’ heads. A running auto-transcript scrolled down the side of the screen a few seconds behind their speeches. The sound was being recorded too, but was muted to prevent feedback.

  Benford continued: “You’ve all received the same comprehensive briefing materials, so there’s no need for me to tell you why we’re here. We’ve got a problem, and our job is to find a solution to that problem. Simple as that.”

  No introductions all round, no preliminary small talk, none of that. Straight to business. Marley scrolled back through the transcript. The figures on screen scrambled backwards through time. Benford walked in at 0800 sharp and started the meeting at once. He hadn’t missed the preliminary chitchat — there wasn’t any.

  Benford continued in the present: “As you know, yesterday Secretary Pritzker authorized the CDC to implement level one quarantine on all known civilian cases. Now, has everyone reviewed the latest updates this morning?”

  Yesses all around. Marley had skimmed through the latest on the way over while Tennover drove.

  “Then you know that two more cases have been reported in two different theatres of operation. Anything notable or significant about them?”

  Noes all around.

  “Now, I think the place to begin is diagnostics. How do we know when we have a case? You’ve all seen Dr. Marley’s paper from Clinical Psychiatry. I suggest we take that as our starting point for developing diagnostic criteria. That case report was our first indication that the syndrome had begun to appear in the civilian population. Before that, only military physicians and psychiatrists had seen these cases, and their diagnostic criteria were simplistic: if you zoned out on the line and didn’t want to fight, you had it. Obviously, that’s not going to work in the real world.”

  One of the men at the table sat forward. “Wait a second.”

  Marley glanced at the speaker’s image on his screen. The uninspired name of “Fred Peters” hovered over his head.

  Peters was a much-published research neurologist and a specialist in organic brain disease. In his late fifties, he was a bit older than most of the group. His voice had a harsh, sharp tone. His left hand was frozen into a stiff gesture suggestive of a crab’s claw, which he flourished like a conductor’s baton as he spoke. He had a number of other nervous tics and mannerisms. Even when he wasn’t talking, some part of him was always in motion.

  “I don’t see how Dr. Marley’s work is relevant. In fact, I don’t see any justification for supposing this so-called outbreak is anything other than garden-variety stress-reaction.”

  Seated beside Peters, a younger man smiled broadly, looking round the table. “Dr. Peters,” he explained, “has appointed himself the official skeptic of the group.” John Sikora was a Defense Department bioterrorism specialist. Marley found his presence in the group puzzling, if not absurd. Did Benford really think IDD could be a biological weapon? Sikora had a round, open face, blond hair and freckles, an athletic build, and a constantly changing smile. He looked more like a prep school politician than a bioweaponery expert.

  Benford responded to Peters in a measured tone: “As you know, Dr. Peters, the purpose of this group is to investigate that very question, so let’s—”

  “That’s my point, colonel. Let’s not jump right to figuring out the diagnostic criteria before we’ve established there’s anything wrong with the patient. If we can’t demonstrate with reasonable scientific certainty that these cases are not simple stress trauma reactions, then there’s no justification for going any further. The case for IDD just hasn’t been made. It’s a statistical anomaly.”

  Marley could see that Benford didn’t like being interrupted. And she didn’t want to waste more time going through this debate again.

  “All right,” she said. “Then how do you account for the fact that half a dozen COs scattered over half the planet have suddenly started reporting cases of bat
tle stress reaction different from the typical presentations they’re all familiar with, yet strikingly similar to each other? And remember that these COs aren’t even aware of one another’s reports.”

  “Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. This is the 21st century. Everybody communicates with everybody.”

  DiGrandi interjected: “We’ve reviewed their communications records. We know who they’ve been in touch with, and they haven’t been talking to each other.”

  DiGrandi was a Defense Intelligence contractor. He was the youngest person in the room. Either he hadn’t shaved in a week or this was his idea of a beard. Good-looking, slightly built, and dark. And he was obviously very bright — sharp, quick eyes, and no hesitation when he spoke. There hadn’t been much about him in the dossiers. Marley scrawled a note on his tablet. DiGrandi — access to surveillance material.

  Peters answered impatiently:

  “Yes, yes. But you don’t know who they gossip with in the real world, the non-electronic world, and what they gossip about. You don’t know whether any of those non-electronic contacts are corresponding with any of the other COs. You don’t know how much this idea is just ‘in the air.’ Rumors run through ground units even faster than the clap.”

  He waved his stiff hand in the air suggesting invisible infectious fads might be swarming through the room like pixie dust.

  “Each degree of separation between any two officers increases the domain of your analysis by another order of magnitude. You could never track all that down.”

  DiGrandi was unimpressed. “I think you’re being pretty farfetched.”

  Marley broke in: “What’s farfetched is the notion that four different enemies have suddenly deployed a spooky new neurological agent on six different battlefields and one psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Is there any CIA intel supporting that idea?”

  DiGrandi dismissed him: “I’m not with the CIA. Anyway, that’s just one of many possible explanations. It’s not necessarily the most probable one.”

  Peters nailed DiGrandi with a finger. “Now you’re talking sense! What is the most probable explanation? We should take that as our presumptive answer and test the observable facts against it. That is the scientific method after all.”