SEPTEMBER
Kate Blackwood heard the phone as soon as she turned off her hair dryer. She waited a moment, heard it ring again and hurried out of the bathroom. Only the White House and her new secretary there had the number.
Pulling on a ratty gray sweatshirt, she shook her dried hair back into order and climbed over the barricade of boxes still unpacked after more than two months in the Capitol. Work demands had robbed her of any time to become domestic. Besides, she liked the feeling of impermanence the boxes gave her.
She followed the ringing toward the last place she had actually seen the phone, atop a Matanzas Creek Winery box next to the French doors that overlooked her landlords' beautifully landscaped back yard.
When she reached the phone, she checked the LCD display. The display told her this was not a secure call. She need not activate the encryption features. The LCD's caller ID told her that it was indeed the White House calling. Kate picked up the handset.
"Blackwood," she answered.
"Ms. Blackwood, this is Betty Shuster with the White House switchboard calling."
"Good morning."
"Yes. Well, thank you. I'm sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but I've got a very persistent caller from Tokyo holding, an Army doctor, Colonel Mills, who says he knows you and must talk with you. I didn't want to give out your home number, but he says he has to talk with you about something that's a life-and-death matter."
Kate searched her memory. "Anthony Mills?"
"That's correct."
Anthony Mills. After a moment, a face came to her. She'd met him in an advanced molecular biology seminar during her last year of graduate school at Stanford. He'd been a second-year student at the medical school and had been paired with Kate for the hands-on parts of the seminar. He'd been an able lab partner, meticulous, often brilliant. They'd stayed in touch for a few months after the course and then lost contact.
"So he joined the Army."
"Pardon me?" The operator asked.
"Nothing," Kate said hastily. "Go ahead and connect us, please."
As soon as the operator put Kate on hold, the earpiece filled with a characterless New Age instrumental musical score of the kind the new president favored.
"Yuppie elevator music," Kate muttered as she unlocked the French doors and threw them open. Cool moist morning air rolled in, bringing with it the scents of flowers below. She dragged the phone with her out on the abbreviated wrought-iron balcony, tugging at the cord to free it from a box of kitchen paraphenalia that, like half her stuff, did not fit into this compact apartment and would have to go into storage.
As the music droned on in her ear, Kate looked around. She had been fortunate to find this apartment. It was small but functional and comfortable. It occupied the second floor of an old brick carriage house behind an 1880s stone Victorian, both of which had been lavishly restored by the owners. Most importantly, it was well away from the snobbish ghetto of Georgetown, where most of the Administration's people had congregated.
The few people who had visited her had expressed dismay over the state of the apartment, its modest size. Why, they had asked her, hadn't she taken a nicer place, hired a decorator, paid someone to unpack for her.
She simply shrugged a non-answer to them all. She thought all of that was pretentious; homes were to be lived in, not decorated like cakes. She didn't want strangers pawing through her clothes and the other objects of her life. She liked the temporary nature of the arrangement.
The telephone scratched and clicked. "Hello?" a voice said tentatively. "Hello Kate?"
"Tony?"
"You bet."
"It's been a while."
"Too many years."
"More than I'd like to count," she said.
They chatted like that for several minutes, then Tony interrupted, voice turned strained and anxious. "Kate, I don't want to seem abrupt, especially after all these years, but I'm up to my ass in a real bear of a problem -- "
"That's all right," Kate said as she stepped back inside the apartment and located a pen and pad of paper in case she had to take notes.
"Please don't misunderstand," he said quickly. "If it's not...appropriate or something, just let me know, okay?"
"Give me a break, Tony," Kate said as she shoved a pile of bath towels off the sofa and sat down. "Just spit it out."
The phone line fell silent for a moment.
"Well? So tell me."
Tony told he about the glanders "Korean Leprosy" summer outbreak in Tokyo. "It hit like a bomb,"` he said, "and less than two weeks later, poof! It was gone."
"Humor me for a minute, Tony. I've been in research all these years. What the hell's glanders?"
"Oh. Right, sorry." He cleared his throat. "Well, it's a pretty nasty bug even when it's normal."
"And this one isn't normal?" Kate interrupted.
"Not normal," Mills replied. "Not normal at all." He paused a beat. "It's primarily an animal disease, mostly in Asia, caused by the Malleomyces mallei bacteria. It's rare for humans to get it, but when it jumps species, the normal variety causes huge abscesses and suppurating skin sores. It sometimes has a pneumonic variety. Sometimes patients take months to die; there's also an acute form that can kill pretty quickly."
"I assume that's what the Tokyo variety was?"
"Yes and no," Tony said. "The Malleomyces is there all right, plain and simple under the microscope. In fact, it was no big thing to ID this bug as the variant 087 that wiped out an entire Korean village not that long ago."
"So cut to the chase," Kate demanded as she glanced at her watch and looked around the living room at all of the boxes yet to be dealt with.
"I'm getting there. This Korean Leprosy, as they call it, looks like it was caused by the Malleomyces bug, but that's not what's killing people."
Kate stopped gazing around her apartment and started taking notes. "What?"
"Well, it had all the grotesque sores and abscesses seen with glanders, but when we took a good look at cell cultures under the microscope, it was clear the bacteria hadn't killed the cells or the people."
"What did?"
"In every cell we examined, the mitochondria had been destroyed...every last one of them."
"Dear God!" Kate whispered.
Mitochondria were the powerhouses of every cell. They were the sites of cell metabolism. Wthout them, a cell could not live.
"This sucker could be a real slate wiper," Mills said. "Especially if you happen to be Korean. It cut through that specific population like a wet towel over a smudged blackboard."
Kate shivered as she wrote. "You said you were going to give me your guess."
"It'll scare the shit out of you."
"It already has."
Over the phone line, Kate heard Tony Mills take a deep breath. "My guess is that it's a combination of Malleomyces and some retrovirus that attacks mitochondria. I think it inserted itself into the glanders bacterial chromosomes. Something there must neutralize the virus to keep it from attacking the glanders mitochondria. What we've got here is a new, more lethal mutation.
"Happens more than we'd like to think," Kate said as she wrote. "You say it hits Koreans only?"
"So far," Mills said.
"You and I both know that a bug capable of jumping species. It wouldn't take much of a mutation to break out of its Korean-only mode."
"No shit."
"Tony, this isn't my speciality. Why aren't you talking to CDC or maybe Ft. Detrick?"
"They won't listen. I've been trying for more than two months now. First of all, Zama command is pissed as hell that we bent regs and got samples at all." He explained the hands-off order in Tokyo, the earlier failure to send him and Davis to investigate the outbreak in Cheju-Do.
"My commanding officer mutters court martial everytime I bring it up. Fort. Detrick stonewalls me, and the CDC won't do anything without something official from the Japanese government."
"What do you think I can do?"
"Some sequencing," Mills said quickly. "The glanders genome's been sequenced, and you can pull the data up. I'd like to send you the samples of variant 087 to see if you can find a sequence in its genome that matches something, some virus sequence, anything that will tell us what we can do for treatment. From what I've read, your company is a leader in Representational Difference Analysis."
"My old company," Kate corrected him. "But you're right, we could do an RDA on the samples, and if we get some weird new sequences, we can compare them to known viral gene sequences." She paused. "Remember that there are millions of viruses out there that haven't been sequenced. We have no idea if this is a previously harmless retrovirus that has mutated into a lethal form."
"Then you'll do it?" Mills asked hopefully.
"I may not own the company," Kate said. "But I've still got a couple of friends left there. I'll set it up."
"You won't regret it," Mills said.
"That's an assumption we can't make yet," Kate said worriedly as she underlined sections of her notes and connected them with arrows. "Send the samples and copies of all your notes to Will MacVicar." She listened, then said, "Yeah, M-A-C." She watched a bluejay jumping in the branches of a graceful Elm tree outside and thought of the Daiwa Ichiban Corporation, of Edward Rycroft, the quirky researcher Kurata had installed as GenIntron's new president. The thoughts lead to black areas she wasn't yet ready to admit might exist. "Wrap it up... " She paused. "Like a birthday present or something."
"A birthday present?"
"Yeah," Kate said. "With pretty paper and everything."
"Are you sure this is -- "
"Do you want your sequences, Tony?"
"Well..."
"Then send Will his birthday present. I'll call him and tell him it's on the way."
"You're the boss."
"Not anymore." A deep sense of loss and separation had plagued her for the past three months, beginning with the day she cleaned out her desk at GenIntron. It was almost like the loss of a loved one.
When they rang off, the digital phone switch in the White House basement -- through which the connection had been routed -- noted the end of the call and entered the details in its log, giving future archivists the retrieval location for the digitized file containing the entire conversation.