James Tabor: The Deep Zone

Munching a bit of sandwich, he said casually, “Those African caves are nasty. I was in Bandubyo myself.”

She almost dropped her coffee. “Bandubyo?”

He looked sheepish, meeting her astonished gaze. “Well, yes. It was back in—let me think—’03 or maybe ’04.”

“My God. Ebola-B was discovered in that cave. The worst of the Ebola family. What were you doing there?”

“I was part of a WHO team of virologists and microbiologists. Some people had contracted hemorrhagic fever after eating Passiflora edulis grown near the cave.”

“Passion fruit.”

“Right. We determined that fruit bats from the cave contaminated the crops. Passion fruit and cassava both, in fact.”

“Bandubyo,” she repeated, shaking her head. “That is supposed to be one hell of a cave.”

“There was a lot of vertical. And to penetrate the dark zone we had to do some diving. Inside, the cave was clean. But from the twilight zone with its bat chamber on out—red-hot with what turned out to be that new species of Ebola virus.”

“I hadn’t realized you did that kind of fieldwork.”

“Oh, when the need arises. I don’t get out often enough to keep my skills really sharp. But I can still hold my own if I have to.”

This was a side of Al Cahner she had not known about and would not have suspected. But he was trim and looked reasonably fit, so it was not completely outlandish to imagine him exploring wild caves. And she could not help but admire him for it. Penetrating viral caves was as bad as fieldwork got, partly because it was so dangerous and required a host of technical skills like rock climbing and vertical rope work and scuba diving. The really bad part, though, was that such caves sometimes housed pathogens of unearthly virulence.

“I gather you’ve done some cave work yourself,” he said.

I wonder what else he knows about me? Hallie thought, but didn’t press the subject. BARDA was not a large facility. People talked.

“Yes. For fun and work both. A lot of cave diving, too.”

“It takes a special kind of person to do that for fun . It is dangerous business.”

“There’s no margin for error, that’s for sure.”

They talked a bit more about caves and viruses, then went back to their food. But the conversation had changed Hallie’s perception of her lab partner. There’s more there than meets the eye , she thought. And then: All he needs is a little TLC .

Their bond grew, and as the months passed they talked about themselves, laughed at odd fellow workers, bitched about the bureaucracy, damned do-nothing politicians—took the small risks that inched them closer together. Of all the things they talked about, Hallie was most surprised to find that Al Cahner was a walking encyclopedia of baseball statistics. He was especially fond of the 1950s—“baseball’s golden age,” he called it. He could recite ERAs and slugging percentages and double-play combos as if he were reading them off a page. He also delighted in the sounds of baseball. Not the smack of a fastball in a catcher’s mitt or the ring of a cleanly hit home run. The sounds he found most beautiful were players’ names, which he loved to recite, almost like a kind of poetry:

“Granny Hamner. Enos Slaughter. Ryne Duren.” Pause . “Paolo Discomenides. Hart Workman. Joe Bolt.” Pause . “Gino Cimoli. Rabbit Hopper. Artie Dedeaux.”

Hallie had never been a baseball fan. One of her brothers had played cornerback for Duke; the other had been a flanker for the University of Colorado on a nationally ranked team. Both had been high school standouts, so she had been watching football games since she was ten. Nevertheless, she enjoyed listening to her lab partner’s name-poems, and enjoyed, as well, seeing him smile.

On her last afternoon, when stone-faced security guards escorted her back to retrieve her personal effects, Cahner appeared stunned. The blood drained from his face so rapidly she feared he might pass out. But then, glaring at the guards, he asked what in God’s name was happening. They just stood and stared. He turned to her.

“I’m leaving” was all she could say, and she knew it was only the first of many such encounters to come.

After several unsuccessful tries to learn more from her, he again fired sharp questions at the guards, who only shrugged. One said, “Hey, we don’t know anything. We’re just doing our jobs here, you know?”

Cahner started to berate the two men, but Hallie said, “It’s not them, Al,” and he let it go. So all he could do was stand and gape during the ten minutes it took for her to collect the pictures of her family, epidemiology reference books, laptop, back issues of Science . By the time she finished, she saw that he had composed himself somewhat.

As they shook hands for the last time, he held on and said, “This is horrible, Hallie. I don’t know what to say. But if you ever need anything that I can provide, you must call.”

She nodded and, still holding his hand, leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, which made his eyes fill with tears.

Barnard pulled her back from those recollections. He said, “There has been no breakthrough.”

She understood. “Or else you wouldn’t have me here.”

“Right.”

With the coffee and sandwiches, she was feeling better, but sensed she was missing something still. “Why haven’t I heard anything about this in the media?”

“Damage control at the highest levels. President O’Neil has called in quite a few chits. But it won’t stay contained for long.” Lathrop sounded pained.

“How many military hospitals are there?” Hallie wanted to run the numbers.

“More than two thousand in the U.S. More overseas.”

“How many patients in those?”

“As of six P.M. yesterday, 217,452.”

“And not just from this war, but from others, right? Plus all those dependents hospitalized to give birth, get hernias fixed, whatever.”

“That’s right.”

Hallie felt sick. “So it’s not only active-duty soldiers. Families packed into bases, circulating through movie theaters, clinics, gyms, kindergartens. My God, the list is endless. You could not create better pandemic conditions if you tried. What’s the transmission factor?”

“Unknown,” said Barnard. “The other ACE is similar to smallpox.”

Lew Casey continued: “Smallpox carriers take about seven days to become contagious. After that, in an urban environment, they infect an average of twelve people every twenty-four hours. Those carriers infect others. Exponential growth. A million or more in two weeks.”

Lathrop rubbed his face. “Military bases, with higher population densities than cities, would be much worse. Ships at sea, submarines—the Pentagon , for God’s sake.”

Then Barnard spoke, in a tone Hallie had never heard him use before:

“ ‘Potentially the worst threat since Pearl Harbor.’ Those are not my words, but President O’Neil’s.”

HALLIE POURED HERSELF MORE COFFEE. SHE TURNED TO LATHROP.

“Is anything else being done?”

“Yes, of course. Everything possible with the information still on close hold, anyway. But it’s all reactive.”

“How long do you think we have, Don?”

“With colistin and aggressive containment, ten to fourteen days. No more.”

“That’s not enough time.”

“No.”

“So the only real hope is…”

“That highly classified work you had been doing here at BARDA.”

Classified. BARDA .

She had been so focused on the burgeoning catastrophe that she had all but forgotten what had happened thirteen months earlier. Now those two words took her back to the small and windowless room—its smells of cigarette smoke and body odor, its contents a metal conference table, six chairs, and two men. The table and chairs were gray, the men were black and white.