Michael Palmer - Fatal

I told you, Ma… I told you they 'uz after me…

Her head began to spin. Then, just as she thought she was going to throw up, peace and darkness settled over her.

Ellen sat alone, nestled in the well-worn leather easy chair in Rudy's pine-paneled den, a barely touched avocado and Swiss sandwich on the TV tray in front of her, a nearly drained glass of Merlot — her second — cradled in her hand. She had never been much of a drinker and couldn't remember if she had ever drunk wine in the morning. But the Omnivax "documentary" she was watching, put together by the Marquand campaign, coupled with the letter in her purse that she had yet to deal with, had generated a level of tension that simply could not go untreated.

It was just after twelve noon on the day following her remarkable interview with Nattie and Eli Serwanga, and a few hours after that, with Lassa victim John Gendron, a thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher from Baltimore.

It was a frantic dash, with some luck from the traffic gods thrown in, but Ellen managed to catch a return flight from Chicago to BWI Airport. Her car was at Reagan International outside of D.C., so she rented one and drove to Gendron's place — a modest town house on Fayette, several blocks from the sparkling Baltimore waterfront.

Before his infection with the Lassa virus, Gendron had taught English in an inner-city junior high school. He was now eighteen months past his close brush with death, and believed he was too disabled ever to teach again. Ellen's conversation with him was limited by his hearing, which was 70 percent gone in one ear and 100 percent in the other as a result of his illness.

"I went to Sierra Leone to visit my sister, who is a nurse with an international aid organization," he said. "About a week after I returned, my throat began to burn when I swallowed anything — even water. Within three days, my temperature was spiking to a hundred and five. Blood was coming out of my nose and rectum."

The man's eyes began to glisten, and Ellen could see that, however gracious he had been about inviting her to his home, this exchange was exquisitely painful for him.

"Mr. Gendron, please feel free to send me packing if this is too hard for you," she said. "I live close enough to come back another time."

"No. No, I'm okay. You promised to tell me what it is you're working on."

"And I will," Ellen said.

"Well, I became delirious around the end of the second week, and was put in the hospital. They… they had to remove my intestine to keep me from bleeding to death. Even so, I nearly did. I'm divorced and live alone, so my sister flew back here from Sierra Leone and took care of me for nearly two months. My colostomy is a souvenir of my trip to Africa."

It may actually be the souvenir of your flight home, Ellen was thinking.

"Go on," she said.

"As far as I know," he went on flatly, "I infected six of my students, plus my son and one of his friends. The friend made it okay. Two of my students and my son, Steven, weren't as fortunate."

Oh, no.

"I am so sorry."

"He was my only child. Every day I wish I had died and pray that I will soon."

"I've had personal tragedies, too," Ellen said. "Making any sense of life afterward is terribly hard. Therapy and time. That's all I can tell you. Therapy and time and reaching out to help others."

"Thank you."

Once again, Gendron assured Ellen he was able to continue,

"Is there anything unusual you can recall about your flight back to the States?" she asked, taking pains to avoid any leading questions.

"The flight back here was uneventful. But I did meet one unusual character on the flight from Freetown to London, if that's what you mean."

"That's exactly what I mean."

"He was an American engineer — interesting and very outgoing. Specialized in inspecting bridges, I think he said."

Ellen gripped the arm of her chair. "Can you describe him for me?"

"I think I can, although my memory hasn't been so good since — "

"Just do your best," Ellen said, deciding not to put the man through Rudy's writing exercise.

"Well, first of all, he was big. Not just tall, but big. Like a football player. His hair was sort of blondish and he wore thick glasses with a heavy frame."

"Anything else?"

"I can't think of anything… except, wait, he had a scar — an unusual scar — right here above his lip."

Bingo!

With some prompting now from Ellen, Gendron even recalled being bumped by the man while waiting in line at Gatwick Airport in London.

"He tripped, I think, and stumbled into me. It was like getting hit by a train. We both went down."

After extracting the same pledge of silence from Gendron as she had from the Serwangas, Ellen explained her interest in the Lassa cases and the man with the scar. Then she drove to Reagan and exchanged the rental for her Taurus. She arrived back at Rudy's cabin just after two in the morning and was relieved to find that he hadn't waited up for her.

Now she sat in his den watching the Omnivax campaign special, breathing in the lingering, earthy essence of his pipe tobacco. His Merlot was gradually stoking the fires of her resolve to speak to him. Rudy was upstairs in his study, poring over the passenger manifests, making phone calls, and being a rock of support to a woman he considered a good friend — a woman who just happened to know that he had been in love with her to the exclusion of all others for almost forty years.

How was she going to tell him what she had done? And perhaps even more important, how did she truly feel about what he had written? There was no way to answer the first question without being ready to respond honestly to the second.

Ellen splashed in another glassful of wine. This was last call, she resolved, even as she felt warm fingers working through the muscles of her face. Three glasses were quite enough. Or had it been four? The glasses weren't that big anyway.

Omnivax had clearly become the flagship of the Marquand campaign. With just over two months remaining before the election, the President's camp was laying out big bucks to get their message of beneficence, progress, and commitment to campaign promises through to the public. The documentary had initially focused on vaccinations in genera] and now had moved on to Omnivax. The narrator — unseen at the moment — was a movie star with a voice that inspired confidence and radiated authenticity. James Garner? Donald Sutherland? Ellen didn't watch enough movies or TV to be certain.

"And so," the voice was saying, "estimates are that between fifty and sixty thousand cases of potentially lethal infections will be prevented by this astonishingly potent vaccine over just the next year. I am honored to introduce to you the First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Lynette Lowry Marquand."

Marquand strolled the pediatric ward of a hospital as she spoke, "At three o'clock in the afternoon on September second, two days from today, a four-day-old child will receive the first official dose of Omnivax. I will be there for that most significant occasion, as will Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Lara Bolton, who will administer the supervaccine using this pneumatic device, especially developed for this purpose." She held up a small gun that looked something like a derringer with a flattened muzzle. "We are on the verge of the greatest advance in preventive medicine in our history — an advance that could signal the beginning of the end of infectious diseases as we know them…"

"What about the thimerosal mercury a gazillion kids have gotten dosed with?" Ellen asked out loud, aware at the same instant that her speech was thick and her glass was empty. "What about the autism? What about the seizures and brain damage and sudden death? What about the asthma and learning disabilities and ADHD? And what about the man who's flying around sowing disease and death to peddle his goddamn vaccine? What about all those?"