Daniel Kalla - Pandemic

But over a year had passed since the last travel advisory was issued. Haldane was home, and reveling in the relative quiet of the infectious diseases world. He had time to catch up on his research and clinical work. Best of all he had time to reconnect with his three-year-old daughter Chloe. Enough time even to take a stab at resuscitating his crumbling marriage.

Lost in plans for a family getaway for the upcoming weekend, Haldane breezed through the door of his research office in Georgetown. “Karen, hi,” he said as he dropped off a cup of coffee on his receptionist’s desk and then strode past her into his office.

When Haldane ignored his receptionist’s hailing, she jumped up and followed him into the office. At twenty-seven, Karen Jackson had taken the job as Haldane’s secretary so she could entrench herself in the academic milieu while she worked her way through graduate school. An African American full-figured beauty, she was bright, able, and defiant to a fault.

“Noah, did you hear me?” she said with her hands on her hips, as if talking to a toddler who had just covered the walls in ink.

Haldane leaned back his chair and rested his own Starbucks cup on top of the shortest of the tall piles that covered his desk. “What’s up, Karen?”

“You forgot your pager and cell phone, again, didn’t your’ Jackson chastised.

Haldane shrugged. “I was lecturing ”

“Oh, yeah, that explains it,” said Jackson with a roll of her eyes at her absentminded boss.

Haldane slid a hand in his drawer and pulled out his phone and pager. “Who is looking for me?”

“Exactly.” Jackson chuckled, pulling her hands off her hips. “The WHO is looking for you. Dr. Nantal. Said it was urgent.”

As the WHO’s Executive Director of Communicable Diseases, Dr. Jean Nantal was responsible for all global hot spots. He had no time for social calls, especially “urgent” ones. Haldane rubbed his eyes and sighed heavily. “You were supposed to tell him I died.”

“Noah, haven’t I been telling you for months to give up this globe-trotting gig with the World Health Organization?” she demanded. “It’s a job for single people. Not old married folk with a young child like you. That old smoothie, Dr. Nantal, could charm a starving lion out of his kill, but you should tell him ‘no’ this time.”

Haldane marveled at his young finger-wagging secretary. She must have been mothering people since she could talk. Maybe before. Besides, her point was moot. Nantal’s urgent phone call could only mean that something nasty was brewing somewhere on the planet. As the WHO’s expert on emerging pathogens, Haldane knew Nantal wasn’t asking.

Haldane was being summoned.

Bleary-eyed, Dr. Gwen Savard had trouble focusing on the screen. As Department of Homeland Security’s inaugural Director of Counter-Bioterrorism (or the “Bug Czar” as some of her colleagues had taken to calling her), she chaired the Bioterrorism Preparedness Council meeting, through which she now struggled to stay awake. She tried to convince herself that it had nothing to do with Peter moving the last of his belongings out the previous sleepless night and everything to do with the dull speaker in front of her.

Oh, how the man droned! Savard was tempted to cut him off. Or to scream. Everyone in the room knew about anthrax. How accessible it was in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and even in the U.S. How deadly it could be in the perfect aerosolized form. He wasn’t enlightening a soul when he explained how a thermos full of anthrax spores spilled on a windless day over Manhattan could kill hundreds of thousands.

But Gwen didn’t intervene. Instead, she conceded that maybe she was a touch hard on her poor subordinate. And she grudgingly realized she might even be a tad run-down, physically and emotionally, this morning.

It wasn’t so much the departure of Peter—whoas her mother had predicted early in the relationship was a decent guy but all wrong for Gwen—as the implication of his leaving. The end of her marriage dealt an unexpected blow. Failure was foreign to Gwen. And it meant that at forty-two, she had to start over. Not that attracting other men would pose a challenge. Year in, year out, she maintained her size four figure. Her face with its high cheekbones, full lips, and upturned nose had aged well. The crow’s-feet at the comers of her striking green eyes softened her features; those little imperfections of time had made her less intimidating, more accessible to men. She drew more attention in her forties than she had in her twenties. Still, she shuddered at the thought of one day facing the “dating scene” again.

Savard was relieved when Alex Clayton, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Deputy Director of Operations, interrupted both her unhappy ruminations and her subordinate’s endless rambling. “Yeah, Dr. Graves, fascinating stuff,” Clayton said, but his stifled yawn belied the remark. “Can you get to the part where you update us on the powder trail from the anthrax mail out?”

Oblivious or indifferent to Clayton’s condescension, Dr. Clive Graves responded in the same nasal monotone. “We know the powder is consistent with what was developed in Baghdad in the late 1980s, but we haven’t matched it with any of the U.S. control samples. We’ve tested the known substrate from the labs and universities with legal access to anthrax in every state. We’re in the process of subtyping—”

“So the trail’s gone cold, Doctor?” Clayton cut him off.

Graves pushed his glasses back up his nose. His shoulders sagged. “Um, I’m not in the detective business, so those aren’t the, er, terms I would choose…” he stammered.

Always protective of her staff, Savard stepped in. “Even in ballistics, a far more traceable science, you need to find the gun before you can match a bullet to it. Short of what we’ve known for some time—thatthe powder on those letters was consistent with what the Iraqis and Soviets were producing in the eighties—wewill never be able to narrow down the origins until you and your colleagues . find us some source material to compare it to.” She leaned forward in her seat and eyed Clayton steadily. “Find us a smoking gun, Alex, and we’ll tell you if it’s the right one.”

Clayton chuckled. “I’m not packing today, Gwen.”

Though Savard maintained a healthy suspicion for anyone associated with the CIA, Clayton’s ability to laugh at himself and his organization—an exceedingly rare characteristic among the spies she’d met—endeared Clayton to her. In spite of his brash, reckless demeanor, she liked the guy. Not quite enough though to ever accept one of his offers for coffee or a movie.

“So, in summary, you’ve made no progress on the anthrax case,” Moira Roberts interjected with a heavy sigh. In just a few months on the job, the Deputy Director of the FBI had already cemented her reputation as a humorless and brusque bureaucrat In her early forties like Gwen, Roberts was one of the youngest deputy directors in the FBI’s history, but with her gray hair and formless matronly wardrobe, few realized she was still on the young side of middle age. “Dr. Savard, is there any possibility we can move on to variola major?”

Gwen Savard resisted the rising ire. Who was this woman trying to impress by tossing around esoteric phyla names? Even the people in the know, and Roberts wasn’t one, always referred to it as smallpox. But Gwen refused to let Roberts draw her into another confrontation in front of the whole committee. She wasn’t about to give the otherwise male group more locker-room fodder with another demonstration of alpha females butting heads.