Darwin's Radio

  “We?” Kaye shook her head. “What we talked about at the zoo just doesn’t make sense now.”

  “Why not?” Mitch asked, swallowing.

  “Dicken has done a turnabout,” Kaye said.

  “What kind of turnabout?”

  “He feels miserable. He thinks we’ve been completely wrong.”

  Mitch cocked his head to one side, frowning. “I don’t see that.”

  “It’s more politics than science, maybe,” Kaye said.

  “Then what about the science? Are we going to let one premature birth, one defective baby—”

  “Steamroll us?” Kaye finished for him. “Probably. I don’t know.” She looked up and down the drive.

  “Are any other full-term babies due?” Mitch asked.

  “Not for several months,” Kaye said. “Most of the parents have been choosing abortion.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s not been talked about much. The agencies involved aren’t releasing names. There’d be a lot of opposition, you can imagine.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  Kaye touched her heart, then her stomach. “Like a punch in the gut. I need time to think things over, do some more work. I asked him, but Dicken never gave me your phone number.”

  Mitch smiled knowingly.

  “What?” Kaye asked, a little irritated.

  “Nothing.”

  “Here’s my home number in Baltimore,” she said, handing him a card. “Call me in a couple of days.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently, then turned and walked back into the hotel. Over her shoulder, she shouted, “I mean it! Call.”

  45

  The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

  Kaye was hustled out of the Baltimore airport in a nondescript brown Pontiac lacking government license plates. She had just spent three hours in TV studios and six hours on the plane and her skin felt as if it had been varnished.

  Two Secret Service agents sat in polite silence, one in front and one in back. Kaye sat in the back. Between Kaye and the agent sat Farrah Tighe, her newly assigned aide. Tighe was a few years younger than Kaye, with pulled-back blond hair, a pleasant broad face, brilliant blue eyes, and broad hips that challenged her companions in these tight quarters.

  “We have four hours before you meet with Mark Augustine,” Tighe said.

  Kaye nodded. Her mind was not in the car.

  “You requested a meeting with two of the NIH mothers-in-residence. I’m not sure we can fit that in today.”

  “Fit it in,” Kaye said forcefully, and then added, “Please.”

  Tighe looked at her solemnly.

  “Take me to the clinic before we do anything else.”

  “We have two TV interviews—”

  “Skip them,” Kaye said. “I want to talk with Mrs. Hamilton.”

  Kaye walked through the long corridors from the parking lot to the elevators of Building 10.

  On the drive from the airport to the NIH campus, Tighe had briefed her on the events of the past day. Richard Bragg had been shot seven times in the torso and head while leaving his house in Berkeley and had been declared dead at the scene. Two suspects had been arrested, both male, both husbands of women carrying first-stage Herod’s babies. The men had been captured a few blocks away, drunk, their car packed with empty cans of beer.

  The Secret Service, on orders from the president, had been assigned to protect key members of the Taskforce.

  The mother of the first full-term, second-stage infant born in North America, known as Mrs. C., was still in a hospital in Mexico City. She had emigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in 1996; she had worked for a relief agency in Azerbaijan between 1990 and 1993. She was currently being treated for shock and what the first medical reports described as an acute case of seborrhea on her face.

  The dead infant was being shipped from Mexico City to Atlanta and would arrive tomorrow morning.

  Luella Hamilton had just finished a light lunch and was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out over a small garden and the windowless corner of another building. She shared a room with another mother who was down the hall in an examination room. There were now eight mothers in the Taskforce study.

  “I lost my baby,” Mrs. Hamilton told Kaye as she walked in. Kaye stepped around the bed and hugged her. She returned Kaye’s embrace with strong hands and arms and a little moan.

  Tighe stood with arms folded near the door.

  “She just slipped out one night.” Mrs. Hamilton held her eyes steady on Kaye’s. “I hardly felt her. My legs were wet. Just a little blood. They had a monitor on my stomach and the little alarm started to beep. I woke up and the nurses were there and they put up a tent. They didn’t show her to me. A minister came in, Reverend Ackerley, from my church, she was right there for me, wasn’t that nice?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kaye said.

  “The reverend told me about that other woman, in Mexico, with her second baby . . .”

  Kaye shook her head in sympathy.

  “I am so scared, Kaye.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I was in San Diego and I didn’t know you had rejected.”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re my doctor, is it?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And the others.” Kaye smiled. “But mostly you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a strong black woman, and we make an impression.” Mrs. Hamilton did not smile as she said this. Her expression was drawn, her skin verging on olive. “I talked to my husband on the telephone. He’s coming by today and we’ll see each other, but we’ll be separated by glass. They told me they’d let me go after the baby was born. But now they say they want to keep me here. They tell me I’m going to be pregnant again. They know it’s coming. My own little baby Jesus. How can the world get along with millions of little baby Jesuses?” She started to cry. “I haven’t been with my husband or anyone else! I swear!”

  Kaye held her hand tightly. “This is so difficult,” she said.

  “I want to help, but my family, they’re having a hard time. My husband is half crazy, Kaye. They could run this damned railroad so much better.” She stared out the window, held on to Kaye’s hand tightly, then waved it gently back and forth, as if listening to some inner music. “You’ve had some time to think. Tell me what’s happening?”

  Kaye fixed her eyes on Mrs. Hamilton and tried to think of something to say. “We’re still trying to figure that out,” she finally managed. “It’s a challenge.”

  “From God?” Mrs. Hamilton asked.

  “From inside,” Kaye said.

  “If it’s from God, all the little Jesuses are going to die except one, then,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “That’s not good odds for me.”

  “I hate myself,” Kaye said as Tighe escorted her to Dr. Lipton’s office.

  “Why?” Tighe said.

  “I wasn’t here.”

  “You can’t be everywhere.”

  Lipton was in a meeting, but interrupted it long enough to talk with Kaye. They went to a side office filled with filing cabinets and a computer.

  “We did scans last night and checked out her hormone levels. She was almost hysterical. The miscarriage didn’t hurt much if at all. I think she wanted it to hurt more. She had a classic Herod’s fetus.”

  Lipton held up a series of photographs. “If this is a disease, it’s a damned organized disease,” she said. “The pseudo-placenta is not very different from a normal placenta, except that it’s much reduced. The amnion is something else, however.” Lipton pointed to a process curled on one side of the shrunken shriveled amnion, which had been expelled with the placenta. “I don’t know what you’d call it, unless it’s a little fallopian tube.”

  “And the other women in the study?”

  “Two should reject within a few days, the rest over the next two weeks. I’ve brought in ministers, a rabbi, psychiatrists, even their friends—as long as they’re female. The mothers ar
e deeply unhappy. No surprises there. But they’ve agreed to stay with the program.”

  “No male contact?”

  “Not from any male past puberty,” Lipton said. “By order of Mark Augustine, co-signed by Frank Shawbeck. Some of the families are sick of this treatment. I don’t blame them.”

  “Any rich women staying here?” Kaye asked, deadpan.

  “No,” Lipton said. She chuckled humorlessly. “Need you even ask?”

  “Are you married, Dr. Lipton?” Kaye said.

  “Divorced six months ago. And you?”

  “A widow,” Kaye said.

  “We’re the lucky ones, then,” Lipton said.

  Tighe tapped her watch. Lipton glanced between them. “Sorry to be keeping you,” the doctor said sharply. “My people are waiting, too.”

  Kaye held up the photographs of the pseudo-placenta and amniotic sac. “What do you mean when you say this is a terribly organized disease?”

  Lipton leaned on the top of a filing cabinet. “I’ve dealt with tumors and lesions and buboes and warts and all the other little horrors diseases can build in our bodies. There’s organization, to be sure. Rearranging the blood flow, subverting cells. Sucking greed. But this amniotic sac is a highly specialized organ, different from any I’ve ever studied.”

  “It’s not a product of disease, in your opinion?”

  “I didn’t say that. The results are distortion, pain, suffering, and miscarriage. The infant in Mexico . . .” Lipton shook her head. “I won’t waste my time by characterizing this as anything else. It’s a new disease, a hideously inventive one, that’s all.”

  46

  Atlanta

  Dicken climbed the gentle slope from the parking garage on Clifton Way, glancing up with a squint at clear skies with low fat-bellied puffs of cloud. He hoped the fresh cool air would clear his head.

  Dicken had returned to Atlanta the night before and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and holed up in his house, drinking until four in the morning. Walking from the living room to the bathroom, he had stumbled over a pile of textbooks, slammed his shoulder against a wall, and fallen to the floor. His shoulder and leg were bruised and sore, and his back felt as if he had been kicked, but he could walk and he was pretty sure he did not have to go to the hospital.

  Still, his arm hung half-bent, and his face was ashen. His head hurt from the whiskey. His stomach hurt from not eating breakfast. And in his soul he felt like shit, confused and angry at just about everything, but mainly angry at himself.

  The memory of the intellectual jam session at the San Diego Zoo felt like a burning brand. The presence of Mitch Rafelson, a loose cannon, saying little substantive but still seeming to guide the conversation, at once challenging their sophomoric theories and spurring them on; Kaye Lang, lovelier than he had ever seen her before, almost radiant, with her patented look of puzzled concentration and no goddamned interest in Dicken beyond the professional.

  Rafelson clearly outclassed him. Once again, after having spent his entire adult life braving the worst that Earth could throw at a human male, he was coming up short in the eyes of a woman he thought he might care for.

  And what the hell did it matter? What did his masculine ego, his sex life, matter in the face of Herod’s?

  Dicken came around the corner onto Clifton Road and stopped, confused for a moment. The attendant at the garage booth had mentioned something about picketing, but had given no hint of the scale.

  Demonstrators filled the street from the small plaza and tree planter fronting the redbrick entrance of Building 1 to the American Cancer Society headquarters and the Emory Hotel across Clifton Road. Some were standing in the beds of purple azaleas; they had left a path open to the main entrance but blocked the visitor center and the cafeteria. Dozens sat around the pillar that held the bust of Hygieia, their eyes closed, swaying gently from side to side as if in silent prayer.

  Dicken estimated there were two thousand men, women, and children, in vigil, waiting for something; salvation or word at least that the world was not about to end. Many of the women and more than a few of the men still wore masks, colored orange or purple, guaranteed by half a dozen fly-by-night manufacturers to kill all viruses, including SHEVA.

  The organizers of the vigil—it was not called a protest—walked among their people with water coolers and paper cups, leaflets, advice, and instructions, but those holding the vigil never spoke.

  Dicken walked to the entrance of Building 1, through the crowd, attracted to them despite his sense of the danger in the situation. He wanted to see what the troops were thinking and feeling—the people on the front line.

  Cameramen moved around and through the crowds slowly, or more deliberately along the pathways, cameras held at waist level to capture the immediacy, then being lifted to shoulders for the panorama, the scale.

  “Jesus, what happened?” Jane Salter asked as Dicken passed her in the long hall to his office. She carried a briefcase and an armload of files in green folders.

  “Just an accident,” Dicken said. “I fell. Did you see what’s going on outside?”

  “I saw,” Salter said. “Creeps me out.” She followed him and stood in the open door. Dicken glanced over his shoulder at her, then pulled out the old rolling chair and sat down, his face like a disappointed little boy’s.

  “Down about Mrs. C.?” Salter asked. She pushed back a wisp of brown hair with the corner of a folder. The wisp fell back and she ignored it.

  “I suppose,” Dicken said.

  Salter bent to set down the briefcase, then stepped forward and laid the files on his desk. “Tom Scarry has the baby,” she said. “It was autopsied in Mexico City. I guess they did a thorough job. He’ll do it all over again, just to be sure.”

  “Have you seen it?” Dicken asked.

  “Just a video feed when they took it from the ice chest in Building 15.”

  “Monster?”

  “Major,” Salter said. “A real mess.”

  “For whom the bell tolls,” Dicken said.

  “I’ve never figured out your position on this, Christopher,” Salter said, leaning against the door jamb. “You seem surprised that this is a really nasty disease. We knew that going in, didn’t we?”

  Dicken shook his head. “I’ve chased diseases so long . . . this one seemed different.”

  “What, more sympathetic?”

  “Jane, I got drunk last night. I fell in my house and cracked my shoulder. I feel like hell.”

  “A bender? That sounds more appropriate to a bad love life, not a misdiagnosis.”

  Dicken made a sour face. “Where are you going with all that?” he asked, and shoved his left forefinger at the files.

  “I’m moving some stuff over to the new receiving lab. They’ve got four more tables. We’re putting together personnel and procedures for a round-the-clock autopsy mission, L3 conditions. Dr. Sharp is in charge. I’m helping the group doing neural and epithelial analysis. I’ll keep their records straight.”

  “Keep me in the loop? If you find something?”

  “I don’t even know why you’re here, Christopher. You flew way above us when you went with Augustine.”

  “I miss the front lines. News always gets here first.” He sighed. “I’m still a virus hunter, Jane. I came back to look over some old papers. See if I forgot something crucial.”

  Jane smiled. “Well, I did hear this morning that Mrs. C. had genital herpes. Somehow it got to little Baby C early in its development. It was covered with lesions.”

  Dicken looked up in surprise. “Herpes? They didn’t tell us that before.”

  “I told you it was a mess,” Jane said.

  Herpes could change the whole interpretation of what happened. How did the infant contract the genital herpes while still protected in the womb? Herpes was usually passed from mother to infant in the birth canal.

  Dicken was severely distracted.

  Dr. Denby passed by the office, smiled briefly, then doubled back and peered
through the open door. Denby was a bacterial growth specialist, small and very bald, with a cherub’s face and a natty plum shirt and red tie. “Jane? Did you know they’ve blocked the cafeteria from outside? Hello, Christopher.”

  “I heard. It’s impressive,” Jane said.

  “Now they’re up to something else. Want to go look?”

  “Not if it’s violent,” Salter said with a shudder.

  “That’s what’s spooky. It’s peaceful and absolutely silent! Like a drill team without the band.”

  Dicken walked with them and took the elevator and stairs to the front of the building. They followed other employees and doctors to the lobby beside the public display of CDC history. Outside, the crowd was milling in an orderly fashion. Leaders were using megaphones to shout orders.

  A security guard stood with his hands on his hips, glaring at the crowd through the glass. “Will you look at that,” he said.

  “What?” Jane asked.

  “They’re breaking up, boy-girl. Segregating,” he said with a mystified look.

  Banners stretched in plain view of the lobby and the dozens of cameras arrayed outside. A breeze rippled one banner. Dicken caught what it said in two sinuous flaps: VOLUNTEER. SEPARATE. SAVE A CHILD.

  Within a few minutes, the crowd had parted before their leaders like the Red Sea before Moses, women and children on one side, men on the other. The women looked grimly determined. The men looked somber and shamefaced.

  “Christ,” the guard muttered. “They’re telling me to leave my wife?”

  Dicken felt as if he were being whipsawed. He returned to his office and called Bethesda. Augustine had not arrived yet. Kaye Lang was visiting the Magnuson Clinical Center.

  Augustine’s secretary added that protesters were also on the NIH campus, several thousand of them. “Look on the TV,” she said. “They’re marching all over the country.”

  47

  The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

  Augustine drove around the campus on the Old Georgetown Road to Lincoln Street and made his way to a temporary employee parking lot near the Taskforce Center. The Taskforce had been assigned a new building at the surgeon general’s request just two weeks before. The protesters apparently did not know of this change, and were marching on the old headquarters, and on Building 10.