Darwin’s Radio

‘Is it good news, or bad?’ she asked.

‘I am not allowed to say,’ he replied. ‘We should, as you say, keep our options open? We are like babes in the woods.’

Kaye nodded and stared straight ahead as they entered the parking area. Lado helped her take her bags to the new international terminal, past lines of taxis with sharp-eyed drivers waiting impatiently. The check-in desk at British Mediterranean Airlines had a short line. Already Kaye felt she was in the middle zone between worlds, closer to New York than to Lado’s Georgia or the Gergeti church or Mount Kazbeg.

As she reached the front of the line and pulled out her passport and tickets, Lado stood with arms folded, squinting at the watery sunlight through the terminal windows.

The clerk, a young blond woman with ghostly pale skin, slowly worked through the tickets and papers. She finally looked up to say, ‘No off going. No taking.’

‘Beg pardon?’

The woman lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if this would give her strength or cleverness and tried again. ‘No Baku. No Heathrow. No JFK. No Vienna.’

‘What, they’re gone?’ Kaye asked in exasperation. She looked helplessly at Lado, who stepped over the vinyl-covered ropes and addressed the woman in stern and reproving tones, then pointed to Kaye and lifted his bushy brows, as if to say, Very Important Person!

The pale young woman’s cheeks acquired some color. With infinite patience, she looked at Kaye and began speaking, in rapid Georgian, something about the weather, hail moving in, unusual storm. Lado translated in spaced single words: hail, unusual, soon.

‘When can I get out?’ she asked the woman.

Lado listened to the clerk’s explanation with a stern expression, then lifted his shoulders and turned his face toward Kaye. ‘Next week, next flight. Or flight to Vienna, Tuesday. Day after tomorrow.’

Kaye decided to re-book through Vienna. There were now four people in line behind Kaye, and they were showing signs of both amusement and impatience. By their dress and language, they were probably not going to New York or London.

Lado walked with her up the stairs and sat across from her in the echoing waiting area. She needed to think, to sort out her plans. A few old women sold Western cigarettes and perfume and Japanese watches from small booths around the perimeter. Nearby, two young men slept on opposite benches, snoring in tandem. The walls were covered with posters in Russian, the lovely curling Georgian script, and in German and French. Castles, tea plantations, bottles of wine, the suddenly small and distant mountains whose pure colors survived even the fluorescent lights.

‘I know, you need to call your husband, he will miss you,’ Lado said. ‘We can return to the institute – you are welcome, always!’

‘No, thank you,’ Kaye said, suddenly feeling a little sick. Premonition had nothing to do with it: she could read Lado like a book. What had they done wrong? Had a larger firm made an even sweeter offer?

What would Saul do when he found out? All their planning had been based on his optimism about being able to convert friendship and charity into a solid business relationship …

They were so close.

‘There is the Metechi Palace,’ Lado said. ‘Best hotel in Tbilisi … best in Georgia. I take you to the Metechi! You can be a real tourist, like in the guide books! Maybe you have time to take a hot spring bath … relax before you go home.’

Kaye nodded and smiled but it was obvious her heart was not in it. Suddenly, impetuously, Lado leaned forward and clutched her hand in his dry, cracked fingers, roughened by so many washings and immersions. He pounded his hand and hers lightly on her knee. ‘It is no end! It is a beginning! We must all be strong and resourceful!’

This brought tears to Kaye’s eyes. She looked at the posters again – Erblus and Kazbeg draped with clouds, the Gergeti church, vineyards and high tilled fields.

Lado threw his hands up in the air, swore eloquently in Georgian, and leaped to his feet. ‘I tell them it is not best!’ he insisted. ‘I tell the bureaucrats in the government, we have worked with you, with Saul, for three years, and is not to be overturned in one night! Who needs an exclusive, no? I will take you to Metechi.’

Kaye smiled her thanks and Lado sat down again, bending over, shaking his head glumly and folding his hands. ‘It is an outrage,’ he said, ‘what we have to do in today’s world.’

The young men continued snoring.

CHAPTER SEVEN New York (#ulink_2066a958-ebb6-5f5d-8663-3cfe3290538f)

Christopher Dicken arrived at JFK, by coincidence, on the same evening as Kaye Lang, and saw her waiting to go through customs. She was transferring her luggage to a cart and did not notice him.

She looked dragged-out, wan. Dicken had been in the air himself for thirty-six hours, returning from Turkey with two locked metal cases and a duffel bag. He certainly did not want to run into Lang under the present circumstances.

Dicken was not sure why he had gone to see Lang at Eliava. Perhaps because they had separately experienced the same horror outside Gordi. Perhaps to discover if she knew what was happening in the United States, the reason he had been recalled; perhaps just to meet the attractive and intelligent woman whose picture he had seen on the EcoBacter web site.

He showed his CDC identification and NCID import pass to a customs supervisor, filled out the requisite five forms, and slouched through a side door into an empty hall.

Coffee nerves gave everything an extra sour edge. He had not slept a wink on the entire flight, and had slugged back five cups in the hour before landing. He had wanted time to research and think and be prepared for the meeting with Mark Augustine, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Augustine was in Manhattan now, giving a talk at a conference on new AIDS treatments.

Dicken carried the cases to the parking garage. He had lost all track of time on the plane and in the airport; he was a little surprised to discover dusk falling over New York.

He made his way through a labyrinth of stairs and elevators and drove his government Dodge out of long-term parking and faced the bleak gray skies above Jamaica Bay. Traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway was dense. With a solicitous hand, he steadied the sealed cases on the passenger seat. The first case held dry ice to preserve a few vials of blood and urine from a patient in Turkey, and tissue samples from her rejected fetus. The second contained two sealed plastic pouches of mummified epidermal and muscle tissue, courtesy of the officer in charge of the United Nations extended peacekeeping mission in the Republic of Georgia, Colonel Nicholas Beck.

The tissue from the graves near Gordi was a long shot, but there was a pattern emerging in Dicken’s mind – a very intriguing and disturbing pattern. He had spent three years tracking down the viral equivalent of a boojum: a sexually transmitted disease that struck only pregnant women and invariably caused miscarriages. It was a potential bombshell, just what Augustine had tasked Dicken to find: something so horrible, so provocative, that funding for the CDC would be guaranteed to rise.

During those years, Dicken had gone time and again to Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkey, hoping to gather samples and put together an epidemiological map. Time and again, public health officials in each of the three nations had stonewalled him. They had their reasons. Dicken had heard of no fewer than three and as many as seven mass graves containing the bodies of men and women who had supposedly been killed to prevent the spread of this disease.

Getting samples from local hospitals had proven extremely difficult, even when the countries had made formal agreements with the CDC and the World Health Organization. He had been allowed to visit only the grave in Gordi, and that one because it was under UN investigation. He had taken his samples from the victims an hour after Kaye Lang had left.

Dicken had never before dealt with a conspiracy to hide the existence of a disease.

All his work could have been important, just what Augustine needed, but it was about to be overshadowed, if not blown wide open.

While Dicken had been in Europe, the quarry had broken cover on the CDC’s home turf. A young researcher at UCLA Medical Center, looking for a common element in seven rejected fetuses, had found an unknown virus. He had shipped the samples to CDC-funded epidemiologists in San Francisco. The researchers had copied and sequenced the virus’s genetic material. They had reported their findings immediately to Mark Augustine.

Augustine had called Dicken home.

Rumors were spreading already about the discovery of the first infectious Human Endogenous Retrovirus, or HERV. As well, there were a few scattered news stories about a virus that caused miscarriages. So far, no one outside the CDC had yet put the two together.

On the plane from London, Dicken had spent an expensive half-hour on the Internet, visiting key professional sites and news groups, finding nowhere a detailed description of the discovery, but everywhere a slam-dunk predictable curiosity.

No wonder. Someone could end up getting a Nobel – and Dicken was ready to lay odds that someone would be Kaye Lang.

As a professional virus hunter, Dicken had long had a fascination with HERV, the genetic fossils of ancient diseases. Lang had first come to Dicken’s attention two years ago when she published three papers describing sites in the human genome, on chromosomes fourteen and seventeen, where parts of potentially complete and infectious HERV could be found. Her most detailed paper had appeared in Virology: ‘A Model for Expression, Assembly, and Lateral Transmission of Chromosomally Scattered env, pol, and gag Genes: Viable Ancient Retroviral Elements in Humans and Simians.’

The nature of the outbreak and its possible extent was a closely guarded secret for the time being, but a few insiders at the NCID and the CDC knew this much: The retrovirus found in the fetuses were genetically identical with HERV that had been part of the human genome since the evolutionary branching of old-world and new-world monkeys. Every human on Earth carried it, but it was no longer simply genetic garbage or abandoned fragments. Something had stimulated scattered fragments of HERV to express, then assemble the proteins and RNA they encoded into a particle capable of leaving the body and infecting another individual.

All seven of the rejected fetuses had been severely malformed.

These particles were causing disease, probably the very disease that Dicken had been tracking for the past three years. The disease had already received an in-house name at the CDC: Herod’s influenza.

With the mix of brilliance and luck that characterized most great scientific careers, Lang had precisely pegged the locations of the genes that were now apparently causing Herod’s influenza. But she did not yet have a clue what had happened; he could tell that in her eyes in Tbilisi.

Something more besides had drawn Dicken to Kaye Lang’s work. With her husband, she had written papers on the evolutionary significance of transposable genetic elements, so-called jumping genes: transposons, retrotransposons, and even HERV. Transposable elements could change when, where, and how often genes expressed, causing mutations, ultimately altering the physical nature of an organism.

Transposable elements had very likely once been the precusors of viruses; some had mutated and learned how to exit the cell, wrapped in protective capsids and envelopes, the genetic equivalents of space suits. A few had later returned as retrovirus, like prodigal sons; some of those, over the millennia, had infected germ-line cells – eggs or sperm or their precursors – and had somehow lost their potency. These had become HERV.

In his travels, Dicken had heard from reliable sources in Ukraine of women bearing subtly and not-so-subtly different children, of children immaculately conceived, of entire villages being razed and sterilized … In the wake of a plague of miscarriages.