Darwin’s Radio

‘The baby was born dead or severely injured. The back of her head is broken, perhaps by the thrust of a fire-hardened pointed stick.’

Her. The infant had been a girl. For some reason, this shook Mitch deeply. He took another sip of water. All the emotion of his present position, the death of Tilde and Franco … The sadness of this ancient story.

His eyes watered, threatened to spill over. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and dabbed away the moisture with the sleeve of his gown.

Luria observed sympathetically. ‘This lends your story some credibility, no? But …’ The professor lifted his hand and pointed at the ceiling, jabbing slightly, and concluding, ‘Still hard to believe.’

‘The infant most definitely isn’t Homo sapiens neanderthalensis,’ Brock said. ‘She has interesting features, but she is modern in all particulars. Not, however, particularly European. More Anatolian, even Turkic, but that is just a guess for now. And I know of no specimens of that sort so recent. It would be incredible.’

‘I must have dreamed it,’ Mitch said, looking away.

Luria shrugged. ‘When you are well, would you be willing to walk the glacier with us, look for the cave again in person?’

Mitch did not hesitate. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘I will try to arrange it. But for now –’ Luria glanced down at Mitch’s leg.

‘At least four months,’ he said.

‘Not a good time to be climbing, four months from now. In the late spring, then, next year.’ Luria stood, and the woman, Clara, took his glass and hers and set them on Mitch’s tray.

‘Thank you,’ Brock said. ‘I hope you are right, Dr Rafelson. It would be a marvelous find.’

They bowed slightly, formally, as they left.

CHAPTER TWELVE Atlanta, 1600 Clifton Road: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention September (#ulink_d6394251-7e58-55b7-8ea9-861df5ed8ecf)

‘Virgin females don’t get our flu,’ Dicken said, looking up from the papers and graphs on his desk. ‘Is that what you’re telling me?’ He raised his black eyebrows until his broad forehead was a dubious washboard of wrinkles.

Jane Salter reached forward to plump the documents again, nervous, laying them with a solicitous finality on his desk. The concrete walls of his sub-basement office enlivened the rustling sound.

Many of the offices in the lower floors of Building I of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been converted from animal labs and holding cells. Concrete dikes jutted up near the walls. Dicken sometimes imagined he could still smell the disinfectant and monkey shit.

‘That’s the biggest surprise that I can pull out of the data,’ Salter confirmed. She was one of the best statisticians they had, a whiz with the variety of desktop computers that did most of their tracking, modeling, and record-keeping. ‘Men sometimes get it, or test positive for it, but are asymptomatic. They become vectors for females, but probably not for other males. And …’ She finger-tapped a drum roll on the desktop. ‘We can’t get anyone to infect themselves.’

‘So SHEVA is a specialist,’ Dicken said, shaking his head. ‘How the hell do we know that?’

‘Look at the footnote, Christopher, and the wording. “Women in domestic partnering situations, or those who have had extensive sexual experience.”’

‘How many cases so far – five thousand?’

‘Six thousand two hundred women, and only about sixty or seventy men, all partners of infected women. Men seem to be the vectors, and only constant re-exposure transmits the retrovirus.’

‘That’s not so crazy,’ Dicken said. ‘It’s not unlike HIV, then.’

‘Right,’ Salter said, mouth twitching. ‘God has it in for females. Infection begins with the mucosa of nasal passages and bronchia, proceeds to the mild inflammation of alveoli, enters the blood stream – mild inflammation of ovaries … and then it’s gone. Aching and some coughing, a sore tummy. And if the woman gets pregnant, there’s a very good chance she’ll miscarry.’

‘Mark should be able to sell that,’ Dicken said. ‘But let’s make his case stronger. He needs to scare a more reliable group of voters than young women. What about the geriatric set?’ He looked at her hopefully.

‘Older women don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Nobody younger than fourteen or older than sixty. Look at the spread.’ She leaned over and pointed to a pie chart. ‘Mean age of thirty-one.’

‘It’s too crazy. Mark wants me to make sense of this and strengthen the Surgeon General’s case by four o’clock this afternoon.’

‘He’s preparing another briefing?’ Salter asked.

‘Before the Chief of Staff and the science advisor. This is good, this is scary, but I know Mark. Look through the computers again – maybe we can come up with a few thousand geriatric deaths in Zaire.’

‘Are you asking me to cook the books?’

Dicken grinned wickedly.

‘Then screw you, sir,’ Salter said mildly, head cocked. ‘We haven’t got any more statistics out of Georgia. Maybe you could call up Tbilisi,’ Salter suggested. ‘Or Istanbul.’

‘They’re tight as clams,’ Dicken said. ‘I was never able to shake much out of them, and they refuse to admit they have any cases now.’ He glanced up at Salter.

Her nose wrinkled.

‘Please, just one elderly passenger out of Tbilisi melting on an airplane,’ Dicken suggested.

Salter let loose an explosion of laughter. She took off her glasses and wiped them, then replaced them. ‘It’s not funny. The charts are looking serious.’

‘Mark wants to let the drama build. He’s playing this one like a marlin on a line.’

‘I’m not very savvy about politics.’

‘I pretend not to be,’ Dicken said. ‘But the longer I hang around here, the more savvy I get.’

Salter glanced around the small room as if it might close in on her. ‘Are we done, Mark?’

Dicken grinned. ‘Claustrophobia acting up?’

‘It’s this room,’ Salter said. ‘Don’t you hear them?’ She leaned over the desk with a spooky expression. Dicken could not always tell whether Jane Salter was joking or serious. ‘The screaming of the monkeys?’

‘Yeah,’ Dicken said with a straight face. ‘I try to stay in the field as long as possible.’

In the director’s office in Building 4, Augustine looked at the statistics quickly, flipped through the twenty pages of numbers and computer-generated charts, and flung them down on the cafeteria table. ‘All very reassuring,’ he said. ‘At this rate we’ll be out of business by the end of the year. We don’t even know if SHEVA causes miscarriages in every pregnant woman, or whether it’s just a mild teratogen. Christ. I thought this was the one, Christopher.’

‘It’s good. It’s scary, and it’s public.’

‘You underestimate how much the Republicans hate the CDC,’ Augustine said. ‘The National Rifle Association hates us. Big tobacco hates us because we’re right in their back yard. Did you see that damned billboard just down the highway? By the airport? “Finally, a Butt Worth Kissing.” What was it – Camels? Marlboros?’

Dicken laughed and shook his head.

‘The Surgeon General is going right into the bear’s den. She’s not very happy with me, Christopher.’

‘There’s always the results I brought back from Turkey,’ Dicken said.

Augustine held up his hands and rocked back in his chair, fingers gripping the edge of the desk. ‘One hospital. Five miscarriages.’