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 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 14 and 17, 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 Chromo-somally 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 CDC knew this much: The retroviruses 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 them, but they were no longer simply genetic garbage or abandoned fragments. Something had stimulated scattered segments 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 flu.
With the mix of brilliance and luck that characterized most great scientific careers, Lang had precisely pegged the locations of the genes that were apparently causing Herod’s flu. 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, retrogenes, had very likely once been the precursors 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 retroviruses, like prodigal sons; some of those, over the millennia, had infected germ-line cells — eggs or sperm or their precursors — and 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.
All rumors, but to Dicken evocative, even compelling. In his hunting, he relied on well-honed instincts. The stories resonated with something he had been thinking about for over a year.
Perhaps there had been a conspiracy of mutagens. Perhaps Chernobyl or some other Soviet-era radiation disaster had triggered the release of the endogenous retrovirus that caused Herod’s flu. So far, he had mentioned this theory to no one, however.
In the Midtown Tunnel, a big panel truck decorated with happy dancing cows swerved and nearly hit him. He stood on the Dodge’s brakes. Squealing tires and a miss of mere inches brought sweat to his brow and unleashed all his anger and frustration. “Fuck you!” he shouted at the unseen driver. “Next time I’ll carry Ebola!”
He was feeling less than charitable. The CDC would have to go public, perhaps in a few weeks. By that time, if the charts were accurate, there would be well over five thousand cases of Herod’s flu in the United States alone.
And Christopher Dicken would be credited with little more than a good soldier’s footwork.
8
Long Island, New York
The green and white house stood on top of a low hill, medium in size but stately, 1940s Colonial, surrounded by old oaks and poplars, as well as rhododendrons she had planted three years ago.
Kaye had called from the airport and picked up a message from Saul. He was at a client lab in Philadelphia and would be back later in the evening. It was seven now and the twilight sky over Long Island was glorious. Fluffy clouds broke free from a dissipating mass of ominous gray. Starlings made the oaks noisy as a nursery.
She unlocked the door, pushed her bags through, and keyed in her code to deactivate the alarm. The house smelled musty. She put down her bags as one of their two cats, an orange tabby named Crickson, sallied into the hallway from the living room, claws ticking faintly on the warm teak floor. Kaye picked him up and skritched him under the neck and he purred and mewed like a sick calf. The other cat, Temin, was nowhere in sight. She guessed he was outside, hunting.
The living room made her heart sag. Dirty clothes had been scattered everywhere. Microwave cardboard dishes lay scattered on the coffee table and oriental rug before the couch. Books and newspapers and yellow pages torn from an old phone book sprawled over the dining table. The musty smell came from the kitchen: rotten vegetables, stale coffee grounds, plastic food wrappers.
Saul had had a bad time of it. As usual, she had returned just in time to clean up.
Kaye opened the front door and all the windows.
She fried herself a small steak and made a green salad with bottled dressing. As she opened a bottle of pinot noir, Kaye noticed an envelope on the white tile counter near the espresso maker. She set the wine out to breathe, then tore open the envelope. Inside was a flowery greeting card with a scrawled note from Saul.
Kaye,
Sweetest Kaye, love love love I am so sorry. I missed you and this time it shows, all over the house. Don’t clean up. I’ll have Caddy do it tomorrow and pay her extra. Just relax. The bedroom is spotless. I made sure of that.
Kaye folded the note with an unmollified sniff and stared at the counter and cabinets. Her eye fell on a neat stack of old journals and magazines, out of place on the butcher block table. She lifted the magazines. Underneath, she found a dozen or so printouts, and another note. She turned off the heat on the stove and put a lid over the pan to keep the steak warm, then picked up the pile and read the first sheet.
Kaye…
You peeked! This stack by way of apology. Very exciting. Got it off Virion and asked Ferris and Farrakhan Mkebe at UCI what they know. They wouldn ‘t tell me everything, but I think It’s here, just like we predicted. They call it SHERVA — Scattered Human Endogenous Retrovirus Activation. There’s very little useful on the web sites, but here s the discussion.