"And two more men who came in with us are missing," Nikki added.
"Do you know why Grimes did this to us?" Ellen asked.
"I don't know why he included you," Matt replied, "but as you can see, the local mine has been illegally storing toxic chemicals in here. We were about to expose the whole business. Grimes is in bed with the mine owners."
With Kathy's fatal prion disease not adequately accounted for, Nikki had never felt completely comfortable with Matt's contention about the mine.
"Not to muddy the water," she said, "but what Matt didn't say was that a number of people from this area have developed a syndrome of horrible facial lumps and progressive paranoia. Matt thinks it has something to do with these chemicals. I'm not as certain about that as he is. Do you have something to do with the mine?"
"No. I've never been in this area before."
"Then, why?"
"Well, believe it or not, I came because a man broke into my home in Glenside, Maryland, and swore he would kill my granddaughter unless I did what he wanted me to. I was able to learn who he might be, and traced him back here to Tullis, but I needed to get a look at him before I could be certain he was the one. Your police chief was supposed to help me do that and also take a statement from me, but we never got that far."
"I don't understand," Matt said, turning back to check on Morrissey. "Who was the man you came about?"
"His name was Sutcher. Vinyl Sutcher."
Stunned, Nikki and Matt stared at one another.
"Perhaps you'd better tell us more," Nikki said.
Fred Carabetta had lapsed into unconsciousness. His steady, sonorous breathing formed the background for Ellen's account of her place on the blue-ribbon Omnivax commission; of Lynette Marquand's politically motivated pledge to the American people; of her terrifying encounter with Vinyl Sutcher; and finally, of the fruits of Rudy Peterson's dogged pursuit of the truth behind the outbreaks of Lassa fever. For a time after she had finished, nothing was said. Matt's eyes closed as he spun through the kaleidoscope of his memories, searching to connect with something… something he knew was there.
Suddenly he looked up at the two women, his expression grim.
"The Lassa fever vaccine was tested here," he said.
"What?"
"I don't know exactly when, sometime between when I left for college and when I came back to practice. A drug company paid all the doctors in the valley for each patient they could convince to get the shot. After I came back to go into practice here, a bunch of the older docs were joking about it one day in the lunchroom at the hospital. Here none of them had ever even seen a case of Lassa fever in their lives, and now, with a bunch of the town immunized, none of them ever would. That was the gist of what they were laughing about. A couple of them didn't even know what the disease was, even though they signed up a number of their patients and gave them the shot. I actually think I remember them saying that they got a hundred dollars a head, and that some of them shared that money with the patients. It was all perfectly legal as far as I know — docs and patients are both paid all the time for participating in research protocols or drug testing. I don't know how many in the valley were given the test shots."
"Four hundred," Ellen said. "Four hundred of all ages. I saw the summaries of the field trial, but I never noted down where it was conducted."
"How many years ago?" Nikki asked.
"I don't know," Matt replied. "Maybe ten."
"Oh, God," she exclaimed.
"What?"
"Matt, don't you see? Prions. The latent period between exposure to the germ and development of symptoms can be as much as ten years or even longer. That's where the Belinda syndrome is coming from — from the vaccine, not from these barrels of poison. The tissue culture cells that the virus was grown on must have been contaminated with prions right from the start. It seems likely they would have used monkey tissue. If so, maybe the monkeys that the cells came from originally were infected."
"But — "
"You were right all along about the mine storing toxic waste. You were right and you were passionate about what you believed. Grimes knew about this dump and probably sent you that note to keep pushing you in this direction so you wouldn't ever search for the truth about the cases you discovered."
"But why would he do that?"
"He must have a stake in the vaccine."
"If he does," Ellen said, "he's on the verge of becoming an extremely wealthy man. Lasaject is one of the most expensive components of Omnivax. In the next year, especially when older children and adults are immunized in addition to newborns, tens of millions of doses are going to be administered. What's this about prions? What are they?"
"The germs that cause Mad Cow disease and other neurologic illnesses as well," Nikki said. "We think they're responsible for the condition that man has, and also the woman who attacked me, and the girl over there. The symptoms don't appear for years after exposure, and there's essentially no test to see if someone without symptoms has contracted the disease."
"You think everyone who gets the vaccine will get infected with prions?"
"I doubt it. Those who get the disease probably have some sort of genetic predisposition to the effects of the prions. In Britain, despite the hundreds of thousands of people who ate contaminated beef, relatively few cases of Mad Cow disease have been reported."
"How many of the original four hundred do you think have developed prion disease?"
Nikki shrugged. "Let's see," she said. "Matt and I have encountered six cases, including these three. If, say, an additional six cases have disappeared thanks to the handiwork of Grimes and his men, that would make twelve."
"Three percent," Ellen said.
"That may be higher than with Mad Cow disease," Matt said, "but the jury is still out on the rest of those exposed, because we don't know how variable the latency period of the disease is. And the British ate the germ. These people had it injected."
"Three percent at a minimum," Ellen said. "That's terrible. Do either of you know the date and time right now?"
"The second," Matt said, checking his watch. "One-thirty A.M. Why?"
"Because later today, at three o'clock this afternoon, I think, the First Lady is going to preside over a live televised ceremony featuring the Secretary of Health and Human Services giving a four-day-old girl the first official shot of Omnivax. She's going to be inoculated at a neighborhood health center in the Anacostia section of D.C. Immediately after that first shot, pediatricians all over the country will begin giving Omnivax to their patients. The vaccine is already in their refrigerators."
"And probably none of those kids will get sick immediately," Nikki said glumly. "There'll be no warning that anything is wrong."
"Oh, some will get sick," Ellen said. "A percentage of children getting vaccinated inevitably get sick, some of their reactions are serious, some of them even fatal. The pediatricians and scientists and drug manufacturers tell us their lives are a trade-off for the greater good. I wonder how they would feel if it was their child's life. The real question now is one that has troubled me and others about inoculations right along: Who will be able to say what will happen five years after a child receives her immunizations, or ten — especially now that they're all rolled up into Omnivax?"
"These three can," Matt said. "Grimes must have realized the vaccine was flawed. With all that money on the line, rather than come clean about it or chance someone like us seeing enough cases to piece things together, he decided to eliminate everyone who has developed the prion disease. That gives him ten years before the next wave of spongiform encephalopathy and neurofibromas hits."
"A wave maybe," Nikki said, "but possibly a tsunami."