THE VIRON CONSPIRACY (JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS #4) (5 page)

“Probably the result of a troubled childhood. Lack of nurturing.”

Mack looked at his bodyguard.

“Wh
o are you? Dr. Phil? Stay away from daytime TV. It’ll dry out your brain.”

They started walking to the limo.

“Jake was a goner,” Mack said. “He always had a weak spot for troubled women, or women in trouble.”

“Well, I hope he can keep this one alive, boss. He doesn’t always.”

“Yeah.”

CHAPTER 7 - KATE AND JAKE

The sleek Seastreak catamaran was capable of doing almost 40 knots, although at night it was kept at less than full throttle, for obvious reasons. It would reach downtown Manhattan in about an hour. A large-screen television in one of the lounges had attracted most of the 30 or so passengers to a baseball game. Boston versus the Yankees. Ordinarily, Scarne would have been interested. Instead he went to the full bar in the main cabin and ordered a double brandy, which he took back to the rear of the boat, which was deserted. He sat in one of the plush leather seats and stared out at the water.

***

It had been Dudley’s idea to double date.

“For God’s sake, Duds, what are we
, 16? Who the hell goes on a double date? Just give me the girl’s number and I’ll call her up.”

Both men weren’t that long out of the service. Scarne was just moving up the ladder in the New York Police Department while his friend was consolidating the semi-criminal empire that would become his life’s work. Scarne had quickly learned that there were good criminals and bad criminals. He knew that Dudley, despite a penchant for occasional over-the-top violence, was a good crook. In addition to
a to-the-death loyalty he knew went both ways, Scarne also realized that a good crook could prove invaluable to a cop who often had to work both sides of the street.   

But Dudley Mack’s taste in women was suspect. At Providence College, where he and Scarne met and bonded after initially trying to beat each other’s brains out, Mack was known as “Go ugly early Dudley” for his tactic of always targeting the least attractive girls in bars or college parties.

“They all look the same by the end of the night,” he’d explained. “Why waste your dough all night trying to sweet talk some snooty Newport babe when the ugly ones are so grateful for the attention you’re almost certain of getting laid or a blow job hours earlier. Then you have the whole rest of the night free.”

Jake, who tended to romanticize woman, was appalled, but couldn’t argue the logic.

Of course, as the years past, Dudley’s choice of women improved markedly. His growing reputation as a dangerous rogue attracted a surprisingly sophisticated series of lovers. The woman he was now dating, Chevelle Riggs, was an African-American beauty who wrote about style for the
Wall Street Journal
.

“Come on, Jake. It’s not really a double date. I’m renting a house down on Long Beach Island for the summer and I’m taking Chevelle there this weekend. I told her she could invite a friend. They went to Bryn Mawr together. Girl’s one of those Philadelphia Main Line types that you prefer. You know, the ones you put on a pedestal.”

Not wanting to be locked into a weekend, Scarne reluctantly agreed to drive down to the New Jersey barrier island near Atlantic City on Saturday for dinner.

***

“I’m going to build a house here someday, Cochise.”

They were sitting on the front deck of Dudley’s rental, drinking gin and tonics and watching the sun go down over the Atlantic. The house was nestled close to the dunes in a quiet section of Harvey Cedars.

“It’s certainly very nice, Duds.”

Scarne had arrived shortly before 7 P.M. to find Mack alone on the deck, drinking and smoking. Chevelle and her friend were out.

“Shopping,” Dudley explained. “Women are very patriotic.”

The men exchanged smiles. It was an inside joke. Both had been contemptuous of the
Government’s exhortation that that best way Americans could respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was to go out and shop. Scarne and Mack thought they knew a better way. They enlisted. When they met after their respective discharges, they had compared wounds. It was Mack who said, “Maybe we should have gone shopping.”  

They heard a car pull into the gravel driveway and a moment later the two women walked out onto the deck. Both men rose and Scarne and Chevelle hugged.

“Oh, it’s great to see you, Jake. I’d like you to meet my friend, Kate. I’ve told her all about you. And she didn’t run for the hills.”

Scarne liked Chevelle, who was as much Bronx as Bryn Mawr.

The woman standing confidently behind Chevelle looked amused. She was tall and athletic-looking, with a triangular face, slightly pointed chin, wide mouth and almond curved blue-green eyes that gave her a slightly feline look. Dark-haired and light-skinned with just a touch of that day’s sun, she was, in a word, stunning. She put out her hand.

“I’m Kate Ellenson.”

“Jake Scarne.”

Chevelle looked at Dudley and winked.

***

“Why do you call him Cochise?”

The four of them were sitting at the bar waiting for a table at Kubel’s, a tavern a few blocks from the Barnegat Lighthouse on the northern tip of Long Beach Island.

“Indian blood flows through Jake’s veins, Kate. Cheyenne.”

“The term is Native-American,” Chevelle said.

“Whatever. I used to go out to visit Jake in Montana. He taught me how to scalp.”

“Please shut up, Dudley,” Scarne said.

“How much Cheyenne are you,” Kate asked.

“My grandmother, on my mother’s side.”

“The rest of him is Sicilian,” Dudley said. “Not only can he scalp, but he’s a hell of a cook.”

The men were drinking Absolute on the rocks. The women ordered Cosmos, which proved less of a challenge for Kubel’s bartenders than Scarne would have thought, given the restaurant’s pedigree. It was a rough-and tumble shore joint that some said had been the model for the tavern in the movie
The Perfect Storm.
But the seafood was the best on the island and the dining room was always crowded.

“How does a Sicilian wind up with Cheyenne blood,” Kate asked.

The force of her interest was palpable. 

“I’ve heard this wigwam story before,” Mack said. “Come on, Chevy, let’s play a video game. Order another round, Jake.”

Scarne signaled the waiter and then turned back to Kate.

“First of all, I was born in Montana. My grandfather, my father’s father, was an Italian naval officer who was a prisoner of war in Montana after his submarine was sunk in the Mediterranean during World War II. The prisoners often worked on local farms in return for fresh produce for their camp and he met my grandmother on her family’s farm. After the war he came back to the United States and they married. When my parents died, my grandparents raised me.”

“How old were you?”

“Six. It was a plane crash. I survived. They didn’t.”

“How awful.”

“I barely remember it.” Except in the occasional nightmare, Scarne thought. “After my grandmother died, my grandfather raised me
alone. He had become a respected judge. I lacked for nothing. I actually had an ideal childhood, all things considered. Spent a lot of time outdoors. My grandfather believed in letting a boy find himself.”

“But you went to college in the East.”

Scarne smiled.

“There’s a lot of room in Montana to find oneself. In fact, I got lost a couple of times doing it. He thought I might have been overdoing the ‘going native’ part, so he arranged a change of scenery that probably kept me out of the hoosegow. He wanted me to have a good Catholic education and had relatives in Providence he believed could keep an eye on me. Didn’t quite work out the way he envisioned. He didn’t know they were, how shall I put it, connected.”

“Mafia?”

“On the fringe. Wonderful people. Taught me a lot about the world. Dudley loved them.”

“I can imagine.”

“He liked my Montana crowd, too. He absorbed the best, or maybe it’s the worst, of both cultures. I guess I did, as well. But it’s worked out.”

“Cops and robbers.”

“What’s that
?”

“My father used to say that there was usually very little difference below the surface.”

“Sounds like a very Philadelphia thing to say.”

“I hope you’re not offended.”

“Do I look offended?”

She drank some of the new Cosmo that the bartender had placed down.

“How did you wind up in New York?”

“My grandfather died when I was in the service. There was really nothing left for me in Montana.”

Scarne finished his drink.

“Now, you’ve somehow managed to get me to spill my guts. It’s your turn.”

“I’m afraid my story isn’t as exotic as yours,” Kate said. “I’m an only child and was spoiled rotten. My family has money, but not as much as I want someday. I was reluctant to come this weekend because I knew Chevy would try to set me up with someone.” She paused. “But now I’m glad I came. Are you?”

“Yes.”    

***

After dinner they all walked over to the lighthouse. Jake and Kate sat on the bulkhead near some fishermen while Mack and Chevelle went for a walk on the beach. It was getting cool and Scarne draped his jacket over Kate
’s shoulders.

“I’m going back to Philadelphia tomorrow,” Kate said.

“I’m leaving, too.”

“It will be awkward back at the house,” she said. “I like you too much to sleep with you tonight.”

Scarne smiled.

“Give me back my jacket.”

She laughed.

“You know what I mean, don’t you. I suspect we will be lovers soon. But sleeping together on our first night would be, I don’t know, inappropriate. We wouldn’t be getting off on the right foot.”

Scarne didn’t bother asking how she was so sure of him. Women know.

“Will you be disappointed?”

“There is no safe answer to that question, Kate.”

***

The next day, after Jake and Kate had both departed, Mack and Chevelle sat on the porch drinking coffee.

“Well, you tried,” Mack said.

“What do you mean?”

“I guess they didn’t hit it off. They slept in separate bedrooms.”

“That’s because they’re already half in love with each other.”

Mack looked at her.

“Are you nuts?”

“You dumb Mick. You don’t know anything. Just because people fuck doesn’t mean they love each other. Look at us.”

“Hey!”

“Hey, your ass. We like each other, Duds. We’re good in bed. We have a lot of fun outside the rack, too. But we’re not in love. Did you see the way those two looked at each other? They didn’t want to ruin it by sleeping together on their first date.”

“We screwed the first time we met.”

“I rest my case.”

***

Scarne called her the next week and went to Philadelphia. They first made love in Kate
’s Rittenhouse Square apartment. She was a bold, adventurous lover. At first, the 90-mile difference in their lifestyles suited them, giving them just enough space and time to keep their relationship at a delicious arm’s length. The sexual tensions they released after being apart for a week or two led to sublime lovemaking. The fact that they weren’t always together also served to hide their individual traits and shortcomings from each other. In Scarne’s case, his obsessive work ethic. In Kate’s, her emotional volatility. After a year, when Kate moved to New York to take a job in advertising, things changed. Not immediately, since they were still deeply in love. But she took her own apartment, not wanting to move in with Scarne. And they had their first real fights. He worked too hard at a job she thought was beneath him. She didn’t want to discuss the future. They broke up. And made up. The makeup sex was always thrilling, but Scarne wanted more. He proposed. She turned him down. He drank too much. His friends despaired. But she came back to him and agreed to marry. They picked a church.

Then she ran away, out West somewhere. He probably would have fallen to pieces but he had just made detective and was closing in on a child killer and was able to subsume his own problems. That, and the constant ministrations of Dudley Mack, who felt responsible for what happened with Kate, got Scarne through it.

But he was a changed man.

***

Scarne heard the rumble of the reverse engines and felt the slow deceleration of the catamaran. He stood and realized he was slightly drunk. He always knew he would see Kate again, but not like this. He walked off the ferry and hailed a cab.

CHAPTER 8 - POOR INDIA

Dr. Satyavrata Venkataraman lit a cigarette, his 20th of the day, and sat wearily on the wooden box outside one of the medical tents on the outskirts of Thakkar, a village near India
’s border with Bangladesh. The other doctors in his team had dubbed it “Venka’s smoking box.”

Despite his fatigue after a 16-hour day, the 36-year-old physician still cut an attractive figure. The nurses in his home hospital called him Dr. Bollywood because he had the rakish handsomeness of a movie star. Tall and thin, with a small mustache and bedroom eyes, he was catnip to females, especially since he was as yet unmarried.   

As the chief epidemiologist at the Gauhati Medical Center in Chandmari, a city known as an educational hub in the Northeastern Indian state of Assam, Dr. Venkataraman, considered a rising star in Indian medical circles, was often called on to identify disease outbreaks in rural communities before they could spread to the nation’s overcrowded cities. He thought he had seen just about everything a malevolent nature could throw at the human race. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He was at a loss, and not a little frightened.

For all the publicity and dread generated by Ebola and other viral outbreaks in Africa,
he knew that some of the diseases in the Indian hinterland had the potential to be more dangerous in the long run. To be sure, Venkataraman wanted no part of Ebola and other hemorrhagic viruses, such as Marburg. They were horrific and killed most of their victims, turning internal organs into soup. But their potency had an upside, savage as it was. The viruses usually burned their way through a local human population quickly, since they soon ran out of hosts.

Like most epidemiologists and scientists, Dr. Venkataraman feared viruses that killed more slowly and less efficiently. The influenza virus of 1917-18 slaughtered 50 million people around the globe before enough people built up immunity to halt its spread. Moreover, the origins of Ebola and its deadly siblings were usually quickly identified: apes, bats, rodents and other so-called reservoir
vectors and carriers.

But Dr. Venkataraman and his team still had not identified what was sickening the people living in Thakkar. Not that the medical sleuths lacked suspects. Sanitation in the village, where most of the dwellings consisted of mud huts with bamboo roofs, and families slept six to a wooden platform, was abysmal. The huts were poorly ventilated and stifling. Insects buzzed about and it was not unusual for livestock to wander in and out at will. Bowls of corn, rice, mangoes and bananas lay exposed everywhere and attracted flies and rats. Villagers drank from a well that had mosquito larvae floating in the clouded water. The village elders were partial to desidaru, a fermented liquor made from the sap of litchi trees. They often left half-full pots of the noxious brew lying around, where they were invariably contaminated with drowned insects, bat feces and urine.

Yet for all of that, the doctors and scientists knew, the villagers remained fairly healthy, having over generations built up immunities to germs that would quickly flatten a Westerner in New York and London.

The first victims that Dr. Venkataraman saw after arriving in Thakkar a week after the outbreak were a young mother named Anunitha Sule and her six-year-old daughter, Rubaina. Both had the same flu-like symptoms that the previous 20 victims had presented before the Gauhati team set up a small diagnostic and treatment clinic in a set of trailers and tents provided by India’s Pandemic Intelligence Service. The P.I.S. was a new department created with the help of the Center for Disease Control in the United States. It was designed to not only deal with the 1,200 epidemics that annually scourged India’s 1.3 billion inhabitants, but to also prevent them from exploding into worldwide threats, or pandemics. 

Both the Sule woman and her daughter were in extreme distress when he first saw them, but Dr. Venkataraman was confident they would respond to the kind of advanced medical treatment not available to the first patients, of whom approximately 30 percent died. He dosed them with antibiotics to counter secondary bacterial infections, added some antivirals and provided them with liquids and food intravenously. At first, the interventions seemed to be working. While they remained listless, their color improved and they were even able to eat some solid food. Thus encouraged, the doctor even went so far as to tell Anunitha Sule’s worried husband that the crisis had apparently passed.

That was a mistake he would not make again. Both the woman and her child died the next morning in convulsions and he was forced to try to explain the unexplainable to the stunned man.

The pattern repeated itself, over and over. Victims came in, were stabilized, and either lived or died in the same proportion as those who had not received proper treatment. It made no sense. The mortality rate was brutal, although not as bad as with Ebola and the other viruses, but the fact that medical intervention didn’t seem to matter went against reason. Moreover, the survivors all seemed to be debilitated neurologically in some manner. Many exhibited tremors in the limbs and mental impairment.

It would remain to be seen if those effects of the disease diminished over time. Venkataraman surely hoped so. An illness that killed 30 percent of its victims and left the other 70 percent permanently disabled was too terrible to contemplate.

Blood, urine, feces, skin and saliva samples were sent off to various laboratories, and while they, as expected, revealed an incredible plethora of noxious pathogens, none seemed capable of causing the physical deterioration the doctors and technicians were seeing in the slowly dwindling population of Thakkar. And it was dwindling. What started as an isolated case, became a trickle, and was now a flood. Most of village’s 364 residents had some form of the mysterious disease, which caused vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, high-fever, hallucinations, and in the 30% of victims it killed, violent convulsions. Young children and old people seemed particularly vulnerable, and died at a higher rate than others. That was to be expected. Nature culled the weakest from the herd. But a fair number of relatively healthy adults, male and female, also succumbed.

Every time the Gauhati medical team thought they discovered a possible pathogenic culprit or disease vector, someone who didn’t fit the paradigm got sick. For the first time in his experience, Venkataraman began to sense a feeling of panic among the doctors, nurses and scientists working with him. Thankfully, the fear quickly subsided, because the affliction, whatever it was, had one saving grace. It was apparently not airborne, and there was a growing consensus that other normal vectors — insect and animal bites, contaminated drinking and bathing water, sexual transmission and the like — were also not to blame. That gave authorities the confidence to transfer victims from Thakkar to the Gauhati Medical Center and other larger facilities in Assam. Where, unfortunately, the same damnable 30% mortality rate still prevailed.

Dr. Venkataraman bent forward and ground his Marlboro into the mud. Then, he pulled out his cell phone and called his boss, Dr. Chitrabhanu Bhargavahis, the 72-year-old Director of the Gauhati Medical Center. For the next ten minutes, he brought Bhargavahis up to speed on everything his team had done.

“Well,” Bhargavahis said when he finished, “the good news is that there have been no similar outbreaks elsewhere. It seems to be limited to Thakkar. And there has not been one transmittable case here or in any other hospitals where we’ve sent patients.”

Venkataraman respected his superior, who was not only open to the most modern medical techniques, but who had also taken the younger man under his wing. But he was not comforted. 

“I’m not even sure it’s viral or bacterial,” he said. “What do the toxicology screens show.”

Both men were acutely aware that in addition to nature’s biological wrath, there were man-made disasters affecting the population. A few months earlier, 14 children in Alipurduar, a city in West Bengal, died after eating lunch in a school where the food had somehow been contaminated with fatal levels of phosphorous, which in India is used to preserve various grains. 

“Not a damn thing that would account for the symptoms,” Bhargavahis replied. “I mean, there are traces of various pesticides and other chemicals, but not in amounts significant enough to cause distress. You and I probably have as much crap in our systems.” The old man laughed. “If you sent in a blood sample, Sati, they would probably clap you in the hospital because of the nicotine levels.”

“I’m trying to cut back,” Venkataraman said, as he lit another cigarette. “What about the autopsies?”

“The same. It’s easy enough to tell what organ failure killed these people, but not what caused the disease process. Some victims had lesions in the brain. Others in the heart, lungs, liver, etc. No pattern. Very strange. We are sending off some tissue samples to Atlanta. The C.D.C. has more powerful instruments. Hopefully, they can find something. You know, maybe it’s not a virus. Was it Mad Cow Disease that is caused by a protein?”

Venkataraman was always impressed by how agile the old man’s mind remained. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy was a degenerative disease that affects the central nervous system of adult cattle and has been transmitted to humans who ate infected meat.

“Yes. It’s caused by
an abnormal version of a protein normally found on cell surfaces called a prion. The damaged prion destroys the brain and spinal cord. But I hardly think cows would be a vector in India, especially here. The people consider them sacred and do not eat them.”

“Pity. I like a good steak. They don’t know what they are missing. But perhaps it is something similar in another food.”

“If it is a prion, the C.D.C. may be able to isolate it.”

A goat trotted over
to Venkataraman. He watched in amazement as it bent its head and started eating the accumulated cigarette butts at his feet, filters and all.

“Unbelievable,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”   

“So, what should I tell New Delhi in the meantime,” Bhargavahis asked.

“Pray.”

My poor India,” the old doctor said. “When will she stop suffering?”

“Perhaps, it will not be too bad this time,” Venkataraman said, trying to cheer his mentor up.

He closed his cell phone. The goat was looking at him, chewing the last cigarette butt, the tip of which was sticking out its mouth.

“What? You want a light?”

Venkataraman stood up and the animal cantered away. I’ve got to get some rest, he thought. I’m talking to goats. He was suddenly ravenous and started walking to the mess tent for some coffee and a balushahi, the Indian pastry made with maida flour, deep-fried in clarified butter, then dipped in sugar syrup. Some doctor, I am. Two packs a day and balushahis. I’ll probably be dead before some of my patients.

He felt a drop of rain and returned to his “smoking box” to move it inside the tent to keep it dry for his next break.

The exhausted physician barely registered the inscription stamped on the side of the box:

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