Every inch a man’s man.
Lou’s best friend, and for ten years his AA sponsor, was a fifty-two-year-old Bahamian, with a physique that looked like it had been chiseled by one of Michelangelo’s descendants. He had earned his nickname, Cap’n Crunch, from his days as a professional boxer, specifically from the sound noses made when he hit them.
It was April 14—a Thursday. Lou’s trip to Georgia had been ordered by Walter Filstrup, the bombastic head of the Washington, D.C., Physician Wellness Office (PWO), a position that made the psychiatrist Lou’s boss.
Filstrup’s sweet wife, Marjory, a polar opposite of her husband, was in the ICU of a Maryland hospital with an irregular heartbeat that had not responded to electrical cardioversion. But as one of two candidates for the presidency of the National Federation of Physician Health Programs, Filstrup was scheduled to address the annual meeting, being held this year at the lodge in the mountains north of Atlanta.
Wife in ICU versus speech in Georgia.
Let … me … think.
Not surprisingly to Lou, Filstrup had actually wrestled mightily with the choice. It wasn’t until Marjory had an allergic reaction to one of the cardiac meds that the man turned his speech over to Lou along with his conference registration, and an expense account that would cover all Lou’s meals, providing he only ate one a day.
Whoopee.
“You’re slowing down, Welcome,” Cap said. “You’re not going to get to three hundred that way.”
“I’m not going to get … to three hundred
any
way.”
Cap, his competitive fire seldom dimmed, delighted in saying that most people’s workout was his warm-up. Lou, nine years younger, and at six feet, an inch or so taller, never had any problem believing that. Their connection began the day Lou was checked into Harbor House, a sober halfway house in one of the grittier sections of D.C. Cap, given name Hank, was working as a group leader there while he cajoled one bank after another trying to scrape together enough bread for his own training center. Twelve months after that, Lou was living on his own, the Stick and Move Gym had become a reality, and the two friends, one black as a moonless night, and the other a blue-eyed rock-jaw with the determination of a Rottweiler and roots that may have gone back to the Pilgrims, were sparring three times a week.
A year or so after that, following a zillion recovery meetings and the development of a new, infinitely mellower philosophy of living, the suspension of Lou’s medical license was lifted, and he was back in the game.
“Okay, then,” Cap said, “do what you can. It’s no crime to lower your expectations. Only not too far.”
“Does everything … we do together … have to be … some sort of competition? Two-twenty … two-twenty-one…”
“I assume we’re going to have breakfast after our run and I don’t believe in competitive eating, if that helps any.”
“Of course. It would be the one area I could kick your butt.”
The Chattahoochee Lodge had been built in the twenties for hunters and had been enlarged and renovated in 1957, the same year Elvis purchased Graceland. A sprawling, rustic complex, the main building was perched in the mountainous forest, high above the banks of the fast-flowing Chattahoochee River. As ecotourism boomed in the early 1990s, the place became a major destination for leisure travelers, birders, hikers, and convention goers, with rooms often booked a year in advance.
Lou, board-certified in both internal and emergency medicine, had never particularly enjoyed medical conferences of any kind, so it was a godsend when he whined about the impending trip to Cap and learned that his friend’s only living relative was an aging aunt, living just outside of Atlanta. Working full-time in the ER at Eisenhower Memorial Hospital, and part-time with the PWO, Lou had more than enough in his small war chest for another ticket south. The quite reasonable rent for his second-floor, two-bedroom apartment down the street from the gym and just above Dimitri’s Pizza helped make a loan to his sponsor even more painless.
Proof that the idea was a solid one was that Cap haggled surprisingly little over the bartering agreement Lou proposed—two months of weekly sessions in the ring for him, plus an additional four lessons for his precocious fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily. Cap would get the window seat.
Having to put up with Filstrup notwithstanding, Lou loved his job at the PWO. The pay was lousy, but for him the irony of going from being a client to being an associate director was huge. The organization provided support and monitoring services for doctors with mental illness, physical illness, substance abuse, sexual boundary violations, and behavioral problems. Most new PWO contracts required the troubled physician to enter some sort of treatment program or inpatient rehab, followed by regular meetings with their assigned PWO associate director, along with frequent random urine screens for alcohol and other drugs of abuse.
Lou was hardly averse to counseling and psychotherapy for certain docs, but he strongly believed that, physician or not, addiction was a medical illness and not a moral issue. Walter Filstrup disagreed.
When Filstrup finally handed over his carefully typed speech and the conference program, the trip got even better. Not only would Lou and Cap have time for some training runs together in the mountains, but while Cap was visiting his aunt, Lou would be able to take a conference-sponsored guided tour of the Centers for Disease Control—the CDC.
More irony.
Lou had spent nearly ten months of his life in Atlanta and had never even been close to the world-renowned institute. The last time he was in the city, nine years before, was for the one-year reunion of his treatment group at the Templeton Drug Rehab Center.
It was time to complete some circles.
CHAPTER 2
One man can dream, a handful can plan, thousands can strike, but just a hundred, properly placed and effectively utilized, can reshape the world.
—LANCASTER HILL,
100 Neighbors
, SAWYER RIVER BOOKS, 1939, P. III
His name was Douglas Charles Bacon, but to the seven others participating in the videoconference, he was N-38.
N
for
Neighbor
.
The Society of One Hundred Neighbors, conceived in secret during the early 1940s, arose from political philosopher Lancaster Hill’s treatise,
100 Neighbors
. Hill’s masterpiece, and several volumes that followed it, were written in response to Franklin Roosevelt’s economic and social legislations known collectively as the New Deal. Initially, there were only a dozen Neighbors, strategically placed throughout the country. But within a year, the one-hundred-member limit prescribed by Hill had been reached. One hundred neighbors. No more, and no less.
Bacon was a jovial, round-bellied Southerner, with a mind for numbers and an encyclopedic knowledge of Scotch. He was still a crack shot with a Remington, even after the hunting accident that had left him with a permanent limp and only two toes on his left foot. As the chosen director of the society, he was an ex-officio member of all seven of their current APs—Action Projects. From what he had been told just two days ago, AP-Janus, the most ambitious, far-reaching undertaking in the group’s history, was in trouble. Bacon took a sip of Macallan 18, one of his favorites, and smiled thinly. No one who knew him had ever seen him lose his cool. Perhaps Scotch was the reason.
N-80, Dr. Carlton Reeves, was a professor of surgery at Michigan. When Bacon first learned of the Janus bacteria, he had assigned Reeves to look into it further. Later, when the stunning possibilities had become clear, he had made the physician the coordinator of the AP and helped him to form his team. It was Reeves who had convened this advisory committee videoconference.
The members of the Society of One Hundred Neighbors blended with those around them as effectively as chameleons in a jungle. They wore business suits and ties to work, flannel shirts or uniforms or lab coats, and often carried briefcases. They lived in cities or towns in nearly every state, and whatever their talents, were uniformly respected for the quiet skill they brought to their jobs. But beneath their varied positions and appearances, the members of One Hundred Neighbors were joined by a singleness of purpose.
They were all, by the most widely accepted definitions, terrorists.
The goal of the organization, a straight line from Lancaster Hill, was quite simple. By any means, they were pledged to eliminate the suffocating government programs of entitlement that had brought America lurching to the brink of bankruptcy.
Bacon took the brief oath as director in 1993, taking over from the woman whose failing health had led her to relinquish leadership of the society. It was the year Bill Clinton had begun his first term as president, and also the year Islamic fundamentalists bombed the World Trade Center. Bacon, a registered Democrat and universally revered investment banker, had squelched efforts to put him on a short list for a post in the Clinton cabinet. Too much visibility and too little mobility.
His office was in the North Tower of the WTC. However, he was away at the time of the lethal bombing. His vacation was hardly a coincidence, given that he had financed mastermind Ramzi Yousef and had chosen the day of the truck bomb explosion. The goal of the Neighbors at that time was the erosion of the public’s confidence in the head of the House Armed Services Committee that would lead to his resignation.
“Are we ready, Eighty?” Bacon asked. “I’m certain Nine will be here shortly, so we might as well begin.”
Bacon’s face, like those of the others, was electronically distorted. The bottom of the massive screen displayed small boxes containing the encrypted video feed of each attendee, while the center area was reserved for a larger display of whoever was speaking. Bacon’s feed was the only one to run in the upper-left corner of everyone’s display.
The director held fiat over all board decisions. The advisory committee was there to help plan a new AP or to deal with decisions involving a member. Bacon would be a Neighbor until he could no longer do the job, after which his number would be given over to his replacement. Lancaster Hill had wisely laid out the blueprint of succession seventy-five years before:
Any Neighbor who no longer serves the cause because of an illness, shall be retired by the board, and their number reassigned to their replacement.
Except for health issues, no one ever left the society of their own volition. Members were sometimes dismissed when they lost their positions, or their influence otherwise waned, but they were always quickly replaced. Rarely, a member insisted on disengaging himself, or was found to be a security risk. In those instances, there were specialists in elimination who were kept on retainer at the advisory committee’s discretion.
The final screen lit up as Selma Morrow, N-9, activated her camera. She was chief of strategy and operations for Phelps and Snowdon, considered one of the strongest hedge funds in the country. She held the same position on the society advisory committee, and as such was a consultant to every AP. A personal favorite of Bacon’s, Nine would be his nominee to succeed him when the time came. For the moment, though, succession was not the issue.
The Janus strain was.
“Good to see you all,” Eighty said, “at least as much as I
can
see you. I wouldn’t call you all together unless you needed to hear this update regarding AP-Janus. To review, the Janus bacteria came to our attention some time ago thanks to N-Seventy-one, who stumbled on the germ accidentally while investigating another bacteria. The complete microbiology of Janus is too complex to go into here, but basically, most bacteria are divided into two major groups depending on whether or not their cell walls accept Gram staining—a process invented in the late nineteenth century, and still widely used today. Gram positive bacteria appear purple under a microscope, and Gram negative, once they are counterstained with the red dye safranin, appear pink.”
“Excuse me,” Twenty-six, a specialist in mass psychology, asked, “but you said most bacteria are either Gram positive or Gram negative. Most but not all?”
“Precisely.”
“But the Janus bacteria is neither?”
“Right again. Even though nearly all bacteria are either Gram positive or Gram negative, a very few, relative to the probably tens of millions of different species, are Gram intermediate—neither purple nor pink. There are even some that are Gram variable, staining either positive or negative depending on the age of the germ at the time it is removed from its culture medium for staining. But Janus is different. Janus has the genetic makeup that enables it to change from positive to negative and back again. Other properties of the germ are constantly in flux as well.”
“Like a shape-shifter,” Ninety-seven said. “That’s why it’s resistant to all antibiotics.”
Ninety-seven was a mechanical engineer and mathematician, just six years past earning a dual Ph.D. at MIT. The youngest of the Neighbors, her adult-adjusted IQ had been measured at 182.
“Actually,” Eighty replied, “it seems the Gram positive form is sensitive to some antibiotics, but the Gram negative is totally resistant to all—all, that is, except one—a sequence, actually. Almost by accident, Seventy-one stumbled on a combination of chemicals that, administered in a particular order, completely eradicated the Janus strain. It was tried on infections induced in pigs, then monkeys, and finally in several humans. The sequence eradicated every one of their infections—like magic.”
“No side effects?”
“None in the past three years that we can see. But now a problem has arisen.”
“You mean a challenge,” Bacon corrected.
“Of course. A challenge. The Janus strain is working as we hoped. In that regard, it is clear to everyone in the government that we are capable of delivering on our threat.”
The name of the demon germ had been carefully chosen. Janus, the two-faced Roman god of duality—beginning and end; comedy and tragedy; birth and death; health and sickness. There was something unsettling about the name, which was just what the advisory committee wanted. Something creepy.