THE VIRON CONSPIRACY (JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS #4) (11 page)

CHAPTER 18 - CIRCLES ON A MAP

Solna, Sweden

Dr. Knut Thorkelson was not happy. As head of the European Center for Disease Control, he was used to working long hours and even the occasional weekend. But damn it, he’d planned this three-day weekend a month ago, and to have it cut short was highly annoying.

“What’s so important that it can’t wait until Tuesday,” his wife had asked, not unreasonably in his estimation.

“Lars wants me at the weekly briefing. He says he’s worried.”

“Lars is always worried,” Inge Thorkelson rebutted. “He sees the end of the world in every new disease.”

“He only has to be right once,” her husband said mildly, feeling the need to defend a colleague. “I agree he is a worry-wart, but he is a first-class scientist. He wouldn’t ruin my holiday without a good reason.”

“I think he’s after your job,” Inge said.

“He can have it,” Thorkelson said. “I’ll retire. Then you can have me to boss around the house every day, instead of just one extra day. That was your plan, wasn’t it?”

She laughed.

“There is some work that has to be done before it gets too cold.”

Thorkelson knew she was right. Swedish winters can be brutal. There were windows to caulk, firewood to stack and a heating system to check. The older home that Inge had talked him into buying on the lake was charming to be sure, but keeping it up was a royal pain. That reminded him. The dock was sagging a bit, probably from ice damage the previous winter. The fact that he spent much of the previous two days doing such household chores didn’t bother Thorkelson. Like most Swedes, he liked manual labor. It was a nice break from his days at ECDC, where he spent much of his time poring over epidemiological reports from around the globe.

His wife walked over to him and ran a hand down the front of his trousers.

“It wasn’t all work and no play, Knut,” she said with a lascivious smile. “You got your rewards.”

One of the advantages of having a beautiful second wife 20 years his junior was her sexual fervor. It was also one of the disadvantages. At that moment, the respected Dr. Thorkelson would have ignored an Ebola outbreak in the Vatican to stay home. Inge saw, and, through his pants, felt his distress. She laughed.

“Go to work.” She kissed him. “I’ll probably get more done without you. But don’t worry. When you come home I’ll still schtupp your brains out.”

***

Dr. Thorkelson lived only 20 minutes from the ECDC campus in Solna, a municipality located just north of Stockholm. On his drive to the Monday briefing, he wondered what had gotten Lars Bohlander
’s knickers in such a twist. He liked Lars, although the fact that they were both Swedes did cause some grumbling among the international staff. And Inge was wrong. Lars knew he’d never succeed Thorkelson, for that very reason. The next director would probably be Martine Babineau, the woman who once ran the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in Paris. More than competent, and in the current political climate, politically correct. Thorkelson smiled at the thought of some of his colleagues taking orders from a woman. Well, the married ones should be used to it.

He passed Friends Arena, the new national football stadium adjacent to the Solna Stockholm commuter rail station, and then the Karolinska Institutet and the Karolinska University Hospital, where he often lectured or observed, before pulling up to the gate guard at ECDC. Security had been beefed up in recent years because of the threat of terrorism, even though the ECDC was strictly a gatherer of information and did not keep dangerous viruses or bacteria on hand. The center publishes an annual Epidemiological Report, which suggests where European resources should be devoted to reduce the damage caused by communicable diseases, and Eurosurveillance, a seminal
journal devoted to epidemiology. But there was always the chance that some ignorant terrorist would view the ECDC as a threat, or assume the place was loaded with deadly pathogens that could be stolen. It was a crazy world, Thorkelson knew. Just the month before the nearby Stockholm International Peace Research Institute received a bomb threat. Who the hell would bomb a peace institute?

The ECDC guard checked Thorkelson’s pass and, as usual, teased him about his car, a 1998 Saab 9000. He took the ribbing good-naturedly. The sedan was in wonderful shape, and he was determined to get at least 250,000 miles out of it. His young wife had expensive tastes, and he indulged them all. Inge’s new Volvo had set him back more than 200,000 krone! He was not about to buy another car. He drove to the small private lot and his reserved space and entered the modernistic, three-story, glass-and-steel ECDC headquarters building. 

The organization Thorkelson headed was less than 10 years old. Europeans have the highest respect for, and a good working relationship with, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, the American agency considered the finest facility of its kind in the world. But as economic integration increased and traditional frontier barriers were removed in the European Union, it became apparent that Europe needed its own bulwark against infectious diseases. The outbreak in 2003 of the SARS coronavirus, which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome first in Asia and then rapidly spread across country borders, scared the hell out of Europe. The urgency was so great that the usual red-tape and bureaucratic wrangling was dispensed with and the ECDC, an independent entity of the European Union, was established in 2005 and located in Solna, Sweden. ECDC’s network comprises 28 Economic Union members (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom), plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. The ECDC has a staff of around 300 and an annual budget of over 50 million euros.

Thorkelson looked at his watch. It was almost 10 A.M., the time for the Monday briefing, so he went directly to the conference room on the third floor where it was always held. There were 12 people sitting around the large rectangular table, e
ach an expert in one disease or another. He greeted them all with fake grumpiness, to let them know that he put their concerns ahead of his aborted holiday. Grabbing a cup of coffee from a sideboard, he sat down at the head of the table and nodded to the man on his right, who stood up and began speaking.

“Sorry I had to bring you in on a day off, chief,” Dr. Lars Bohlander said, “but we just received a report from India that is very disturbing.”

Thorkelson’s expression didn’t change but he was slightly nettled. I hope I wasn’t brought in because of another Indian outbreak, he thought. There was always something disturbing going on in the rural unsanitary hell holes of that huge country.

“The Pandemic Intelligence Service has reported an outbreak in Thakkar, on the Bangladesh border.”

“Two questions, Lars. What is the Pandemic Intelligence Service, and an outbreak of what?”

“The P.I.S. is a new organization the Indians set up with the help of the C.D.C. in Atlanta to collate information the country’s thousand or so annual epidemics.”

“About time,” Thorkelson muttered.

“And they don’t have a clue about what the outbreak is.” Bohlander consulted some notes. “One of the epidemiologists on the scene, a Dr. Venkataraman, apparently a top man, says that, based on some of the sym
ptoms, he initially suspected bovine spongiform encephalopathy.”

“Good God, man,” Thorkelson said, “isn’t India about the last place one would suspect Mad Cow Disease? They don’t eat them.”

“I agree,” Bohlander said, “and so does Venkataraman. He thinks it’s a new disease. Except he can’t identify the vector and no one has been able to isolate the organism. If it is an organism. He postulates that it might be a prion similar to the one that causes Mad Cow. Something we haven’t come across yet. The Americans are stumped, too.”

“How deadly is it?”

“Well, it’s no Ebola. It kills only about 30 percent of its victims, but many of the survivors are neurologically impaired, perhaps for life.”

Thorkelson immediately saw the danger. A disease that didn’t kill enough victims to burn itself out but maimed many others would be disastrous economically. More so than the deadlier diseases that reaped all the media attention and scary headlines.

“How far did it spread?”

“It doesn’t seem to have moved out of the original village. That’s the problem.”

“I don’t understand. I would think that’s good news.”

“It might be, except for this.”

Bohlander picked up a small remote. In a moment a large screen slid down from the ceiling. Everyone’s eyes turned to it. A map of the world was projected on the screen. There were circles, the majority of them red, around various locales in many countries.

“That red circle in northern India is where Thakkar is,” Bohlander said. “Notice all the other circles, 20 of them, on every continent except Antartica.  All had localized outbreaks of a disease similar to the one in India. We can find no connection between them. I mean, some countries are served by the same airline, but what does that prove? Choose any 20 places on earth and you will find an airline connection.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Approximately a year.”

“And we’re just catching on now!”

“It’s a miracle we noticed it at all,” Bohlander said defensively. “Isolated incidents, spread far apart. Some barely reported, often as an afterthought. The Americans and the World Health Organization missed it too. We had to tell them.”

Thorkelson was somewhat mollified. At least the ECDC was first.

“Can someone be traveling to these places and infecting people?”

“You mean a modern Typhoid Mary? I’ll let Timon answer that.”

All eyes turned to Dr. Timon Petrides, a Greek specialist in infectious diseases.

“As you all know,” Petrides said in what was the best English spoken around the table except for the representative from England, “Mary Mallon, the cook known as Typhoid Mary, was typhoid’s most famous asymptomatic carrier. From 1900 to 1907 she shed huge amounts of the Salmonella typhi bacteria throughout New York City through food she served, particularly her famous peach ice cream. After she was confined by the authorities it was determined that the bacteria probably had colonized her gall bladder and eventually found its way to her stools and urine. She apparently never washed her hands. She never became ill, but she spread the bacteria everywhere she went. She refused to have her gall bladder removed and eventually was imprisoned until she died 23 years later, of something else.”

“Your point, Tim,” Thorkelson prompted. When the Greek got going, there was no stopping him.

“My point is that she was one in a million but was easily spotted by the authorities in an era that was still a medical Dark Ages. To think that there is someone flitting around the world today unnoticed in an era of security checks and computer traces is inconceivable. It would have to be a superman, or woman.” Petrides nodded at the Frenchwoman, Dr. Martine Babineau, who smiled. “Some of the outbreaks were virtually simultaneous, on opposite ends of the globe. And there is something else. See the blue circles? Not all the outbreaks affect humans. The blue circles designate some outbreaks that are limited to a specific animal.”

“Why are we concerned with animals? Don’t we have enough to worry about with humans?’

“Because,” Bohlander said, “from what we have been able to determine, the symptoms in the animals are eerily similar to those in the human victims. Their organs have the same lesions, whether they are camels, dolphins or cattle.”

Thorkeslon stared at him. Camels?

“Knut. You will notice that one of the blue circles is in my country.”

Thorkelson turned to Clyde Fortunot, the English member of his team.

“There has been a small outbreak in Gloucestershire of what was initially thought to be Mad Cow Disease,” Fortunot said. “But it has characteristics distinct from the typical spongiform. We think it’s a different disease, although probably prion-based. And no one knows how the herds were infected. All the so-called usual suspects have been eliminated. Some quite literally. My Government ordered the killing of thousands of badgers, who were the prime suspects. But none showed any sign of the disease. There has been quite a row over it, as you might imagine. Investigations in Parliament. Resignations. My countrymen are quite fond of badgers.”

“What about the cows? How far has the infection spread?”

“Thankfully, it’s been contained. The diseased animals were killed and burned, but they don’t seem to have infected any other cattle, even within their own herds, although the other animals were, of course, also killed, as a precaution.”

“So, you see,” Dr. Babine
au chimed in, “we have all these outbreaks, limited in scope, all over the world, with no obvious vectors.”

“A coincidence?” Thorkelson asked.

The Frenchwoman shook her head.

“Maybe one or two, even three such events so close together might be a coincidence. But 20? Statistically impossible,”

“The Americans agree,” Bohlander said. “But, like us, they don’t know what the hell is going on.”