The Pinocchio Syndrome

‘The wire services are reporting an outbreak of illness in southern Tennessee that has features in common with last week’s outbreak in Iowa,’ she said. ‘You’re familiar with that, sir?’

‘Yes, I am.’ The director had been informed as a matter of routine about the outbreaks in Iowa and Tennessee but had not given the matter much thought, since it was outside his field of expertise.

‘Do you consider the outbreaks to be a public health concern?’ Karen asked.

‘Certainly. The public health people are looking into it.’

‘But not a terrorism concern.’

‘We have no reason to suspect that.’

Karen pushed an errant lock of her dark hair away from her eyes.

‘Let me ask you hypothetically, Mr Director – suppose that terrorists possessed a chemical or biological weapon capable of affecting large groups of people in a short period of time. Do you think the radical terrorist organizations would shrink from using such a weapon on a mass scale?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure,’ the director replied. ‘But I would not like to find out. I want to be sure that none of the terrorist groups ever develops that capability.’

‘Do the outbreaks in Iowa and Tennessee put thoughts like this into your head?’

The director thought for a moment.

‘They would if the disease we found there could be linked to any known toxin or pathogen.’

‘And it has not?’

‘No, it has not.’

‘Are you saying, sir, that it is the same disease in both locations?’

‘No, I’m not,’ the director replied with some irritation. ‘I’m only relating what I’ve been told by the public health authorities.’

‘You’re saying that neither disease presents symptoms associated with known pathogens or toxins?’

‘To my knowledge, neither. That’s correct.’

‘What if a toxin or pathogen as yet unknown to the authorities had in fact been used?’

The director shrugged this off. ‘You’re talking about a hypothesis for which we have no evidence. It’s hard for me to comment about such things.’

He made a point of calling on other reporters for the next several minutes. Karen let him get away with it, for she was confident he would look at her sooner or later. He had noticed her beauty.

When his eyes darted to her she pounced. ‘You’re aware, Mr Director, that Vice President Everhardt’s illness is baffling the physicians at Walter Reed,’ she said. ‘Are you concerned that a man so important is ill, and nobody knows why?’

The director was taken off guard.

‘I don’t know that to be true,’ he said. ‘The doctors are evaluating the vice president’s condition and giving him the best possible treatment. I don’t know that they are ‘baffled,’ as you put it.’

‘But no one at Walter Reed or in the White House has been willing to comment on the situation,’ Karen said. ‘Don’t you think the public has a right to know what the vice president is suffering from?’

The director frowned. ‘I’m not really the person for you to be asking about that,’ he said. ‘I’m not a physician, and I’m not close to the situation. I’d suggest you speak to the doctors.’

‘They’re not talking.’

The director was ruffled by Karen’s questions. It had been a long time since he had been grilled this way by a reporter. Her questions were maddening because he didn’t have good answers to any of them.

‘Sources have told me,’ she pursued, ‘that the vice president’s illness has features in common with the outbreaks in Iowa and Tennessee. Is there any truth to that?’

‘None at all, to my knowledge,’ the director replied. ‘Miss Embry, at the risk of offending you, I think we should stick to the topic at hand.’

‘The topic, as I understand it, is terrorism,’ Karen countered. ‘It seems clear that terrorism and public health are two issues that can’t be separated easily.’

‘Nor can they be connected easily,’ the director said. ‘Not without hard evidence.’

He did not call on Karen again. The news conference petered out amid questions about the ongoing Chechen uprising in Russia and the India-Pakistan conflict.

As the reporters were packing up their equipment the director’s press secretary appeared at Karen’s side. A tall, handsome man who looked strikingly like a male model, he had kept a low profile during the news conference.

‘I’m Mitch Fallon,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘Why haven’t we met before?’

‘I moved here from Boston last spring,’ Karen said. ‘I’m doing a series of articles on politics and public health issues.’

‘Well, it’s good to have you here,’ he smiled. ‘However, I must say you seem to have a slight tendency toward the hypothetical.’

She smiled. ‘Back in the eighties, who could have guessed that the money being used to support the Contras in Nicaragua was coming from Ronald Reagan through the Ayatollah Khomeini? Sometimes the wildest hypothesis is less strange than the truth.’

‘I have to agree with you there.’

He studied the young reporter. Her look of permanent skepticism seemed superimposed over a face that, at rest, would have communicated something quite different. Something soft and even girlish that she had long since renounced.

‘Do you have any evidence for your theories about the Crescent Queen?’ he asked. ‘I mean, about terrorists having the capacity to make and deliver nuclear weapons.’

There it was again – nucular. Karen had to suppress a smile. Was Fallon mispronouncing the word out of loyalty to his boss? There was no way to know.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s just a possibility I’ve been wondering about. I thought it was strange that all the known terrorist organizations denied being involved. Something about that had a ring of truth. They’re ruthless people. They don’t care about public opinion. They wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.’

‘What about the illness in Iowa, and the Tennessee problem?’ he asked. ‘What got you interested?’

‘I try to keep tabs on the news from the various public health organizations,’ she said. ‘I just thought the stories sounded strange. I’ve done articles on the major viruses, HIV and Ebola and Marburg and so on. I flew out to Iowa a couple of days ago, by the way.’

‘Did you learn anything?’

‘A little, here and there.’

He was looking at her with apparent admiration for her beauty, though she sensed a harder scrutiny behind it.

‘What evidence do you have that such a thing might be intentional?’ he asked.

‘None,’ she said, not taking her eyes off him.

‘What makes you think the connection is even possible?’ he asked.

‘It seems to me that it’s just a matter of time,’ she said. ‘If you look at the terrorist activity over the last couple of decades – Lockerbie, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center, and of course the Crescent Queen – it’s obvious that the terrorists have been coming into possession of better and better technology. They’re not the old-fashioned bomb-in-the-suitcase types. They’re twentieth-century men, like everybody else. And with countries like Iraq and Libya stockpiling chemical and biological weapons, it seems to me almost inevitable that sooner or later we’re going to see a terrorist attack employing such weapons.’

‘A scary thought,’ he said.

‘But not unrealistic,’ she replied. ‘The terrorists don’t care much about human life. They do what they think they have to do to achieve their ends. As I say, some things are only a matter of time.’

‘But you don’t have any evidence that the time is now,’ he probed.

‘No.’ She shook her head.

There was a pause. Fallon nodded to a female reporter who was hurrying past with a cameraman in tow. Something about the nod seemed a bit too familiar for a high-level official’s press secretary. Karen suspected Fallon was a ladies’ man. She filed away her intuition for future reference.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Nice talking to you.’

‘If it was possible to make a person sick for political purposes,’ she said, ‘Vice President Everhardt would probably be a good choice, given the current circumstances. Don’t you think so?’

Fallon smiled. ‘You certainly do have a tendency toward the hypothetical,’ he observed.

‘Think about it a moment,’ she went on, undaunted. ‘Everhardt was the ideal running mate for the president five years ago. He was chosen over a lot of other possible candidates, and the process of selection took a long time. Now, just like that, he’s out of the picture.’

‘That’s true.’

‘The administration has been struggling in the polls, with all these calls for the president to resign,’ Karen said. ‘Now, with Everhardt removed, the pressure will probably increase. The administration looks weaker than ever.’

Fallon nodded. ‘Maybe.’

‘Suppose for the sake of argument that Everhardt was eliminated intentionally,’ Karen suggested.

‘That’s a heck of a supposition,’ Fallon observed.

‘Far-fetched or not,’ the reporter said, ‘suppose it was true. Unlikely things happen in the world, don’t they? Think of the Kennedy assassination. Nobody saw it coming. And the ripple effect was enormous. The whole course of our history …’

As a CIA man Fallon bristled at the mention of the Kennedy assassination.

‘I’m afraid I’m out of time, Miss Embry. I wish you good luck with your theories.’

‘Call me Karen.’ She held out a hand. Mitch Fallon was a person she had to be nice to.

‘Karen, then. Call me Mitch. Keep in touch. Nice to meet you.’

‘Same here,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll be around.’

He watched her walk away from him. She moved with firm strides, her body lithe and athletic. The young female animal at the peak of her powers and her attractiveness, he thought. If she was this intense on the job, what must she be like between the sheets?

He stopped in at the director’s office on his way back to his own office.

‘Did you talk to her?’ the director asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What does she have?’

‘Nothing, except an overactive imagination. As far as I can see.’

‘Keep your eye on her.’

‘I will, sir.’

The director turned his back.

Karen arrived home an hour after the news conference. Before turning on the computer to write down her notes, she rewound the tape on her office VCR and checked the last hour of news. An item immediately caught her eye.

‘Health authorities in Australia are concerned about a tiny Aborigine village deep in the outback where a strange and crippling illness has broken out. Over a hundred villagers are unable to speak or move. Others, according to doctors on the scene, have died of the disease, which was apparently not reported at first because of the remoteness of the village.’

A video image of one of the victims was displayed behind the commentator. It was a close-up, surprisingly eloquent, of an Aborigine girl, perhaps seventeen years old, whose eyes looked unseeing into the camera. The eyes were macabre. They looked hypnotized from within.

Karen dropped her notes and looked long and hard at the TV screen.

She had seen that look before. On the face of a six-year-old child in Iowa.

12

The girl is bound to an apparatus which resembles a couch or examining table, tilted sharply toward the floor. Her skin glows against the black leatherette, the more so because of the light shining down from above. Her eyes are open, but she seems to sleep like the princess in the fairy tale. Her hair is blond. It is in disarray and hangs over her left cheek, obscuring much of her face.

Her hands are bound by rings fixed under the seat. Her legs are not bound, but because of the shape of the apparatus she assumes the crouch as a natural position. Her knees are bent, the thighs approximately vertical, the calves angled toward the floor. It is just possible for the eye to see that her toenails are painted, though the color does not come through from this vantage point.

Her left breast is clearly visible, pushed against the leatherette. The outline of her ribs is seen under the skin of her side. Her arms are long and slender.

There is something pathetic about her bound posture, but also something provocative. Her pelvis is the center of focus. The gradual upward thrust of the back leads to it, as does the vertical line of the thighs. The curve of her buttocks is given optimum shape and tension by her bound posture. She looks like a princess, but not one garbed in silk and brocade. Hers is the nobility of nudity.

There is movement, there is sound. A shadow approaches from the right, moving slowly. The girl sees nothing. As the shadow comes closer there are calls from the distance, and laughter. She does not hear. Or rather, if she hears she does not move a muscle to show that she hears.

The shadow is next to her now, a hand outstretched. The music builds toward its crescendo. The voices call out urgently.

Now the hanging cord is seen, dangling from the other hand. Slender, tufted at the end, it moves along the wall, swinging slightly as it approaches her. The voices call out encouragement. Uncertain, hesitant, the shadow dangles. Then it falls over the naked buttocks. The girl’s empty eyes do not say whether she is aware of the approach or not. Is it obliviousness or terror that freezes her?

The shadow swings this way and that. The voices call out. The female flesh waits passively.

Suddenly everything stops. The poised shadow does not move. The girl is a statue. The voices are cut off. The hanging tail is an inch from her crotch. But nothing moves. All is still.

A sound is heard. A gasp, perhaps a cry of anguish.

Darkness falls. Girl, shadow, wall, disappear like magic.

The scene is ended, until next time.

13

Sydney, Australia

November 27

Karen Embry’s plane landed at four-thirty in the morning, Australia time, after a total of twenty-three hours spent in the air.

It had taken lengthy politicking with her agent to get him to agree to this journey. She had told him much – but not all – that she had learned about the mystery illness. Sensing a book in the offing, he had finally given in.

Karen could not sleep on airplanes. By the time she arrived she had not slept in a day and a half. She had powerful uppers in her purse, given to her by a fellow reporter who was a speed addict. But she hadn’t taken any. So far the scent of a story was enough to keep her alert.

She took a local flight to Perth, and then a chartered Cessna into the outback, landing on an airstrip seemingly a thousand miles from nowhere.

According to the reports she had read, the mystery disease had gone undiscovered for a couple of months or more. It had not spread beyond the small tribe of Aborigines, but it had killed most of them and incapacitated the rest. There were only about fifteen survivors, most of them quarantined in a health clinic.

The reports about the illness were garbled, no doubt because of the remote location and the victims’ suspicion of the authorities. However, in one somewhat obscure report an Aborigine from a neighboring village had said, ‘When the people neared death, their feet and hands became hard and large, like the hoofs of animals.’ This had made Karen decide to see the syndrome for herself.

This would make a tremendous feature story, she thought. She could scale it up for the scientific journals, and simultaneously hype it with more dramatic wording for the popular media. If it was true that the disease involved bizarre deformities, the story could be important.

In the Land Rover Karen gazed for a few moments at the vast expanse of scrub land, punctuated by eucalyptus and occasional acacias. Then she opened the report, which included the testimony of the neighboring villager.

‘The people became silent and rigid. Those who were standing up remained standing until they fell. Those who were sitting did not move until fatigue and weakness made them fall over. They would not speak. They seemed stubborn and did not move. Then they became sick.’

Karen furrowed her brow in concentration. She twirled a strand of her dark hair with a finger. She barely noticed the exotic scenery around her, or the bumps and lurches of the Land Rover on the dirt roads.

The driver dropped her at the tiny hospital where the sick Aborigines were being treated. It was a battered old frame building that huddled under a shabby growth of gum trees. Emus languidly patrolled the scrub in search of small rodents. It was incredibly hot.

The doctor in charge was a tired-looking man in late middle age. His name was Dr Roper.

‘Thank you for seeing me,’ Karen said. ‘I hope my timing isn’t too terrible.’

‘I’m glad you got here quickly,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t much time left. Of the fifteen villagers we brought in, twelve are already dead. The three still living are critical.’

‘Can I see them?’ Karen asked.

‘Sure. But you’ll have to put on a hot-zone suit. We’re still not sure whether the disease is communicable, and we’re not taking chances.’

He sent her to a nurse who helped her put on a decontamination suit. She accompanied the doctor to a quarantined ward where the three remaining patients were being kept. All were attached to life-support systems, tubes connecting them to electronic machines of surprising sophistication for this remote region.

‘They’re completely comatose and unresponsive,’ the doctor told her. ‘They were that way when they came in. The vital signs have been steadily weakening. We’ve been concentrating on keeping them breathing and supporting the heart rate, but there’s nothing more we can do. They’re simply dying.’

The faces of the three Aborigines, one woman and two men, were wasted. Their dark skin seemed gray as death approached.

‘As far as we can tell,’ the doctor said, ‘the progress of the disease was much faster in the children than in the adults, and slightly faster in the women than in the men. But it’s hard to speculate with any accuracy. No one reported the outbreak until almost everybody was dead.’

Karen was looking at the sheets covering the hands and feet of the dying Aborigines. They were suspiciously distended.

‘May I look?’ she asked.

‘Get ready for a shock,’ the doctor said. ‘This isn’t easy to look at.’

He pulled back the sheet from the female patient. The hands were grossly distended and distorted. It looked as though the fingers had fused together in a gelatinous mass. But when Karen touched the left hand on the invitation of the doctor, it was hard. It had the appearance of amber, but darker, more opaque.

‘We’ve done biopsies,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. The cell structure looks human, but the tissue is a morphological monstrosity.’

He pulled back the sheet to show Karen the foot. It was even more distorted than the hand. The toes were fused, and the front of the foot had pulled back toward the heel, creating a bizarre hooflike impression.

‘Apparently the distortion comes on not long before death,’ the doctor said. ‘Those who died the quickest had less deformation than those who lasted longer. Whatever the cause and mechanism are, we haven’t got a clue. My colleagues are talking along the lines of Elephant Man’s disease, acromegaly, things like that.’

Karen was looking more closely at the distorted foot. ‘Or some sort of scleroderma,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps one of the collagenous tissue diseases like dermatomyositis or even lupus erythematosus.’

The doctor raised an eyebrow, impressed by Karen’s knowledge.

‘Are you a physician yourself?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He took her to a makeshift pathology lab in an adjoining building. There were bodies of several villagers there, women and children as well as men. The macabre hooflike fusion and distension of the hands and feet were obvious in all the cases. In the two children it looked particularly cruel and unsettling.

‘Were there other physical changes?’ Karen asked. ‘Internally, I mean.’ Karen knew enough physiology to know that a change as bizarre as the distorted extremities of these victims had to be accompanied by some sort of massive anomaly at the cellular level.

‘We’re not equipped to deal with that here,’ the doctor told her. ‘The pathologists in Adelaide are working on the two patients we sent there. I’ll give you their names. They’re doing complete autopsies with cell studies. They may have something for you.’

Back in his office the doctor showed Karen a strange object, apparently fashioned out of clay. It was a doll or talisman in the shape of a person with enlarged hands and feet.

‘This was made by the medicine man,’ he said. ‘It was found by one of the health officers in the village. We think it represents the illness. Apparently the medicine man tried to use the icon to propitiate the gods.’

Karen held the object in her hands. Though crudely designed, it radiated a sort of force, born obviously of the medicine man’s intense faith. The creature held out its oversized hands as though in a gesture of acknowledgment, or perhaps prayer.

‘Have you ever seen an icon like this before?’ she asked.

The doctor shook his head. ‘Never.’

He wrote down the names of the physicians in Adelaide who were working on the bodies. Karen thanked him and went to a small lodge that catered to hunters, hikers, and the occasional brave tourist who came to this remote area. On the way the driver pointed out a wombat that Karen was not quick enough to see as it waddled out of sight in the brush. Rock wallabies, some carrying infant joeys in their pouches, were surprisingly plentiful.

Her exhaustion and jet lag were catching up to her now. She had difficulty filling out the guest form. By the time she reached the little cabin where she was to sleep, she was moving slowly and her eyelids were drooping.

She left her overnight bag and briefcase unopened on the floor and lay down on the bed. The old comforter that covered it smelled of mothballs and stale food, but to Karen it felt wonderful. The minute she closed her eyes dreams began to crowd against the conscious thoughts in her mind. She breathed deeply, floating mentally over the impressions of the last ten days. It had been a busy time, full of breaking stories, garbled rumors, and well-kept secrets.

A distant motor coughed into life. A dog barked. The calls of strange birds sounded far away. Dream thoughts transported Karen to the bed of her childhood, with its colorful afghan and stuffed animals. She reached out reflexively for the blue teddy bear that no longer existed.

She plummeted quickly toward deep sleep. Her dreams took her further and further from this time and place, as though she were on a magic carpet. But something woke her up suddenly. She lay rubbing her burning eyes and looking at the unfamiliar room. What had awakened her?

Hands and feet.

She got out of bed with a sigh and went to her briefcase. She took out the portable computer and turned it on. She clicked through the various folders, searching for something she could not quite remember. She cursed herself for not finding better titles for her icons. It was time consuming to open them one by one, searching for a mere hint or an overheard clue.

Then, fighting off sleep, she remembered. She closed a folder, opened another one, and found the icon she was looking for.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

She called the airline, made a reservation for tomorrow night, and made a note of it on her computer’s desktop.

She would go to Adelaide first thing tomorrow morning and see what she could learn from the pathologists there.

Then she would fly to New Hampshire.

After looking at her watch she lay down under the comforter and closed her eyes. There was time for a few hours’ sleep.

Hands and feet, she thought. Hands and feet.

Exhaustion put her under before the thoughts in her mind could produce insomnia. But the dreams that filled her sleep were cruel and frightening.

14

Atlanta, Georgia

November 27

Damian Lightfoot was cleaning up the trash.

Not physical trash, of course. Damian was a computer technician hired by the Corporation to assay and discard the vast amounts of unneeded and out-of-date files that collected in the company computers. It had to be done carefully. Ninety-five percent of the time the files and documents earmarked for trashing by the various research departments were useless. But once in a while a file or group of files found its way into the trash by accident and had to be double checked with the department concerned. More than once a crucial bit of research had been saved in this manner, either by Damian Lightfoot or by his predecessors.