Lost Almost

By Lynnette Baughman

The horrific Cerro Grande Fire in Los Alamos, New Mexico, was just the beginning. When reporter Patrice Kelsey follows the trail of stolen infectious tissue to Washington, D.C., she finds herself playing a life and death game on the world stage, where biology, medicine, politics and international intrigue intersect and threaten to destroy all she holds dear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781590881286

Book preview

One

Wednesday, May 10, 2000

Los Alamos, New Mexico

Nine ambulances idled side by side at the west end of Los Alamos Medical Center, their doors closed to keep the smoke and cinders out as long as possible. Ambulance crews from Santa Fe and the Española Valley, called by the State Emergency Operations Center, paced the parking lot, anxious to load their patients and get off the Hill. From the west, red clouds of smoke roiled out of Bandelier National Monument, blocking the sun and gathering strength from the winds gusting to forty miles per hour. It was 5:15 p.m.

The three highways leading east out of Los Alamos toward the valley carved by the Rio Grande were clogged with cars full of people and terrified pets. Police sawed the chains off a gate to San Ildefonso Pueblo land, opening a fourth emergency evacuation route at the north end of town. The Jemez Mountains that formed the back and arms of an overstuffed green chair around the town and laboratory no longer offered sanctuary. Instead, the mountains and canyons were fast becoming a cauldron. Soon the winds would gust to seventy-five miles per hour and the fire would breed its own hurricane-force winds. In an hour, temperatures would reach three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and houses would not just burn, but explode.

The battalion chief directing the evacuation of the hospital weighed the dangers. Should he send the ambulances into gridlock with their sirens feeding panic, or move the patients to the hospital’s basement? To his immense relief, the traffic cleared and he gave the signal to move out. The drivers and paramedics flew into action. Like a movie running backward, the patients were wheeled past the Emergency Entrance sign and loaded into the ambulances.

Meanwhile, the inferno gushed down from the wide funnel where Los Alamos Canyon began into the narrow neck of the canyon spanned by Omega Bridge. Hemmed in by walls of volcanic tuff, the fire paused to consume the huge Ponderosa pines on the canyon floor, then explored for fuel on the canyon walls. Tongues of flame crossed the road to kindle the shrubs that clung to the sheer north wall and to the sturdy pine trees for support. It was as if the parched shrubs were fuses on a massive row of pine tree rockets. Scant minutes later a wall of flame erupted straight up the north side of the canyon, igniting houses on Fairway Drive only a few hundred yards from the hospital.

The last ambulance doors slammed shut and sirens wailed away toward the east. The evacuation of the town was complete, with no time to spare.

The Cerro Grande Fire was officially out of control and bending its towering flames over Los Alamos like the neck of a dragon.

ARKADY VALENTIN HAD kissed his wife and daughter good-bye at twelve-thirty. Their wooden house with shake shingle roof sat on the perimeter of the Santa Fe National Forest, at the end of a cul-de-sac in the section of Los Alamos known as North Community. The privacy afforded by acres of Ponderosa pines made the house prime kindling if the wind brought the flames north.

Arnie, Leah and Katy had carried armfuls of valued possessions to the Dodge Caravan and firmly shoved them inside. As Arkady wrapped his grandfather’s brass menorah in a towel, he had to stop and catch his breath at a thud of pain in his chest, the same kind of pain he imagined Moshe Valentin felt when he packed the menorah in Russia so many years before. Then, too, flames closed on the Valentin family, fires set by a mob intent on driving Jews out of Russia.

Leah placed the family’s Haggadah on the floor behind the driver’s seat. The leather-bound story read each Passover Seder was all that was left of her mother’s family, a lone memento saved by a little girl, who was saved in turn by a Dutch couple.

You know where to go? Arnie said as he carried a box marked Tax info to the sliding door and wedged it into the last available space.

We’re fine, yes. If they say to evacuate before you get back, Katy and I will go to the Baptist church in White Rock and wait there for you. Leah spoke to him, but her eyes were fixed in a stare toward the smoke clouds to the south.

Arnie’s eyes were on Leah’s face, her skin dry as corrugated paper from the ravages of disease. No, he corrected himself, from the ravages of treatment, one last protracted attempt to kill the cancer cells that had metastasized from breast cancer. Chemotherapy treatments at three-week intervals had been followed by four weeks of radiation. A tan silk turban covered his wife’s head, bald for the second time in five years.

What about Ben? Katy asked indignantly as she marched from the house carrying a pile of schoolbooks. Benjamin, a white poodle-schnauzer cross, whined pathetically and ran in circles around Katy, lest he be forgotten.

There’s room for him on top of the computer. See, there’s a nice soft rug. Arnie caught Ben in midair as the dog levitated toward the passenger seat. Keep him in the house until you have to go. There’s still a chance they’ll stop the fire and we can stay home. His tone of voice invited no argument from his daughter.

Katy possessed intelligence far beyond her eleven years. In fact, she was doing college level math in a program for gifted children, but emotionally she was still a little girl, and she was scared. Scared of the fire, scared of her mother’s cancer, and scared of the helpless feeling that she’d be left like her mother’s mother, alone in the world, one leather-covered book her only possession. But she wouldn’t admit to being fearful. Anger was her preferred emotion, a reliable fallback position whenever people and events spun out of control.

You don’t care about our house! You won’t let us stay and try to save our house!

Arnie ignored Katy’s outburst. He knew better than to fight Nature’s Wrath, as a TV show called its thrilling shows about real fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and volcanoes. Being smart was better than being brave, and being wise was better than being smart. He found room for Katy’s schoolbooks and closed the side door of the van.

I’m counting on you to help your mother. Arnie kissed Katy, named Ekaterina after his mother, on the cheek, which was all she would tolerate in her fit of pique, then kissed Leah quickly on the lips. I’ll see you in an hour or two. I’ve got to take care of something in my lab. You know how it is. If they turn off the power while my project is running, I’ll be screwed.

That’s not the only way I can be screwed, he admitted to himself as he backed his old Honda Civic, even older than the Dodge, up the sloping driveway and onto the street. He stopped for a moment, seemingly to wave to Leah, but really to take one more look at his house, just in case it was on the devil’s burn list.

The mob that forced his grandfather out of Russia had done his descendants a favor. Moshe Valentin’s youngest son, Isaac, grew up in Canada and raised his sons, Arkady and Daniel, in upstate New York. Thanks to hard work, their parents’ high expectations, and scholarships, the boys had prospered, Arkady in the United States, where he was known as Arnie, and Daniel in Israel. Both did undergraduate work in microbiology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then headed west to earn their doctorates at the University of California, Berkeley. Daniel moved to Israel to marry and begin his career, while Arnie did post-doctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, or LANL, as everyone called it, and stayed on as a technical staff member.

He’d received the coded e-mail message from Daniel three hours earlier, but couldn’t leave the house to drive to the lab until now. He was cutting it closer than he liked and feared being turned away by a guard. The whole facility, Los Alamos National Laboratory, was closed except for personnel needed to secure materials and buildings. There was no danger of the fire going toward the laboratory officials had said that morning on both radio and TV. The facility was closed only so fire crews could move freely on the roads.

Well, he needed to secure materials. If he were stopped, he would just explain that to the guard and tell him to call whomever he needed to notify.

Traffic wasn’t too bad on Diamond Drive, to Arnie’s relief. Schools were closed, as well as the Laboratory. Some people had left the Hill Sunday when Western Area was first evacuated, and had elected to stay in motels or with friends away from the smoke. Businesses had been urged not to open. Keep the streets clear for emergency vehicles, that’s what they kept saying on the radio. The newspaper the night before said Wednesday would be the make it or break it day.

Arnie saw on TV at 8:00 a.m. that firefighters and bulldozers had slashed a fifty-foot wide fire line west of Camp May Road on Tuesday, and he’d heard at noon that eight hot shot crews were on the scene with support from five air tankers and seven helicopters.

He didn’t know the latest news on the fire—couldn’t know it, in fact, since his car radio had been broken at least a year.

He crossed the Omega Bridge at 1:10 p.m., his mind racing ahead to the work he had to do inside his lab, and wound his way across a maze of roads to a concrete building on the southern perimeter of the main laboratory complex. With his laptop computer clutched tightly, he strode across the parking lot at a brisk pace, showed his badge to the guard inside the building, and hurried to the back staircase.

Had he been listening to KRSN at 1:12, he would have heard Mark Bentley passing on the word from Los Alamos Fire Department. The Cerro Grande Fire has jumped the Camp May Road and is now in Los Alamos Canyon. Police and fire department are ordering an immediate evacuation of the Western Area and the North Community. All homes in those areas will get automated phone calls in the next few minutes on the Community Alert Network System. I repeat, the fire has jumped the Camp May Road.

Inside his lab, Arnie plugged in his laptop to preserve the battery. At the same time, he turned on his large desktop computer and logged on to LANL’s supercomputer.

On his laptop he read Daniel’s e-mail message again. The chatty tone, with snippets of news about Daniel’s wife and twin sons, cheery inquiries about Leah and Katy, as if Leah faced nothing more onerous than a head cold, rang false to Arnie, as Daniel had intended.

Working hard on the A/Senegal virus, Daniel wrote. What a bugger that is. Sometimes I fear it’s a dead end, but my old friend from Cornell (you remember Russell, I’m sure) encourages me to stay with the project. Although it’s awfully complicated, I am making progress.

Arnie sorted through the files he had helped create on influenza strains and potential vaccines: A/New Caledonia/20/99-like (H1N1); A/Moscow/10/99-like (H3N2); B/Beijing/184/93-like antigens; and dozens more. As he had anticipated, the so-called A/Senegal was not on the list.

He began a search of related databases, gradually immersing himself in the task. When he was working, Arnie nearly always lost track of time.

He looked back at Daniel’s note again. I should get at least two papers out of it, co-authored with Russell. Maybe I’ll get to present one of them at the virus meeting in New York in August. But I think it’s more likely for the spring 2001 conference. Arnie, please send me your detailed schedule. Did you send one to George? Is he planning to join us?

Arnie knew no meeting was scheduled in New York in August; he knew Daniel’s old friend Russell was the name he always used for the director of the infectious disease section of the research facility where he worked in Tel Aviv.

He also knew Daniel wasn’t working on any virus with the designation A/Senegal. The message was really about A/Shenyang, a newly emerging and deadly influenza virus. So far, mankind had dodged all the viral bullets—hantavirus, Marburg, Ebola, West Nile. Only a handful of scientists knew how long the list was, and how close the human race had come to pandemic, a worldwide epidemic, with each of the killers. Sin nombre hantavirus, first found in northwestern New Mexico in 1993, failed by only microns to cross from the lining of the capillaries to the adjacent air sacs. Had it been transmittable by a cough, the dead would number in the tens of thousands rather than the tens.

Arnie Valentin staggered under the weight of his knowledge of infectious microbes and toxins. Increasingly, any crowd gave him vertigo, the feeling he saw clouds of bacteria and virus, billions upon billions of deadly bugs, swirling among the people, who inhaled death with every breath and coughed it out on every surface of the city. He couldn’t ride a subway, or a crowded elevator. He drove across country rather than travel by plane and breathe recirculated air.

His avowed reason for not traveling to England, Israel, or Russia—all places where his expertise was requested—was Leah’s health. But the truth was, he’d lost his nerve. His belief in the invincibility of science and medicine was gone. He put up a good front, but deep down he felt defeat. Bitter, acrid, hopeless defeat by the bugs. The crushing burden of his knowledge—the very thing he’d always believed would help save the world—was eating him alive. The more he knew about mutations within AIDS, antibiotic-resistant strains of strep and staph, about adenoviruses and cytomegaloviruses and hantaviruses, the more depressed Arnie became.

Three things kept him functioning. The first was unfaltering use of antidepressant drugs in a dosage meticulously worked out by Arnie and his doctor. Second was that he had to be strong for Leah, and third he felt he must inspire Katy to become a brilliant and brave scientist, to carry on where he had failed.

The message from Daniel, send me your detailed schedule, told him to download from the laboratory’s supercomputer the complex structure of the influenza strain isolated in the lung tissues of a rice farmer in Shenyang, China. The new strain differed enough from all the previously known strains of influenza that no vaccine in existence would fight it. A/Shenyang was an avian flu, a virus harbored for millennia in the digestive tracts of wild ducks, then in the bodies of domesticated fowl, which excreted the virus into water shared by pigs and humans. Inside the pigs, the seven hundred or so proteins on the surface of each virus made a climactic mutation. The hemagglutinin and neuraminidase proteins that protruded from the tough protein-and-fat armor of the spherical virus underwent an antigenic shift. Had it been just a drift, previously infected or immunized humans would have some antibodies that matched some antigens. But a shift meant humans had no immunity. The Shenyang flu had the potential to erupt in a killer pandemic. The Spanish flu of 1918, Arnie knew, killed about forty million people. And like his favorite professor at Berkeley used to say, That was when forty million was a lot of people.

The death toll now might be in the billions. And the social fabric of every country on earth would be shredded. First to die would be most of the doctors, nurses, police and firefighters.

There was a way to prevent the pandemic. Somewhere in the billions of calculations that the supercomputer had done to digitize A/Shenyang was the structure of the molecules that could defeat it. Daniel had done the dangerous work, handling the rice farmer’s lung tissue in a Bioscience Level Three lab.

Well, not so very dangerous, Arnie lamented. A Level Three lab wasn’t all that big a deal. All medical and veterinary research facilities had them. That an institution the size of Los Alamos National Laboratory did not have such a lab was a source of consternation among staff members in the Bioscience Division. Daniel had naturally assumed Arnie had access to such a facility.

Level One described any high school laboratory. Any place technicians drew blood, like a hospital lab, was Level Two. Then there was the highest restriction, Level Four, the places that dealt with such horrors as live Ebola virus. There were only three Level Four facilities in the United States.

But the gap between Level Two and Level Four was like the gap between bicycles and space shuttles. There was a lot of work that needed doing in a Level Three lab.

Arnie knew from a previous message that Daniel’s research on the A/Shenyang flu was going slower than they’d hoped. Roadblocks and glitches at this stage of research and development could be compounded by problems in manufacture. Even if there were no problems, the likelihood of having millions of doses of vaccine ready by the fall of 2001 was remote.

Arnie knew that the strain of influenza expected for the coming winter of 2000, a much less virulent flu than A/Shenyang, was proving much harder to cultivate than expected. Four companies had contracted to supply the United States with a vaccine, a combination of three different strains of killed virus. Growing one of the strains in fertilized chicken eggs was so far behind schedule that widespread shortages of flu shots were inevitable.

Daniel had sent a sample of the Chinese farmer’s lung tissue to Arnie in Los Alamos, ten slides of killed virus for examination with an electron microscope and three grams of tissue containing live virus packed in dry ice.

Lacking authorization to work on something so dangerous as the live virus, Arnie had notified the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, but his calls were lost in a labyrinth of menus and voice mail and promises to return his call as soon as possible. He’d ended up locking the tissue, packed inside a plastic box labeled Biological Material—Hazardous, in a vault kept at minus ten degrees Celsius. The small box was wrapped in white paper, sealed, and the seal wrapped with waterproof tape. Both outside and inside the box was the address of Beth-el Laboratory in Tel Aviv and the bright red biohazard trefoil against a white background.

Only Arnie’s group leader, Mitchell Quaid, knew about the tissue. The electron microscope and super-computer work was done without fanfare, too, the cost buried in contract work for the AIDS virus. People tended to leave the Infectious guys alone.

In Tel Aviv, Daniel was racing the biological doomsday clock to write the recipe for a vaccine to A/Shenyang. Then would come production at a rate and a scale never seen before. If enough vaccine could not be made for everyone, or more reasonably for as many people as possible in every country on earth, then who would get it? Who would make such a god-like decision? Arnie couldn’t think of anyone except Daniel that he would trust with such power, but Daniel was human, too. How could he turn his back on his family, his nation, and on Jews in other nations?

Of course, in the wrong hands, or what Arnie had to think of as the wrong hands, Jews might be denied the vaccine. World wars had been fought over less. Arnie sighed, determined to repackage the lung tissue for transport and to by-God get the CDC to take it.

He logged off the Cray computer and held two disks in his hand. He marveled that something so small could contain so much information. But then, so did each and every virus.

He typed a reply to Daniel, a few words about the forest fire and that he’d be out of pocket for a few days, that Leah and Katy were okay, and that he, too, was working on A/Senegal. He added a P.S. I haven’t heard anything from George. I’ll send him something today.

He smiled as he typed George. Some secret code! As if no one could figure out that meant Atlanta and the CDC. Oh well, nobody has any idea what Daniel is working on.

Hardly anybody, he corrected himself. A few scientists in Israel, himself, and Mitchell Quaid. He pressed Send and powered down the laptop.

Then he pressed a series of numbers to gain access to the freezer-vault, turned on the light, and held absolutely still. Someone must have moved the white box. He searched rapidly, treating every jar, box and vial with the utmost care. But five minutes later he had to face a fact as cold as the vault in which he stood. The tissue sample of A/Shenyang was gone.

When Arnie Valentin emerged from the bioscience lab about half past five, he had to force his feet to work in tandem and carry him toward his car. As he fumbled for his key, puzzled by the early sunset, he awoke as if from a trance to the sound of sirens. He whirled around, attempting to fix on the sound, but the wail came from every direction. He turned again, slowly, and stopped with his face to the west. The light, he saw then, was not from a red sun at night, but from a squall line of flames roaring across the forest. He looked north, to where Omega Bridge appeared to float in a shroud of smoke. By chance, he saw the first flames catapult up from the canyon and catch the wind that would ferry fire inexorably into the lush fuel of houses, cars and gardens.

He turned his back on the inferno and drove toward White Rock to join his family. He could hear sirens, but the road was eerily deserted. He felt as if his family stood beside an abyss, a crevasse containing pestilence and death, and only by holding each other could they keep from hurtling down into the darkness.

Two

Friday, June 1, 2001

Los Alamos, New Mexico

Patrice Kelsey:

I breezed into the new office of the Los Alamos Guardian on Trinity Drive, willing myself to be cheerful, or at least poetic. With a nod to the receptionist and to Gordon Wilson, the new managing editor, I raised my arm theatrically and began reciting, "And what is so rare as a day in June?"

"A day in February! Gordon barked. And you’re late." Standing inside the wooden fence that separated reporters, like me, from real people, he crossed his arms and gave me his best imitation of an angry man.

I swung the gate open with my hip and pinched his cheek. I’m so scared.

Marian handed me a stack of mail, mostly catalogs and junk flyers. With her eyebrows arched and clearing her throat for emphasis, she set a letter marked Personal on top. My name, Patrice Kelsey, was circled in red, presumably by Marian, and Personal was underlined twice. All the words were typed, and there was no return address. My heart did a little flip-flop when I saw the postmark: Alexandria, VA.

Personal? I said, mimicking her arched eyebrows. Does that mean you didn’t open it? Or that you resealed it?

You are wounding me, she said with a sigh.

I’m going to wound both of you if you don’t get to work! Gordon blustered.

I leaned closer to him. I’ve been meaning to ask, Gordon, how are your hemorrhoids?

I liked you better when you were afraid to lose this job, he groused on his way to his glassed off cubicle.

I dropped the junk mail and press releases onto my chair and followed him. I think I read about an experiment with mice, or maybe it was prisoners of war, who would adjust to horrible conditions if there was even one tiny hope of reward. When they became totally devoid of hope, their bodies and minds just shut down. Zilch.

I read that, too. Danny Carter, the Guardian’s photographer, slumped against the doorframe of the cubicle. Only it wasn’t mice or prisoners of war. It was newspaper reporters.

How’s your mother? Gordon asked as he sat down.

Danny had made a break from his hometown when he landed a job at a San Antonio paper, but came back to Los Alamos when his mother had a stroke. She’d improved, thanks to grit and therapy. Her speech was slow because she often had to search for words, but her motor skills were pretty good. The weakness on her left side was noticeable only when she was tired. Now, however, Myrtle Carter was hospitalized with a nasty flu.

Not good, Danny answered. She’s in isolation, and her fever keeps spiking to one hundred three.

I didn’t know anybody got the flu, I mean a real, official, ‘influenza’ in the summer, Gordon said. He rubbed his chin and cheeks roughly as if checking his shave, and his pale skin reddened. He tossed his red hair back off his forehead and rested his arms on the shelf formed by his belly. Sit down a minute, please. Let’s go over the stories coming up next week.

I had to wait half an hour until I could open my Personal letter. My impatience was rewarded at last. As I’d hoped, it was from Rick Romero. Previously the managing editor at the Guardian and still the object of my affections, he’d taken a temporary government job in Washington, D.C., at a salary that made saliva seep from the corners of my mouth. He’d moved shortly before January 1, Y2K+1, or as purists called the year 2001, the real new millennium. We were not engaged, either officially or secretly, but I’d say we had an understanding. Actually, I guess we had two understandings. His and mine. Mine was that Rick was leaving the cave in search of meat and that when he returned, smeared with mammoth blood, he would carry me away to a land of milk and honey.

I was coming to recognize that Rick’s understanding had more to do with paying off his tax liability, his car, and his late wife’s medical bills before he made any commitments involving co-habitation, cave or otherwise.

Meanwhile, back in the fire-denuded mountains of New Mexico, I’ve been doing my best to keep busy and pay my rent on time while continuing, like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill, to pay off my student loans. Some women of twenty-nine, my age, are thinking of their biological clocks. That is one of many luxuries I can’t afford. I have set a goal: the day before I’m thirty, I’ll be debt free. And I’ll do it without asking my mother for all my birthday and Christmas presents for the next ten years in cash now.

Toward that noble goal, I acquired a roommate. Nancy Kohler, a woman I’d met at the Family YMCA, wanted to share an apartment in name and rent but only occasionally in person, so we’d thrown our resources together and gotten a decent two-bedroom apartment on Rose Street. Nancy spent about one-third of her time at her job at the laboratory. She lived with her boyfriend, Delano, another third, and some fraction of the remainder she was my roommate. I didn’t care what she did just so she