“Your outfit will have operational security,” said Derek, raising his voice to drown Olivia out. “The guy in charge isn't going to scatter the anthrax. He's going to be a million miles away in the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan or Uzbekistan.”
“The mountains of Afghanistan,” said Olivia predictably, “are not a million miles away.”
Derek was now speaking exclusively to Mitty “The mastermind sends his instructions online. He's supervising his minions electronically, and if the minions die of anthrax, who cares? They were always expendable. Anyway, if you're terrorizing people, the more victims the better.”
Mitty tried to swallow.
Nothing happened. His throat refused to obey him.
Mr. Lynch took them to the library again. Derek muttered that it was sure easy to be a teacher if all you did was escort people into the library. Everybody explainedto Derek it was sure easy to be a student if your teachers just escorted you into the library so shut up.
Olivia sat down next to Mitty.“Game or no game?”
She was just about the most attractive person on earth, Mitty decided. She had her flaws, but who was Mitty to talk about flaws? “Game,” he agreed.
She nodded and bounded off to continue her research, setting such a fine academic example that Mitty decided he would wrap up this stupid biology report right now, during the forty-eight minutes of this period. Subtract five for settling in. If he wrote one sentence per minute, he'd never have to think about smallpox again.
Bioterrorism. First consideration: would it work?
Since people weren't immunized anymore, the whole population of the world was at risk. Several sources agreed that one case of smallpox would multiply by a factor of ten, so an initial exposure of fifty people meant five hundred exposed secondarily.
But this is New York in 2004, thought Mitty. It wouldn't be fifty people. That was the olden days, when nobody went anywhere or did anything. Subway, store, school, gym, trains—I bet one victim could expose five hundred people all by himself. And terrorists wouldn't choose Grand Central. They'd go for Penn Station. More trains, more traffic. Darker, sleazier and more confusing, plus Madison Square Garden and all those tourists on top.
Penn, not Grand Central, was the connecting station for Washington, D.C., and Florida. Mitty knew, because every New Yorker knew, that half a million people passed through Penn Station every weekday. All of them had to breathe. Perfect for that aerosol delivery.
Penn Station was packed with National Guard and theNYPD and the transit police. It was safe. Mitty was comfortable there; his grandmother was comfortable there. But the best-armed guards could not see a virus. And even if they could, they couldn't shoot it or stomp on it or lock it away.
And since smallpox took twelve to fourteen days to become visible, before the authorities knew a disease was out there, never mind which disease it was, thousands of people would be infected, and couldn't be tracked down, and couldn't be isolated, and couldn't be treated, and couldn't be ringed.
It had taken the world only twenty years to reach forty million cases of HIV Smallpox, said one of Mitty's sources, might reach that number in ten or twenty weeks.
Olivia handed Mitty an old leather book. It was small and dainty, like a prayer book. He managed not to glare at her, but he definitely glared at the book.
“Don't get mad,” said Olivia quickly.
“I'm not mad,” he said, thinking that this was like dealing with his mother. Derek was on to something here. Was Olivia trying to rebuild him into a finer, more intellectual Mitty? Maybe he wouldn't go to the basketball game after all. Maybe it was time to pull out.
Olivia's book was entitled The Travel Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It had been written in the 1700s. Mitty was mental. It was bad enough going back a hundred and two years; he wasn't going back three hundred!
Olivia held up both palms (exactly like Mitty's mother) to ward off his tantrum. “Lady Mary's husband was the British ambassador to Turkey,” she said quickly. “Back in England, Lady Mary had had smallpox so bad her face was ruined. She was terrified her son would get smallpoxtoo and die, or be disfigured. But in Turkey, smallpox didn't create as much trouble. What Turkish mothers would do is, they would have a slumber party for all the neighborhood children. They'd scrape up the kids' arms and rub in pus from smallpox victims.”
Smallpox had to be the most disgusting thing on earth, and here was Olivia, an otherwise sane and pleasant person, forcing Mitty to consider even more gory details.
“The result was,” Olivia said, “Turkish kids would get mild cases of smallpox but have no scars and be immune for good.”
Mitty tried not to scream. “I'm not interested in kids in Turkey in seventeen hundred or whatever, Olivia.”
“There's another kind of old-fashioned immunity,” she confided,“but I haven't found out yet if Lady Mary knew about it. In China, people protected themselves from smallpox by a method called insufflation. What they would do is, they would grind dried smallpox scabs into a powder and breathe it up into their noses through a straw. And insufflation also conferred immunity.”
I haven't infected myself, thought Mitty. I've practiced insufflation.
I'm immune.
He tossed Lady Mary's letters into the air, caught the book juggler style, leaped up and flung his arms around Olivia, singing at the top of his lungs, “Celllllllll-e-brate good times, come on!”
The librarian said,“Mitty Blake!”
Mitty swung Olivia under one arm, ballroom style, seized the librarian's hand and yanked her forward, dance partner number two. “Cellllll-e-brate good times, come on!” he sang, whirling them in circles.
“What happened?” Zorah asked Emma. “Did Mitty just propose or something?”
“Stop it,” hissed Olivia, who was not usually embarrassed by Mitty but had to draw the line somewhere.
“Mitty!”yelled Mr. Lynch, racing around the stacks.
“Celebrate good times, come on!” Mitty sang one more time. Then he said to the assorted adults, “Sorry about that.” He let go of his unwilling dance partners and lowered himself into his chair.
Olivia vanished into the safety of her girlfriends.
Derek sat down next to Mitty. “What was all that about?”
Mitty was still laughing to himself.
“Stop it,” said Derek.“You sound like a lunatic.”
“But I'm a happy lunatic.”
Naturally Mitty went to the ball game. After all, there might be an appropriate moment to bellow “Celllll-e-brate good times, come on!” It was going to be his theme song now. Thank you, Kool and the Gang. Talk about classic rock.
The girls didn't play well, no surprise to Mitty, and he drifted into consideration of other, better, ball games. For days he had not even thought of turning on the television, although normally college basketball consumed him from December through March. He was of course a UConn fan, because of the Blakes' house in Connecticut, and it looked like a good year for UConn, what with Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon on the men's team and Diana Taurasi on the women's. (Mitty didn't actually care about the women's team, but his mother never missed a game and served dinner in front of the TV when herbeloved Huskies were playing. She even had a crush on Geno Auriemma, their coach.)
What a crazy world it was. Imagine being consumed by smallpox instead of basketball.
Mitty considered the weekend to come. He had planned to coax his parents to stay in the city because when they bailed every Friday afternoon, Mitty got left out of all the good stuff. He had planned to stay in New York, where he would finish, print out and maybe even proofread his report.
Forget that. He wanted to run around and cross-country ski, have another driving lesson with his father and watch lots of television. And even if his mom won the to-do list and this became the weekend when Mitty and his dad finally painted the front hall (whose walls were black with fingerprints, or so his mom claimed, although the wall looked pretty clean to Mitty), that wo
uld still be a hundred times better a weekend than he had anticipated.
Emma and Constance and a bunch of other girls wanted to know more about Mitty's sudden burst of ballroom dancing.“If Mr. Lynch hadn't cut me off,” Mitty told them, “I would have serenaded Olivia for the rest of class.”
“This guy's a keeper,” Emma told Olivia.
“I was just thinking the opposite,” said Olivia. “Do not serenade me in public again, Mitchell Blake.”
“It's probably the kind of thing a guy only needs to do once anyway,” said Mitty.
He kissed her on the lips and the small crowd at the girls' game cheered.
It had now been five days since Mitty Blake had opened the envelope.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The drive to the country was brutal, alternating snow and rain. The farther north they went, the worse the roads were.
Mitty was fine with the weather forecast, which was for more of the same. Rotten weather was a perfect excuse to watch TV all night and all day. He deserved it.
But Friday night and Saturday morning Mitty caught up on his sleep instead of sitting in front of the tube. He had barely finished waking up when his mom and dad put on the television to watch UConn play an afternoon game. The Blakes had high snack standards for TV sports, so the long, low coffee table was covered with food options. Mitty, having missed breakfast and lunch, examined his choices carefully. He skipped anything vegetable, just ashe skipped girls who were vegetarians. People who didn't want to go get a hamburger were tiring.
Mitty was mainly a chipster. First choice was Cheez Doodles, because they turned his fingers yellow and then he could lick them clean for a second helping; next choice, spicy hot potato chips with plain sour cream dip, nothing vegetable ruining the dip, like chives or anything; third choice, long thin pretzels, which he never ate but used to occupy himself during time-outs building little log cabins all over the table. His favorite nonchip option was baby hot dogs in their own fat little wads of dough, piping hot from the oven. His mom had everything, which was always the case, he thought contentedly, still warm in the glow of being healthy as opposed to being a global scourge victim.
Naturally in such an atmosphere, UConn won.
After the game Mitty and his dad discussed the possibility of a driving lesson.
New York City restricted teenage driving, and basically, if you were sixteen, give it up. It was not a city for beginners. But Mitty's classmates were indifferent to driving anyway, because they already had their freedom: with a MetroCard, they could take a bus or subway anywhere, and they did. A car, which eventually had to be parked, was not a plus in Manhattan.
But in Connecticut, having a license mattered.
His mother opposed the driving lesson. “The roads are slick,” she said firmly.
When Mitty and his dad went outside to assess the weather, they were forced to agree, but by the time they got back to the television, Mitty's mom had figure skating on. Neither Mitty nor his father considered figure skatinga sport. “How come we only have one television here?” Mitty asked.
“Because in the country we want to be a family,” whispered his dad, so he would not drown out the TV commentary “and do everything together.”
“Then together you and I should seize the remote, Dad,” Mitty whispered back,“and hold it hostage.”
Mitty's mom was giggling but not meeting their eyes because she might give in and end up looking at a car race or even wrestling. She wrapped herself around the remote.
Watching his mother, Mitty was seized by affection so intense that he had to look away. Mitty loved his family, but he didn't usually notice loving them. This kind of thing had been happening to him all week.
Sunday morning, Mitty briefly considered doing homework. Luckily, he hadn't remembered to bring it along, so instead, he drowsed happily, moving seamlessly from breakfast to brunch. He had barely put his dishes in the dishwasher when it was time to head back to the city.
After having slept most of the weekend, Mitty also slept in the car.
But once they were inside the apartment, Mitty came face to face with the fact that Sunday was followed by Monday. Mitty hated how this happened every week; how Sunday accelerated, leaping feetfirst into Monday, depriving a person of weekend joy. School really ought to start on Tuesday.
He recalled now that he had meant to accomplish tons of things, freeing himself from his biology report and thinking up a no-effort topic for that English paper.
Mitty summoned up some energy. He was down to the last two smallpox topics: ancient preventive techniques and vaccination supply.
Olivia was never wrong, and he could probably put her in his bibliography for ancient preventive techniques, but Mr. Lynch wouldn't be amused, so Mitty went to work with his books and online to grab a few facts.
He learned two.
First, the arm-scraping technique of old Turkish slumber parties wasn't what Mitty had pictured. You didn't get a shot and go on with your life. The Turkish technique actually gave you smallpox, except it was very mild. And the slumber party had to last for weeks, because the kids had to be quarantined. They weren't very sick, but they were just as infectious as if they'd gotten the real thing. And anybody who caught smallpox from these kids did get the real thing.
That, of course, was if it worked.
It didn't always work.
Second, insufflation, which the Chinese had practiced, usually did not work.…If it had worked, smallpox would have disappeared.
Mitty's mouth got dry again.
Then he read up on vaccine supply.
The puzzle of why the government wanted vaccines when they weren't going to vaccinate anybody was solved. Mitty should have read this stuff earlier. In fact, he should have read everything earlier, and in order, and paying attention.
His typing was worse than usual. Practically every word on his screen was highlighted because of spelling errors. Mitty didn't correct them. He just typed on.
Nobody gets vaccinated for smallpox anymore, but we have a big supply of vaccine. If smallpox managed to reappear, probably due to terrorists getting hold of the virus, doctors think that if they vaccinate an exposed person before the fourth day, maybe they can't stop the guy from getting smallpox, but he might have a less terrible case. But by the fourth day, the virus has taken over too many cells. It's too powerful. No vaccine would have an effect. There is no hope.
Mitty hit Print. He checked the date and time.
Sunday, February 8,11:45 p.m.
Subtract Sunday, February 1,4:00 p.m.
A week had passed since Mitty Blake had handled and inhaled smallpox remains.
No vaccine would have an effect.
There was no such thing as insufflation.
At some point during his sleepless night, Mitty turned on the light. He felt an uncontrollable desire to wash his hands. This was pathetic. He had handled those scabs days ago.
His bedroom was too quiet. He opened his window a few inches. Cold air leaped in and he froze, but it was worth it. Garbage trucks lifting and grinding all over the West Side made a welcome racket.
Then he went online, casually, as if just planning to check his mail.
In fact, Mitty and his friends did not e-mail all that much. They didn't phone either. They did a lot of text-messaging. In middle school, Mitty had had fifty-four best friends with whom he had routinely communicated.Back then, he knew everybody's screen name, even the people who had two or three of them, and if he didn't hear from somebody once a week, he was angry
In ninth grade, his list had diminished, and by tenth, it had narrowed to a handful. But this year, along with everything else he was not doing, he was not keeping in touch. Derek and Olivia were pretty much the extent of his buddy list.
Even when he'd been a pretty decent student, Mitty had never been an Olivia, bursting with questions and answers. It seemed unlikely that he would ever fight for a first-row chair, wave his hand madly and shout out opinions on British literature
. But now, a quarter past three on a Monday morning, he was online and he was a person madly shouting out.
He had already been to the sites of NIH, Homeland Security and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management, in charge of the vaccine stockpile). Now he went to his favorite search engine to look for experts. ImmunoQuest turned out to be somebody's personal wellness site; ViroQuest was software; jimmunol. org was the Journal of Immunology, where you could read anything for free, and Mitty was excited until he pulled up a title about smallpox: “Targeting Antigen in Mature Dendritic Cells for Simultaneous Stimulation of CD4+ and CD8+T Cells.”
Right.
The American Association of Immunologists wanted him to be a member before they would tell him anything, and immuno.org was for sale. But the Clinical Immunology Society had a forum on infectious disease. Mitty wrote in the hope that they would post his question:
Last week, researching a term paper on smallpox, I came upon actual smallpox scabs. Am I the only person except the CDC with smallpox remains?
At ImmunoQuery, he typed in smallpox and was taken to a response page where he found a request submitted by a doctor:
I wish to contact survivors of smallpox. I recognize there will be very few still alive in America so hope to hear from survivors perhaps in Bangladesh or India. If you are a survivor or know of survivors, please e-mail.
Mitty wrote to her:
I am not a survivor but I just found scabs from the 1902 Boston epidemic, which might interest you.
Mitty had a number of e-mail addresses. Sometimes he used
[email protected] or
[email protected]. His school address was
[email protected]. He rarely used that one, because the only communications were from disappointed teachers. Even more disappointed now, probably, because he had never read their e-mails, never mind their assignments.
To the International Infectious Disease Research Council, he submitted this:
I just found smallpox scabs from a 1902 epidemic. Is it possible to extract variola virus from these scabs and if so, how?