The Laptev Virus

“All right,” she said, her shoulders hunched as if the weight of the morning were a heavy burden she was trying to bear. “Thanks for the pep talk. I’d better head back over.”

As she walked slowly back, Sarah once again replayed the events of the last few weeks in her mind. They had been assigned a nearly impossible task of trying to learn something about a hitherto unknown supersized virus. They had made loads of progress in figuring out its mode of transmission and had come up with a plausible theory about its history in the region. They had also found another infection which seemed to provide a measure of protection against it, and then had been summarily told to stop all work.

It didn’t seem fair. Perhaps Rhonda was trying to make her life difficult so that she would resign? Well, that wasn’t going to happen. She thought back to her work with HIV, and suddenly she remembered Emile’s words about the relative insignificance of Laptev-HFV when compared to the havoc wreaked by AIDS. If it were destroying small villages in some remote third world country, we wouldn’t even be looking at taking on this project. And no one would be asking us to drop AIDS research, when HIV affects so many thousands of people, just to take on this tiny outbreak in the Arctic.

He was right. Their research on AIDS was consequential. She would return to it proudly and inspire her team to do the same. The difference would be that now they had more money at their disposal, they could work for a longer period of time and she could be more directly involved. It wasn’t such a bad thing after all, she thought, and with a lighter heart, she returned to the IDI.

EPILOGUE

Stan Sundback was checking his e-mails, even though it was almost 2:00 am and he really should have been asleep by now. It was a nervous, reflexive habit. Ever since he had authorized the re-opening of the drilling sites in the Arctic, he had been extra attentive, always half-fearing the worst.

It hadn’t helped that Angela had resigned as soon as she found out about the site being re-opened without her approval. That had been another scandal, losing her. She had been strident as she accused him of being “irreverent with the lives of others” by agreeing to open up the drilling areas without further tests. Her words had stung him all the more since they mirrored his own doubts, but, he reminded himself, the job of a CEO was not supposed to be a bed of roses.

Three weeks had passed and everything seemed to be perfectly fine. It was true that they had taken extra precautions and only people who were Laptev HFV resistant had been allowed to work on the drilling sites. Finding Laptev resistant workers had turned out to be quite easy in the end: a simple blood test showed whether anyone had the little “cat critters” as he called them—that infection that came from owning cats and somehow provided immunity to Laptev. He didn’t understand the science, but then again, he didn’t need to. His job, as the shareholders frequently reminded him, was to make sure that the company made money. Ever since Angela had learned from the researchers at the university that there was a way to ensure that the workers would be protected, things had gone smoothly for Riesigoil. With any luck they would have an active well started before the weather turned colder in September.

Stan yawned and placed his cell phone on his bedside table, then went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He was concerned, to be quite honest, because Dennis had told him today that Glassuroil had just closed down its Arctic drilling stations because there had been “incidents” as of late. The intelligence reports had not mentioned what the nature of these “incidents” was, but he was attempting to convince himself that they were due to the thawing conditions in the Arctic. Maybe the melting permafrost had made it difficult to sustain the scaffolding above the well? Certainly the melting permafrost had caused havoc as the unpaved roads were now disappearing at an alarming rate. Stan had seen that this was a problem in many areas inside the Arctic circle, especially places like Alaska where the frozen roads had served for decades.

Surely the incidents at Glassuroil had nothing to do with any viral outbreaks. Nothing at all. That kind of thing could not have been kept secret.

After wiping his face and hands with a towel, Stan returned to his bed and picked up the phone to silence it before turning in for the night. That’s when he saw that there had suddenly been a frantic list of emails. Isolated words, ‘urgent’, ‘six dead,’ ‘compound not responding,’ flashed across the message subject lines.