Page 10

Nairobi, 1983
IT had been ten years since Jason Monk had been a sophomore at the University of Virginia and he had lost touch with many of the students he had known. But he still recalled Norman Stein. Theirs had been an odd friendship, the medium-height but hard-muscled football player from the farm country and the unathletic son of a Jewish doctor from Fredericksburg. It was a shared and mocking sense of humor that had made them friends. If Monk had had the talent for languages, Stein was the near genius in the Biology Department.
He had graduated summa cum laude one year before Monk and gone straight to medical school. They had kept in touch the usual way, by Christmas cards. Crossing a restaurant lobby in Washington two years earlier, just before his Kenyan posting came through Monk had seen his friend lunching alone. They had had half an hour together before Stein’s lunch partner had showed. That had enabled them to catch up on each other’s news, though Monk had had to lie and say he worked for the State Department.
Stein had become a doctor then taken a Ph D in tropical medicine and was even then rejoicing in his new appointment to the research faci
lity at Walter Reed Army Hospital. From his apartment in Nairobi, Jason Monk checked his address book and made a call. A blurred voice answered at the tenth ring.
“Yeah.”
“Hi, Norm. It’s Jason Monk.” Pause.
“Great. Where are you?”
“In Nairobi.”
“Great. Nairobi. Of course. And what time is it there?”
Monk told him. Midday.
“Well it’s five in the fucking morning here and my alarm is set for seven. I was up half the night with the baby. It’s teething, for God’s sake. Thanks a lot, pal.”
“Calm down, Norm. Tell me something. You ever heard of something called melioidosis?”
There was a pause. The voice that came back had lost all trace of sleep.
“Why do you ask?”
Monk spun him a story. Not about a Russian diplomat. He said there was a kid of five, son of a guy he knew. Seemed the boy was likely to die. He had heard vaguely that Uncle Sam had had some experience with that particular illness.
“Give me your number,” said Stein. “I have to make some calls. I’ll get back to you.”
It was five in the afternoon when Monk’s phone rang.
“There is—may be—something,” said the physician. “Now listen, it’s completely revolutionary, prototype stage. We’ve done some tests, they seem good. So far. But it hasn’t even been submitted to the FDA yet. Let alone cleared. We’re not through testing yet.”
What Stein was describing was a very early cephalosporin antibiotic with no name in 1983. It would later be marketed in the late eighties as ceftazidime. Then it was just called CZ-1. Today it is the standard treatment for melioidosis.
“It may have side effects,” said Stein. “We don’t know.”
“How long to develop these side effects?” asked Monk.
“No idea.”
“Well, if the kid’s going to be dead in three weeks, what’s to lose?”
Stein sighed heavily.
“I don’t know. It’s against all the regulations.”
“I swear, no one will ever know. C’mon, Norm, for all those chicks I used to pull for you.”
He heard the roar of laughter coming all the way from Chevy Chase, Maryland.
“You ever tell Becky and I’ll kill you,” said Stein, and the line went dead.
Forty-eight hours later a package arrived for Monk at the embassy. It came via an international freight express company. It contained a vacuum flask with dry ice. A short, unsigned note said the ice contained two vials. Monk made a call to the Soviet embassy and left a message with the Trade Section for Second Secretary Turkin. Don’t forget our beer at six tonight, he said. The message was reported to Colonel Kuliev.