Contagion Read online

  “Who’d have ever thought the peaceful practice of medicine could be so exciting? It’s a good, fast read.”

  —The Denver Post

  CONTAGION

  From the undisputed master of the medical thriller comes the story of a deadly epidemic spread not merely by microbes but by sinister sabotage—a terrifying cautionary tale for the millennium as the health care giants collide…

  “The underlying theme—how easily could someone start an epidemic—is answered in a pretty chilling way.”

  —The Birmingham News

  A Literary Guild® Main Selection and a Main Selection of the Doubleday® Book Club

  Praise for

  ROBIN COOK

  and his bestselling novels

  “Leave it to doctor-turned-novelist Robin Cook to scare us all to death.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Straight out of today’s headlines.”

  — UPI

  “Holds you page after page.”

  —-Larry King, USA Today

  “Shocking and thought-provoking.”

  —The Associated Press

  “Dr. Robin Cook certainly knows how to tell a story.”

  —The Detroit News

  “Fast… exciting… spine-tingling.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Stern and bracing… [a] suspenseful thriller.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A riveting plot, filled with action.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A spell-binder… unbearable tension.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  INVASION

  A sudden outbreak defies diagnosis—because the causes are unlike anything humankind has ever seen…

  “DR. ROBIN COOK CERTAINLY KNOWS HOW TO TELL A STORY.”

  —The Detroit News

  ACCEPTABLE RISK

  His most shocking thriller—a timely and terrifying glimpse into the dangers of antidepressant drugs…

  “STERN AND BRACING… [A] SUSPENSEFUL THRILLER.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  FATAL CURE

  One of the most controversial books Robin Cook has ever written—a terrifying look at the darker implications of managed health care in America…

  “A RIVETING PLOT, FILLED WITH ACTION.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A HAIR-RAISING, CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT THE POSSIBLE PITFALLS OF IMPENDING HEALTH-CARE REFORM IN AMERICA.”

  —The Detroit News

  TERMINAL

  Brain cancer patients are miraculously “cured”—when the rising cost of research sparks a medical conspiracy that lowers the price on human life…

  “A SPELLBINDER… UNBEARABLE TENSION.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “STRAIGHT OUT OF TODAY’S HEADLINES.”

  —UPI

  BLINDSIGHT

  How far will people go to obtain donors for eye operations? Murder is beyond comprehension. But seeing is believing…

  “GRABS THE READER… MAINTAINS SUSPENSE WITH SURPRISING STORY TWISTS.”

  —Pittsburgh Press

  “RIVETING.”

  —The Nashville Banner

  VITAL SIGNS

  Dr. Cook explores the frightening possibilities of experimental fertilization—the passion to create life, and the power to destroy it…

  “CONSTANT SUSPENSE… BELIEVABLE AND CHILLING.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “VINTAGE COOK… NONSTOP ACTION.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  HARMFUL INTENT

  The explosive story of a doctor accused of malpractice—a fugitive on the run who pierces the heart of a shocking medical conspiracy…

  “A REAL GRABBER!”

  — Los Angeles Times

  “TRULY EXCITING.”

  —The Associated Press

  MUTATION

  On the forefront of genetic research, a brilliant doctor tries to create the son of his dreams—and invents a living nightmare…

  “HOLDS YOU PAGE AFTER PAGE.”

  —Larry King, USA Today

  “REALLY FRIGHTENING.”

  —Booklist

  MORTAL FEARM

  A major scientific breakthrough becomes the ultimate experiment in terror when middle-aged patients begin to die—of old age…

  “A CHILLING ODYSSEY INTO THE ORIGINS OF LIFE—AND DEATH.”

  —USA Weekend

  “COOK’S BEST BOOK SINCE COMA.”

  —People

  OUTBREAK

  Murder and mystery reach epidemic proportions when a devastating plague sweeps the country…

  “HIS MOST HARROWING MEDICAL HORROR STORY.”

  —The New York Times

  “THE ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE… SPINE-TINGLING INTRIGUE AND FEVER-PITCHED ACTION.”

  —The Associated Press

  GODPLAYER

  Only Robin Cook could portray with such terrifying brilliance what happens when the one place dedicated to saving lives starts taking them…

  “A PAGE-TURNER.”

  —People

  “NERVE-WRACKING HOSPITAL HORRORS.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  FEVER

  A family searches for the truth from a corporation and a medical establishment all too willing to ignore the fate of their little girl…

  “GRIPPING.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A TIMELY MEDICAL THRILLER… AUTHENTIC, CREDIBLE, HIS BEST YET.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  Titles by Robin Cook

  INTERVENTION

  FOREIGN BODY

  CRITICAL

  CRISIS

  MARKER

  SEIZURE

  SHOCK

  ABDUCTION

  FEVER

  VECTOR

  TOXIN

  INVASION

  CHROMOSOME 6

  CONTAGION

  ACCEPTABLE RISK

  FATAL CURE

  TERMINAL

  BLINDSIGHT

  VITAL SIGNS

  HARMFUL INTENT

  MUTATION

  MORTAL FEAR

  OUTBREAK

  MINDBEND

  GODPLAYER

  BRAIN

  SPHINX

  COMA

  THE YEAR OF THE INTERN

  ROBIN

  COOK

  CONTAGION

  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand. London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CONTAG
ION

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / January 1996

  Berkley edition / December 1996

  Copyright © 1995 by Robin Cook.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-20361-3

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  20 19 18

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  FOR PHYLLIS,

  STACY, MARILYN,

  DAN, VICKY,

  AND BEN

  Our leaders should reject market values as a framework for health care and the market-driven mess into which our health system is evolving.

  JEROME P. KASSIRER, M.D.

  New England Journal of Medicine

  Vol. 333, No. 1, p. 50, 1995

  I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who are always graciously willing to field questions and offer helpful advice. Those whom I’d particularly like to acknowledge for Contagion are:

  DR. CHARLES WETLI, Forensic Pathologist and Medical Examiner

  DR. JACKI LEE, Forensic Pathologist and Medical Examiner

  DR. MARK NEUMAN, Virologist and Virology Laboratory Director

  DR. CHUCK KARPAS, Pathologist and Laboratory Supreme Commander

  JOE COX, Esquire, Lawyer and Reader

  FLASH WILEY, Esquire, Lawyer, Fellow Basketball Player, and Rap Consultant

  JEAN REEDS, Social Worker, Critic, and Fabulous Sounding Board

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  June 12, 1991, dawned a near-perfect, late-spring day as the sun’s rays touched the eastern shores of the North American continent. Most of the United States, Canada, and Mexico expected clear, sunny skies. The only meteorological blips were a band of potential thunderstorms that was expected to extend from the plains into the Tennessee Valley and some showers that were forecasted to move in from the Bering Strait over the Seward Peninsula in Alaska.

  In almost every way this June twelfth was like every other June twelfth, with one curious phenomenon. Three incidents occurred that were totally unrelated, yet were to cause a tragic intersection of the lives of three of the people involved.

  11:36 A.M.

  DEADHORSE, ALASKA

  “Hey! Dick! Over here,” shouted Ron Halverton. He waved frantically to get his former roommate’s attention. He didn’t dare leave his Jeep in the brief chaos at the tiny airport. The morning 737 from Anchorage had just landed and the security people were strict about unattended vehicles in the loading area. Buses and vans were waiting for the tourists and the returning oil company personnel.

  Hearing his name and recognizing Ron, Dick waved back and then began threading his way through the milling crowd.

  Ron watched Dick as he approached. Ron hadn’t seen him since they’d graduated from college the year before, but Dick appeared just as he always did: the picture of normality with his Ralph Lauren shirt and windbreaker jacket, Guess jeans, and a small knapsack slung over his shoulder. Yet Ron knew the real Dick: the ambitious, aspiring microbiologist who would think nothing of flying all the way from Atlanta to Alaska with the hope of finding a new microbe. Here was a guy who loved bacteria and viruses. He collected the stuff the way other people collected baseball cards. Ron smiled and shook his head as he recalled that Dick had even had petri dishes of microbes in their shared refrigerator at the University of Colorado.

  When Ron had met Dick during their freshman year, it had taken a bit of time to get used to him. Although he was an indubitably faithful friend, Dick had some peculiar and unpredictable quirks. On the one hand he was a fierce competitor in intramural sports and surely the guy you wanted with you if you mistakenly wandered into the wrong part of town, yet on the other hand he’d been unable to sacrifice a frog in first-year biology lab.

  Ron found himself chuckling as he remembered another surprising and embarrassing moment involving Dick. It was during their sophomore year when a whole group had piled into a car for a weekend ski trip. Dick was driving and accidentally ran over a rabbit. His response had been to break down in tears. No one had known what to say. As a result some people began to talk behind Dick’s back, especially when it became common knowledge that he would pick up cockroaches at the fraternity house and deposit them outside instead of squishing them and flushing them down the toilet as everybody else did.

  As Dick came alongside the Jeep, he tossed his bag into the backseat before grasping Ron’s outstretched hand.

  They greeted each other enthusiastically.

  “I can’t believe this,” Ron said. “I mean, you’re here! In the Arctic.”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” Dick said. “I’m really psyched. How far is the Eskimo site from here?”

  Ron looked nervously over his shoulder. He recognized several of the security people. Turning back to Dick, he lowered his voice. “Cool it,” he murmured. “I told you people are really sensitive about this.”

  “Oh, come on,” Dick scoffed. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m dead serious,” Ron said. “I could get fired for leaking this to you. No fooling around. I mean, we got to do this hush-hush or we don’t do it at all. You’re to tell no one, ever! You promised!”

  “All right, all right,” Dick said with a short, appeasing laugh. “You’re right. I promised. I just didn’t think it was such a big deal.”

  “It’s a very big deal,” Ron said firmly. He was beginning to think he’d made a mistake inviting Dick to visit, despite how much fun it was to see him.

  “You’re the boss,” Dick said. He gave his friend a jab on the shoulder. “My lips are sealed forever. Now chill out and relax.” He swung himself into the Jeep. “But let’s just buzz out there straightaway and check out this discovery.”

  “You don’t want to see where I live first?” Ron asked.

  “I have a feeling I’ll be seeing that more than I care to,” he said with a laugh.

  “I suppose it’s not a bad time while everybody is preoccupied with the Anchorage flight and screwing around with the tourists.” He reached forward and started the engine.

  They drove out of the airport and headed northeast on the only road. It was gravel
. To talk they had to shout over the sound of the engine.

  “It’s about eight miles to Prudhoe Bay,” Ron said, “but we’ll be turning off to the west in another mile or so. Remember, if anybody stops us, I’m just taking you to the new oilfield.”

  Dick nodded. He couldn’t believe his friend was so uptight about this thing. Looking around at the flat, marshy monotonous tundra and the overcast gunmetal gray sky, he wondered if the place was getting to Ron. He guessed life was not easy on the alluvial plain of Alaska’s north slope. To lighten the mood he said: “Weather’s not bad. What’s the temperature?”

  “You’re lucky,” Ron said. “There was some sun earlier, so it’s in the low fifties. This is as warm as it gets up here. Enjoy it while it lasts. It’ll probably flurry later today. It usually does. The perpetual joke is whether it’s the last snow of last winter or the first snow of next winter.”

  Dick smiled and nodded but couldn’t help but think that if the people up there considered that funny, they were in sad shape.

  A few minutes later Ron turned left onto a smaller, newer road, heading northwest.

  “How did you happen to find this abandoned igloo?” Dick asked.

  “It wasn’t an igloo,” Ron said. “It was a house made out of peat blocks reinforced with whalebone. Igloos were only made as temporary shelters, like when people went out hunting on the ice. The Inupiat Eskimos lived in peat huts.”

  “I stand corrected,” Dick said. “So how’d you come across it?”

  “Totally by accident,” Ron said. “We found it when we were bulldozing for this road. We broke through the entrance tunnel.”

  “Is everything still in it?” Dick asked. “I worried about that flying up here. I mean, I don’t want this to be a wasted trip.”

  “Have no fear,” Ron said. “Nothing’s been touched. That I can assure you.”

  “Maybe there are more dwellings in the general area,” Dick suggested. “Who knows? It could be a village.”

  Ron shrugged. “Maybe so. But no one wants to find out. If anybody from the state got wind of this they’d stop construction on our feeder pipeline to the new field. That would be one huge disaster, because we have to have the feeder line functional before winter, and winter starts in August around here.”

  Ron began to slow down as he scanned the side of the road. Eventually he pulled to a stop abreast of a small cairn. Putting a hand on Dick’s arm to keep him in his seat, he turned to look back down the road. When he was convinced that no one was coming, he climbed from the Jeep and motioned for Dick to do the same.