Blind sided, p.1
Blind Sided, page 1
BLIND SIDED
K S Gray
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Writing has always been my passion. K S Gray is a pen name used for the author’s privacy. If you wish to contact the author, you may do so at: graykasam@gmail.com (also a pen name).
COPYRIGHT © 2022 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This is a copyrighted work. All rights are reserved in accordance with the U. S. Copyright Act as well as under all applicable federal and state laws. No portion of this book, whether in print or electronic form, may not be scanned, uploaded, copied or reproduced without the express written consent of the author. If you wish to use any material from this book, you may contact the author.
DISCLAIMER:
This is a work of fiction. While COVID-19 and political unrest are very real, the names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
The author wishes to thank his wife, Linda, and his family for all of their love and support throughout the years. Much appreciation is also given to my editor Karen, my longtime friend Nancy, and my beta readers Rachel, Latisha and Paul. These may or may not be any of their real names, but they know who they are.
ISBN: 979-8-9859048-1-9 (paperback)
979-8-9859048-0-2 (Kindle)
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: October 4, 2020: A serene beach, a storm approaching
Chapter 2: Janson-Selene For America
Chapter 3: Dinsley knows it all
Chapter 4: Go ahead caller
Chapter 5: October surprise? You ain’t seen nothing yet!
Chapter 6: … but I won’t do that
Chapter 7: Somewhere in a basement nowhere to be found
Chapter 8: October 8 and it’s JustUS – right?
Chapter 9: Just the two of us, we can make it if we try
Chapter 10: FISA warrants, espionage, and other cool stuff
Chapter 11: @HopenaIslandHopping reports to Beijing
Chapter 12: Sure; why the hell not?
Chapter 13: Unit 29155
Chapter 14: October 10 in Russia; October 9 in Hawaii
Chapter 15: Saltine and Wheat Thin
Chapter 16: 10.10 @10
Chapter 17: Reasons to be listened, one, two, three
Chapter 18: Mortimus?
Chapter 19: Two hackers, two continents, one goal
Chapter 20: It’s just a suitcase
Chapter 21: … a suitcase with a bug
Chapter 22: Cuba, quiero bailar la salsa
Chapter 23: I remember this conference table
Chapter 24: Running Man, Bollywood style
Chapter 25: From Russia, With Love
Chapter 26: Warrants pay dividends
Chapter 27: I see the bad moon a-rising, I see trouble on the way
Chapter 28: Not China, not Russia
Chapter 29: Hairspray
Chapter 30: Blind Sided
Chapter 31: No, let’s not speculate
Chapter 32: JSFA, WTF?
Chapter 33: Arrested Development
Chapter 34: The call from inside the house
Chapter 35: Traffic, really?
Chapter 36: Remember Mata Hari?
Chapter 37: Where’s Ricky?
Chapter 38: On the virtual set with Rachel
Chapter 39: Please come to Boston, redux
Chapter 40: We’ll take your badges
Chapter 41: October 20: The Essen Strikes Back
Chapter 42: Deng does what?
Chapter 43: Willie’s 15 minutes of fame
Chapter 44: Spin it to win it
Chapter 45: Release the Kraken
Chapter 46: Plans, PetSmart and polvorones
Chapter 47: Let’s Make a Deal
Chapter 48: Investigations galore
Chapter 49: Air space and head space
Chapter 50: All tricks, no treats
Chapter 51: Midnight at the oasis
Chapter 52: A gaiwan for steeping
Chapter 53: Iron goddess again
Chapter 54: Repurposing the vaccine
Chapter 55: Our relationship with Russia is like a marriage
Chapter 56: Fuhgeddaboudit
Chapter 57: Reunited, and it feels so good
Chapter 58: Just the two of us, redux
Chapter 59: The Gang of Eight
Chapter 60: The Election 100
Chapter 61: Sorry, not sorry
Chapter 62: Why not both?
Chapter 63: This does not end well
Chapter 64: Plausible deniability – on video?
Chapter 65: Hail, hail, the Gang’s all here
Chapter 66: Well, that went well
Chapter 67 : I don’t, I don’t, I don’t
Chapter 68: I do, I do, I do
Chapter 1: October 4, 2020:
A serene beach, a storm approaching
Ricky and Caihong held hands on and off throughout their 12 hour flight from Beijing to Kuai. Caihong had made an excellent suggestion: to travel to Hawaii. She convinced her fiancé that this would be a much more pleasant experience than Ricky’s idea of vacationing at the Wuchang River Beach in Hubei province, China. Caihong reminded Ricky that the Wuchang beach, close to where they were born and first met, would be cold, windy and very crowded, even in October. The brochure and online virtual tour of the exclusive Hawaiian resort Caihong suggested promised a much warmer, more private beach, with fine sand slipping effortlessly between their toes.
Ricky, formally Dr. Tsang Yi DeeLu, had only one objection: his desire to avoid more lengthy flights. His work as a leading immunologist and virologist had him flying all over the world for the past 15 years and taking very few days off. He had logged many hours flying between Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and North America. He’d been to many countries where deadly pandemics had broken out, helping with isolation, prevention, mitigation, and cure. Ricky had finally taken a much needed break starting about six weeks ago.
The couple would have preferred for this to be their honeymoon. While their wedding was to be just over a month from now, Caihong had to take this trip when her work schedule allowed her to be away for ten days. Ricky took some friendly needling from several colleagues that his fiancée’s schedule dictated their travel plans. He didn’t mind. This would be just one of many eagerly awaited changes in his life.
In the days before departing, they assured both sets of very traditional parents that their suite would have separate sleeping quarters. Caihong promised to check in daily on the wedding planning that her mother, Shia, and Ricky’s mother, Mae, had gleefully taken on. Their quick engagement made all of their parents happy. Ricky’s mother had simply stated, “when you know you have the right one, why delay?” Shia fervently agreed, adding “you are getting neither younger nor shorter,” a reference to Caihong being in her mid-30’s and taller than the average adult Chinese male.
Ricky could afford to splurge on business class seats and a two bedroom suite at the five star, all-inclusive resort. He had millions of dollars in his investment accounts from his recent work in Boston for CNOVation, helping to create the first safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine. While Caihong napped, Ricky kept thinking back to the events that brought him to a fame and fortune he’d never sought, and his ambivalence about any widespread use of the vaccine that had been named for him. Ricky reflected on how this past summer the American President, Drake Richards, had made Ricky’s team’s work public while they were still just in the testing and development stages, and rushed his immunization towards use in the United States.
Ricky had not planned on creating an immunity that caused color blindness. He had simply been experimenting with the science behind the Covid-19 virus causing temporary loss of taste and smell, while other researchers were focused on different aspects of the inner-workings of the spike protein. Ricky also figured out a delivery system that no one else even imagined: a drinkable serum, one that could even be spread through rain water. But the color blinding side effect continued to draw the rage of many bioethicists around the world who argued, posted and tweeted against use of the DeeLu vaccine. Ricky had not even reconciled himself to whether this dramatic side effect was an acceptable trade off against the highly transmissible and deadly Covid-19 virus that was ravaging the world.
Ricky’s formal work commitment with CNOVation had ended in mid-August, after the final clinical trials were held in Asia. Still, all throughout this past September, he participated in numerous secure conference calls from his parents’ Beijing apartment with his research team and a few other colleagues. Ricky had continued to work closely with CNOVation’s production partners in France and the Netherlands. Together, they still hoped to mitigate the long term nature of the color blinding side effect of his vaccine and make it a temporary condition. As of September 30, the genetic coding and recoding attempts had led to dead ends; his vaccine either caused color blindness or was highly inefficient in warding off Covid.
President Richards would not wait for a reformulation now just as he refused to wait for Ricky’s team to finish its research over the summer. Richards had pushed the testing and rushed production. As vain as he was, even Richards accepted that he desperately needed something that could stop Covid to be in widespread use in the US in order for him to be reelected. His poll numbers had been crashing throughout 2020 over his inability to stem the pandemic. Richards had screamed loud and often that a Covid vaccine had to be in use Septem ber 30. What DeeLu’s team created was the only one even close to being available by that deadline.
CNOVation had delivered over 150 million doses to the U.S. government by September 30, as it had promised, meeting the wildly aggressive production schedule that Richards’ Chief of Staff, John Ben “JB” Clark, had insisted upon while negotiating their contract. The money was huge for a small company with substantial government contracts and great expertise in virology. Thus far, CNOVation had been paid just over $1.5 billion and promised an additional $3 billion worth of orders by the Department of Defense (DoD). That lucrative compensation resulted in the significant payment of $20 million to Ricky for his incredible work, and large bonuses to his team. But the slow march towards any type of use approval from the FDA resulted in DoD delaying additional orders, and the 150 million doses sat idly in a secure DoD warehouse.
Richards’ anger and desperation grew when September 30 came and went with no federal approval to use the DeeLu vaccine. Richards could not get the authorization process accelerated no matter how much he bullied his own governmental agencies. On multiple occasions, he publicly tweeted and privately bellowed that he would fire the heads of the FDA, Health and Human Services (HHS), the CDC and Dr. Seymour Cooper, chief immunologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The DeeLu vaccine remained under peer review, a critical step before the request for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) could even be considered by the FDA and CDC. The CDC released several statements that it would review the data on the DeeLu vaccine, as well as any other potential Covid-19 preventives, “in due time and without any outside influence.”
Being rebuffed by his own federal agencies, which Richards insisted were supposed to do his bidding, was driving him even crazier, if that was possible. Clark knew Richards was becoming more and more desperate to hold on to power. Richards ranted, screamed and tweeted about all this “ridiculous red tape. Russia beat us to a goddamned vaccine. Russia!” On several occasions in the Oval Office and the presidential residence, Richards snapped at Clark, “Why can’t you get this done?” Clark twice tried to explain how Russia’s vaccine, nicknamed “Sputnik,” was only approved for use in Russia, and it was not as safe and effective as Americans would want and US health agencies would require. Sputnik had not been approved even for emergency use by the European Medicines Agency or the World Health Organization (WHO). Plus Russia had produced only enough doses for a fraction of its own population.
Richards could care less about “details” like these. All this President focused on was Russia had a vaccine, America did not, and voting was about to start. Richards also publicly declared his administration’s Operation Warp Speed (OWS) a “total loser.” OWS had been the brainchild of Richards’ own administration, a government initiative to provide huge amounts of federal seed money to accelerate work on finding a vaccine to fight against a once-in-100-years pandemic. The DeeLu vaccine was not the only one aided by the OWS program; several others were in studies under way, including a joint venture of Pfizer and BioNTech.
With just an hour left in his flight, Ricky looked adoringly at Caihong, occasionally refreshing his social media feeds. While his soon-to-be-bride dreamed of lying on the North Kuai beach, soaking up the sun, he received an encrypted email from a colleague that simply read “FZR bn+ soon”. Ricky knew this meant that Pfizer and BioNTech were getting close to seeking use authorization for their proprietary serum, designated “BNT162b2,” which, while also revolutionary, was highly safe and effective without any widespread, severe side effects. Ricky knew that these companies were nearly three months into a Phase III clinical trial, with over 43,000 enrolled volunteers. This final phase was scheduled to last until at least the end of October.
Ricky took great comfort knowing that there would be over a billion doses of highly safe and effective vaccines available later this year or early in 2021. What confounded him was why so many in the so-called developed world refused to be socially responsible and help stem the spread of Covid by wearing masks and socially distancing. The world’s poorest, most densely populated countries could barely get their hands on donated masks and had no ability to socially distance while they waited for medical help. Ricky looked up as he heard “You seem so deep in thought, my love.” Caihong yawned, squeezed his hand, and, as instructed, adjusted her seat to a full upright position as they descended through high blue skies to arrive at Lihue Airport in Kuai.
At that same time, Richards was meeting in the presidential residence with Clark, Attorney General Milo Thaddeus Farraday, and White House counsel Max Gold. Rain clouds had gathered over Washington, the sky turned an ominous gray, and lightning struck the south lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Richards paid no attention to the storm outside. He had decided it was time to launch an all-out PR campaign to divert attention from the failures surrounding him. Of course, none of this could be his fault. He would claim he was the victim of some massive conspiracy to delay the real vaccines and sabotage acceptance of DeeLu’s. Richards would do this and whatever else it would take to keep the White House. Over the past two days he and Clark had met for hours to concoct some last minute, 95 yard Hail Mary pass to salvage his reelection.
This evening, over burgers and fries, Clark told Farraday and Gold that the three of them would meet in the White House with Abel Dinsley tomorrow. A former high ranking national security official for both Bush Presidents and Bill Clinton, Dinsley had been aggressively pushing the narrative that Covid-19 had been created in a lab in Wuhan and accidentally escaped. The White House would now formally embrace Dinsley for their political advantage. Clark gave Farraday and Gold informational packages about Dinsley’s data and assumptions.
The next morning, Farraday, Gold and Clark met with Dinsley in the White House Map Room. While Clark and Farraday had prepared for the meeting by reading through their prep materials from the night before, Gold, as was typical for him, had looked at nothing. Clark and Farraday probed Dinsley on his theories throughout the 90 minute meeting. Gold asked no questions, until the very end. “This theory you have. Which is easier – to prove it, or disprove it?”
Dinsley simply stared at him, then Clark and Farraday, before he stated, “I suppose it depends on who you ask.”
“Nope. It depends on how you package it. You put a turd in a brown paper sack and leave it on the porch, everybody knows it’s a turd. Set it on fire and it’s a child’s prank. But put it in an expensive package, spray it with perfume, call it a natural bio-cleanser, and advertise the hell out of it, you’ll have a bunch of people rubbing it on their faces. Look, I grew up working in the schmatta district in New York. The business next door, the guy had a company that made jeans. Any time one of the workers messed up and made a hole in the jeans, he had to rip them up and use them for patches or rags. Drove him nuts. One day, some marketing genius starts pushing torn jeans as a fashion statement. The more ripped, the more they cost.”
Clark understood but Dinsley did not. Farraday had long ago stopped paying attention to anything Max Gold said or did. Dinsley asked “Meaning?”
Clark jumped in. “Meaning it’s all about the marketing, the packaging. We’ll have our media guys add some slick graphics to your data slides. When you get on TV, embellish the … you know, the facts you base your conclusions on. We have you booked to go on Joe O’Day’s show tomorrow night on NewsFirst. He’ll give you the full hour. He’s primed to express his views about how Covid had been created in that Wuhan lab and then leaked accidentally or, worse yet, purposefully. He’s more than happy to do so. And he has an audience willing to buy what he sells. You game?”
Dinsley did not hesitate. It came as no surprise to him that this White House had strong connections to the sprawling media empire anchored by the 24 hour cable news station, NewsFirst. Dinsley had watched enough of their coverage of Richards to know that they always favored him and rarely criticized his administration. Any negative coverage was only to castigate an official who Richards had already publicly called out. “Of course. Wow, O’Day has the largest audience on television. The Wall Street Journal carried my articles about Wuhan but most of the liberal media barely mentioned it. I can use O’Day’s platform to emphasize how China’s continued refusal to allow a comprehensive forensic investigation of its Wuhan lab should be considered an admission of guilt.”
