Executive orders - Tom Clancy [42]
I know Gus Lorenz, Dean James said with a smile. We interned together at Peter Brent Brigham. Which Harvard had since consolidated into Brigham and Women's.
Brilliant guy, Alexandre agreed in his best Creole drawl. It was generally thought that Gus's work on Lassa and Q fever put him in the running for a Nobel Prize. And a great doc.
So, why don't you want to work with him in Atlanta? Gus tells me he wants you pretty bad.
Dean James-
Dave, the Dean said.
Alex, the colonel responded. There was something to be said for civilian life, after all. Alexandre thought of the dean as a three-star equivalent. Maybe four stars. Johns Hopkins carried a lot of prestige. Dave, I've worked in a lab damned near all my life. I want to treat patients again. CDC would just be more of the same. Much as I like Gus-we did a lot of work together in Brazil back in 1987; we get along just fine, he assured the dean. I am tired of looking at slides and printouts all the time. And for the same reason he'd turned down one hell of an offer from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, to head up one of their new labs. Infectious diseases were a coming thing in medicine, and both men hoped that it wasn't too late. Why the hell, James wondered, hadn't this guy made general-officer rank? Maybe politics, the dean thought. The Army had that problem, too, just as Hopkins did. But their loss
I talked about you with Gus last night.
Oh? Not that it was surprising. At this level of medicine everyone knew everyone else.
He says just hire you on the spot-
Good of him, Alexandre chuckled.
-before Harry Tuttle at Yale gets you for his lab.
You know Harry? Yep, and everybody knew what everybody else was doing, too.
Classmates here, the dean explained. We both dated Wendy. He won. You know, Alex, there isn't much for me to ask you.
I hope that's good.
It is. We can start you off as an associate professor working under Ralph Forster. You'll have a lot of lab work-good team to work with. Ralph has put a good shop together in the last ten years. But we're starting to get a lot of clinical referrals. Ralph's getting a little old to travel so much, so you can expect to get around the world some. You'll also be in charge of the clinical side in, oh, six months to get your feet good and wet ?
The retired colonel nodded thoughtfully. That's just about right. I need to relearn a few things. Hell, when does learning ever stop?
When you become an administrator, if you're not careful.
Yeah, well, now you know why I hung up the green suit. They wanted me to command up a hospital, you know, punch the ticket. Damn it, I know I'm good in a lab, okay? I'm very good in a lab. But I signed on to treat people once in a while-and to teach some, naturally, but I like to see sick people and send them home healthy. Once upon a time somebody in Chicago told me that's what the job was.
If this was a selling job, Dean James thought, then he'd taken lessons from Olivier. Yale could offer him about the same post, but this one would keep Alexandre close to Fort Detrick, and ninety minutes' flying time to Atlanta, and close to the Chesapeake Bay-in the resume, it said Alexandre liked to fish. Well, that figured, growing up in the Louisiana bayous. In sum total, that was Yale's bad luck. Professor Harold Tuttle was as good as they came, maybe a shade better than Ralph Forster, but in five years or so Ralph would retire, and Alexandre here had the look of a star. More than