Inside the germy, sneeze-filled meeting between Morgan Stanley's CEO and the Saudi crown prince at the onset of COVID-19

• James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley, met with the Saudi crown prince at the onset of the pandemic.
• The young royal kept sneezing during the meeting — and Gorman's fear of a deadly pathogen began to grow.
• The following is an excerpt from "Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink."

James Gorman nervously eyed the gold-plated tissue box.

He was in the royal palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, seated to the right of the country's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. It was early March 2020, and the Morgan Stanley CEO was on the second leg of a three-day trip through the Middle East to visit with clients and dignitaries.

The United States had just reported its first death from COVID-19 a few days earlier — a man in his 50s in Washington State. There appeared to be an outbreak of cases at a long-term care facility near Seattle, and there were pockets of cases in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, too.

Life was continuing mostly as normal, though, in America. It hadn't occurred to Gorman to cancel the trip.

Globe-hopping was central to the role of any modern CEO, especially on Wall Street, where bankers lined up to advise governments on modernizing their economies and investing their money. These trips also provided a window into global trends that was hard to get even from New York, the crossroads of global capital, and in early March, such windows were hard to come by.

Gorman's first stop had been Kuwait, where a security officer had put a temperature scanner to his forehead before

The check had rattled Gorman

The emirate had been through Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), another type of coronavirus that had struck the Saudi peninsula in 2012. (MERS was extraordinarily lethal, killing four in ten people who caught it — deadlier than smallpox — but turned out not to be particularly contagious and petered out on its own.)

Given their recent experience with a deadly virus, Gorman took the caution of his Kuwaiti hosts as a sign that the West was underestimating the dangers of this one.

By the time he landed in Saudi Arabia two days later, Gorman was spooked enough to let the protocol officers at the royal palace know he wouldn't be shaking hands. They asked whether he was sick. "No," he said, "just concerned."

He had mostly managed to stick to his plan of limited physical contact, though the Saudi energy minister insisted during a brief meeting on draping his arm around the lanky CEO and leaving it there.

And now, as Gorman chatted with the controversial 34-year-old crown prince about ways Saudi Arabia could diversify its economy and reduce its reliance on oil, the young royal kept sneezing. Each time he did, he grabbed a tissue from an ornate gold-clad box that sat on a marble table next to a vase of freshly cut white tulips, then dropped the wadded tissues into a wastebasket that sat on the floor between the two men's knees.

Gorman had already been iffy about taking the meeting; Saudi Arabia was a fast-growing economy and was using its oil riches to become a key player in global finance and investments, but the murder of a Washington Post journalist in 2018 — pinned by U.S. intelligence squarely on the young crown prince — had tarnished its reputation in the West.

Now, as the pile of tissues grew, so did Gorman's angst

As he left the palace, he shared his concerns with Franck Petitgas, head of Morgan Stanley's international business, who had accompanied him on the trip. "This could be the big one," Gorman mused.

The Big One. Pharmaceutical executives and public health experts had been warning for years of a deadly pathogen, a superbug perfectly evolved in ways big and small, conniving and accidental, to do maximum damage.

That trope was a popular vein of inspiration for Hollywood, which tapped pandemic storylines in hits like the 1990s classic Outbreak, inspired by the bestselling book The Hot Zone, in which a deadly tropical fever sweeps the globe, carried by a monkey captured in an African jungle and sold to an exotic pet store. Ebola, the closest thing in real life to that fictional virus, had flared up in the mid-2010s in Africa, killing more than eleven thousand people and sowing panic as photos of bloodstained hospital floors and funeral pyres were distributed across global news services.

But tropical diseases like Ebola simply kill their victims too quickly to go global. Those who don't die are rendered too sick to venture out to restaurants or movie theaters or other communal gathering places where they might infect others. And these diseases are mostly blood-borne, which means that only close contact with bodily fluids can spread them.

The real threat, public health experts warned, was far more mundane: a virus that spread through the air or casual touch, something resembling the seasonal flu.

It would look more like the SARS virus that had emerged in China in the mid-2000s than anything cooked up in a Hollywood studio. It wouldn't go to the trouble of liquefying organs or shredding blood vessels. It would instead set down roots right where it entered the body — in the lungs — and wreak a slower, quieter havoc there. Early symptoms would resemble any of the thousands of viruses that are typically dismissed as a bad cold.

And rather than the near-certain death that fictional bogeyman pathogens promised, The Big One would live in the mortality sweet spot that terrifies virologists. It would kill enough of its victims to cause alarm in the halls of public health departments but would leave most of them alive and even ambulatory, with a high enough viral load to be infectious but well enough to go about their daily lives.

Such a middle ground might well be a biological quirk, a mutation in a strand of genetic code. But it would be an evolutionary triumph. Viruses have a single-minded purpose: to spread. Killing a host too quickly is counterproductive.

One early scientific study, from February, had pegged the mortality rate at 5.25 percent, about half as deadly as SARS and 50 times more lethal than the typical winter flu.

That was squarely in the virological sweet spot. The virus had hopped international borders with ease and eluded a lockdown by the Chinese government — admittedly belated, but far more drastic and strictly enforced than anything that would likely be achievable in less authoritarian countries.

A few days later, Gorman landed back in New York, where life seemed to be continuing as usual

He dined at Elio's, a white-linen Italian joint on the city's Upper East Side, with three other couples, including the Australian consul general in New York and his wife, who were in town for an event the next day at the consulate, where Gorman would be receiving the Order of Australia, the country's highest civilian honor.

When asked months later about the last normal thing he had done — his last untroubled outing in what would, in the grim tongue-in-cheek-speak of the pandemic, become known across America as "the before times" — he would mention this dinner.

Excerpted from Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink by Liz Hoffman. Copyright © 2023 by Liz Hoffman. Excerpted by permission of Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.