Bio-Strike

SEVENTEEN

From Reuters Online:

After hearing Lieberman summarize Roger Gordian’s symptoms and lab results over the phone, Eric Oh, his colleague at public health, became concerned enough to ask him to fax over the case report the instant they hung up.

Oh waited at his machine, plucking each page out of the tray as it was transmitted. His hurried reading prompted him to make an equally fast callback.

His impressions corresponded to Lieberman’s — Oh’s version of gut radar, which he’d dubbed his “Spidey sense” in homage to his favorite childhood comic book character, was giving him physical tingles. He urged that a fresh specimen of Gordian’s blood be transported to the renowned virology lab at Stanford Medical School in nearby Palo Alto for examination and recommended that Lieberman follow the usual guidelines for a potential biohazardous threat and ship a second viable sample, dry-iced, to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

“I’d also appreciate you getting another tube of sera to the research facility at Berkeley,” he said. “I consult with researchers there pretty often, and we have a good working relationship.”

“I’ll need to make matters official,” Lieberman said. “Advise the departmental chairs, obtain their authorizations.”

“Think you can rustle them together this afternoon?”

“I’ll give it my best.”

“One more thing before I forget — Gordian’s X-rays. The reports note you’ve had series taken every twelve hours. Can I see your originals? From the initial images to the most recent. I’ll send them right back to you tomorrow morning.”

“No problem.”

“Great, they should give me a better sense of how this has evolved,” Oh said. “The material’s out to Stanford within the hour, I’ll drive down to personally sign for it and get cracking.”

“I thought you mentioned you were taking Cindy out for an Italian dinner tonight.”

“She got used to losing me to an electron microscope and assay plates the day our honeymoon ended, Eli.”

It was late afternoon when Pete Nimec stepped out of the elevator to find Gordian’s admin staring at his office door from behind her desk.

“Norma,” he said. “How you holding up?”

She turned to him slowly as he approached.

“As best I can, Pete,” she said. “Has Mrs. Gordian gotten in touch with you again?”

He shook his head. “We assume she will after that government epidemiologist has a look at things.”

Norma was quiet.

“I don’t want to think about him not being in there.” She indicated Gordian’s office with her cheerless eyes. “And somehow I can’t think about anything else.”

Nimec looked at her.

“I know,” he said.

“Nothing seems right,” she said. “It’s so strange. He’s one of those people I’ve taken for granted will always be with us. I can’t imagine him being seriously ill. He’s so much larger than most…” She paused. “I’m sorry. Of course it doesn’t make sense.”

He reached across the desk and touched her shoulder.

“Maybe not,” he said. “But you aren’t alone. Everybody who cares about him feels that way a little.”

She put her hand on his and let it rest there a moment.

“Thank you.”

He nodded in silence.

“It’s incredible how much Mr. Gordian is able to manage,” she said then. “I’ve spent the past two afternoons canceling his appointments. That luncheon with senators Richard and Bruford from the Armed Services Committee. Meetings with senior executive board members. With a representative from the Silicon Valley Business Alliance. I can’t tell you how many others.”

“You have to field a lot of questions from the press since that stroke story appeared?”

“Enough,” she said. “I’ve stayed with Megan’s official explanation to the letter. Dizziness, maybe too much yard work, routine tests.”

“That’ll hold a while,” he said.

“And hopefully we won’t have any reason to go beyond it.”

“Hopefully.” He paused. “Norma, while we’re on the subject of Gord’s schedule, I need a favor. Something Vince Scull thinks might be important to the doctors. Would you be able to provide a list of his verifiable contacts over the past couple, three weeks? The ones with whom he physically connected, that is.”

She looked at him.

“Yes, I log all his engagements into an electronic scheduler,” she said. “The calendar automatically appears when I turn on my computer every morning. I input whether the date is kept, missed, or reshuffled. Occasionally, Mr. Gordian will have me enter a list of talking points beforehand. Or his handwritten impressions of how the meeting went.”

“I won’t ask for Gord’s private notes. Just the names of people he met and who they work for. Maybe where their meetings took place. Can you swing that for me right now?”

“Pete, I’ll do anything to help. Now, later, don’t hesitate to check with me for whatever information you want,” Norma said. The thought that she could be of use had given her a kind of animation. “Would you like a printout or disk?”

“A copy of each sounds good to me.”

“You’ve got them,” she said, then slipped a rewritable CD into her drive and began tapping on her keyboard.

“I’m sorry, truly sorry, but I can’t help you with that information,” said Carl VanDerwerf from behind his desk. His job title at UpLink was Managing Director of Human Resources.

“An’ I’m tellin’ you I got to have it,” said Rollie Thibodeau from the seat opposite him.

The two men stared at one another, clearly at an impasse.

“We have to be sensitive to the privacy of our employees,” VanDerwerf persisted. “Moreover, there are state and federal laws. You may not be aware of the penalties we could incur. The liabilities were someone to press a suit about your prying into their personnel records for confidential details—”

Thibodeau held a hand in the air to interrupt him.

“Never mind these people’s ages, work experience, or whether they like to pole vault or pole dance in their rec time. Doesn’t matter to me if somebody’s a kleptomaniac, nymphomaniac, single, married, divorced, a bigamist, or takin’ care of his or her shut-in Aunt Emma,” he said. “Just give me the names of employees in this building who took sick days the past couple weeks, and the departments where they work. You got to have that on file.”

VanDerwerf produced an exasperated sigh. “Certainly we do. For payroll and insurance purposes. But if you’d allowed me to finish my sentence a moment ago, you would know the law requires that we keep an individual’s medical background confidential.”

“Nobody’s talkin’ background. Thibodeau said. ”What you got your neck poked out for? Just let me know who’s called in sick lately. An employee does or doesn’t choose to get into the reason why, it be up to him.“

VanDerwerf sighed again.

“Sir, just as you are responsible for our corporate security operations, I supervise all phases of personnel function. At all levels from senior executive to mail room clerk. My decisions must be guided by UpLink’s established policies and procedures and by applicable government regulations.” He pursed his lips, ran a finger across his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache. “Now, I’m not denying that unanticipated situations will sometimes arise that demand judgment calls. Should you care to explain the basis of your request… address my own need to know if it is associated with rumors circulating about Mr. Gordian’s condition… I’m sure we can reconcile our differences in a mutually amenable, commonsense manner.”

Thibodeau glowered. “You sayin’ it ain’t okay for me to ask a fella straight on whether he had a cold or a sprained ankle last week, but it’s fine for you to stick your bill into the boss’s affairs through a third party?”

“That is an oversimplification rendered in insulting terms. My capacities include oversight of UpLink’s health-care costs, and Mr. Gordian is covered by our corporate policy. The wall of silence surrounding his absence stands to put me in a difficult position with our provider. I merely suggest we trade off—”

“I heard enough, you officious little prick.” Thibodeau pushed off his chair and stood over the desk. “Talk about insults, what do you call wastin’ my time, pretendin’ to be grieved up over employees’ rights when you only lookin’ to talk trash—?”

“That was not my intention—”

“Come see!” Thibodeau boomed, thrusting a finger at him. “You don’t commence to turn over what I gotta have, you’ll know how a bug feels when it’s been stepped on with a hikin’ boot.”

VanDerwerf blinked, rapidly stroking his mustache, spots of color on his cheeks and forehead.

Then he released his third and longest sigh yet.

“Okay,” he said in ruffled capitulation. “My staff’s ready to leave for the day. I’ll have them get the names to your office first thing tomorrow morning.”

Thibodeau shook his head and sat.

“Best make that your office in fifteen minutes,” he said and glanced at his wristwatch. “Meanwhile, I’ll just make myself comfortable an’ wait for them right here.”

True to his promise, Eric Oh was at the Stanford lab in time to receive the radiographs and diagnostic specimen from Lieberman.

They arrived via special courier a little after five o’clock, the serum packed separately in accordance with international requirements for transport of fluid, tissue, cultures, and other substances believed to contain etiologic agents — live microbial organisms that were potential causes of infectious disease in human beings.

Or, as they were broadly categorized in the rule books: Dangerous Goods.

Its seal wrapped in waterproof tape, the labeled vial had been placed in a tubular plastic container, the spaces around it filled with sufficient wadding to absorb every drop of sera within should an accidental leak or breakage occur in handling. The secondary receptacle was then capped, taped for watertightness, labeled with the name, address, and phone number of the sender at San Jose Mercy, and encased in an outer shipping canister. Besides a duplicate of the sender’s identification and contact information label, this third canister bore the standard tag for biomedical etiologic materials prescribed by the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, highlighted by a bright red biohazard trefoil against a white background and bearing the appropriate phone number for notification of the CDC should the package become damaged.

These same procedures had been followed for the transport of the sample to Berkeley, as well as for the air shipment of the sample to Atlanta, with additional black-and-white stickers mandated by the International Air Transport Association for containers of dry ice and infectious substances.

Before putting on his protective attire and bringing the package into the virology lab’s biosafety cabinet, where he planned to spend perhaps an hour or two studying its contents, Eric rang Lieberman to let him know it had reached him safe and sound. He then went out to a nearby fast-food restaurant, ordered a couple of cheeseburgers to go, and ate them drowned in ketchup, trying to imagine it was the tomato sauce he’d so looked forward to enjoying at his canceled dinner.

He knew he was kidding himself, of course.

There wasn’t the slightest chance in the world that the burgers would relieve his unfulfilled longing for calamari.

And given his suspicions about Gordian’s case, there was also virtually no chance he’d be leaving the laboratory for many long hours to come.

“From what I can see here, we got thirty-four employees in the building called in sick over the last three weeks,” Thibodeau said.

“Seven… no, sorry, make that eight, are currently out,” Megan said.

“None of them for longer than three days,” said Ricci.

“The rest of the absences average two days,” Nimec said. “I do notice one person, a Michael Ireland in Legal, who’s been down five and counting….”

“Mike fractured his leg rock climbing,” Megan said. “He and his fiancée are friends of mine.”

“Scratch his name off the list,” Scull said and did so on the copy in front of him, drawing a line through it with his pen.

It was a quarter to seven in the evening, regular work hours long past, Nimec’s office once again having become a strategy room for Sword’s core leadership group… plus one, since Vince Scull was, technically speaking, not a member of the organizational security division. They had pulled up chairs to whatever flat surfaces were available — or reasonably clearable — and were poring over photocopies of the separate computer printouts obtained by Nimec and Thibodeau, verifying, cross-checking, and generally hoping for a lead that might steer them toward a carrier from whom Roger Gordian could have received his infection.

“Anyone think it’s worth talking to the people on Rollie’s list who took off sick and are already back to work?” Nimec said.

“My opinion’s that it isn’t, with one possible exception,” said Ricci. “This bug has the boss flat-out kayoed. Somebody’s on his feet after a couple days, he’s not likely to be our contact.”

“That’s if it hits everyone the same, a big assumption to make,” Scull said. “Certain people could have a natural resistance and be mildly affected. Or not be susceptible at all. Or they could be what are called asymptomatic hosts, intermediaries for the bug to hitch a ride on. Our germ bag might be unaffected but have an acquaintance or relative who’s deathly sick—”

“Point taken, Vince,” Nimec said. “But I think our hunt has to stay narrow for now, or we’ll find ourselves lost in the woods.”

Thibodeau nodded. “The direct route gets us nowhere pickin’ up tracks, we widen our range.”

Megan looked at Ricci. “You mentioned an exception…”

“Yeah. A James Meisten. His name’s the only one that’s on both lists.” He looked down at the printouts spread side-by-side in front of him. “He was out sick yesterday, back today. Also met with the boss last Friday.”

“I know him a little,” Megan said. “He was at the Marketing and Promotions conference about the info kiosks.”

“So we phone him at home tonight even though he’s returned?”

“I suppose it couldn’t hurt.” She frowned. “Candidates aren’t exactly leaping out at us, are they? And when I weigh what Vince said… it gets so tangled. I can think of so many possibilities off the top of my head. Assuming the carrier is even a human being as opposed to something that flies, creeps, or crawls, he doesn’t have to be a person who actually had a scheduled meeting with Roger. It could be somebody who chatted with him in the hallway or elevator. Or whose office he popped into on the spur of the moment. Or who shook his hand during a thirty-second introduction. And that’s before we even consider people on his appointment schedule from outside the company. Businessmen. Politicians. Social interactions we don’t have the vaguest idea about. He has friends, family members…”

She let the sentence trail.

“Thought we were sticking to the straight and narrow,” Ricci said to her. “We’ve got Meisten, which is better than nothing. And, far as it goes for the boss’s unplanned contacts, we should look at Thibodeau’s list, try to pinpoint employees most likely to have crossed his path without an appointment over the course of a normal workday. See if that takes us anywhere.”

“I’ve already been doing that,” Nimec said. “Only name that stands out as a possible is Donald Palardy.”

“Palardy heads one of the sweep teams,” Thibodeau said. “Rotated out of Brazil ’round the same time I did.”

Nimec was nodding. “He called in sick Monday.”

Ricci looked at him.

“A day after the boss collapsed.”

“Yeah. And he’s still on the absentee list.”

Everyone in the room was momentarily quiet.

“Don’t see how we can read too much into this,” Scull said. “Sweeps are conducted early, right? Before most of us get to work. We’ve no reason to believe he and Gord have ever been in the same room together.”

“No reason to think they haven’t, either,” Ricci said.

“I know for sure Palardy’s been inside the boss’s office,” Thibodeau said. “We got four teams in the building. All of them be assigned permanent sections. An’ his section includes the top executive suites.”

Ricci exchanged glances with him.

“No shit,” he said.

“Non, ” Thibodeau said.

There was more silence in the room.

“I think we ought to give him a call,” Ricci said.

Lathrop exited the CNN Web site after finding no updated headlines about Roger Gordian’s condition and then restored the Profiler application to his computer screen.

Blondie’s luscious face reappeared in front of him, enlarged and enhanced from the digital video he’d taken near the carousel in Balboa Park. None to his surprise, the program still hadn’t made her. The only reason he’d bothered running her image through it again was that he’d procured a handful of new investigative files from one of his infoworms — although for some reason this particular worm wasn’t penetrating very deep inside the apple lately and soon would be worthless as an informant. It was part of the natural order of things, Lathrop thought. The ebb and flow. They rose to grace, they fell. They gained access, they lost it. But he had other sources at his disposal in a lot of different places. And there were always prospects to be cultivated among the greedy and disenchanted.

Leaving his desktop on, he swiveled around in his comfortable leather office chair and reclined to watch his coon cat toy with a favorite ball of yarn. She prodded it with her front paws to set it rolling and then crouched in readiness to pounce, her tail flicking back and forth on the floor.

“Okay, Missus Frakes,” he said in a fond tone. “Let’s see you go for it.”

The cat cooed at the sound of his voice. Then she sprang upon the wound-up yarn and twisted onto her back, holding the ball against her middle with her forelegs, kicking and raking at it with her sharp rear claws.

Lathrop smiled a little. She would work the thing till it became unraveled and spread loosely across the carpet. Just as he was working his own ball of yarn. The biggest he’d ever chanced upon.

He sat thinking about what he actually knew, what further information he’d been able to surmise from it, and what choices and opportunities the sum total presented to him.

His surveillances at Balboa and the harbor parking lot combined to tell a pretty amazing story. Whatever her identity might be, it was certain Blondie was a courier for El Tío. And her purpose in meeting Enrique Quiros had been to deliver the jewelry box for the obscure narco distributer and instruct Enrique to pass it along to the guy he’d then arranged to meet harborside. His name was Palardy. A member of the security or countersnoop team at UpLink International whose gambling jones had gotten him in over his head with some serious operators, and who’d paid off a piece of his debt by turning over classified information about the defense systems of UpLink’s manufacturing compound in Brazil. El Tío’s involvement in the terrorist raid on that base was unclear to Lathrop, but it probably didn’t have much importance at this stage, and he hadn’t concerned himself with it.

The main thing for him was to keep on top of what was happening now. Because events were already moving fast, and he had the sense they were about to kick up to a breathless pace.

It was interesting how sellout dupes like Palardy could be so utterly blind to the traps being set for them. How they never realized that the type of men who were using them would keep their hooks in until every bit of usefulness was exhausted. At the harbor, Palardy and his current user had talked about genetic blueprints, disease triggers, stuff Lathrop had needed to research afterward. And there was enough he still had to check out. But despite a lingering question mark or two, he’d gotten the gist of their encounter… and stripped to the bone, it all came down to blackmail and murder. Palardy had been given some kind of biological agent, something new under the sun, and been ordered to take out Roger Gordian with it.

Lathrop tilted a little farther back in his chair, continuing to watch Missus Frakes relentlessly pull apart the yarn with her teeth and claws.

That’s the way, all right, he thought. Work the bastard.

In the Safe Car — ha — ha — Palardy had understandably squawked with resistance. Quiros’s errand would bounce him from the role of informant to killer, and he’d never planned for things to escalate that far. But Quiros pushed, bringing up what dirt he had on him, and that made him shut his mouth and agree to cooperate. It was a variation of a theme Lathrop had seen repeated time and again in the territory he chose to prowl, though one notable distinction about the enactment featuring Quiros and Palardy was that neither had been inclined to get mixed up in Gordian’s assassination. That Quiros was himself muscled into it. This had become apparent from his protestations to Blondie and a couple of indirect comments he’d made to Palardy — the latter being moments of commiseration and empathy that hadn’t exactly caused Lathrop’s eyes to mist. But he supposed he was a cynical audience, having maybe seen the basic plot unfold once too often.

After that night at the harbor, Lathrop had concentrated on the script he’d drafted for Quiros and Lucio Salazar without their knowledge. It had netted him a sweet take, and the blowout climax promised to be refreshing fun. But in another twenty-four hours, it would be time to move beyond it. Turn a bend, head on out toward virgin soil.

If he’d needed any incentive to urge him along, nothing could have been better than the news reports about Gordian’s hospitalization.

Lathrop glanced around at the pretty lady on his computer screen and remembered the afternoon he’d followed Enrique to his rendezvous with her. Remembered watching the carousel make its slow rotations with the “Blue Danube” piping in the background, the rowdy, stoned-out teenagers on the lead horses rising from their saddles, stretching their arms to reach for the silver and brass rings above them, only the gleaming brass worth a prize.

A smile ghosted at the corners of Lathrop’s mouth again.

The brass ring.

He’d gotten hold of it. Without ever climbing aboard the platform, stalking the periphery on his ceaseless, solitary hunt, he’d been the one who caught hold. And that left him having to make two major decisions.

Namely when to claim his prize and how best to trade on its indescribable value.

“Third time I’ve called, and still no answer except from his machine,” Ricci said. “Where the hell is Palardy?”

“Who knows? Maybe he went out for some groceries.”

“He’s supposed to be sick.”

“Doesn’t have to mean he’s bedridden. A person has to eat, no matter how lousy he feels. If there’s no food in the house, you live alone, you go buy some.”

“Third time in an hour, Pete. If I’m under the weather and need orange juice or something, I might run over to the corner deli. But I wouldn’t make a whole shopping excursion out of—”

“Whoa,” Megan said, putting up her hand. “I think you two are getting way ahead of yourselves.”

They looked at her from their chairs in Nimec’s office.

“How so?” Nimec said.

“It could be that he’s turned off the ringer on his phone to get some sleep, or doesn’t hear it, or just doesn’t want to answer.”

“Or maybe he was feeling better and went out for fresh air,” Scull said. “For all we know, the guy had a stomach bug and is already back to normal.”

“If that’s the case, why wasn’t he at work today?”

Scull shrugged. “He might not have felt normal till earlier tonight. I’m only agreeing with Meg that—”

“You see me phone his section chief ten minutes ago? You remember our conversation?”

“Sure I do—”

“What he told me, this section chief, was that the last time anybody heard from Palardy was when he phoned in yesterday, and that the guy sounded sick as a dog, and he was supposed to call back today to report how he was doing. And never did.”

“I said I remembered—”

“The section chief, his name’s Hernandez, also said he thought it was very odd that Palardy didn’t call. In fact, I’m pretty sure he started to use the word irresponsible, too, but checked himself.”

“Probably didn’t want to get him in hot water with us,” Thibodeau said.

“I agree. But that doesn’t change anything,” Nimec said. “The sweeps aren’t a haphazard affair. If they become disorganized, we start to have countersurveillance lapses.”

“Exactly,” Ricci said. “Guys on these teams show up for duty at five-thirty, six o’clock in the morning. And unless it happens that one of them wakes up feeling too sick to come in, like Palardy did Monday—”

“Or a last-minute emergency comes up… car breaks down on the highway, kid’s got a fever—”

“Which wasn’t the case—”

“Then Hernandez has got to have his people give him notice the day before,” Thibodeau said, finishing Ricci’s sentence. “Arrange to pull a replacement off another team. Be sure every area in the building due for a sweep is covered.”

Ricci nodded.

“Especially when it’s a team leader who’s going to be out,” he said. “Hernandez is sticking with his man until he learns the score, and I’d do the same. But Palardy being MIA is a bigger deal than he wanted us to think.”

Megan shook her head. “I’m still not sure I understand what the three of you are saying—”

“What I’m saying is Palardy might be too sick to call. Might’ve passed out same as the boss.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“You’ve made quite a huge leap,” she said. “It’s possible we’ve hit on a disciplinary problem rather than anything having to do with Gord.”

“Meg’s right,” Scull said. “Don Palardy appears for work tomorrow morning, fit as a fiddle, your whole discussion’s moot. Like I said before, I can’t see reading a whole lot into his absence. Not at this stage.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I tell you something, Scull. He doesn’t show bright and early, I want to know his home address. Because wherever he lives, I’m heading over there to see what’s up.”

Dr. Eric Oh thought they resembled water lilies.

Clusters of beautiful, perfectly formed lilies floating on the surface of a quiet pond.

This quality of simple structural perfection was the essence of the virus’s enduring success as a life form. It was also what made them ideally suited for comparison study with an electron microscope. Every virion of a type was identical. An intact specimen of a virus from the blood of a patient in Mozambique would be the mirror image of a specimen of the same family, genus, and strain grown in culture at a California research laboratory, assuming it was likewise undamaged. To an experienced researcher it would look as though they had been manufactured at a single factory, on a single, orderly assembly line. You saw one, you’d seen them all.

At three o’clock in the morning, Eric was still at the Stanford lab, examining the photographs he’d snapped with its state-of-the-art Hitachi instrument beside those he’d called up on his computer from the vast database of EM pictures compiled and shared by medical and biological research facilities around the globe.

As with any sort of photography, setting up the shot was the difficult part of the process; once you got to the shutter click, you were home free. From the moment he’d scanned Gordian’s case report, Eric’s mind had been whispering virus. After he’d inspected the first-generation X rays sent by Lieberman, that whisper became an urgent shout. But the problem in taking pictures of viruses was that they tended to be camera shy. The tiniest were dwarfed even by common bacteria. Scientists measured their size in nanometers—billionths of a meter. On this infinitesimal scale, a single droplet of blood became a vast, unmapped sea of crests and troughs where they could remain undetected unless present in great numbers. And the greater their numbers, the worse the infection. It was therefore easier when investigating deadly viral illnesses to find colonies in samples from autopsies of the dead or patients in late-stage disease than in samples taken from less advanced cases.

Eric had hoped from the start that Roger Gordian wasn’t going to make life easy for him. When his viewing of an unconcentrated drop of serum failed to reveal any viruses after nearly two hours, he considered it a break. Better he’d needed to take the extra step of placing a sample in a centrifuge to pack as many organisms as possible into a concentrate than have an abounding population instantly jump out at his eyes. Viruses were unsparing, mechanistic parasites that used up the living cells of their hosts as they bred. Given Eric’s fears about the nature of Gordian’s infection, a sample that teemed with virus particles might have suggested a bleak prognosis indeed.

After centrifugation, Eric had used filter paper to drain the circular grid bearing his concentrated sample, then stained it with a solution of 2 percent phosphotungstate that was conductive to electrons. He had known that his processing would damage whatever viruses might be displayed, and that further deterioration could be expected from the ionizing effect of the microscope’s electron beam. But while there were methods of cryogenic preparation that could have substantially reduced, if not altogether eliminated, the loss of a specimen’s structural integrity, these techniques were finicky and took time. And Eric’s goal was to aid in Gordian’s diagnosis and treatment, not his postmortem, which meant he had to be expedient. He had weighed the two options against each other and decided to go ahead with conventional EM, reasoning that an adequate amount of the sample remained for the lab’s regular staff to perform cryo EM later on, should his own examination indicate it was advisable.

Now Eric removed his glasses and sat rubbing his eyes, strained from too many long, sleepless hours fixed on the visual panel of the EM. The only reminder that his stomach wasn’t completely empty was an occasional repeating of the ketchup-sopped burgers he’d picked up for dinner. He knew he ought to go home, pop some antacid tablets, and climb into bed. But the pictures wouldn’t let him budge.

He put the glasses back on and looked at his micrographs. Then at the electronic library shots on his computer screen. His gaze moving between them again and again.

Lilies. On a quiet pond.

As an epidemiologist with the CDC in the midnineties, Eric had been one of the primary investigators who had worked to identify the mystery illness that scourged the Four Corners Navajo tribal reservation in the Southwest and then gradually made its way eastward, killing better than half its victims — many of them young, otherwise healthy individuals — within days of their first symptoms. The infections began with mild flulike respiratory problems and rapidly progressed toward systemic crash, the walls of the capillaries in the lungs breaking down, developing tiny leaks that bled out into the surrounding tissues until they became inundated with fluid and sometimes swelled to double their normal size. In many of the fatal cases there was a similar breakdown of stomach membranes. The external signs of terminal-stage disease were especially horrible as the blood vessels in the body’s mucous membranes and subcutaneous tissues deteriorated, causing petechiae, pinpoint hemorrhages of the eyes, mouth, and skin.

In the early days of the contagion’s spread, the inhabitants of Four Corners came to refer to the epidemic simply — and for Eric chillingly — as sin nombre. Without a name. That designation stuck with it after intensive scientific detective work eventually determined the disease was a new strain of hantavirus, a lethal hemorrhagic fever whose occurrence was never previously recorded in North America.

The tingles Eric had felt on first perusal of Gordian’s case report had stemmed from the combination of his respiratory problems and the abnormal lymphocytes and diving platelet count in his bloodstream. Platelets were essential to the body’s healing factor, minuscule patches that gathered to stop bleeding and release clotting agents. A normal platelet count averaged 150,000 to 350,000 per microliter of blood. Gordian’s count had been 120,000 per microliter when he was admitted to San Jose Mercy — borderline low. It had then fallen to 90,000 Monday morning. On the most recent workup, it declined even more pronouncedly to 50,000 per microliter.

Eric had seen nearly the same profile in sin nombre patients entering the pulmonary edema phase of the disease. And changes in Gordian’s chest X rays had also been discomfortingly familiar. The vague skeins of shadow across his lungs evident on Sunday’s pictures had become linear opacities of the airspaces within twenty-four hours, visible as short perpendicular white streaks at their bases. By Tuesday afternoon, there were longer lines developing from the hilum, the crowded interchange where the blood vessels, nerves, and bronchi emerged into the lungs.

Sin nombre, he thought.

Without a name.

The liliform viruses now on Eric’s computer screen were micrographs that he and his colleagues on the CDC investigative team had taken eight years ago… and the shots he’d gotten out of the EM’s photographic chamber tonight bore an undeniably striking similarity to them.

As in the original series, the organisms were circular in shape. As in the originals, their envelopes were ringed with binding proteins that enabled them to attach to the outer membranes of host cells. But the architecture of their nucleocapsids — the core material within the viral envelopes that held the genomic code for their replication and entry into the cell — showed a subtle variance.

Studying the set of images he’d isolated from Roger Gordian’s bloodstream, Eric could see none of the roundedness typical of the nucleocapsids on the database specimens of sin nombre, or for that matter in any of the related old-world hantavirus strains he’d encountered in his scientific career. Instead, they appeared long and straight, almost filamentous, even when computer-enhanced.

Eric couldn’t go beyond guessing whether this anomaly represented a difference in the genetic makeup of the separate specimens until a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, probe was conducted on Gordian’s samples, and the actual RNA sequences could be compared against the codes of all other known hantaviruses. But his immunogobulin capture assays — fluorescent dye screening tests developed in the late 1980s that produced results within three or four hours — had shown weak positives for several catalogued strains of the disease, with the brightest green glow on his lab slide appearing for sin nombre. While that, too, had been relatively pale, it had made Eric nervous as hell once added to the rest of the evidence before him.

His eyes hurting, his stomach hollow, he sat there tensely in the lab, frozen behind his computer as dawn crept its slow way into the sky outside. He could say very little absolutely except that Roger Gordian was in serious trouble. But he believed in his bones that if Gordian didn’t have sin nombre, he’d contracted something very much like it.

That a close relative to the disease without a name, one nobody had known about, had just shown up on the doorstep.

The doe strode softly into the thick stand of trees, her tracks like broken hearts in the fallen snow. Food was plentiful here, the low-hanging pine boughs bunched with cones, the needle buds on the saplings still succulent, only beginning to brown in their cold-weather dormancy.

Scanning a moment for predators, she saw nothing disturb the vegetation, heard nothing except the hushed whisper of the breeze. Then she lowered her head and tore at the young trees with her flat, blunt teeth, lacking incisors to bite into them.

The knife slashed up from beneath the dark shelf of a branch, plunged hilt-deep into the softness of her throat, then slashed crosswise once and again. Arterial and venous blood gushed over the animal’s white down and stained the snow under her front hooves mingled shades of red. She collapsed heavily, the brightness of life frozen in eyes already dead.

Kuhl knelt to pull his knife from the wound, traces of vapor steaming from its wet blade.

For the first time in weeks, he felt released.

Gordian awoke, gasping for air.

Feverish and disoriented, unable at first to remember where he was, he felt certain a hand was clapped over his nose and mouth. Then he got his bearings. He was in his hospital room. His bed light off in the dimness of early morning. A thin crack of illumination spilling under his door from the outer corridor.

Air.

He needed air.

Gordian struggled to pull down a breath, his body arched off his mattress from the effort. But his lungs didn’t respond. They felt heavy and clogged. A muffled gurgling noise escaped him. Air. He fumbled under his chin for the oxygen mask. Couldn’t find it. He reached down to his chest and still couldn’t locate it. Groped about on his right side, where he sometimes clipped it to the safety rail. Not there.

The oxygen mask. He needed the mask. Where was it?

His mouth opened wide, he swung his arm up over his head, found the feed hose running from the wall, and with a surge of relief slid his fingers down along its length. Feeling for the mask at the end of it—

His newborn relief suddenly plummeted away into confusion.

The mask…

He was already wearing it.

He cupped his hand over its curved plastic surface, pressed it against his face, drew hard. Air hissed through the tube. He could hear it over the strangled shreds of sound coming out of him. Hear it flowing into his mask… but that was where it seemed to stop. His throat, his chest, were blocked.

Desperate, choking, feeling as if his chest were about to explode, he clawed for the emergency button at his side to summon a nurse, hoping to God one was very nearby.