Germ

Germ

by Robert Liparulo

To my boys—

Matt, always thoughtful and a joy to know

and

Anthony, who keeps me young and smiling

IF YOU BREATHE IT WILL FIND YOU

The list of 10,000 names was created for maximum devastation. Business

leaders, housewives, politicians, celebrities, janitors, children. None of them

is aware of what is about to happen—but all will be part of the most

frightening brand of warfare the world has ever known.

The germ—an advanced form of the Ebola virus—has been genetically

engineered to infect only those people whose DNA matches the codes

embedded within it. Those whose DNA is not a match, simply catch a cold.

But those who are a match experience a far worse fate. Within days, their

internal organs liquify.

DEATH IS THE ONLY ESCAPE

The release of the virus will usher in a new era of power where countries

are left without

defense. Where a single person—or millions—could be killed

with perfect accuracy and zero collateral damage. Where your own DNA

works against you.

THE TIME ISN'T COMING. IT IS NOW.

PRAY THE ASSASSINS GET YOU FIRST.

Facts

Ebola is one of the most lethal viruses known to man.

With each outbreak, a higher percentage of people who contract it die. In 1995, an airborne strain of Ebola was discovered. Even thirty years after the first Ebola outbreak, no one knows where it came from or where it resides when it is absent from humans or monkeys.

The Guthrie test, also called a PKU test, was developed by Robert Guthrie in 1962. It involves drawing a sample of blood from a newborn's heel and helps diagnose certain genetic diseases, such as phenylketonuria. It is routinely administered to all babies born in industrialized nations.

Most Guthrie cards, with these blood spots, are stored in warehouses and never destroyed.

The blood on these cards contains DNA that identifies the donors.

With the advent of gene splicing, scientists are capable of encoding viruses with human DNA.

Theoretically, this gives viruses the ability to find specific DNA to find you.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he

outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery

all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

—George Bernard Shaw

"Let there be light!" said God, and there was light!

"Let there be blood!" says man, and there's a sea!

—Lord Byron, Don Juan

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.

It means a strong desire to live taking the

form of a readiness to die.

—G. K. Chesterton

one

Hardly resembling a man anymore, the thing on the bed jerked and thrashed like a nocturnal creature dragged into the light of day. His eyes had filled with blood and rolled back into his head, so only crimson orbs glared out from behind swollen, bleeding lids. Black flecks stained his lips, curled back from canted teeth and blistered gums. Blood poured from nostrils, ears, fingernails. Flung from the convulsing body, it streaked up curtains and walls and streamed into dark pools on the tile floor.

Despesorio Vero, clad in a white lab coat, leaned over the body, pushing an intratrachael tube down the patient's throat; his fingers were slick on the instrument. He snapped his head away from the crimson mist that marked each gasp and cough. His nostrils burned from the acidic tang of the sludge. He caught sight of greasy black mucus streaking the blood and tightened his lips. Having immersed his hands in innumerable body cavities—of the living and the dead—few things the human body could do or produce repulsed him. But this . . . He found himself at once steeling his stomach against the urge to expel his lunch and narrowing his attention to the mechanics of saving this man's life.

Around him, patients writhed on their beds. They howled in horror and strained against their bonds. Vero ached for them, feeling more sorrow for them than he felt for the dying man; at least his anguish would end soon. For the others, this scene would play over and over in their minds—every time an organ cramped in pain; when the fever pushed beads of perspiration, then blood, through their pores; and later, during brief moments of lucidity.

The body under him abruptly leaped into an explosive arch. Then it landed heavily and was still. One hand on the intratrachael tube, the other gripping the man's shoulder, Vero thought mercy had finally come—until he noticed the patient's skin quivering from head to toe. The man's head rotated slowly on its neck to rest those pupil-less eyes on the doctor. With stuttering movements, as if a battle of fierce wills raged inside, the eyes rolled into their normal position. The cocoa irises were difficult to distinguish from the crimson sclera.

For one nightmarish moment, Vero looked into those eyes. Gone were the insanity of a diseased brain and the madness that accompanies great pain. Deep in those bottomless eyes, he saw something much worse.

He saw the man within. A man who fully realized his circumstances, who understood with torturous clarity that his organs were liquefying and pouring out of his body. In those eyes, Vero saw a man who was pleading, pleading . . .

The skin on the patient's face began to split open. As a gurgling scream filled the ward, Vero turned, an order on his lips. But the nurses and assistants had fled. He saw a figure in the doorway at the far end of the room.

"Help me!" he called. "Morphine! On that cart. . ."

The man in the doorway would not help.

Karl Litt. He had caused this pain, this death. Of course he would not help.

Still, it shocked Vero to see the expression on Litt's face. He had heard that warriors derived no pleasure from taking life; their task was necessary but tragic. Litt was no warrior. Only a monster could look as Litt did upon the suffering of the man writhing under Vero. Only a monster could smile so broadly at the sight of all this blood.

two

thirteen months later

For one intense moment, sunlight blazed against the windshield, making it impossible to see the traffic streaming ahead on I-75. Special Agent Goodwin Donnelley kept the accelerator floored; he could only hope he didn't plow into another vehicle. At the top of the on-ramp, the sedan took flight. Donnelley and his passenger smacked their heads against the roof, then the car crashed down in an explosion of sparks. Its front bumper crumpled the rear quarter panel of a Honda before Donnelley's frantic overcorrection slammed the car against the right-hand guardrail.

He saw a clear path in the breakdown lane and straightened the wheel to accelerate past Atlanta's lunchtime congestion. In the rearview mirror, the black Nissan Maxima pursuing them bounded onto the highway, disappeared behind a semitrailer, then reappeared in the breakdown lane. The man beside him—Despesorio Vero, he had called himself—turned to look, blocking Donnelley's view.

"They're gaining!"

"Sit down!" Donnelley shoved him, then scanned the roadway ahead. A glint of sunlight flashed off a car stopped in the breakdown lane a half mile ahead. At eighty miles per hour, the distance would evaporate in twenty seconds. Traffic was lighter here; he could swerve into the lane on his left anytime.

Another glance at the rearview: the Maxima was almost on top of them. A figure armed with a shotgun jutted up from the passenger-side window.

If Donnelley waited until the last moment to swerve, the Maxima would crash into the stalled car. The car's hood was up, but Donnelley could not see anyone around it. If he tricked the Maxima into hitting it, he would impose a death sentence on anyone standing in front of the car.

He veered back into the traffic lane, granting the Maxima time to follow.

His pursuers crossed into the middle lane and in a burst of speed edged closer. Now the Maxima's bumper was even with Donnelley's door. Instinctively, he touched the outside of his pants pocket. It was still there—the tracking device. He had not been able to place it on Vero's clothing, but it was turned on: his partner could track them. She was back there now, somewhere behind the Maxima.

He drew his pistol from the holster under his arm, bringing it across his body to shoot. Just then, the rear driver's-side window shattered into thousands of tiny crystals that sailed across the car's interior, along with the thunderous sound of a shotgun blast from the Maxima. Vero screamed, and both men ducked.

Another blast hit Donnelley's door. He kept his head down, blind to the road ahead, letting minor collisions with the guardrail on his right and the Maxima on his left keep the vehicle relatively straight. Another blast took out the metal pillar between the front and rear side windows and most of Donnelley's headrest. His gun flew across the car and skidded around on the passenger floor mat.

Boom! Vero's window disintegrated.

"Enough of this!" Donnelley slammed his foot down on the brake for a mere instant. The car jolted and the Maxima pulled ahead. He cranked the wheel to the left. The sedan's front corner rammed dead into the Maxima's passenger door, directly below the startled face of the shooter hanging halfway out the window.

The man's torso jerked down, as if for an enthusiastic Oriental greeting. From his position ducked behind the wheel, Donnelley didn't witness the man's face hitting the sedan's hood, but that it did was indisputable: the shotgun pinwheeled across the windshield and over the roof. A split second later the man jerked back into view, blood spewing from both nostrils. He disappeared back into the Maxima.

Donnelley sat up and cranked the wheel again. This time, the sedan nailed the Maxima just forward of the front tire. The pursuer's car shot across three lanes and fell back. Just as he was registering the decent distance he'd gained on the Maxima, the bloody-faced shooter reemerged, a new shotgun in hand. He appeared to be bellowing in rage, a warrior whose battle had become personal.

Donnelley slapped Vero in the chest and pointed to the floor. "Hand me that pistol. Now!"

Back at the on-ramp that had admitted the dueling vehicles onto I-75, another car, this one a chocolate brown Ford Taurus, vaulted onto the highway. In a chorus of screeching rubber, it fishtailed across three lanes before choosing one and bulleting forward.

Inside, Julia Matheson straightened the wheel and pushed the accelerator. Her lips were pressed against her teeth. Dark bangs clung to her sweaty face despite the car's air-conditioning. Her wide eyes darted around, looking for openings in the traffic and for her partner up ahead.

The pandemonium coming through the tiny speaker nestled in her ear was maddening. Through intermittent patches of static and dead air came explosions of gunfire, ferocious commotion that could have been crunching metal or more static, screams, and shouted expletives.

Her partner, Goody Donnelley, wore a wireless microphone designed for monitoring conversations from no farther than a mile away, but she saw no signs of him.

Once again she tried reaching him on the in-car police-band radio: "Goody! Pick up. This is Julia. Goody!"

She knew the problem: he had turned it off before going into the hotel to pick up the guy they'd said was causing trouble, because it tended to interfere with the body microphone's signal.

Through the earpiece she heard Goody yell, "Hand me that pistol. Now!" Static followed.

She thought again of contacting the Atlanta police, Georgia state patrol, her own agency . . . anyone; but she trusted Goody's instincts, and when it had all hit the fan, he had told her not to call for backup.

She slapped a palm down against the wheel.

It was not supposed to have gone down like this. Not like this.

Okay, no duh. But an hour ago the assignment had seemed more than boring. It had seemed beneath them.

three

Goody had called her shortly after six.

"Rise and shine," he said.

She could hear his sons laughing and yelling in the background. She couldn't image that kind of energy this early.

He continued, "Our mad caller's in town. He showed up at CDC this morning."

"Vero?" Julia asked, still groggy. "He's here?"

For two days the guy had been calling, demanding to speak to the director of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases. He had been only semicoherent, rambling about an old virus that was really a new virus and a threat that may or may not be related to bioterrorism. As agents of the NCID's new Law Enforcement Division, which Congress created as part of the Bioterrorism Weapons Antiterrorism Act, Julia Matheson and Goodwin Donnelley had attempted to trace the calls and find out more about the man making them. The calls had been placed from different pay phones in the DC area, and the name "Despesorio Vero" had been conspicuously absent from every database available to them.

"Showed up at Gate 1 about five, hysterical about getting in. The security guard thought he was going to ram the barricade. The guard force was about to detain him when he backed up and took off. Rental car, picked up at the airport last night." "So we gotta find him?" "He's meeting us at the Excelsior at nine." "He's meeting us?"

"Well me. He thinks I'm Sweeney." Director of NOD, John Sweeney. Vero called right after taking off. They patched him to me "

And meeting off-site was standard operating procedure. Samples of most of the world's deadliest pathogens were housed in the CDC's labs. A candy store for terrorists. Prudence demanded knowing who wanted in and why. It was a policy that rankled CDC scientists who had invited their peers and the public relations staff who thought every taxpayer and his kids deserved access. But nobody wanted nuts roaming the halls. And Vero sounded certifiable.

"You going in wired?" Julia had special training in surveillance technology. These days, everything was recorded.

'"Course," he answered. "And bring the SATD. Molland wants this guy tagged, in case he bolts and there's something to his claims "

Edward Molland was the director of Domestic Operations, their boss.

"Give me forty-five minutes."

"How's your mom?" His voice took on a gentle tone. "Good days, lately. She watches too much TV." "And you don't?"

"Only Lost these days, Goody. You saw me at my worst." Before her mother had gotten sick and come to live with her, Julia had spent a few months in the Donnelley's guest bedroom. She'd just broken up with a guy and hadn't felt like socializing, so she'd spent her evenings soaking up sitcoms and docudramas. She'd gained five pounds too. Long gone now

Worst. Best. What are friends for? See you in thirty."

"Forty-five," she said, but he'd already hung up. On the way out she had listened outside her mother's bedroom, then knocked softly and cracked the door. Mae Matheson was sitting on the edge of the bed, reading the label of a pill bottle

"You all right?"

She looked up, startled. "Oh, I didn't hear you. What are you doing up so early?"

"Case came up. I'm heading out. You going to be all right?" Mae smiled, and Julia felt a familiar dull ache in her chest. Her mother was too young to be like this. Fifty-three. Multiple sclerosis made her more like eighty-three.

She'd been diagnosed six years ago. Julia's father had decided he didn't want to spend the rest of his life taking care of an invalid, and he'd taken off. Two years ago, her mother had moved in with her. Some days she couldn't get out of bed, couldn't eat. If Julia could not stay home—more often than not—she called in a nurse or an assisted-living worker. It looked as though today she could get by on her own, already sitting up, doing things.

"Couldn't sleep," Mae replied. "What else is new? I'll be fine. Have a good day, sweetie."

Julia had held the door open a moment longer. One of these days, she'd have to stay home with her on a good day, just to do it, just for fun. She'd thought the same thing every day for two years. She smiled a good-bye and shut the door.

At their offices on the CDC compound, she had rigged her equipment and strategized with Goody and Molland. By five minutes to nine, she was sitting in her car across from the marble-and-gold Excelsior Hotel, listening.

"No sign of him yet," Goody said from inside the hotel's restaurant. He had reconnoitered the lobby, offices, and kitchen before taking a seat.

Julia heard a waitress ask him what he wanted, heard him order a large OJ.

"Oh no!" he said, panicky. Her body tensed. "What?"

"These prices are ridiculous. Becky in accounting's going to have a stroke."

"Funny." She eyed the laptop computer in the passenger seat. Its monitor displayed a map of the area surrounding the hotel. A glowing red dot marked Goody's location inside the building

A cable ran from the computer to a box the size of a hardback book on the floor. Another cable connected the box to a device that looked like a mobile phone antenna with a flanged tip, which was suction-cupped to the outside of the passenger window. The box and antenna, along with custom software on the laptop's hard drive made up a unit called the Satellite-Assisted Tracking Device, or SATD Developed by a defense contractor under the joint supervision of the FBI and the CIA, it allowed agents to locate a transmitter the size of a fingernail to within several feet from halfway around the world.

"Here we go," Goody said under his breath. Another voice, breathy and raw: "Sweeney? Are you Sweeney?" Goody: "Are you all right? You don't look so good." The other voice: "Don't worry about it."

"Hold on. I am worried about it. Waitress, some water, please! Let me take you to the hospital. We can talk there."

"Look, I want to go to your office. Why did we have to meet—?" The transmitter conveyed the piercing sound of smashing glass Down! Down!" It was Goody. A volley of booming explosions followed—shotgun blasts, judging by their deep resonance. Six pistol shots rang out in quick succession: Goody's return fire

Julia simultaneously unbuckled her seat belt and opened the door She was about to leap out when she heard Goody address her: "Julia! Pull up—." More gunfire. "Pull up out front. I got Vero. We're coming out."

She started the car, cranked the wheel, and jammed her foot on the accelerator. Her half-opened door swung out, smashed into the corner of the car parked in front of her, and slammed shut. A car screeched to a halt inches from he, Her car vaulted across three lanes of downtown traffic toward the hotel's canopied entrance

"Get down! Get down! Everybody down!" Goody shouted through the wireless microphone.

Two shotgun blasts, close together—too close to have come from a single weapon.

Just as Julia's car bounded onto the sidewalk directly in front of the hotel doors, valets and pedestrians leaping aside, she heard Goody.

"Can't get there, Julia! Get out of here! We're heading for my car in the parking garage. You go! Go!"

She cranked the wheel left to shoot back into the street. She drove two blocks, turned two corners, and pulled to the curb. She was facing the hotel again on the street that ran past the rear entrance—and the parking garage exit. The wireless conveyed mostly static now. Then: "—Julia? .. . hear me? I'm on . . . McGill . . . west. . . right on my tail!"

McGill! She was on the same street. He was driving away from her. She made a squealing U-turn.

"Listen to me," Goody said. The reception was clearer now. "I recognized one of the shooters. James something. Satratori—something like that. Almost busted him a few years back. Serpico for DEA at the time, as far as I could figure. They got him out of my custody faster than—sit down!"

He berated Vero for getting in his way.

Julia bit her lip. Serpico meant he was a deep-undercover agent.

"Don't call in backup," Goody continued. "Not till we figure out why a fed's on the hit team. Got it?"

There was silence and the rustling of Goody's shirt over the microphone. He was probably maneuvering through traffic. She could hear Vero rambling in the background.

"As soon as I lose these guys, we'll meet and decide on a plan," Goody said. "But for now, it's just us, okay?" More silence, then: "Gettin' on the highway. Hear me? I-75 north."

That was only minutes ago, twenty at most. Now, as she barreled down I-75 somewhere behind Goody, only static filled her ear. Goody's frantic movements must have dislodged the transmitter's wires, or he had finally traveled out of range. She plucked out the ear-phone and glanced at the laptop. The glowing red dot indicated that her partner was about two miles ahead. Her foot muscles flexed harder against the accelerator.

Julia realized with sudden terror that the knot of cars in front of her was stopped. She slammed on the brakes. As the smell of burnt rubber washed over her, she saw the glass and bits of plastic that littered the roadway. Paint the color of Goody's car clung in long streaks to the crushed guardrail. On the SATD display, the red dot was moving away fast. She laid on the horn. From the car in front of her, a hand with an upraised finger shot out of the driver's window.

"Suit yourself," she said and stepped on the gas.

four

The man in the pilot's seat of the Cessna CJ2 was obsessed with serving his clients well. He believed in quick responses and promptness, so much so that he hadn't given a second thought to purchasing the jet, or the one before it or the one before that. He believed in confidentiality, so he piloted the plane himself, and he had no staff, just a series of electronic telephone relays that ultimately dumped inquiries into a voice mailbox in Amsterdam. He didn't buy the currently voguish axiom "Underpromise/overdeliver." He listened to his clients' needs; they agreed to an action plan and when that plan would be completed; and he carried it out on time. Enough said.

Take his last job. The client had been a stockbroker, entangled in an SEC investigation. His defense's weak link had been his assistant, whom he'd foolishly allowed to know more than he should have. The pilot had visited the assistant's apartment and shot the man twice in the head. Problem solved. As usual, he had charged a staggering sum for his services, but the fee had barely made a dent in the broker's annual bonus. And now the broker would be cashing next year's bonus check as well, instead of cleaning toilets at Danbury. He had made a wise investment.

One client had said he'd heard the assassin was the best in his field. He didn't know about that. He didn't care. He did his job. Period.

That's not to say he was dispassionate about it. He loved his job, which allowed him to do it without comparing his performance to others'. He loved the economics of death: hastening a person's passage into the afterlife not only provided him with a good living; it gave work to coroners, beat cops, detectives, crime scene technicians, the people who made fingerprint powder and luminol and other sundry chemicals and devices—not to mention firearm, ammunition, coffin, and tissue manufacturers—obituary writers, crime reporters, novelists. He'd spent an evening once enumerating the occupations that owed their existence, either wholly or in part, to murder—seventy-eight—and the economic impact of homicide—more than $23 billion, trumping the recording, motion picture, and video game industries.

He loved that he was able to remedy a critical life problem as quickly and easily as a plumber unclogs a drain or a mechanic tunes an engine. Who else could make that claim? Not attorneys, accountants, or doctors. Not homebuilders, psychiatrists, or priests. He'd considered hanging around after a kill to covertly watch his client happily get on with his life, to derive that extra pleasure of witnessing the benefits of his service to them. But that would be unprofessional and unwise.

He held a glass of club soda and lime in his hand and watched the autopilot gently maneuver the control stick. The sky outside was bright and blue and clear. He closed his eyes.

Another thing he loved: being part of a mysterious and fearful force of nature. The ways people personified death fascinated him— the stereotypic hooded, faceless Reaper, harvesting souls with the snap of a gleaming scythe; Hemingway's stealthy beast that consumed the ill-fated adventurer in the shadow of Kilimanjaro; the beautiful woman, whose kiss bore eternal consequences, in the movie All That Jazz. He felt them all dwelling within.

Even his name, the only name he had ever known, fit the lexicon of death. Atropos. The ancient Greeks depicted Fate as three stern old sisters, goddesses though they were. Clotho, the Spinner, spun the thread of life; Lachesis, the Dispenser of Lots, decided the thread's span and assigned to each person his or her destiny; and Atropos, the Inexorable, carried the dreaded shears that cut the thread of life at the proper time, which was often determined by her whim. This third sister's role was his. He gladly accepted the mantle and the name.

Death was a release from this world's problems. He had seen serenity in his victims' eyes as they focused on something invisible to the living. In his experience, all humans lived in a constant state of terror; but in death, peace engulfed them. No more fear, no more worries. Just peace. That was his gift to them.

Blessed are the peacemakers. He liked the idea of being blessed. A drop of moisture slid down the glass and pooled on his finger. Then another and another. A single bead of cold condensation trickled over his knuckles.

His eyes flicked open.

He'd almost drifted off. He took a sip from the glass and placed it in a cup holder, then he rolled sideways out of the pilot's seat and stood, staying low to slip out of the cockpit. Even in the cabin, he walked stooped over. His six-foot-four frame was ill-suited for the cabin's five-foot height. For the thousandth time, he yearned for a Gulfstream G500. But as pricey as the Cessna was, the Gulfstream cost ten times more. He couldn't justify the expenditure. Not yet.

The Cessna's cabin had been converted to accommodate a galley, a plush chair that folded flat for sleeping, video and stereo equipment, a hanging martial arts heavy bag, and a workout bench with fastened down weights. In the back wall, a door serviced a room with a shower, sink, and commode. For better or worse, this was home, as much as anywhere.

He bent lower to peer into a mirror. His thick black hair was cut short, but not short enough to keep it from standing up on one side and spiking on the other. He ran his fingers back through it, which failed to alter the design. He had green eyes behind thick-framed glasses that made him look like either a geek—despite his muscular build—or a trendy filmmaker. A strong, straight nose, square jaw, and—when he smiled—deep dimples that made charming the ladies relatively easy—a skill he often tapped to keep a store clerk from chasing him off as he staked out a nearby target or to get a waitress to divulge her knowledge of a target. He shaved twice a day, but still his stubble was heavy, accentuating a long hairline furrow on his left cheek where nothing grew.

Acquiring that scar had taught him to appreciate the speed at which a human could produce and use a previously undetected weapon. Prior to that incident, he had killed exclusively by hand. Well, technically, by gauntlet, a weapon he'd had custom-made. It allowed him to be near his targets when he released them from life's burdens, to feel the physicality of the release. But his own release wasn't part of the deal, so he'd also taken to using a pistol when he thought it would be prudent. Life was about adjusting, fine-tuning, and being forced to amend his killing style to include both gauntlet and gun was so perfect, it felt to him like divine guidance.

He picked up the television remote and pushed a button. Two forty-two-inch plasma screens—one at each end of the cabin—sprang to life, showing blue screens and the words locking in satellite reception. Then an image appeared, a woman slapping a man . . . The image changed to a kid eating cereal . . . and changed again to a black-and-white western—Shane, the assassin thought—then it changed again . . . and again . . .

The channel-changing button had been permanently depressed with a toothpick. It was the way the assassin liked it. Frenetic and active, never still. Flip, flip, flip . . .

". . . never thought I'd see anything like . . ."

". . . act now and we'll throw in these . . ."

[the low grieving sound of a violin]

". . . what was it like playing an animal. . ."

[engines revving, tires screeching]

[static]

". . . because I know you did it. I know . . ."

Yeah. He felt his synapses picking up speed, trying to catch up with the information cycling past. Before long, he'd be able to start and finish the sentences whose fragments each channel spat out with blinding speed. The chances of his guesses being the actual sentences were slim, but they made sense, and that alone meant his mind was clicking, and clicking fast.

A beep sounded from the cockpit. He returned to the pilot's seat and checked the laptop strapped into the copilot's seat. His new client had fed updated coordinates into the mapping software he had provided upon retaining Atropos's services. The target was on the move. The man's current trajectory warranted a change in destination airports. He found the new airport coordinates in a GPS unit and punched them into the autopilot. The cockpit brightened as the plane banked toward the sun.

five

"We have a lock on the SATD signal."

The man who spoke did not take his eyes off the three flat-panel displays arranged before him. One showed a twenty-five-square-mile section of Atlanta, with a thick vein running diagonally through it. Small letters next to the vein identified it as I-75. A red dot moved steadily northwest along the highway.

An old man in a wheelchair turned from surveying the bucolic landscape beyond a wall of windows. The chair buzzed across an expanse of hardwood floor and edged up next to the technician.

"Can we seize the signal completely?" the old man asked.

"You mean cut the CDC agent out of the loop, so only we have it?"

"Exactly."

"Yes, sir."

"Will anybody—the FBI, CIA, CDC, anybody—be able to intercept it once we take it?"

"No, sir. Nobody."

"Will they be able to trace it back to us?"

"We are completely cloaked, sir."

"Will this CDC woman be able to reconnect or disrupt our use of it?"

"If she tries, the program itself will block her out. She'll just keep getting error messages on her computer."

"Then do it."

The technician typed a command and hit ENTER. The image flicked once. "Done."

Wheeling away, the old man said, "Now tell our men to back off."

He shook his head. You always tried to hire professionals for jobs like this, but with freelancers you never knew what you'd get: someone calm and competent or a complete nut job. These two had come highly recommended, and look: They didn't seem to care who they blew away in their quest to capture the target. They'd destroyed a restaurant and were now engaged in a high-speed gun battle with a federal agent. Not exactly the discretion he'd hoped for.

"Keep them close, but not too close," he instructed. "Let's give 'em a chance to calm down."

Julia's Taurus rammed into the space between the concrete median and the car ahead. The force knocked the other car only partially out of the way; its bumper screeched along the entire length of the sedan. Then her car popped free, and Julia roared toward her partner.

The SATD showed her partner at least five miles ahead of Tier now, the assailants all over him, no doubt.

Hang in there, Goody. I'm coming.

As she watched, the red dot sputtered and blinked out. Then the map switched off, leaving only faint gridlines. She slammed on the brakes and stopped in the center lane of the momentarily empty highway. She stared at the screen, dumbfounded.

Her hands flashed to the keyboard. She punched in command after command. Nothing. She checked the connections at the antenna, at the box on the floor, at the back of the computer. The screen remained blank.

She snatched the radio mike and keyed the talk button. "Goody! What's happened? Goody!"

She grabbed the wire connected to the receiver for Goody's body mike and slid her hand up to the earplug. She jammed it into her ear. Static. She ripped it out again.

With a last futile look at the computer monitor, she hit the accelerator and plunged ahead, blind.

Donnelley was about to take another shot at the Maxima when it swerved out of sight behind him.

Vero yelled out in surprise and pointed. "Look!"

In the rearview Donnelley saw the Maxima fly off the shoulder and down an embankment, kicking up a cloud of dust.

"You beat 'em!" Vero laughed, almost giddy.

Donnelley wasn't so sure, but he set his gun on the seat. He felt as though he'd been kicked hard in the side. He touched the pain, and his hand came back drenched in blood.

Vero stared. He gripped Donnelley's shoulder. "I should drive."

Donnelley eyed him. "I don't think so."

Vero himself looked terrible: oily sweat glistened on his face and arms and plastered his curly brown hair to his skull. His lips, cracked and bleeding, quivered constantly. His eyes bulged, held in place, it seemed, by the red vessels fanning out from each corner. Blood was crusted around the opening of his ear.

Registering Donnelley's quick assessment, he said, "I'm not as bad as I look. Not yet. Pull over."

"No. Sit back" Flicking his attention between the road ahead and the rearview mirrors, Donnelley clutched the wheel with his bloody fist. His face hardened with purpose.

six

She'd lost them. Goody and Vero had simply vanished.

Julia had long ago passed the place they had been when the SATD malfunctioned. Surely they could not have continued their fierce battle with the assailants this long. One of them would have triumphed, the other beaten too hard to carry on. Yet she had not come across wreckage—of car or man—other than a periodic scattering of glass, plastic, and paint.

Three state patrol cruisers, cherry-tops blazing, had sailed by in the other direction miles ago, suggesting that the troopers had not spotted two feuding vehicles up ahead. They apparently thought the trouble lay in the stalled and battered traffic behind her. It wouldn't be long before they realized their error and started combing ahead for the culprits. She had to find Goody before they did.

She swept the hair back from her forehead and realized that tension was contracting every muscle in her body: her abs burned, her forearms bulged in crisp definition from gripping the wheel so tightly, even her face ached. She inhaled deeply through her nose, then let the air escape slowly through her mouth.

She had known Goody for six years, ever since her assignment to the FBI's Denver field office. He'd been an office hotshot with a reputation for cracking the toughest cases and collaring the most elusive criminals. Twenty-five years old and fresh from the Academy, she was consigned to grunt work and rarely had occasion to watch the great Goodwin Donnelley in action.

For eight months the Denver SAC had her handling background investigations of people applying for sensitive government jobs. This was a choice assignment in DC, where the subject might be a potential Superior Court judge or congressional aide. But in Denver it amounted to drudgery, especially for an eager young agent with a master's degree in criminology.

Whenever she could, she'd quietly sit in on Goody's case meetings, just to watch him work and learn the investigative ropes, if only vicariously. At first she was merely a curiosity, a pretty woman with a thing for criminal investigators.

But her attraction to him had nothing to do with the man's physical appearance. She conceded that his trim frame, chiseled features, and Caribbean-blue eyes were a handsome combination, but she believed his greatest asset was his ability to capture criminals.

After all, physical characteristics were simply handed to you: luck of the draw. She knew that people found her attractive. But what she admired—and wanted people to admire in her—were accomplishments, strength of character, applied logic. Things for which a person had to work.

Goody was a good investigator because he wanted to be, he tried to be. That's what she found alluring.

One day an argument had flared up between Goody and Special Agent Lou Preston, a surveillance expert, over the reason several wireless transmitters kept malfunctioning. Preston had placed the bugging devices under the tables in the visiting room of the Quincy State Correctional Facility to monitor conversations between a hood named Jimmy Gee, imprisoned there, and his brother-in-law, Mike Simon. The Bureau suspected Gee of negotiating with Simon to kill a young woman who had witnessed Gee murder a rival.

But during Simon's visits, white noise—in the form of continuous static, sudden loud pops, and high-pitched whistles—interrupted the reception for five or more minutes at a time.

The snatches of conversations that were clear had led Goody to believe he had one last chance to get the scheme recorded. White noise at the wrong moment would blow attempted-murder charges against the two and could cost the young woman her life.

"You're telling me there's nothing you can do?" complained Goody. He stood at the front of a small conference room. Someone had taped color pictures of the suspects on a dry-erase board. Beside them was a portrait of the intended victim, a blonde in her twenties with girl-next-door freckles and a radiant smile. A diagram of the visiting room leaned against a tripod. Humming fluorescents bathed the room in a bluish-white glow.

Preston's anger strained his voice and got him out of his seat. "You know electronic surveillance is prone to all kinds of problems—background noise, weak signals, even electromagnetic interference from the sun, for crying out loud! We're lucky we got what we did."

Other agents around the long table appeared to shrink in their chairs. Julia watched in fascination from the back of the room.

"So this girl's gonna die because of solar flares?" Goody asked, pointing at the portrait.

"I'm not saying that's what's causing the white noise. But we've considered everything." Preston began counting on his fingers. "Are we too close to the kitchen? No. The laundry? The wood shop? The metal shop? No, no, no. Could one of the guards have a device to intentionally disrupt our reception? We've changed guards. Could Gee or Simon be carrying something? Our searches came up with zip. We've replaced the bugs and the receivers and the tape machines. What more do you want?"

"I want to get an entire conversation recorded for once."

Preston threw up his arms and turned his back on Goody.

Julia stared at the diagram on the tripod. Before realizing it, she had raised her arm.

Goody gawked at her faintly waving hand, as rare in these meetings as albino bats from Mars. "Julia, what is it?"

She cleared her throat. "Excuse me, sir, but what's in the corner there?" She pointed toward the diagram. "There, where the row of tables stops? There's room for another table, but it's not on the diagram."

"Maybe they ran out of tables!" Preston blurted, obviously annoyed.

"No," said Goody. "It's a Coke machine."

Julia stood, counting on her firm posture to belie her shaky confidence. She focused on Goody's interested face, knowing that a glance at the other agents in the room would be as ruinous to her composure as a novice mountain climber's look down.

"Pop machines are not the problem," Preston said sharply. "We've planted bugs in them before."

Goody waved him off. "Julia, what's your point?"

"If the electrical contacts—the brushes—in the Coke machine's compressor motor are worn, they would spark more than usual. Electrical sparks produce broadband radio signals—white noise. Such broadband interference covers most of the usable RF spectrum, which is why replacing the bugs and receivers didn't work."

Goody's smile broadened. He looked at Preston, who just glared.

"Like a household refrigerator," she continued, walking to the front of the room. "The motor kicks on only when the temperature inside rises above a preset point. That's why the interference is sporadic. And look . . ." She tapped a spot on the diagram. "We're monitoring from this room on the other side of the wall from the Coke machine. Some motors spit out more sparks than others, even when they're working fine. The brand that goes in this machine may be that kind. I'd bet even replacing the motor won't entirely fix the problem, considering its proximity to the receiver."

She stopped, realizing she may have overstepped her bounds. She had said we, though she was not part of this investigation. Worse, she had flaunted her textbook understanding of electronics in front of Preston, who would find this humiliation hard to live down.

She lowered her head and said quietly, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be ridiculous," Donnelley said. He grasped her shoulder and gave it a brief shake. "There's nothing to be sorry about. It's about time we reaped the benefit of your presence." He winked.

Julia was sure only she saw it.

"Preston! What do you think of Agent Matheson's analysis?"

"Might work. We'll unplug the thing and see."

He turned back to her, satisfied. "Thank you, Julia. Feel free to interrupt anytime."

She smiled and nodded. She left the room and walked back to her cubicle. Her mouth was dry. Despite the positive outcome, she feared that the way she had imposed herself on the tight group of men would label her overeager and unprofessional.

A half hour later, Goody leaned into her cubicle. "Good job, kid," he said. "I mean it."

"Thank you, sir. I'm sorry I stepped on Agent Preston's toes like that."

"Preston needs more than his toes stepped on. Don't worry about it. He knows you're right. We all do."

"Sir? I wouldn't unplug the Coke machine."

"Oh?"

"Might tip 'em off. If it doesn't dispense pop, or the display lights are out, Gee and Simon might talk about everything but what you want them to."

"What do you suggest?"

She squared herself in her chair. "Well, clip only the compressor's wire. Do it early, or if you can't be sure when Simon will show, run the wire through the wall and disengage it only when he shows up, so the drinks will still be cold."

Goody paused. "Good idea—again." As he walked away, he called back to her, "Keep it up, and I'll think you're after my job."

I am, she thought.

Turned out she was right; the Bureau captured Gee's evil scheme on tape, helping to send him to prison for life, and Simon for five years. The incident started the department grapevine buzzing, and among other congratulations, Goody insisted on putting a letter of commendation into her personnel jacket. Julia soon found herself working alongside him, designing complicated surveillance strategies and brainstorming with other crack agents about the best way to nail felons.

It was the beginning of a deep friendship. Though only fourteen years her senior, Goody treated her like a daughter, advising her on career decisions and trying to set her up with the few men he felt were worthy of her attention. By the time she spent that first Christmas with him and his wife and two boys, the feeling of family had permeated their relationship. And when he was transferred to CDC-LED, he pulled enough strings to bring her along.

seven

Now Goody was out there on his own, a carload of killers probably bearing down on him at that very moment.

The farther Julia moved away from the last place the SATD had detected him, the more panicked she became. That spot was at least twenty miles behind her now. The two center lanes of the urban, six-lane highway had given way to a wide grassy median, and the speed limit had jumped to seventy.

Atlanta was gone, and so was her partner.

She continued her breathing exercises, but the tension wouldn't leave her. Use it, she thought. Turn the stress into sharper focus. What happened? What went wrong?

She chided herself for losing him. She never should have left the hotel, despite Goody's instructions. He hadn't been thinking clearly, all those guns, trying to protect Vero. And when she left the area, she should have remained closer; two blocks was too far.

Was she to blame for the SATD's malfunction? Once it was running, the program required nothing from the user but watchful eyes. Trouble with the host satellite was a slim possibility; geosynchronous satellites were famously reliable, which accounted for their proliferation.

In one of the SATD's more innovative constructs, the locator signal was routed through a commercial satellite. Commercial communication satellites tended to be more robust, making them less susceptible to adverse weather. More important, hiding the SATD's signal in a random, nongovernment satellite kept savvy criminals from blocking or scrambling it. Not even the operators of the host satellite were supposed to know the SATD was hitching a ride.

She thought now that they might have uncovered her covert intrusion, but the program was designed to maintain surveillance even while feeding false data to the operators who had stumbled onto it. To them, the SATD program would look like a minor system corruption. While they tried untangling the glitch, the covert user had ample time to switch host satellites. At that time, the "glitch" would vanish, without so much as a trace of the program's trespass.

In this case, the signal had blinked out without warning. When she had tried to shift host satellites, she could have been pounding on a dead keyboard for all the good it did.

Now that she thought about it, even the way it malfunctioned seemed odd. Most crashes resulted in the screen simply locking up; blinking cursors stopped blinking and keyboard commands yielded no computer activity at all, but the image always remained frozen on the screen. With this malfunction, first Goody's signal had blinked out, then the map had disappeared—

Almost as if someone had stolen it, one component at a time.

Julia cranked the wheel right and braked to a stop. She punched the gear lever into park and unsnapped her seat belt. Her hands flew to the laptop's keyboard. She used a special key code designed to override system failures to restart it, then waited for the operating system to load.

She tapped a staccato rhythm on the laptop's case as cold moisture seeped from her pores. The feeling that something hellish and huge had descended upon them threatened to cloud out all rational thought.

As if someone had stolen it. . .

Let me be wrong. Let me be wrong.

A few seconds later, the program came online. She instructed it to uplink to the same host satellite. The screen flashed the words MAKING CONNECTION . . .

Then CONNECTING TO: SATCOM6 455HR21911.89 v.62. *2

After a brief pause, as the laptop's hard drive whirled, the words on the screen changed to:

CATALOG B-TREE ERROR

RESOURCE FORK, BLOCK 672 (NODE 792, RECORD 4)

> ?

Julia moaned. The satellite was interpreting her current attempt to connect as unauthorized probing, so it was sending a false error message back to her to make her think the old program was nothing more than a system problem. This red herring would fool a good 99 percent of the world's satellite operators.

Julia knew better.

She bit her lip. The top secret program was to reside in the host satellite only as long as it received microbursts of passwords from the base computer every six seconds. That kept it from remaining in the satellite in the event the base computer failed before its user could instruct the program to withdraw. But her laptop—the program's base computer—had failed. And she had restarted it, which would have kept even a functioning system from feeding passwords to the program for more than a minute.

The old program should not have been running.

But it was.

And that meant only one thing: someone else was feeding it the correct passwords.

She snatched up the radio microphone and keyed the talk switch. "Goody! Goody! If you can hear me, listen." She enunciated her words carefully. "Turn . . . off . . . the . . . tracking . . . transmitter. Someone else is receiving the signal. Someone else is tracking you. Turn off the transmitter."

She tossed the microphone down. What else could she do? She could not defeat the program—not with the limited software utilities her hard drive contained, probably not with all the utilities in the world. Its programmers had anticipated that criminals would continue to increase their technical sophistication. They had made it nearly impossible to disable.

The best she could do for Goody now was to find him—fast.

eight

Blood flowed from him like sap from a broken pine, and dehydration parched his throat. His hands were sticking to the steering wheel. Donnelley focused on the road and tried not to think of his damaged body.

He was tilting forward and sideways now, keeping the wound away from the seat back. The hole in his flesh, piercing him with icy-hot ripples of pain, was just under his rib cage, between side and back. He looked at Vero. Dark skin. Black hair. Coarse features. Mexican or Brazilian, he guessed. The one thing he was sure about: the man was dog-sick.

"What's wrong with you?" he asked.

Vero's lips bent up on one side of his face. A new fissure opened in his bottom lip. "My employer fired me."

"Fired?"

"Instead of a pink slip, he gave me a virus. Not so strange. Gangsters shoot each other. Makes sense biologists infect each other, no?"

"You're a biologist?"

"Virologist, really."

Donnelley thought about it, leaning more than he knew he should against the steering wheel. "So, what, like the flu?"

Vero laughed or coughed, he couldn't tell. "If only it was tame like that."

He glanced over. "Are you dying?"

"Oh yes, yes." He read Donnelley's expression. "It's not contagious."

"You sure? My throat's a little sore. . . Maybe it's just the dehydration."

"No, it's this. You got a cold, friend." "But I thought you said—"

"What I have is no cold."

"But I caught a cold from you? You're not making any sense." He waited for a response, but Vero just turned his head to stare out the glassless side window. After a minute, he started fiddling with his Windbreaker. Donnelley thought the zipper was stuck, then he heard the material rip. When he looked, Vero was removing something that had been sewn into the lining. He held it up, a black sliver of plastic the size of a postage stamp.

"This will explain," he said. "I made it for the CDC."

Donnelley squinted at it and held out his hand. When Vero hesitated, he said, "If that's what got us both killed, you gotta let me hold it, man."

Vero placed it in Donnelley's palm.

"Is this a camera memory chip?"

"Like it, but much higher density."

Donnelley closed his fingers over it. "You want this to get in the right hands, you gotta let me have it."

Their eyes locked.

"I'll take care of it."

Vero nodded.

Donnelley dropped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. "But if I find out the only thing on it are pictures of your family reunion," he said, "I'll come after you."

Vero smiled weakly and turned away.

Donnelley glanced at the police-band radio. It dangled from its bracket under the dash, torn open and gutted. Looks like I feel, he thought.

They'd been driving a long time when Donnelley saw the sign that marked the Georgia-Tennessee border. Given the tenacity of their assailants, he half expected another attack: a fiery ambush or even sudden death from a military-type strike—an Apache attack helicopter or a LAW rocket, maybe. He wouldn't put anything past them after the barrage they'd just let loose on him and Vero.

Time to pull over and let Julia catch up. If he didn't get to a hospital soon, his life would simply drain out of him. But the prospect of letting his guard down on an operating table without someone he trusted standing over him was more nauseating than the lack of blood. Besides, if he was going to die for something, he wanted to make sure it got into the hands of the good guys—whoever they were.

Where I-75 branched east, Donnelley went west, onto I-24 and into the heart of Chattanooga. Green hills rose around them, and a humid, musky aroma of honeysuckle filled the car. For the first time in over an hour, he smelled something other than his own blood. He glided into an exit lane and found himself on Belvoir Avenue. Turning east on busy Brainerd Road, he spotted a good place to stop and cranked the wheel into a nearly deserted parking lot. He edged the war-torn sedan into an alley behind a brick building and killed the engine.

He stretched slowly, carefully, testing for aches and discovering which movements caused spears of pain from the wound. He found renewed strength, slightly, in having something to do. He shouldered the door open, the twisted metal popping and screeching. As he stood on shaky legs, he examined the rear of the building: lined with back doors, as he expected. He hoped the one he wanted was unlocked so they could slip in without being exposed to the main street. "Let's go."

"Go where?"

"A bar, my man. A dark, inconspicuous, everybody-minds-his-own-business bar. Last one in buys."

nine

The car was too close to the building for Despesorio Vero to open his own door, so he brushed away pellets of glass and clambered out the driver's side, staying high to avoid the crimson-drenched seat. Lots of blood, smelling like raw meat.

He got out of the car in time to see Donnelley disappear into the building. When Vero followed, he entered an office-cum-storage room. Boxes marked pretzels, Margarita mix, and napkins formed makeshift half-walls between steel shelves, file cabinets, and a desk barely visible under a heap of papers and magazines. Donnelley was apologizing to a man in a filthy smock and pushing through another door with a porthole window.

Vero caught the door swinging shut and saw another door closing on his right. A dingy emblem on the door depicted the silhouette of a little boy peeing into a pot. The rest of the bar was equally drab and tasteless. Dim bulbs behind red-tasseled lamp shades barely illuminated each of a dozen maroon vinyl booths, which marched along one wall toward the murky front windows. Chipped Formica tables anchored the booths in place. Opposite the row of booths was a long, scarred wooden bar with uncomfortable-looking stools. Behind the bar, sitting on glass shelves in front of a cloudy mirror, were endless rows of bottles, each looking as forlorn as the folks for whom they waited.

He caught the strong odors of liquor and tobacco smoke, and the weaker scents of cleaning chemicals and vomit. In one of the booths, two heads bobbed with the movement of mug-clenching fists. A scrawny bartender with droopy eyelids picked his teeth with a swizzle stick and chatted quietly with a woman seated at the bar. Otherwise, the place was empty.

Vero walked into the bathroom. Donnelley was lifting his shirt away from the torn flesh in his side. He was cranked around, trying to assess the damage in the muck-spotted mirror. To Vero, he looked like an expressionist painting in which all the objects were the same color of too-vivid red: the shirt, the hands holding the shirt, the belt passing through pant loops. At the center of it all was the thing that corrupted its surroundings with its own gruesome color—a wound. The cut was crescent-shaped, its edges smooth. The flesh around it swelled before tucking into a finger-sized hole. While Vero watched, blood gushed out, flowed to the lip of the pants, and pooled for a moment before seeping in and dripping down.

"Oh," Donnelley groaned. "This is a bad one."

He pushed his index finger into the wound up to the first knuckle and growled through gritted teeth. When he pulled his finger out, it made a wet, popping noise. He fell to one knee, threw his head back, and sucked in air. Vero could hear the man's teeth grinding. Above the crimson mess, Donnelley's face was white as bleached bones.

He gripped the sink to pull himself up. Vero helped him. Donnelley turned on the water, doused his hand, then studied it. His thumb flicked at something on the tip of the finger he'd used to probe the wound. A long and deep cut. Blood welled up within its borders, then spilled out.

"That wasn't there a minute ago," Donnelley said.

Vero leaned closer. "Something's inside you? Something that slices like that?"

"Reckon so. Get me some TP."

Vero didn't understand but followed Donnelley's pointing finger to the tissue roll by the exposed toilet. He unraveled a wad. He leaned in to apply it to the wound.

"No," Donnelley said, stopping him. "Give it to me."

He stuck the wad in his mouth and bit down. He reached back with his left hand and jabbed the tips of his index finger and thumb into the hole, wiggling them to make room. He groaned, coughed, fell to his knees. His probing fingers wiggled farther in.

Vero held Donnelley's shoulders and stared in disbelief.

Donnelley yanked his hand back, holding something solid. He spit out the wad of tissue. His panting echoed against the walls of the small room. Perspiration coated his face in fat, runny droplets. Vero gently pressed another wad of tissue against the wound; in seconds, he was holding a blood-soaked clump. He tossed it into the trash and spun off another handful.

With groaning effort Donnelley stood, one arm propped against the sink, eyes closed, his head hanging down. Sweat dripped off the tip of his nose and strands of hair. The rhythm of his heaving chest gradually slowed. He raised his face and stared into the mirror. He looked down at the object in his palm.

Vero tried to identify it, but a pool of gore obscured its shape. "A piece of the car door?"

Donnelley shook his head. He stuck the object under the flow of water. Pink bubbles churned in the basin and vanished. He turned off the water, shoved a clump of tissue into the drain, and dropped the object into the sink. It made a metal clink! then rattled thinly before sliding to a stop against the tissue.

It was black steel, the size of a dime. From its outside edge, three grooves spiraled slightly inward, forming three sharp teeth. A small hole pierced its center.

"What is that?" Vero asked.

"A flechette," Donnelley said matter-of-factly, his voice raspy. He spoke through clenched teeth. "I've read about 'em. Soldiers used something like it for trench warfare."

"Those killers had these in their guns?" Vero was more angry than astonished.

"Probably—" Donnelley's breath hitched, his face contracted in pain.

The man's ability to behave in an almost normal fashion despite the gaping wound in his side was astonishing.

"Probably had a dozen or so packed into each shotgun shell. They'd tear a man to shreds. The car door slowed this one down before it hit me." He rolled his head in a circle, took a deep breath. "At the Academy," he said, "the first thing you learn about a penetrating injury is 'leave it alone.' Arrow, knife, bullet—don't try to take it out; leave it for the docs, who can clamp the artery that gets severed when it's removed, or take care of whatever complications arise." He shook his head. "I couldn't wait. That thing was tearing me up inside."

The two stared at the black disk in the sink as if it were a new species of poisonous insect.

"Tore you up bad."

"Tore me up good. Could have been worse, I guess. Let me have your jacket."

He put the disk in an outside pocket of Vero's jacket and slipped into it. It covered most of the bloodstain on his pants. He pushed his own bloody jacket into the wastepaper basket and tossed handfuls of tissue over it. The effort obviously pained him, but he held strong. He then reached up under his shirt and yanked something out. Donnelley examined a small box with a wire that abruptly ended. He reached under his shirt again and removed a steel disk with a short wire tail.

"The body mike broke," Donnelley said, seemingly to himself. "I thought I felt it ripping loose. Piece of garbage." He pushed it into a jacket pocket. To Vero he said, "Let's sit down and wait for my partner. I really need a drink."

Julia Matheson's heart pounded in her breast, a fist wanting out. She had periodically listened for Goody's body mike and called for him on the radio. Her mobile phone lay in her lap, useless. It had rung several times, the word Private popping up on the caller ID screen. She had ignored the calls; Goody would have used the code they had devised. And she wanted to avoid Molland until Goody filled her in on his suspicions. The idea of LED involvement in the hit was ludicrous, but he had been clear about not involving anyone. She wasn't about to violate his confidence now.

She'd driven as far as Chattanooga without seeing another sign of him. She wanted to find solace in that, but it would not come. Just past the junction of I-75 and I-24, she'd turned around. Now she was heading back toward Atlanta, still looking and offering up silent prayers . . .

In a car on a quiet street off Brainerd Road, two men inspected their weapons: the driver with a NeoStead combat shotgun, the passenger with a Mini Uzi.

Mr. Uzi put the weapon in his lap and dropped down his visor. In the mirror, he examined his nose, swollen to twice its normal size and mottled in blue and red and even green—green! A fat gash like a little mouth right on the bridge. He touched it gently and flinched. "I can't wait to blow that dude away!"

The driver said nothing, just rubbed a silicone cloth over the shotgun's twin tubular magazines above the barrel.

The passenger watched him for a moment, then said, "I can't believe I lost my shotgun. I loved that thing." He watched a few more seconds'. "We gotta go back and—"

"Don't even think about it, Launy," the driver said without looking.

"I meant after all this is—"

The driver turned. "Did you hear what I said? It's gone. We're not going back for it." He set the cloth on the seat and pivoted the magazines up at the rear. "Local PD probably got it now, anyway. Get another'n."

Launy slapped up his visor. "I was just saying . . ." He touched the side of his nose again and hissed. "What was that guy doing with a gun anyway? I thought he was CDC."

"He wasn't CDC. FBI."

"That would have been nice to know up front. How do you know?"

"I seen him before."

"Well, ain't that just dandy." Launy yanked a thirty-two-round magazine from the bottom of the Uzi's handgrip, tipped it to see the two topmost rounds, and shoved it back in. He was silent, then he held up the Uzi. "Now this is a fine weapon."

"No. I'm using the shotgun. Now shut up." The driver began dropping heavy shells into the magazine tubes until he'd loaded the NeoStead with twelve rounds.

They did their work in a green, late-model Chrysler, stolen from the outer edge of a mall lot where employees parked. They planned on being long gone before anyone discovered the theft, or the black Maxima—which they had hot-wired in Atlanta—stashed behind a tall clump of bushes.

A satellite phone on the seat chirped. Tethered to the phone was a CopyTele Triple DES cryptography device.

"'Bout time," Launy said.

"Shut up. Nobody wants to hear your whining." He punched five numbers into the keypad on the CopyTel, then answered the phone. He listened, said, "Yeah, got it," and disconnected.

He turned a strip of metal protruding from the ignition switch, and the car roared to life. He eyed his partner. "Now listen. We're getting nice change for this and we don't have to sweat getting busted, not with these guys we're working for. It's a sweet gig. So be happy you got it, okay?" He paused. "You ready?"

Launy smiled like a dog showing its teeth. "Oh yeah."

The Chrysler pulled away from the curb and turned onto Brainerd.

ten

Donnelley looked at his watch. "She should have been here by now."

"You haven't talked to anyone," Vero said. "How will your partner find us?"

Donnelley downed a shot of Jack Daniels and set the glass beside two empty ones on the table in front of him. He had poured one over the hole in his side. It had burned at first but felt better now. He wasn't worried about how the alcohol would affect his ability to out-maneuver his opponents; its dulling effect was less inhibiting than the pain, making him feel even more quick-witted than before the drinks. Besides, it would take a lot more than two shots to counteract the adrenaline coursing through his veins.

He nodded and canted to his right, squeezing a hand into his pants pocket. "My turn to share."

He held up what looked like a fat, black dime. A small slot in its side pointed at a 1 stamped into the black plastic case. Rotating the slot ninety degrees would leave it pointing at the numeral 0. "I was going to attach this to your clothes sometime during our meeting. It would have allowed us to find you if you got cold feet and disappeared."

"I came to you."

"And look what happened. We could have been separated. They could have taken you. Never hurts to have one of these." He held it out to Vero. "Take it."

Vero thought for a moment, then shook his head. "No, it's not me that's important. Not anymore. You have the memory chip. You keep it."

Donnelley turned the transmitter over and peeled away a bit of paper. He retrieved the chip. After pressing the transmitter against it, he returned it to his pocket. The round paper he had pulled from the transmitter sat on the table. He tapped it with his fingernail. "The latest and greatest technology, tracking drug dealers and heads of state, and it all relies on two cents of adhesive."

Vero picked up a shot glass. Surprised to find it empty, he set it mouth-down on the table. "It has always fascinated me," he said, "that bombs get so much effort and attention, but hardly anyone thinks about the most important part, the delivery system. If it can't reach its target, what good is it?" He studied Donnelley's face. "This very issue held up my employer's plans for months."

"Plans for a bomb?"

"A virus."

"What plans, Vero? What does he want to do with this virus?"

"Kill people." He lowered his head, to Donnelley looking very much like a shamed child. "Lots of people, women and children."

"Is he still . . . only planning?" Vero's head moved: no.

"What is it? What's happening?" It dawned on Donnelley. "People," he said. "People make the perfect delivery system for viruses, right? It's you, isn't it?" He covered his mouth and nose. He thought of the time he'd spent with this man, in the car, here, and the ridiculousness of using his hand like a biofiltering mask. Hadn't he learned anything at the CDC? He let it drop back into his lap.

"I told you I'm not contagious," Vero said. He slid the upside-down shot glass in front of him from one hand to the other and back again. Quietly he said, "But I had a lot to do with all this. I worked on the project. I ran field tests, mostly in Africa."

"Africa? Is that where you worked?"

"The lab is far from there, that's the point. You shouldn't play with fire in your own backyard." He smiled thinly. "Plus, there's a lot of apathy about Africa. Westerners like to say that's not true, but it is. Deception is easier when people don't care."

"So why didn't you go to one of the CDC's offices in Africa? Or the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Sweden? It's much closer, and if time is a factor—"

"We only field tested in Africa. I was here . . . to release it. . . the germ."

His head dropped farther, until it nearly touched the shot glass. His shoulders hitched, and Donnelley realized the man was fighting back tears.

Vero said, "Que Deus me perdoe." He lifted a wet cocktail napkin and wiped his face. He raised his gaze to Donnelley, as though seeking absolution.

"Wait a minute." Donnelley reached across the table and grabbed his shoulder. "Are you saying now, here? That's what you were doing here?"

Vero nodded, lowered his gaze once more.

"Where? What exactly is it?"

"I came down the coast," he said. "There were four of us, working each time zone. I got Boston, New York, DC. In each city, I picked up a package at a mail center. A canister. I'd go to a mall, sit on a bench with a coat covering it. Turn the valve."

"You exposed thousands of people to a deadly virus?"

He seemed to be intensely studying something on the bottom of the shot glass. "Rhinovirus, most of them. Most common of common colds. Spreads fast, though."

"You're not talking about a common cold."

"Remember what I said about delivery systems." He shot his gaze around, checking for eavesdroppers. He scratched the inside of his ear and looked at the blood on his fingertip—some red and fresh, some brown and flaky. "When I got sick, I thought something had gone wrong. This wasn't supposed to happen. I called Karl. He—"

"Karl?"

"Karl Litt, my boss. A monster." He said it with conviction "Karl he sounded concerned, said, 'Oh no, Despesorio. Hurry, finish the job and come home.' But I know him too well. I heard it in his voice There had been no mistake. But I should have kept my big mouth shut "

He punched himself in the cheek. Hard. Donnelley flinched but said nothing, could say nothing.

"I thought I could buy my way back, threaten my way home. I told him about my insurance policy."

"The memory chip."

"Instead of bargaining with me, he laughed. He said the list of targets had already gone out."

"Already gone out?"

"Made public. That way people would know it was planned, not just some act of God or biological accident. I told him I had more than that list. I had details about our field tests, the capabilities of our lab . . . He hung up on me. That's when I called the CDC I thought. . . I thought. . ."

He shook his head, a slow, painful movement.—

"Listen, you've got to—" Donnelley let the thought die. What Vero had come to reveal was big. He didn't want to blow it by saying the wrong thing, pushing the wrong button. Vero needed to be interrogated someplace safe, with one of the Bureau's interrogation teams—psychologists, mostly—and at least a few CDC scientists who would know the virologist's vernacular and the implications of his words.

He felt shaky, as though he'd been given a glimpse of the future and it wasn't pretty. He shifted on the bench seat and saw the bartender watching him. When they'd first sat down, the man had come around the bar to take their drink order. Assessing them, he'd said, "Get you—dudes something . . . beer, well drink, an ambulance?"

Donnelley said they had just walked away from a detox program

"Feelin' a li'l thin, ya know?" That seemed to satisfy him, but he'd been keeping an eye on them just the same.

Vero mumbled, and Donnelley leaned in. His words came in stuttering whispers, part confession, part rant. Donnelley listened, afraid to ask questions, afraid to disrupt what may have been the fevered speech of a sick man who didn't know he was talking. After a while—it could have been minutes or hours, Donnelley was so lost in the words—Vero grew silent. His body jerked, as if startling awake from trance or sleep. Donnelley thought it had to do with his illness.

Vero leaned back. He used his hand to wipe tears from his eyes, pink spittle from his lips, snot and blood from his nose. His breathing was labored, deep, chest-moving breaths. Heavily bloodshot eyes locked on Donnelley's. He said, "I'm sorry. I—"

Donnelley stopped him. "We've got to get you someplace safe. You need medical attention, and you've got to tell your story." He touched the wad of napkins at his side. Again, it had become a sopping mess. Good thing the injury was in a part of the body that gave up its blood reluctantly; if it had been a head or chest wound, blood loss would have laid him out by now. He checked his watch and wondered if he was placing too much reliance on the SATD to lead Julia to them.

He surveyed the bar and slid out of the booth. "I'll be right back."

Vero grabbed his arm.

"I don't want to use my cell phone, in case someone's watching for it," Donnelley said. "Julia shouldn't use hers, either, but I can't contact her any other way. I'm going to call her from that phone over there."

Vero cranked his head to see the phone booth, how close it was to the door.

Donnelley leaned down to whisper. "Look, I know you've been through hell. You tell me you're dying and a lot of innocent people may die because the guy you're running from is neck and neck with Satan in the evil department, and I guess he is. You want to do what's right and tell someone about it. I appreciate that, okay? I'm going to get you to where you need to go; that's my job." He touched Vero's shoulder. "I don't disappear when things get hairy. You believe me?"

Vero stared into his eyes. Slowly he nodded.

"You can come with me if you want."

Vero smiled dully. "I trust you."

Donnelley concentrated on walking as steadily and normally as he could, ignoring a wave of nausea and spasms of pain. At least they weren't as bad as the lightning bolts he'd felt before. The phone was in an old-fashioned booth tucked into a dark corner by the front door. He slipped in and pulled the bifold door shut. In the ceiling, a fluorescent tube sputtered to half-life and continued to flicker after it should have given up; that and its brightness made his eyes ache. He backed the door open a few inches until the light went out.

He looked out at the mostly empty bar and the back of Vero's head. Not the where and who he'd prefer right now. His left arm had grown numb, so he let the handset hang from its metal braided cord while he punched in his long-distance calling card number, the area code, and his home phone number.

After five rings, his wife's voice came on.

"Hello!"

His heart jumped at hearing her, then sank when he recognized their outgoing voice mail message.

"You've reached Jodi. . ."

His own voice: "Goody . . ."

Brice, trying to sound older than his ten years: "Brice!"

And the sweet voice of his six-year-old: "Barrett!"

All of them: "Leave a message and we'll call you back," followed by uncontrollable laughter and beeeeep.

"Hey, guys. Just wanted to say hi. You must be out. Hope you're having fun. I'll see you soon." He raised the handset to the cradle, then brought it back. "I. . . I love you, Barrett. I love you, Brice. You be good now, okay? Honey . . . thank you for being so good to me. I love you. Bye."

He dropped the handset and held the disconnect button down for a few seconds, then dialed the calling card number and Julia's mobile phone. After two rings, he disconnected, then dialed again.

She picked up instantly.

"Goody!"

"Yeah, let's talk fast: unsecured line. I thought you'd be here by now. I'm hurt, kid. Real bad."

"Goody, listen to me." Her voice was higher-pitched and more panicked than he had ever heard it. "I don't have the signal. Someone else does. Do you hear? Turn off the tracking device, Goody! Do it now!"

"You don't—hold on." He fished the memory chip and transmitter out of his pocket. He used a fingernail to turn the slot in its side to the "0" position.

He closed his eyes to catch hold of his convulsing thoughts. If someone else was tracking them, this thing was bigger than he'd imagined. It boggled his mind to think of the equipment and covert intelligence necessary to intercept the SATD signal. It confirmed for him that someone inside CDC-LED, the FBI, or another federal agency was involved. And people like that didn't let their muscles relax once they had them pumped up; they'd be coming after Vero and him soon; they could be watching the bar even now. Still holding the memory chip, he scanned the confines of the dark booth. Laying the handset on top of the phone, he pushed up on the milky plastic panel that covered the fluorescent tube overhead. It rose about an inch. He pushed the chip and transmitter into the open space, but then the panel wouldn't lay flush.

He could hear Julia frantically calling his name. "Hold on," he said, loud enough to reach the handset. He felt around the perimeter of the telephone itself. Nothing. He leaned over and felt under the small wooden seat positioned in one corner. His hand slid over several clumps of old gum, then he found what he was looking for: a thin space between the seat and one of its supports. He transferred the chip to his other hand, then wedged it into the space, flat against the seat bottom.

Julia was ranting when he put the phone back up to his ear. He cut her off.

"Hey! Hey! It's your turn to listen to me, kid. I'm in the phone booth. In the phone booth."

"I understand that the line is not secure. Okay?"

He could tell she was absolutely panicked that he had not understood her before.

This time she spoke each word with painful deliberation: "Did . . . you . . . turn . . . off! . . . the . . . tracking . . . device?"

"It's off, it's off," he said. "How—"

"I don't know how, but you have to get away from there. Go now, Goody. Your location is compromised. Call me from somewhere else."

"I need to contact Casey, Julia. He's at Earl's place in Chattanooga. Understand?

"No, I. . ."

Come on, kid, Donnelley thought, you have to remember.

"Yes! I understand. But Chattanooga?" She swore. "I was just there. I'm about twenty miles south now. You got Vero?"

"I got him. And he's talking about some kind of bio-attack that may already be under way. I think there's a list somewhere of the cities they're hitting, something to do with a virus—"

"Tell me later, Goody. Just get outta there now."

"Look, if something happens to me and—"

"Nothing's going to happen if you get your butt out of there. Now go!"

"What's your ETA?"

"Give me fifteen minutes."

"You've got ten," he said and hung up.

He was turning from the phone when he saw them: two men in black knee-length coats. He couldn't think of all the reasons a person would wear such a thing in warm weather, but he knew of one—to conceal weapons. They had already passed the phone booth. He couldn't see their faces, but he would have bet his pension one of them had two shiners from a broken nose. They were heading directly for Vero in the second-to-last booth.

He pulled out his gun.

For Donnelley, the next seven seconds moved in excruciatingly slow motion.

Shouldering open the bifold door, he lunged through, pushing a scream out of his lungs.

The men spun. One raised a shotgun—something exotic, Donnelley thought. The other, the one on his right, had something smaller pulled up close to his torso: a submachine gun. Donnelley shot him. A red rose bloomed in the center of the man's chest, and he staggered back, dazed but not down. Donnelley pulled the trigger again, realizing his mistake even as he made it. He should have nailed each assassin with a double-tap before putting more holes in them. The shooter on the left was the one he had recognized, the Serpico for DEA. The guy brought his shotgun around, and Donnelley understood that the split-second decision to fire twice at the first one would cost him his life.

He was falling, one foot remaining in the phone booth. He had swung his pistol three-quarters of the distance to the other shooter when the shotgun boomed, hurling flames and dozens of razor-sharp disks directly at him. He caught a brief glimpse of the shooter's scowl, twisted into a perverted hybrid of man and demon.

When he was a kid, he had imagined that a sweet fragrance was the first evidence that heaven had opened its doors to receive you. But now the acidic odor of cordite from gunpowder stung his nostrils, and he thought, Not sweet at all—it smells like death.

He saw the sparkling of stars—disks catching the light—and behind them, the shotgun barrel's smoking black hole. Then the disks tore into him.

Not sweet at all.

Blackness.

eleven

The bartender's name was Johnny. He'd been doing

this job for . . . he forgot how many years, maybe twelve. He liked the gig, because women liked bartenders. They especially dug a "mixologist" guy who'd perform for them, flipping bottles in the air and pouring a shot from way up high and catching it in a glass balanced on his foot, all the while wiggling his fanny to music Johnny thought had not survived the eighties. He wasn't one of

those

guys—though, truth be told, he broke a few bottles and spilled a paycheck's worth of booze on the floor seeing if he

could

be one of those guys when his uncle, who owned the joint, first hired him on.

Nah, he was the kind of bartender ladies liked second best. If they were nice to him, he gave them free drinks; the nicer they were, the more they could imbibe on the house. He hadn't wanted for a date since he'd started, though he had learned early on that you couldn't be too picky when your dates were more interested in Johnnie Walker than Johnny the Bartender. And it wasn't as if the work could ever be classified hard labor. In fact, Johnny couldn't remember a time when he'd broken a sweat on behalf of Babylon Bar, not even mopping the floor.

Until now. Drops rolled off his head and into his eyes, as if he were taking a shower. He wiped them away and peered around the edge of the bar, where he'd clambered when the shooting started. He'd decided long ago, if something like this ever went down, he wouldn't get stuck behind the bar like a fish in a barrel. He saw a Tarantino film where the bartender got it just because, and he'd been an easy target in that all-too-much-like-a-shooting-range space behind the bar. So that's why he was where he was, on the outside edge of the counter, farthest from the action without being seen and a screaming ten paces from the back office door, should the need arise to make a break.

He'd had his eyes on the two strangers pushing through the door, striding in like kingpins, when the guy who said he was from detox sprang out of the phone booth, gun blazing. As if he'd been waiting for them. Johnny had been on all fours and halfway to safety when he heard a big boom!—not the crack of the guy's pistol.

Coming around the bar, he'd had a straight view of the other detox dude in the booth—the one he'd heard called Desperado or something like that. Desperado had about jumped onto the table apparently, and when Johnny saw him, he was pushing off it and away from the shooters—still in the booth, but now where the other guy had been sitting. Desperado's mouth and eyes were as wide as any Johnny had seen, and he'd been trying to say something but couldn't get anything out except stammering sounds.

Johnny wiped the sweat out of his eyes, and peered around the edge of the bar.

One of the strangers was down. Looked as though he'd crashed against an empty table flipped facedown onto the floor. The guy from the phone booth was down too. Lots of glistening red—on him, around him, seeping out of him. The standing shooter was aiming a wicked-looking gun at him and seemed ready to pull the trigger again. Johnny didn't want to see it and pulled his head back. When the expected roar didn't come, he looked again. The gunman had turned and was now facing Desperado, his big gun pointed at the man. Without turning his eyes away, he jabbed an index finger at Cheryl, who was—God bless her—still sitting on the stool where she'd

planted her butt two hours before. Like pushing a button, the shooter's finger quieted her screaming, screaming Johnny hadn't realized she was doing until she stopped. He must have thought the sound was ringing in his ears from the gunshots. The shooter held his finger on her a few seconds longer, a warning not to start up again, Johnny thought. Then the shooter pointed at the two guys who'd been swigging watered-down Coors since opening time. They hadn't been screaming, just sort of gaping at the scene. The finger got their hands in the air as if they were being robbed. Maybe they were.

Then the man pointed at Johnny, right at him, peering around the bar, and Johnny thought maybe his bladder leaked a little. Just a little.

The shooter reached around to the small of his back and produced a chrome O. He threw it across the room at Desperado. It hit the table, slid off, bounced against the booth padding, and clattered to the floor. Johnny could see better now—two Os connected by a short chain: handcuffs.

The shooter nodded at Desperado. "Nice and easy," he said. "Put them on and—"

A blaze of sunlight exploded behind the shooter, and Johnny realized the front door had burst open. A silhouette quavered between the radiance and the shooter, who was turning, yelling, "What the—?"

The door swung shut again, cutting off the blinding light. A tall, muscular man—Buddy Holly glasses with dark polarized lenses, light jacket, gloves, mussed-up hair—was two strides from the shooter. His fist came around and crashed into the shooter's head. From Johnny's vantage point, the head appeared to crumple under the blow like a melon. The body collapsed in a heap. The new killer's fist dripped with blood. Something stringy, clumpy, dangled from his knuckles. Johnny realized that what he thought was a glove was hard and black, with spikes, some sort of newfangled brass knuckles or—yes, now that he thought about it—a gauntlet. A knight's gauntlet, only black.

Cheryl was screaming again, whooping like a car alarm. Didn't seem to bother the newcomer, though. He reached into his jacket and withdrew a pistol with a long barrel. A red light shot out of it. Laser sighting—Johnny had seen it in a dozen movies. The man extended the gun toward Desperado. A red bead of light appeared on the man's forehead, followed immediately by a black hole and the sudden appearance of spattered brains and skull fragments on the wall behind him.

Johnny had no time to turn away. His bladder emptied. He dropped his head, gulping in breaths that seemed to lack the oxygen his lungs required. He heard sirens approaching. Someone must have heard the shots. Over time—he didn't know how long—his breathing relaxed. When he looked up again, the killer was gone. And so was the body of the guy he'd seen get shot in the head.

twelve

Julia dashed through the automatic sliding doors of Erlanger Hospital's emergency entrance, half expecting to see Donnelley, Vero, and a group of hit men stretched out unconscious and bleeding on identical gurneys in the hall. Instead, unfamiliar faces, miserably attached to a variety of injured and ill bodies, turned toward her from rows of plastic chairs. Keypad locks prevented her from getting to the treatment rooms. She stepped up to the nurses' station.

"I'm looking for a man—Goody . . . Goodwin Donnelley. He would have come in within the past ten minutes or so. Injured, probably a gunshot wound, shotgun maybe . . . a car crash . . . I don't know!"

The nurse, a stern-looking blonde who apparently saw no use for cosmetics, stared at her impassively. "Are you family?" she asked.

"No . . . I . . ." She showed the woman her law enforcement credentials.

After examining the ID for several moments, the nurse spoke slowly, as though dealing with a deranged person. "Ma'am," she said, "no one with injuries like that has come in, but I can—"

"He said here!" Julia interrupted. "He said to meet him at Erlanger!"

That was what he meant, wasn't it? Over a year ago, she had spent a pleasant afternoon with Goody and his family in his backyard. After charbroiled burgers and dogs, the boys had run off with friends, and she, Goody, and Jodi had sat around the picnic table sipping Chianti and chatting. Somehow they'd gotten on the topic of TV medical dramas. Jodi had said that one in particular boasted the cutest doctors, to which Julia had replied that none of the current offerings could match Vince Edwards playing Dr. Ben Casey. She'd had the biggest crush on him, watching reruns as a kid. Despite Goody's and Jodi's lists of other candidates for TV's hunkiest docs, she hadn't budged. Ben Casey represented the perfect physician.

So when Goody had said that he needed to contact "Casey," she'd understood that to mean he needed a doctor. And when he'd said that Casey was at "Earl's place," certainly he'd meant Erlanger, Chattanooga's biggest hospital. At the time, she'd been positive that she had decoded his cryptogram. Could she have misunderstood?

Divulging his whereabouts with what seemed an easily deciphered code over an unsecured line told her his injuries were serious. He'd want the kind of immediate attention only emergency rooms offered. That such places were usually bright and busy was also an asset, though she doubted that killers who attempted assassinations in hotel restaurants and on crowded highways would think twice about blasting their way through an ER.

It dawned on her that he hadn't gone directly to the hospital; he had waited for her to find him. When she hadn't shown, he'd called to give her directions. He had wanted her with him enough to delay treatment and to risk exposure. He had wanted protection. Was he waiting outside for her, maybe passed out in a car? She started for the parking lot. A local cop in uniform passed her and keyed in the code that opened the doors into the treatment area. She followed him in, found a floor nurse, and asked about Goody.

"An ambulance is bringing in a gunshot victim now," the nurse explained. "They called it in a few minutes ago. Should be here in about two minutes."

"An ambulance?" She was having trouble thinking.

"Wait here," the nurse said sternly and darted away. Almost immediately she started talking again, but not to Julia.

"Dr. Parker. You got my page," she said to a man coming down the hall.

Everything about the man commanded attention. An unbuttoned white smock blew back under his arms, revealing immaculately tailored clothes: a gray dress shirt with subtle black and purple pinstripes and pleated slacks the color of ancient tombstones. Dishwater blond hair, trendily coiffed long on top and short on the sides, swept back from a broad forehead. Bushy eyebrows rode a strong crest above squinting gray eyes. His nose, straight but with a faint left-ward bend at the tip, fit his face well. His stride was long, his gait confident.

The nurse reached him and turned to escort him toward a door next to one of the treatment rooms, apprising him of the situation as they walked. The pace of her speech had accelerated dramatically. "The trauma team's tied up in 1 with a boy who fell off his bike and suffered deep head lacerations and a concussion. Dr. Bridges is in 3 with a knife wound—"

"Somebody finally stabbed Dr. Bridges?" asked the man called Dr. Parker. His voice was deep but somehow soft, as if he'd considered each word and deemed it too important to rush or abuse. In such solemn surroundings, it took Julia a few seconds to realize that the physician was joking, despite the gravity in his tone and the scowl on his face.

The nurse giggled dutifully, then continued: "I thought you were still in the hospital. We have a GSW en route. Extensive chest trauma."

Gunshot wound! She's talking about Goody!

"The GSW is to the head, neck, chest, and abdomen," the nurse explained. "ETA any second. He's been boarded, intubated, and they got in two large-bore peripheral IVs—"

The two walked through a windowed door across from the nurses' station. A hydraulic closing mechanism hissed as it pulled the door shut behind them.

The wound sounded more severe than Goody had let on over the phone. And why an ambulance? He would have told her if the injury was that debilitating.

Julia looked through the door's window. The nurse was talking animatedly while the doctor slipped on green latex gloves. She stepped in. The doctor saw her and flashed a winning and obviously well-rehearsed smile.

The nurse made a beeline for her: "You can't come in here. You're—"

"I just talked to him," Julia said to the doctor, sidestepping the nurse. "He said he was hurt bad, but not—"

The nurse was insistent. "Dr. Parker, the patient's GCS is eight."

Julia turned to her. "What's that mean, GCS? Eight?"

Dr. Parker came up behind her and touched her arm. "It means he's verbally nonresponsive, close to comatose. Not a good sign, but we'll see when he comes in. I'm Dr. Parker, Allen Parker."

The nurse walked up with a glove stretched open and ready for him to insert his hand.

"Julia Matheson," Julia answered. She stuck her hand into her jacket pocket for her CDC-LED identification when a warbling siren reached her. It quickly rose in volume. Julia stepped into the hall.

Within seconds, an ambulance braked hard outside. Car doors slammed, and the automatic doors of the emergency entrance slid open on cue. Two uniformed EMTs, like a toboggan team at the top of a run, bounded noisily into Erlanger's emergency department pushing a gurney. One attendant held a clear plastic bag of fluid over the patient. The other pressed his hands against the patient's wounds, afraid, it seemed to Julia, of what might come out if he didn't. A steady stream of blood poured off the gurney, leaving a thick trail in its wake.

"Roll 'im in 2!" the nurse yelled, coming around Julia, pointing at the portal where open double doors revealed a bright, immaculate room waiting to be bloodied. Its tiled floor and walls, the grated floor drain, the smooth metal surfaces of the equipment—all betrayed the gorefest the room was designed to accommodate and contain.

Julia turned from it and rushed to meet the stretcher, anxious to let Goody know she was there for him. But the body on the gurney wasn't Goody—it couldn't be. It was drenched in red. Clothes and flesh hung in strips. She saw an arm that looked filleted. The part of the face she could see was . . . gone. She ran up to the gurney, in front of the attendant holding the bag. He crashed into her, and the whole production stopped.

"Hey!" the attendant yelled.

She leaned over the body, straining to see more of the face. An eye fluttered open, stared at her, closed again.

It was Goody.

She nearly screamed. Her hand clamped over her mouth. She felt her body go limp, as though someone had popped her spirit the way you pop a balloon.

The attendant pushed passed her. She stumbled backward, watched the gurney glide into Trauma Room 2. Then the door closed and she was standing in the corridor, numb and coated from waist to nose in Goody's blood.

thirteen

The bodily damage was as devastating as any Allen Parker had ever seen. Instantly, nothing else mattered: the room, the equipment, the trauma staff, his own physicality all fell away, sacrificed to the intense focus with which he attended to the patient's injuries. Everything around him paled as blood became more vivid, wounds more apparent, the needs of life more demanding. Information about the patient—called out by the staff or communicated as tones, bleeps, lights, and graphs by various machines—fell into the periphery of his awareness, absorbed without effort or recognition, but acted upon or mentally cataloged for later consideration. This was what it was all about: this one life, here and now.

His head darted to within inches of the gaping, bubbling wounds, then reared back to evaluate the injuries from different perspectives. He leaned over the body, then stood erect and slowly walked from head to belly and back again. As he went, he sealed holes in the body with squares of gauze, taping down three sides.

"Focus that light here. Four units RBCs, right? And get an operating room ready, fast."

He guessed that the carotid artery was intact, though only a surgical exploration could tell for sure. The internal and external jugular veins appeared ripped and oozing. He stepped around an intern who was busy injecting local anesthesia, skirting another who was tying off bleeding veins and arteries.

"He's 100 percent dead in the extremities," another nurse called out. "Fingers and toes are white."

"Bring that instrument tray over to me," Parker said.

The patient breathed spontaneously, but only barely. He hissed through shattered teeth, and air seeped out in gurgling bubbles through a dozen holes. Whatever had caused this damage was efficient and as ruthless as a starving shark.

"Where're the chest tubes? Come on, people!"

A section of ribs had turned into tiny fragments, which had shredded the right lung and disintegrated the liver.

"We need another surgeon. Find someone. Now!"

Blood pooled in open cavities. Pieces of flesh hung in strands.

"Get me suction. Clean here, here, and here. We're going to need more blood. Get the blood bank down here."

Parker didn't have to examine the abdomen to know the damage he would find there. A fetid stench suggested multiple perforations in the intestines. When he looked at the intestines protruding from the abdominal wall, he realized some would have to be removed altogether.

"Make it two surgeons . . . as many as we can get!"

Blood splashed and dripped and snaked toward the drain. Shock-induced endorphins probably—mercifully—prevented the man from feeling pain: a temporary reprieve at best, unless death snatched him from pain's grasp first.

Parker shook his head.

"If he codes, make it a DNR," he called out.

The Do Not Resuscitate order told the medical staff what they needed to know. Pulling out all stops to restore life upon cardiac arrest would most likely lead to an endless cycle of rescuing the poor soul from the brink of eternity, until he finally teetered over the edge forever. Restarting the heart could fool clinical death for only so long before the injuries caused biological death, in which all tissue dies: the end.

As a nurse blotted a section of the chest wound, Parker caught a glimpse of something too symmetrical to be organic. It appeared firmly embedded in the man's sternum.

"Whoa, whoa," he said. "What's this?"

Using forceps, he clamped the small, round object and tugged on it. He had to apply more force than he'd expected, but it finally popped loose. It was a black metal disk, razor sharp.

"Yow."

He dropped it into a stainless steel bowl. "Listen up, people," he announced. "It appears somebody has turned this man into a radial saw. Nobody sticks their hands in, got it? Use instruments—forceps and clamps. I want to see survey films of this whole area. Let's find out how many of these ugly buggers we're dealing with, and where they're hiding."

Nurses rushed to the table with masking tape and started marking off the edges of the wound.

The patient sputtered, and what came out sounded like a word. Parker turned to see the man's remaining eye focused on him. The gaze was piercing, intense. Jaw muscles bulged with effort, and the patient's mouth parted slightly. He was trying to talk.

Parker leaned his ear close. Hot, vile breath washed over him, then spatters of blood. Words followed. He bent lower, until his ear was nearly touching the man's mutilated lips. Parker's eyes narrowed, then grew wide. He tried to pull away, but the man's left hand had incredibly reached over Parker's head, holding him. The patient continued to speak in stuttering gasps.

After a long moment, Parker turned his face toward the patient's. "When?" he asked, a raspy whisper. He listened.

Blood bubbled out of the patient's mouth. His arm dropped off the table.

Parker looked around. The trauma team was busy; no one was looking, no one had heard.

"Who is this man?" he called above the cacophony. "Does anyone know?"

"A cop," someone said. "His partner is outside."

He gazed at the devastated face. He lowered his head again, turning his ear back toward the man. As he did, the electrocardiogram ceased its slow, rhythmic beeping to hum in endless, monotonous finality. The patient's heart had stopped.

"He's PEA!" somebody yelled out. Pulseless electrical activity, the condition that usually precedes asystole, or flatline. No one moved; everyone knew resuscitation was hopeless. They watched as Parker, still with his ear pressed to the man's mouth, gripped the patient's tattered shirt. He gave it a little shake, as if to rattle some words out of him. Then, slowly, Parker stood, staring at nothing, deep in thought.

"Doctor?" a nurse said. "Dr. Parker, are you all right?"

"Yes . . . of course." He rubbed his ear, smearing blood. "Uh . . . mark the time." He looked at the wall clock. "Seventeen-oh-nine."

Nurses began stripping off gloves, shutting down machines, collecting gore-encrusted instruments. The various clamps, tubes, and lines still in the body would remain with the corpse until a forensic pathologist conducted an autopsy and declared the cause of death.

Parker tugged down his face mask and pushed through the doors to find Julia Matheson.

She was gone.

fourteen

Two minutes earlier, She had watched Goody die. Gazing through the small windows in the trauma room doors, she had known there was nothing the doctors, nurses, and technicians could do to repair the injuries she'd seen. As soon as she had heard the cardiac monitor drop into a flat tone and someone call out, "PEA!" she felt a heavy weight drop in her stomach. Blood rushed to her head. The edges of her vision darkened. She felt herself sway, and she reached out, found something steady, and held herself up.

"Ma'am?" a voice asked.

She was gripping a young nurse's arm.

"Can I get you something?"

"Restroom?" Julia managed.

"Around the corner, down the hall, on the right."

The nurse raised her voice for the last three words—Julia was already around the corner, out of sight.

She barely reached the toilet when the contents of her stomach came up. She rose and leaned against the wall of the toilet stall, her cheek pressed to the cold steel, and wept. Her body hitched violently whenever she tried to stop, so for now, she let the tears flow. Images of Goody, of Jodi and the kids, kept swimming up from her memory, fueling her wracking sobs.

After a long time—ten minutes, maybe fifteen—the worst of it was over. Slowly, sadness gave way to anger; she felt it and seized on it. If emotions were drugs, sadness would be a depressant, anger a stimulant. She needed a heavy dose of drive to get through the next few hours, and eventually to find Goody's killers. If anger helped dull the pain of losing him and spurred her on, so be it.

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She hardly recognized herself in the mirror. She was pale, her hair disheveled, her eyes red. Somewhere along the way, her lip biting had drawn blood. A dark brown layer of it had formed on her lower lip. She splashed cold water on her face and tried to appear at least somewhat less homeless.

When she left the bathroom, her stride was strong, her shoulders square: she was on a mission to find whoever had slaughtered Goody, and why.

When she reached the ER, the trauma room doors were still closed. She pushed one open enough to peer in. The room looked like a battleground. Blood was everywhere, as were discarded gauze wrappers, bloody sponges, rubber gloves, strips of paper, and soiled towels. On a table in the center of the room, Goody's body lay under a stained white sheet, awaiting transport to a refrigerated cell, an autopsy room, then the ground. She thought she should slip in, touch his hand, but she couldn't do it.

I'm sorry, Goody. I'm sorry.

She wanted to continue talking to him like that, sending words like a prayer to wherever he was, but she understood the damage it would do to her composure, her resolve. She moved her hand and let the door close.

She heard a noise and looked through a series of glass doors to see the physician who had worked on Goody. Dr. Parker, she remembered. She strode through the doors, not noticing until she stood before him that he had stripped down to his underwear. He was holding the gray pants she had seen him wearing earlier, but they were stained with blood. It had soaked through to his underwear and stomach. The image of a battlefield returned; this man was one of the combatants, away from the front, grateful to find that the blood all over him wasn't his.

For a brief moment, surprise contorted his face. Then he smiled, that same smile she'd caught before.

She spun around, saying, "Sorry . . . sorry . . ."

"Job hazard, I guess," he said calmly. "The blood, I mean, not being caught with my pants down by a pretty woman. That doesn't happen enough, I'm afraid."

She heard the snap of elastic and assumed that he had just removed his underwear.

"Do you . . ." she started, getting over her initial shock through the realization that he was flirting with her. His lack of humility riled her, especially considering what had just happened, whose blood he was ridding himself of. "Do you always take your clothes off in public?"

"Only after surgery. It's kind of a ritual we surgeons have."

"I need to talk with you. The person you worked on, the one who died—"

"He was your partner, I know."

"He was my friend."

"I'm sorry."

"What can you tell me about his injuries?"

She heard the rustle of clothes.

"You can look now," he said.

She turned apprehensively, not convinced his invitation to look meant he was decent. To her relief, he had donned surgical pants.

"Actually," he said, "these scrub rooms are usually fairly private. I'd go up to the locker rooms, but they're on the sixth floor and, well, this is just more convenient." He opened a drawer, pulled out a folded smock, and handed it to her. "You'd better play doctor until you can change."

She looked down at her blood-soaked clothes. "Thank you."

"Are you a cop here in Chattanooga?"

"Federal. Out of Atlanta." She pulled out her identification and held it up to him.

He looked at it closely. "Centers for Disease Control," he said slowly.

His face paled, but she decided it was a trick of the light.

"I didn't know they had a law enforcement division."

"Part of Homeland Security. Mostly we're FBI special agents on permanent reassignment." She removed her business card from behind the ID card, jotted her mobile number on the back, and handed it to him.

"I see." He picked up a smock from a shelf, thinking hard about something. "So you investigate . . . what? Threats involving diseases, viruses?"

"Among other things. Doctor, what killed my partner?"

Parker shook his head. "Well, that's up to the medical examiner to decide, but an educated guess? Couple dozen razor-sharp disks, probably shot into his body from a large-bore firearm, like a shotgun."

"Disks?"

"Wait here." He walked through a glass door she had not seen before, which led directly into the trauma room. He picked up a small metal pan and returned.

Julia looked in and inhaled sharply.

"My thoughts exactly," said Parker. "Some of the disks were penetrating. That is, they entered his body and stayed there. This one"— he raised the pan, indicating the disk inside—"was lodged in his sternum. I suspect most of the disks probably went right through him and are embedded in whatever was behind him. By the looks of the injuries, they took a lot of his body with them when they exited."

"May I have this one?" she asked.

He squinted at her. "Is that okay?"

"We haven't established jurisdiction on this case yet, but we will. I might be able to get a jump on it if I can run this through our database, see if something like it has been used before in a crime."

"I see," he said thoughtfully. "Well, I don't see why not. The medical examiner will probably find plenty of others in the body, and the police undoubtedly already have all they need at the crime scene."

He took the pan to a sink and ran water into it. He said, "Was the man who was with your partner a cop as well?"

"No. Did they bring him in? I didn't—" She hadn't even thought of Vero. She had assumed, vaguely, in the back of her mind, that he also had been shot and killed, but she hadn't realized until that moment that she hadn't seen him come in. If he had died at the scene, they would have kept him there for processing—photographs and such—and then taken him directly to the morgue.

Parker said, "One of the attendants who brought in Mr. Donnelley said the killer took the other man's body."

"Took it?"

"A witness said he shot him, flipped the corpse over his shoulder, and walked out the door."

A nurse opened the door behind Julia and leaned in. "Dr. Parker?"

"Yes?" he said without looking.

"There's a Detective Fisher on 3 for you."

"Thank you." He carefully drained the water from the pan. He opened and closed cabinets and drawers, selected a white-and-blue box the size of a pack of cards, and removed a pad of gauze from it. He used the gauze to pick up and dry the disk, then dropped the disk into the box.

"Apparently it was a pretty bizarre scene. Confusing." He handed the box to Julia. "Excuse me." He walked to a phone on the other side of the room. He raised the handset and said, "Dr. Parker . . . Yes." He looked at his watch. "I have an appointment off-site in forty-five minutes. How long will you be? . . . I see . . ."

While his back was turned, Julia slipped out. She couldn't see any reason Goody's admonition to avoid other law enforcement would be any less valid now that he had been killed. In fact, his death may have validated his concerns. She needed to know more about how he died, about who had killed him. The local cops would have plenty of details from the crime scene and any witnesses, but until she had a better grasp of what exactly was happening, she didn't want to see them. Or anyone else.

fifteen

Karl Litt's son, Joe, ran down the grassy hill, arms flapping like wings, legs moving faster than they could on flat terrain, his face brighter than the sun, laughing, squealing.

"Come on, son!" Litt called from the bottom of the hill. "She's gaining!"

Twenty feet behind the six-year-old boy, his mother scampered, reaching for her prey. She was obviously trying to prevent gravity from hurling her forward too fast, into her son.

Litt laughed. "You're almost there, Joe! Right here." He dropped to his knees, clapped his hands, and opened his arms wide to give the child a target. His son tacked left and ran for him. Joe appeared on the brink of a wipeout, but he stayed on his feet and picked up speed.

Instead, it was his mother who wiped out. Her feet pulled ahead, and when she tried to get her body lined up again, her arms and head and torso just kept going until she lost it, hitting the grass with her hands, then somersaulting once . . . twice . . . She twisted and began tumbling sideways, then backwards.

Litt's mouth fell open. He didn't know whether he should laugh or yell out to her. Then Joe slammed into him, and they both tumbled and rolled. They stopped and Joe was under him, giggling uncontrollably. Litt raised his head, saw Rebecca lying still, and felt his heart skip a beat. She raised an arm and proffered a thumbs-up.

"Ha-ha!" he laughed to his son. "You did it. You beat the monster." He pushed himself up and pulled Joe with him. "See?" He pointed at the downed blonde beast.

Joe ran to his mother and nudged her with his sneaker. He turned back to Litt. "Let's fix her, Daddy!"

"Fix her?" Litt picked up his son and flipped him onto his shoulders.

"Wheeeeee!"

Litt looked down. His wife was staring at him with one eye, a tight-lipped smile on her lips. He winked at her, and she shimmered and disappeared.

Bam, bam, bam.

Litt looked up and around. His son was gone. His fingers touched his shoulder: just a bony old man's shoulder; no longer a perch for a little boy.

He was sitting on an unmade bed in a dark room, the only light coming from a black-and-white monitor on a dresser. It showed a man outside his bedroom. Gregor von Papen. While Litt watched, Gregor rapped again.

Bam, bam, bam.

Litt stood and shuffled to the door, kicking aside rumpled clothes, a magazine, a plastic cup. He leaned into the door, pressing his palms against it, head-height and shoulder-width apart, as though preparing to be patted down by police.

"What is it?" he called through the door.

"I have news," Gregor said.

"What is it?"

Gregor hesitated, then said, "Atropos has succeeded."

Litt nodded. "Despesorio is dead?"

"Yes."

"He got the chip?"

Silence.

Litt snapped the dead bolt and yanked open the door. Gregor's face momentarily registered mild shock, and Litt knew he must look particularly awful. He'd done nothing to temper the pallor or scaliness of his skin. His eyes, usually shielded by sunglasses, must have been bloodshot and red-rimmed. Since the accident, his irises had been faded from cobalt to the faintest of blue, almost white. A quick glance would catch only pinprick pupils, which would seem alone in punctuating the eerie-white orbs of his eyes, like periods without sentences. He blinked against the corridor's light.

Gregor took a step back.

"Tell me he retrieved the chip," Litt said.

"It wasn't on the body."

"Did he take the body?"

"Yes, he dissected it. It wasn't inside Vero, either. He found the tracking device in Vero's leg. He wondered if that's what we wanted. I told him no."

Litt turned around. The dimness of the room soothed his eyes. He returned to the bed and sat, thinking. He asked, "Was he alone?"

"Some kind of fed was with him. He's dead too."

Litt nodded, then froze when Gregor said, "Atropos didn't do it."

Litt looked up. "Kendrick?" he whispered.

"I assume so. Atropos said it was a classic two-man hit team. Civilian clothes."

Litt smiled. "Atropos walked into that?" He shook his head in awe. "Worth every penny." He considered the scene a moment longer, then found his previous train of thought. "Did he check the fed?"

"He got out of there with seconds to spare. The cops were all over, apparently."

"So he didn't?"

Gregor shook his head.

"Well, he must. In all probability, Despesorio turned the chip over to the law enforcement officer."

"I'll let him know."

Litt picked up a pair of black sunglasses from a nightstand. Crumpled tissues fell to the floor. He stood and went back to the open door, slipping on the glasses as he did. He ran a palm from his forehead back over his nearly bald skull, flattening several long wisps of white hair.

"Tell him he must do it before Kendrick thinks of it. Kendrick no doubt believes we have already reclaimed the evidence Despesorio brought with him—if he knows about it at all. But it may occur to him to check the cop's body and personal effects. Atropos must beat him to it."

Gregor nodded and turned to leave.

"Gregor," Litt said, "remind him the chip was part of our agreement."

"Of course."

"I'll try to find out what Kendrick knows."

"You'll call him?"

"It's been awhile. Time to catch up."

Litt scanned him up and down. They were the same age, but where Litt appeared at least eighty, Gregor could have passed for fifty, fifty-five tops. He was trim with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, more pepper than salt. He always wore black SWAT boots laced up over his pant legs, a sidearm holstered to a tightly cinched utility belt, and camouflage clothes, a different style and pattern every time Litt saw him, it seemed.

"You look like a houseplant," he said.

Gregor glanced down at himself. "It's called Fall Forest."

"All the rage among heads of security, I presume?"

Gregor laughed. "I wouldn't know, but I am practically invisible in the woods."

"Good for you." Litt closed the door.

sixteen

His family had been dead almost thirty years. Joe had not seen his seventh birthday. Jessica had not experienced even one. His sweet Rebecca, his wife for twenty years—he had not been able to hold her as she died. He had not been able to say I'm sorry. Kendrick Reynolds had not let him.

He wished, as he did every day, that they had had children earlier. If they had started growing their family when they were first married, maybe the kids would have been gone, away at college or on a road trip with friends, when Litt's work escaped the confines of his lab. Instead, they had waited. Litt had put his work first, as Kendrick had wanted. Up to that point, nearly his entire life had been in service to Kendrick. Since then, he had been in service to seeing Kendrick exposed, humiliated, dead.

Litt flipped a switch, and the room filled with red luminance, a color he found least irritating to his eyes. He sat at a small desk, swept away a pile of papers, and pulled a phone console close. He picked up the handset, punched in an encryption key and then a long string of numbers. He waited, listening to clicks and pops as the signal routed itself through a dozen different networks in as many countries. Finally he heard ringing on the other end. It was a dedicated line and completely untraceable.

When Kendrick Reynolds answered, Litt said, "I skunked you again."

"Good evening, Karl," Kendrick said, his voice slow and slight. The man was in his nineties. It was a wonder he could even talk, let alone scheme the way he did.

"Your man defected and got as far as the CDC's doorstep. You're getting lax."

"But I got to him before you did. That's all that matters."

"Okay, I concede your victory . . . this time." Kendrick paused, then said, "You were always competitive. A poor loser and a poor winner. I thought you would outgrow it, but you never did."

"And the only person you've ever cared about yourself. Once, I thought I'd misjudged you, but I hadn't."

Litt closed his eyes. He did not want to exchange petty insults. Why were they compelled to tread these waters time and again?

"You mean I made you believe there was more to me? Pray tell, when?"

Litt pressed his lips tight. "When . . ." He pulled in a deep breath and let it come out slowly. He imagined his anger leaving with it. He realized his fingers were aching from squeezing the handset and forced them to relax. "When you gave me your blessing to marry Rebecca. But now I know you were only tolerating me, appeasing me, to keep me compliant."

"You've been reading too much Freud."

"You never cared about her. Or Jessica. Or Joe. It must have infuriated you that we named him after my father and not you. I realize now that you had hoped for a way to get my family out of the picture. And you finally found one."

"Karl, you're wrong. You know I always loved—"

"Just curious," Litt interrupted, bringing the conversation back in line, "how did Despesorio—my defector—come to your attention? Do you have a keyword tap on the CDC phones?"

The old man coughed, his mouth obviously turned away from the phone. Ever so polite. Then he said, "And at USAMRID, the World Health Organization, all six of the world's biosafety level-four labs . . . everywhere someone with knowledge of you or your operation might show up. It was only a matter of time, Karl."

"It's been thirty years."

"The world is getting smaller. Technology is getting better. You can't hide forever."

"We'll see."

Silence.

"Karl, we can work something out."

Litt pressed the handset tighter to his face. "You mean before I expose you, before I shatter whatever legacy you think you've built?"

"I mean before you do something you'll regret."

"The only thing I regret is ever trusting you."

"I know you're close to something, Karl. Word is, you've stopped taking orders for bioterrorism products. It's not because you've won the lottery, so I figure you've got your crew working on something else, something big enough to forgo cash flow. That tells me you're confident in whatever it is, and you're close to rolling it out. One of your scientists defected. I'm guessing he had an attack of conscience. That—and the very nature of the work you do—tells me that what you have in mind is very nasty."

He sighed into the phone, a raspy gasp that turned Litt's stomach.

"Listen to me. Maybe you're right, maybe I care only about myself, maybe I've always been that way. But that's not you, Karl. I've seen your capacity to love. Has your heart really hardened so much?"

"Yes." A cold, solid syllable.

"I'm trying to tell you: You don't have to do what you're planning. We can work something out."

"I've worked it out, and you're too late."

"What?" Kendrick said. "What have you done?"

"You'll find out soon enough."

"If that's true, why did you hire killers?"

Litt laughed. "You know as well as I do, for every exposed secret, ten new ones need protecting. Now, more than ever, I need my privacy."

"Since you've played your hand?"

"You can say I waited for a royal flush."

"Did you get everything back?"

He's fishing, Litt thought. "I'm short one biologist."

"Another one?"

"No, the same one. He was a good man."

"Apparently too good for you."

"Good-bye, Kendrick."

"Karl."

Litt hung up. Kendrick was difficult to read. For him, the day's events could be over . . . or he was still investigating, seeing what was there to find . . . or he had the chip. Litt didn't put much stock in this last possibility. He believed Kendrick would have hinted that the game was over, that after all the battles he'd lost, he'd won the war. More likely, he would continue to poke around, maybe find Despesorio's trail or something he'd left behind. Litt hoped Atropos was as good as his reputation.

"Soon it won't matter," he said out loud. "Old man, you're about to find out how just how rock-hard my heart has become."

Kendrick disconnected and sat in his wheelchair, staring

at the phone. One hand picked at the wool blanket covering his legs. His other hand went to his mouth. He snipped off a sliver of finger-nail between his teeth and examined the result. God was gazing at him, and he shifted his eyes to gaze back. Nestled in a felt-lined cup holder in the arm of his chair, a God-head pipe cast a disapproving look on Kendrick's agitation.

"I know," he whispered at the face, "but it's him, not me. What choice do I have?"

Kendrick had first beheld the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1958, when he attended the funeral mass of Pius XII as Eisenhower's secretary of state. The potency of Michelangelo's brush had stunned him: the luster of Ezekiel's garments, evil Haman's dramatic crucifixion, the rising saints and tortured sinners of The Last Judgment; all of it rendered among intricate columns and arches and pedestals that the artist had painted on the ceiling's smooth plane. But nothing took his breath away like the visage of God as He was creating Adam. Its combination of strong features and tender expression portrayed the perfect balance of power and compassion, superiority and love.

Back in the States, he found himself pondering that sweeping beard of Michelangelo's God, the granite nose and forehead, the purposeful eyes. In God's face, Kendrick discovered the potential of man, the symbol of the way he wanted to live out the rest of his life. He secured the finest raw meerschaum Eskisehir had to offer—this was three years before the Turkish government banned the export of meerschaum block—and sent it to the most renowned Viennese carver. What he received back was a three-inch-tall, three-dimensional carving in white meerschaum clay. It matched the Sistine head of God right down to the bulging vein in His temple, the arch of concentration in His brow, the way His beard rose up the jawline only to the earlobe. It was a masterpiece of a masterpiece.

It was also a pipe, with an amber stem curving up from the back of the head and a bowl whittled into the crown. Over the years, the meerschaum had absorbed nicotine from countless bowls of tobacco, coloring and highlighting the creases of God's face in a cinnamon glow. It was aging much more gracefully than Kendrick's own craggy countenance.

He was convinced the face on the pipe changed ever so subtly, even if only in his mind's eye, to help guide him. When he was having doubts, God gave him a look of strength, of encouragement; when he was righteously angry, God scowled at the offender with him. Now God was saying, Take care of this, Kendrick. It's why I gave you so much strength, so many resources.

After a long moment he gestured, and a man in Air Force blues stepped over.

"Sir?"

"He was trying to find out if we had something on him. And he claims to have set something in motion. Send in another team. We need to locate whatever it is he's missing."

The captain walked away, his heels clicking on the hardwood floor and echoing slightly in the big, antebellum ballroom that Kendrick had converted into his command center. Leaving his home had come to require more energy than he could afford to expend. But he could not retire or die until he had tied up the one loose end that could wipe out everything he had worked for, his country, his name. He had to find Litt and eliminate him forever.

He considered calling the captain back to remind him that the last team had been sloppy, hardly the surgeon Karl had found. More like surgeons with chain saws. But he decided the method wasn't his business; he cared only about the outcome. Granted, last time the outcome stank, but he wasn't in the field. He had learned a long time ago to let the experts do their thing. Give them an objective and get out of their way.

Would innocent civilians die? Maybe. He hoped not, but he hoped even more for a way to stop Karl.

He avoided making eye contact with God.

seventeen

For a man of letters, Jeff Hunter found himself often thinking about numbers. On his mind at the moment: six. That was the average number of work-related questions or suggestions he fielded during his morning journey from the doors of the New York Times building to his desk on the third floor. More than the hellos or the great-story-yesterdays. No, what he could count on hearing was something like, "That drug dealer didn't really tell you that, did he?" or "I heard from a source that you got that detail wrong," or—the winner by a mile—"I've got a great story for you, Jeff!" Six times on average. Once, the day after his Pulitzer nomination, twenty-eight people suddenly had brilliant story ideas Jeff just had to pursue. Twenty-eight. Only a dozen had congratulated him.

Today the lobby security guard scored number one: "Hey, Mr. Hunter, that story you did on college hazings? I was wondering, my nephew—"

"Can I get back to you about that, Tom? Kinda in a hurry." He didn't slow down. To the elevators, push the button. Janet from HR evened things out: "Hi, Jeff. Are those new glasses?" Then she blew it: "If you have a minute, I thought of something you should write about. You know EQ—emotional intelligence quotient? I just heard of this test—"

As if he needed ideas.

He arrived at his cubicle, having fielded five opportunities for distraction. Not bad. But then he checked his e-mail—not part of the morning's count, but with a scoring system all its own. Forty-four new messages, even with a kick-butt spam blocker and his own kill filters that automatically deleted e-mails containing such obnoxious words as "idea," "lawyer," and George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." He tended to get a lot of messages with at least one of those nasty seven. At least he used to, prior to creating the kill filters.

One wife. Three kids. Two mortgages. A salary just over six figures.

Numbers. Maybe I should have been an accountant.

Except he loved being an investigative reporter. Corruption, greed, abuse of power—what could be better than uncovering these deeds and exposing the perpetrators? In Hunter's book, nothing.

He started sorting through the e-mails. Delete. Delete. Delete.

He came to one with the subject line, "The story of the century"— a slight twist on the usual "Story of the year!" He opened it and was surprised to find it blank. Some story. Then he noticed the attachment, something called "First_Strike.xls." A spreadsheet. Or, more likely, a virus.

"I don't think so," he said out loud and hit the delete key. He'd gone through a dozen more e-mails when he thought about the spreadsheet again. What if it really was a big story? The blank message was a deviation from the norm; most people didn't seem to know how to stop once they started typing a message to him.

He opened his trash folder, then double-clicked on "The story of the century." He checked the return address. It was an anonymous e-mail resender he recognized. He received at least a few nasty-grams a week with return addresses that were untraceable, thanks to web sites that believed in a person's right to anonymity. In his experience, anonymity over the Internet meant trouble. Then again, Deep Throat

went nameless for thirty years. Most whistleblowers preferred it that way. He eyed the icon that represented the attached file. If it was a virus, the company's computer guys could take care of it. And his computer backed itself up every evening, so he wouldn't lose much, in a worst-case scenario. He selected the file and opened it.

His monitor displayed a list of names, addresses, and, on most records, what appeared to be social security numbers. He scrolled down. The list went on and on. He hit the button that jumped him to the last entry. Exactly ten thousand.

Scrolling back up, he recognized some names—politicians, celebrities, business leaders. Of course, these could be average joes who only shared the names of famous people. There was also a large number of names he didn't recognize. What did any of these people have in common? Why were they on this list? Why was he sent the list, and who sent it? The social security numbers bothered him. The list could have come from one of the stolen data files that made the news every week—hacked credit card companies, hospitals, schools. Hardly the story of the century.

There was only one way to piece this puzzle together. He chose a name at random, opened an Internet phone directory, slipped on his Telephone headset, and let his computer dial the number.

The car, sleek, black, and low, roared through the streets

of Paris at dizzying speeds. It plunged into a traffic tunnel, slalomed between pillars, and zipped past slower cars.

"This is where Princess Di crashed," Bobby Waddle said. His eyes darted like Geiger counter needles as he assessed approaching dangers and opportunities to skirt them. He risked a quick swipe at his nose and wiped what came away on his jeans. He sniffed hard to avoid another such distraction.

Next to him, Cole Martin scrunched his nose. "Who?"

"She was going to be queen of England. Mom liked her."

Bobby's car left the ground as it came out of the tunnel onto Pont de l'Alma. Biting pavement again, the rear tires spun with unfocused power and caused the back end to skitter into the side of a taxicab. Sparks flew, and the speedometer instantly dropped ten miles per hour. He was doing only eighty-five now.

He glanced at the rearview mirror and didn't like what he saw: another sleek sports car, this one red, gaining quickly. He pushed a button and released a thick stream of oil onto the roadway. His rival spun out of control and crashed into a bus.

"No fair!" Cole yelled.

"The oil was an upgrade I picked up on the last lap," Bobby said, laughing. He coughed and reminded himself not to laugh.

Cole threw down his controller. On the lower half of the television's split screen, his car was on fire. Words flashed over it—Respawn: HIT BUTTON A.

"Come on. It's no fun by myself," Bobby said. His eyes never left the screen. His fingers moved over the controller with robotic efficiency.

"You always win!" Cole complained.

Bobby set the controller in his lap and turned to his friend. He coughed. His chest felt tight, and it hurt. "I've been playing longer than you. You want me to let you win?"

"No. I just . . . I don't know. I don't like this game anymore."

"Wanna play Halo?"

Cole shook his head.

"Quake?"

"No."

"What do you want to do?"

"How about Nerf-gun tag?"

That sounded good. They'd been on the Xbox for about an hour, as long as his mom allowed him per day.

"It," he said.

"You're always it."

"All right, you be it." He turned off the TV and dropped the wireless controllers into a drawer. As they were heading out the back door, the phone rang.

Bobby's mother yelled down the stairs: "Bobby, could you get that, honey?"

"Aw, Mom!" But his words weren't as loud as he thought they should be. His lungs just couldn't push them out. He decided it was easier to answer the phone than to argue.

"Hello?" He watched Cole pick a Nerf gun out of the toy box on the deck and check it for sponge bullets.

"May I speak to Robert Waddle, please?" A man's voice.

"Who is this?"

"Jeff Hunter, from the New York Times."

"We already get a newspaper."

"I'm not calling about a subscription. Is Robert Waddle there?"

Cole was waving at him to come. He waved back.

"That's me, but nobody calls me Robert. Just Bobby."

"You live in Castle Creek, right? New York?"

"It's next to Binghamton."

There was a pause. "Is your dad also named Robert?"

"His name was Philip. He's dead." He was getting annoyed.

"I'm sorry. Did he die recently?"

"When I was a baby."

"When you were what? I'm sorry."

"A baby. I have a cold."

"How old are you now?"

"Ten. I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."

Cole had jumped off the deck and was making his way toward the woods at the back of the property. Bobby wanted to play around the house, but Cole thought because Bobby wasn't there, he got to choose the rules. Dang it.

"That's right, you shouldn't. But let me just ask one thing. Has anything unusual happened to you lately?"

"Like what?"

"Oh, I don't know. An accident, or has anybody—"

"Bobby, who is it?" His mom whisked into the kitchen and held out her hand for the phone.

"Some guy . . ." He placed the handset into her palm, glad to be done with it, and bolted toward the door.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," his mother said. She raised a finger to tell him to hold on. "Who is this, please?" She listened for three seconds, then hung up. "I don't have time for salesmen. Did you sweep the garage like I asked?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You're so good. Come here." She touched his forehead. "Still warm. How do you feel?"

"Stuffy. Tight right here." He patted his chest.

"Worse than this morning?"

"A little."

"That means a lot. Don't stay out too long, and stay out of the brook."

"Aw, Mom."

"Do you want to not go out at all?"

He shook his head.

"Okay, have fun." She slapped his bottom, and he ran out the door. Cole was nowhere in sight.

A kid. What was it Alice said in Wonderland? Curiouser

and curiouser. Jeff Hunter typed a note on the line that contained Robert Waddle's name. He scrolled down a ways and selected another.

"The lobster cakes and Dom Perignon sound lovely,"

Gretchen Gaither told the woman sitting beside her on the couch. Her smile faltered slightly. "But they're out of our price range."

The woman touched Gretchen's hand. "For your fortieth anniversary? Why not splurge?"

She thought about it. It would be nice. Just this once. She knew Jim would go along with it . . . and then quietly work a few weeks of double shifts to pay for it. She couldn't do that to him.

"I'm afraid not," she said. "What else do you have?"

The woman looked disappointed—or disgusted. She leaned over to a large volume of menus and photographs on the coffee table, flipped a few pages, then a few pages more. "Bruschetta and Torciano Fragolino? Fourteen dollars a bottle."

Gretchen nodded. Jim would have hated this meeting with the caterer. It would have reminded him that things hadn't turned out the way they had dreamed. Still, he had always provided for their needs and had found a way to put their two children through college. It had been a little easier when she worked as a substitute teacher. But two years ago, her arthritis had grown too painful to ignore or sufficiently medicate. And an already tight budget became even tighter. She'd told him that their anniversary needed no special commemoration, other than their own remembrances of the happy times they'd shared. But he had insisted: "Ask the kids to come, invite some friends. Let's have a little party—catered, because the guest of honor shouldn't do the work."

"How many people?" the woman asked.

"About thirty, with the kids and their families."

The caterer looked around the small living room. "Have you thought about renting a banquet room? They can be had for a very reasonable price."

"Our backyard has hosted many a birthday party," Gretchen said, smiling at the memories. "I think it'll do for this."

The phone rang and she excused herself.

She found the cordless handset on the dining room table. "Hello?"

"Gretchen Gaither?"

"Yes?"

"Jeff Hunter, with the New York Times. Do you have a few moments?"

After speaking to the Gaither woman, Hunter disconnected

with a mouse click. Retired schoolteacher. No recent problems with financial institutions or anyone else that she could think of. Seemed like a sweet lady. He could tell his call had spooked her. He hoped she didn't follow up with a call to the news desk or, worse, to the police. He wasn't ready to answer questions, and he wasn't ready to let the list go.

Andrew Wallenski looked at the wall of the boys' restroom

and shook his head. Kids these days. To know such words in middle school was bad enough, but to actually spray paint them on a public wall! No respect. Not for property. Not for the people who had to clean up their messes. If they were his kids, they'd show respect, that was for sure.

He opened the can of white latex paint and poured it into a pan. He'd tried scrubbing graffiti off the walls before. The wall paint had come off with the spray paint, and he'd had to recover the entire wall anyway. Waste of time. Waste of paint. Fool kids. He draped a drop cloth over the tops of the urinals and had run the roller up three feet of wall, dulling but not obscuring a big letter S, when the mobile phone in his back pocket jangled.

A dozen calls later, Hunter had nothing. He'd spoken to a mother in Denver whose infant son was on the list; a sixteen-year-old girl in Dallas who was late for her waitressing job and didn't want to talk; a father in Chicago who wanted to know why a stranger was asking about his seven-year-old daughter; and two women and three men, all of whom had no clue why they'd be on a list sent to a news reporter. Of course he'd encountered wrong, unlisted, and disconnected numbers; busy signals; unanswered calls; and answering machines. But none of those counted. No journalist worth his press pass let that stuff deter him from a story. Problem was, he wasn't sure he had a story. Just a list of names.

He had called a Times entertainment reporter in LA to ask about the celebrities on the list, but she had nothing to report. Biggest news was that the workaholic director Lew Darabont, also on Hunter's list, had failed to show up for a script read-through—the first time in his career. A studio publicist announced that Darabont was suffering from exhaustion and would take a few days off.

Hunter then reached a senator at his Washington office. No news there, except that he was furious over a narrowly defeated tort reform bill he had helped draft. He ranted for three minutes, then apologized, saying he hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. "Fighting a cold," he'd explained. "It's got me down, and I think it wants to be the flu."

That was another thing Hunter had discovered. There seemed to be a high percentage of people with colds. Hunter didn't know when cold season was and wondered if it was at different times of year in different parts of the country. He made a note to check it out.

He'd talked about or to five kids and twelve adults, nine males and eight females, six well-known people and twelve nobodies. Scattered around the country. No rhyme, no reason. No story.

A cub reporter appeared at his desk. The kid was helping him research a story on transit cops making a sport of beating up vagrants in the subway tunnels. He was excited about interviews he had conducted and wanted Hunter to listen to the MP3 files. Hunter took a last look at the mysterious list of names. He closed the document. Just another WAS story—wait and see. He had eighteen others like it.

eighteen

Julia Matheson checked into a downtown motel under her married sister's name and paid cash. It was the kind of place that didn't ask for identification or a major credit card, and couldn't care less who you were or what you did in the room, as long as you didn't destroy the property and you paid in advance. She requested a room on the back side of the building, out of sight of people cruising the boulevard.

The room had brown indoor-outdoor carpeting, a chipped Formica table bolted to the wall next to the bed, a threadbare bedspread, and a hand-printed sign on the back of the door that read NO cooking in room. The smell of fried hamburgers tinged the air.

Julia dropped her purse and laptop case on the bed, along with a big bag from Wal-Mart containing a change of clothes, a gym bag, and other items. She went to the window and opened it, then fell onto the bed beside the bags. Most of the acoustic spray had come off the ceiling, probably a little here and a little there for the past thirty years. There was a big brown-rimmed water stain in one corner. She tried identifying the other splotches: ketchup, coffee, a smashed insect. She sighed and closed her eyes.

What was she doing here? She should have been back in her duplex in Atlanta, cleaning up the dishes, helping her mother to the tub. She needed to call her. It wasn't that her mother's MS rendered her completely helpless, but more that she'd be worried. Julia rarely came home late, and when she did, she always called first. She didn't know what she'd say. Not anything that would make anyone tapping the phone decide to stake out the house and wait for her or anything that would give away her location.

Listen to her: tapping the phone!

But that was her reality right now. Someone with loads of intelligence and highly sophisticated technical capabilities had attacked them and killed Goody and Vero. They had intercepted the SATD signal, which this morning she would have said was impossible. And Goody had recognized one of the assailants, an undercover cop. What did that mean? Was a government agency involved in the hit? A rogue director? Or was the guy freelancing?

Now that Vero was dead, was it over? She didn't know, but she remembered something Goody had said during the investigation of a serial killer: "There's no end to evil."

She wondered if Jodi Donnelley knew that her husband was dead. Probably Edward Molland, the LED's director of domestic operations, had told her. Julia wanted to be there, to hold her, to comfort the boys. At the same time, she wished there was no reason to comfort Donnelley's family. She opened her eyes, turning her mind away from what she wished. It all hurt too much. She needed to keep her head straight, her thoughts on the problem.

She sat up and scooted back to lean against the wall, the nearly disintegrated foam pillow propped behind her lower back. She pulled her knees up and hugged her legs. Her heart felt wedged in her throat.

Okay . . . Goody called a little after six. Despesorio Vero showed up at CDC. What kind of name is that? What was that accent? Mexican? Did he travel to the States, or did he live here? Why did he want to see Mark Sweeney? National Center for Infectious Diseases . . . National Center for Infectious Diseases.

Pressure behind her eyes. She wanted to cry . . . and she didn't want to.

What are the five stages of grief? Or are there six? Denial . . . anger . . . depression . . . No, bargaining, then depression . . .

Ahhhh! Goody went into the Excelsior. The SATD was working. His wire was working. Some white noise, maybe the hotel's AC. He ordered orange juice, then Vero came in, asked if he was Sweeney.

Her top teeth found a ridge on her bottom lip, the scab from having bitten into it earlier. She bit down, feeling the pain, letting it move her away from her grief. She tasted blood.

He said Vero didn't look well. Then . . .

She remembered the gunfire, how loud it was through the ear-piece. Goody had yelled. People were screaming in the background.

She closed her eyes, pinching out a tear. She bit harder on her lip, swallowed against the lump in her throat, fought the flood at her eyes.

If Julia had distracted herself by stepping outside and

looking north, she would have seen in the distance the shape of Missionary Ridge. It was discernable at that time of evening by the lights radiating from the large homes perched on it. If it had been pointed out to her, she could have seen, near the very peak of the mountain, a light glowing in the study of the recipient of Goody's last mortal words.

Dr. Allen Parker sat at his desk, a fire roaring in a nearby hearth, Mozart's Requiem streaming through ceiling-mounted speakers. He was torn between two piles of books and papers. One pile contained everything he needed to finish an article he was writing for the Journal of the American Medical Association on the benefits of partial liquid ventilation for patients with severe respiratory failure. It was already three days overdue.

The other pile interested him more. He pulled a book off the top of the stack—Field Virology.

"Okay, Mr. Donnelley," he said out loud. "You got me. Now let's see if you knew what you were talking about."

He turned to the table of contents, ran his finger down the chapter titles, then turned to chapter 39. A single word in large type at the top of the page read Filoviridae. As he began to read, words and phrases seared into his mind—hetnorrhagic fever, outbreak, abrupt onset of illness, death, no known vaccine. A headache brewed behind his eyes, but he continued reading. Epidemic. Biosafety level 4. Human pathogen. Mortality.

Occasionally he'd look up from an article or book to Google a phrase on the iMac on his desk. One online search would lead to another, and twenty minutes would pass before he'd return to the hard copy he'd been reading.

More than a few times he'd light a cigarette and promptly forget about it. He'd find a butt attached to a delicate cylinder of ashes in the ashtray and have to light another one. In his study, he puffed away as if it were the best thing he could do. Erlanger had become smoke-free, forcing him to smoke outside with the other diehards. It made him feel ostracized and dirty. More times than not, when people saw him in the hall heading for the door with cig and lighter in hand, they'd say, "Doctors smoke?" like Cops commit crimes? He'd answer, "This one does."

He liked to think he didn't care what people thought, but he did. At thirty-six he was already one of the leading thoracic surgeons in the country, thanks to a nearly flawless record in the operating room. That, and a procedure he had invented that happened to save a senator's life. He had been featured in Time magazine as a "Top Ten Doc"; other articles followed in news, medical, and financial publications. Even his house got coverage in Architectural Digest and Southern Living. Before long, movie and television producers began offering ungodly sums for his opinion of their shows' medical veracity. He was one of the few practicing surgeons with a Hollywood agent; a tidbit he carefully dropped into as many conversations as possible.

Parker pushed back his chair and stood. The tambour clock on the mantel told him it was a little after nine; he'd been in research mode for over two hours. The rest of the house was dark, except for the light over the stove, which spilled into the hall and glowed faintly outside his study doors. It reminded him that he had thrown a Hungry Man turkey dinner in the microwave and forgotten about it. He snatched the nearly empty pack of Camels off the desk, shook one out, and lit it with habitual fluidity. He held the smoke in his lungs for a reassuring moment, then sent it billowing over his head. Then he sat down again, pulled the iMac monitor closer, and tapped into a medical database.

It was going to be a long night.

nineteen

Finally, some good news. Litt had just heard from one of his "control subjects"—people on his First Wave list whom he had paid to keep him informed. A school janitor in Chicago had called to let him know that a New York Times reporter had contacted him. The reporter wanted to know why the janitor's name was on a list he had received.

Litt knew it was too early for the reporter to develop definitive conclusions about the list. But either the reporter would make follow-up calls and realize everybody on the list was getting sick, seriously sick, or he would become aware of news reports around the country of people getting sick and eventually make the connection. It wouldn't be long before one of the reporters who received the list realized that someone knew who would get sick before they'd gotten sick.

And that's when Litt would make his entrance onto the world stage.

All he could do now was wait. But he was anxious, and for years his only source of relaxation had been lab work. So he left his room and headed for his laboratory. He would find something to do.

Litt walked stiffly, feeling the lack of fluid in his joints, feeling bone rub against bone. It didn't help that his skin itched all over as well—more than usual. Talking to Kendrick had taken its toll. It had dredged up painful memories, which took away from his ability to handle the here and now.

Kendrick Reynolds. He wished he'd never met the man, even if it meant dying on the docks with his father. He took that back. He had not met Rebecca then, and that was an experience that made everything else bearable. She was morphine in an otherwise painful existence.

He smiled, felt his bottom lip crack. Doubtful you'd find that line in a love song. But it was true. And it was true that she was gone, leaving only the pain.

His father had expected better for him. Then the Reich had fallen, and so had his father. Que sera, he thought bitterly.

A fluorescent tube overhead sputtered and hummed. He shuffled a little farther to a bench and sat. Today, he was tired. A good day to stay in bed. If only he had that luxury. He closed his eyes.

And remembered.

1945

Ten-year-old Karl Litt yearned for sleep. His muscles and

tendons throbbed with fatigue; his eyes were burning embers pressed into his head. Still, he willed his body to stand tall. He resisted the temptation to gaze at the peacefully sparkling stars and tendrils of fog wafting over the harbor's black water. Doing so would surely lull him to sleep. He could not afford that.

He fixed his gaze on the underseeboot moored at the battered wharf. Scars from vicious battles creased and pocked her metal skin. Unimaginable clashes had beaten and blasted away huge chunks of gray paint. She appeared ready for scuttling, not for sailing the most crucial mission of the war.

The U-boat rose on a swell from a deep ocean current. Shadows shifted on her hull, and her entire length seemed to flex into bands of impenetrable flesh, unbeatable muscle. In fact, she was only one in ten U-boats to make it this far. She had cast hundreds of Allied ships to the sea floor. On this voyage, however, she was fangless; the captain had jettisoned the torpedoes to accommodate more precious cargo: gold, scientific equipment, Aryan blood.

Cartoonish insignias had replaced U-boat identification numbers when the war started, an attempt to mystify the fuhrer's U-bootwaffe. The one on this submarine—a grinning devil—glared with vivid white eyes from its position on the partially crushed conning tower. Karl glared back, daring the seafaring imp to blink first.

The shadow of a workman splashed against the conning tower, obscuring the devil face. Karl watched the man shuffle up the gangplank, hugging what appeared to be an extraordinarily heavy crate. Red-faced, he waddled to the open deck hatch, set it down with a thud, and slid it into the arms of another, who would stow it in the belly of the metal beast.

Karl watched the man lumber away from the hatch, chapped hands kneading his lower back. When the man reached the gang-plank, Karl shifted his vision to the conning tower again. He had stopped tracking the workmen's pendulum-like movements from wharf to U-boat and back again; the glare of the naked bulbs near the crates shot daggers into his eyes.

He surveyed the dock. The few fathers who had arrived here stood away from one another, watching the workmen with dazed expressions. Karl had the great privilege of witnessing this historic event to its end. It was a privilege commensurate with the daunting responsibility he bore for their survival—for the survival of the Reich. Like the creaking war vessel before him, his adolescent shoulders did not appear up to the task. But only the sons and daughters of the Reich's top scientists could possibly carry on the battle now; they had been trained, they were ready.

Absently, he ran a hand over his filthy jacket.

Standing at rigid attention next to him, the boy's father tugged on the front of his own jacket for what must have been the hundredth time. He was trying to flatten wrinkles that were stiffened by too much sweat and blood and grime ever to lay smooth again. With blown-out knees, unraveled stitching, and rumpled hat, the uniform was at odds with the man's proud posture. Only the Ritterkreuz—the cherished Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross that hung around his neck—gleamed in the lamplight.

Josef Litt was a man of exquisite refinement. If not for the triumph of knowing his life's work would continue through his son, he would find the humility of his current situation unbearable. He wore the uniform and title of an SS-Oberstgruppenfiihrer, a lofty military rank reflective of his authority, but certainly not of his duties. Although he had killed, he was no soldier. In the lab he had shown how men in white coats could turn men of muscle into pathetic drones. His experiments had earned him the attention of the Supreme Commander. Before long, he was head of a top secret research laboratory, with an SS regiment—and title—at his disposal.

Karl was proud of his intimate knowledge of his father, an otherwise guarded man. He turned to appraise the familiar, crisp profile of the man who was now entrusting the Aryan dream to him.

Approaching footfalls drew his attention to the wharf. One SS soldier had broken away from the other four. Three diamonds on his left collar marked him as an officer. His gray uniform looked disheveled and grubby, but it was a model of German aristocracy compared to Karl's clothes.

The soldier moved to within a handsbreadth of Josef Litt. He angled his head away from the boy and bent closer and whispered in his father's ear.

Josef nodded tersely, without hesitation.

The soldier glanced back at the workmen. Finished, they were talking quietly and waiting for their pay so they could go home and at long last fill their families' bellies. He pulled a Schmeisser submachine gun from a strap over his shoulder. He positioned the weapon so only the boy and his father could see him yank back its bolt, chambering the first round. He flicked his eyes toward Karl. The look surprised the boy; the man's face reflected doubt, even sorrow. Then

the soldier turned away, leaving Karl to wonder. With the gun hidden behind him, the soldier marched toward the workers.

Karl felt his father's hand on the back of his head. The elder Litt's voice was cold as an executioner's blade.

"Sei fleisig, mein Sohn." Learn well, my son.

The hard lessons had started six days before, when his

father had awakened him after midnight. "It's time, Karl," he had said breathlessly.

"I'm ready, Father."

In the anemic light of the foyer, there was a teary farewell with Karl's mother. Hair in curlers, she wore a thin beige nightgown that smelled vaguely of sweat. She alternately embraced him crushingly, kissed his face, and babbled about how much she loved him. He stood stoically unresponsive; her antics shamed him. She had known for more than half a year this day would come. Karl broke free of her arms and strode out the door without looking back.

Several trips along the rubble-strewn streets of Berlin filled the car with three other children—two boys, one of whom wept incessantly, and a cheery little girl who informed them that she was five. Travel was slow as they moved against a pounding tide of refugees heading into Berlin.

Two hours later, they lost their car to three German army officers determined to escape the wrath of both the Allied war machine and an increasingly unstable fuhrer. What followed was a blur of trudging through fields and swamps and dense forests.

The thought of missing the U-boat made his father nearly insane with panic. They caught an hour's sleep here, a couple more there. They rummaged through heaps of trash and the clothes of decaying corpses, looking for scraps of food. Josef feared all pedestrians, and vehicles even more so. He instructed the others to hit the ground and stay flat at his signal.

Once, Josef told the children to wait, and he loped off toward a farmhouse. Karl thought he looked like a wounded beast, bounding toward shelter under the glare of a hateful moon. He returned thirty minutes later with two loaves of bread and a small bag of carrots and potatoes. The bread was splattered with a dark, coppery-smelling liquid, impossible to identify in the night. The group ate it without question.

Sometime after that a fat man in tatters sprang out from behind a stone wall. He grabbed at the children, demanding food. Josef rushed to him and knocked him into the mud. In an instant, he was sitting on the man's fat belly. A huge knife appeared. Josef pressed the blade against the man's bulging neck. Karl saw muscles strain in his father's jaw and forearms and caught a flash of gritted teeth: the wounded beast cornered.

"Don't try me," his father said. "You won't survive to tell the tale."

They did not move for a long moment, then his father pushed off the man and started walking again. Always walking.

The downed man gasped for breath. Blood flowed from what looked to Karl like a small, smiling mouth etched into his neck. But the man pulled himself up, held a dirty handkerchief to his wound, and stumbled off in the other direction.

They staggered into Rostock on the Baltic Sea late the next afternoon. After three years of Royal Air Force bombings, the town was a crumbling mess. Tiny billows of dust danced like ghosts in the empty streets. Shutters clung to darkened windows. If the Brits had failed to completely destroy the place, they had succeeded in beating the spirit out of its people.

They rounded a ravaged brick building and faced the harbor—but no U-boat. The opaque water was smooth and undisturbed. The scorched pilings of shattered docks jutted from the water like rotten teeth. Only the nearest dock had barely survived, the huge sliding doors of its warehouse intact and drawn tight.

Karl turned to his father, who did not look devastated as Karl had expected, only worried. Josef held his hand up to Karl—Don't panic, it said—and walked on, his hand still raised, forgotten.

As they drew closer, one of the warehouse doors screeched open and SS soldiers stepped out. The SS commander explained that the U-boat was waiting thirty miles offshore. Josef's mood lifted; he laughed. "Call it in," he said.

Karl lumbered into the gutted warehouse. A ragtag bunch of children—most of them nowhere near puberty—sprawled in boredom and fatigue over mountains of crates. He discovered later that they numbered thirty-five, including himself. Among them were a half dozen men, unshaven, unbathed, and looking utterly miserable. The scientists and chaperones his father had told him about. Water from an early-afternoon rain shower dripped off exposed rafters, producing a light melody on the crates and concrete floor.

He located a boy about his size, sitting on a short stack of pallets, and hobbled over to him. Karl had lost a shoe in a treacherous ravine several days before and now wore only a bulky rag on that foot.

"What's your name?" Karl demanded.

"Gregor." His voice was weak, as though he had no energy for the task. His face was scratched and dirty. Karl knew his was the same.

"Your shoes—give them to me."

Gregor looked him up and down. "No."

Karl moved in quickly. One hand clenched Gregor's neck, the other caught the arm that had come up in defense. He touched his lips to the boy's ear. "Don't try me," he whispered harshly. "You won't survive to tell the tale."

He took a step back and smiled wickedly at Gregor's stunned expression. Then Gregor lowered his head and untied the shoes.

Six hours later, he watched as the SS officer with the submachine gun hidden behind him used subtle hand signals to organize his soldiers into a crescent around the dockworkers. The military men eyed the officer for a signal, as an orchestra would watch its conductor. Just as one of the workers tossed a cigarette aside and turned his head in suspicion, the officer nodded. He swung the gun around and started firing.

When the other soldiers joined in, the sound was like the sky ripping open from one end to the other.

Within seconds it was over. Smoke billowed like souls into the night, disappearing as it caught the wind and escaped the light. After a moment, the boy felt his father's hand pressure him to walk forward toward the U-boat. At the gangplank, they turned to each other. All the things he could say and do ran through the boy's head, but finally he simply held out his hand to give his father a handshake. Instead of grabbing Karl's hand in return, his father thrust his arm forward, head-high, and said quietly, "Heil, Hitler!"

Karl straightened and returned the gesture. Their eyes locked and the boy whispered, "Heil. . . Father." He hungrily scanned his father's strong features. The man smiled softly and lowered his arm. Josef snapped his head at the warship, and Karl boarded.

From the bridge atop the conning tower, he watched the wharf shrink with distance. He had turned and was about to climb into the sub when a single sharp crack of pistol fire startled him. When he jumped back to the rail, he saw all the men who'd stayed behind: his father, the soldiers, and the scientist-chaperones. They were huddled on the dock, faces turned down looking at a body. One of them leaned over and picked something up. He held it to his head, a shot rang out, and he fell. Another man stepped forward, picked up the gun, and repeated the process.

Karl watched his father stoop down, stand up, and stick the barrel of the gun into his mouth. His arm appeared to be shaking, but at that distance, Karl couldn't be sure. He was facing the harbor, seemingly watching the U-boat.

Does he see me? Karl wondered.

For a moment, Karl forgot who he was supposed to be. Gone from his mind were the grueling lessons he had endured since age three: what it meant to be part of the Master Race, to be Josef Litt's son, to be a scientist with special knowledge of nature's way . . . None of it mattered now. Only his father's acknowledgment.

His father yanked the gun out of his mouth and stared across the increasing expanse of water toward the U-boat. His shoulders seemed to fall slightly.

He does! He sees me!

He was about to raise his arm and call out when the U-boat, which had been making a wide bank out of the harbor, suddenly passed a shoulder of land, and the dock vanished. Five seconds later, the last shot rang out.

Karl stood on the bridge a long time, sea spray slapping his face, stinging his eyes. Finally he lowered himself into the boat.

When the captain told him they were bound for Bahia

Blanca, Karl had imagined emerging into a bright Argentinian sun. But when they disembarked forty-five days later, it was into another moonless night. Soldiers in green uniforms ushered them toward a waiting bus. They filed past a tall man with a young, earnest face. "Wait!" the man said in German. He had an unsure smile on his face. He turned to look back at the U-boat, at the crew unloading boxes of unused supplies under the supervision of armed soldiers. To the children he said, "Where are the adults? Where are the scientists?" His German was heavily accented.

Karl stepped forward. "We are the scientists."

The man's smile broadened, then disappeared.

"Are you Herr Reynolds?" Karl asked. 'I am."

The boy withdrew an envelope from inside his shirt and held it out to the man. "My father asked me to give you this."

Reynolds tore open the envelope and read the letter inside, glancing often at the small faces before him. He lowered the letter and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he had reached some sort of decision.

"Very well, then," he said. His voice was strained. "Welcome, all of you!" He sighed and gestured toward the bus. "Please . . ."

The bus took them to an airfield; a plane took them to America.

Kendrick Reynolds eventually found families for the other children. Karl he adopted—though Karl refused his name. And while the boy's dockside claim that he and his peers were scientists had been an exaggeration, most of them were extraordinarily brilliant children with a foundation of scientific knowledge rivaling postgraduate students. From this foundation, Reynolds developed a program that made him powerful and wealthy. And Karl grew to love the man.

Until the betrayal.

twenty

The fire occasionally flickered and flared as it found a remnant of virgin wood to consume. But mostly it smoldered resentfully as it faded away. Still, the stone hearth held its heat and sent it into the den. Allen Parker came back to the world and realized he was hot. He pushed back from his desk, dead tired. He'd learned more about the topic of Donnelley's deathbed remarks than he'd ever wanted to know. Acid churned in his stomach.

He shut down his computer, saved the Mozart CD from yet another play-through, and meandered out of the den, switching off lamps as he went.

He stepped into the kitchen to turn off the light over the stove and remembered again the turkey dinner he'd left in the microwave. He pulled it out, peeled back the cellophane, and held up two pieces of meat with his thumb and index finger. He lowered them into his mouth and switched off the light with his other hand. In the master bedroom, he turned on the bedside lamp, stripped off his clothes, and pushed them into a chute. He heard them fall softly into a basket in the basement laundry room, where Maria, his part-time housekeeper, would wash and press them.

He walked naked into the bathroom and up to a panel set into the tile near the doorless shower stall. It was more of a shower

room,

really; some families lived in smaller spaces. He pushed a button that would bring the water temperature and pressure of the showerheads to a preconfigured setting. He checked himself out in the wall-sized mirror opposite the shower, pulling his belly in a little. He didn't look too bad, considering.

A bit of the exhaustion washed away under the steaming shower jets, replaced by a healthy, relaxed tiredness. He cranked his neck around, letting the stream massage his muscles. The heat, the pulsating pressure, the tropical sound of the water splashing against the tiles and reverberating between the walls—it all made holding on to the day's tension impossible. He was just rinsing the shampoo from his hair when the phone rang. He darted out of the shower, snatched a towel off a rung, ran into the bedroom, and grabbed the receiver on the fourth ring.

"Dr. Parker," he announced.

"You're out of breath, sir. You all right?" It was a man with a heavy Southern accent.

"Who is this?" He patted his face with the towel.

"Name's Detective Fisher. I'm investigatin' the murder of Goodwin Donnelley—the man you worked on in the ER today—and the other man who was killed with him."

The clock beside the bed glowed 11:18.

"Isn't it a little late to be calling, Detective Fisher? I'll be happy to talk with you in the morning, but I—"

"That's not why I'm callin'. I mean, not really. We've got ourselves a situation here, and we have reason to believe your life is in danger."

"My life?"

"Two of the nurses who assisted you with Donnelley died tonight. They were murdered."

"Murdered?" He sat heavily on the bed.

"As well as one of the EMTs who brought 'im in, I'm afraid. Tell ya the truth, Doctor, it wasn't until we got the call on him that we made the connection. We checked with the hospital, and they confirmed that the two women and the EMT assisted Donnelley after the shooting."

"What are you saying, Detective?" He wanted to hear it outright.

"What I am tryin' to tell you, Dr. Parker, is that someone—or multiple someones—is killin' off everyone who came in contact with this Donnelley guy before he died."

"Why?"

"Maybe you can help me with that one. I understand Donnelley spoke to you?"

"No."

"Well, sir, that's different from what one of your nurses, Gail Wagner, told me not ten minutes ago. If you—"

"Four nurses assisted me," Allen said, changing the subject. "What about the other two?"

"Like I said, I talked with Ms. Wagner by phone just a few minutes ago. We're sendin' a car over to her apartment right now. We can't reach the other nurse or the other EMT. And nobody seems to know where that special agent woman went."

"Julia Matheson?"

"Yeah, that's her. Even her own office in Atlanta's scratchin' their heads over her whereabouts. I hope that's not a bad sign. We've also picked up the bartender where they gunned down Donnelley and Vero, but I suspect nobody wants him. I think whoever's behind these killings is concerned about some kind of deathbed confession, somethin' Donnelley wouldn't have told just anyone unless he thought he was dyin'." Fisher waited for him to comment. "What's your take on that, Doctor?"

Allen said nothing.

"Dr. Parker, these murders all went down within the last two hours. Someone is moving mighty fast here, mighty fast. Now, sir, I'm sending over—"

A shadow flickered in the hallway outside his door, where the moonlight spilled in from the living room windows. For an instant, the dappled light was totally obscured—not the result of a passing bird or breeze-blown branch. Allen's stomach clenched tight, and his heart seemed to stop before kicking into high gear. The security system was not on. By habit, he set it right before climbing into bed. That way, he didn't have to disarm it to answer the door or wander outside. Some nights, he didn't use it at all.

"Okay?" Fisher was saying. "Dr. Parker?"

"I'm sorry?" His head was swimming. He couldn't move. From his position he could see down the entire hall that bisected the home's front half from its back. All he saw was blackness, spattered as usual with diffused moonlight. He couldn't tell Fisher he thought someone was already in the house. That might encourage them to abandon all caution and hurry to kill him. He figured his best chance for survival lay in not being caught off guard.

"I said I'm sendin' a cruiser over to your house right now, for your own protection. Lock your doors and windows and stay inside till it gets there. Don't open the door unless you see it outside, okay?"

"Uh, yeah, okay."

Could the intruder be listening in on an extension?

There was a moment of silence on the phone. Fisher obviously expected Allen to ask more questions, express more concern, protest this disruption of his life.

"Thank you, Doctor," Fisher finally said and hung up.

twenty-one

Allen dropped the cordless phone onto the bed.

Keeping his attention on the doorway, he reached under the bed and pulled out an aluminum baseball bat. In college, a series of dorm room break-ins had taught him the emotional comfort of accessible weaponry.

He backed into the bathroom and punched the button that turned off the shower. As the last droplets fell to the tile floor, he heard a thin creak come from somewhere down the hall. His mind flashed through an inventory of the house: What in it creaked? Which hinges needed oil? Which floorboards were loose? None came to mind. He was still holding the towel in his left hand. He let it drop; what was pride next to survival?

He tiptoed to the bedroom doorway, bat held high in both hands. He stepped into the hall and stopped, listening intently while letting his vision adjust to the dark. The light from the bedroom spilled into the hall only a few feet before surrendering to shadows.

Murdered, the cop had said. But he hadn't said how. Shot? Stabbed? Bludgeoned? Torn apart?

Stop it! Doesn't matter. Dead—that's all that counts. Don't want to be dead. Don't want to be dead.

Slowly he began to distinguish subtle shades of gray: the darker area of the linen closet door; the place where the hall opened up to the big foyer and living room; the place farther along the black, black hall where the weak glow from the embers in the fireplace barely marked the opening to the den.

He lifted his foot and inched it forward with the slowness of a cat's yawn. He set it down carefully, then waited, listened. He repeated the process with the other foot. His breathing seemed extraordinarily loud. He tried to take slower, shallower breaths but managed only a few before his lungs cried out for more oxygen to fuel the surge of adrenaline in his bloodstream. He had to will his leg to start another step.

He jumped as a flash of movement down the hall caught his eye. Gone now. Black moving in black. Someone could stand in the darkest parts of the hall, he realized, without being seen. And to that person, he would be perfectly silhouetted in the lighted rectangle of the bedroom doorway. The image of a hideous dark figure running toward him filled his imagination for a split moment. This was too much. He backed into the bedroom and shut the door.

Murdered.

He felt the breeze on his bare back. He turned to see the sheers that covered the glass opposite the bed billowing away from an open sliding door. He'd been in the room to change clothes and then to shower, and neither time had he opened that door. His mind raced.

The door was open. He hadn't opened it.

He could see the whole room fairly well, except for behind and under the bed and in the bathroom and walk-in closet. He weighed his options: bolt for the front door and hide outside? or into the bathroom, and hope no one was lurking there? or shut and lock the sliding door, search the bedroom, and guard it until the cops arrived?

He didn't like any of them but opted to stay in the bedroom. Trying to leave no flank exposed, he shuffled sideways toward the sliding door. He held the bat high in his right fist, keeping his left hand open and up in a posture of defense. As he moved closer to the door, the far side of the bed came into view. No one there.

He shuffled past the open bathroom and closet doors, the blackness within each seeming to shift ominously, teasingly. He strained his eyes, expecting one of the shadows to peel itself free and flash toward him. The tips of his left fingers were now touching the fluttering sheers. To shut the door, he had to reach out and grab the handle. If someone was waiting on the deck outside, he wouldn't know it until they were face-to-face.

He stretched through the sheers for the handle. For one suspended instant he peered out into the blackness of the deck, imagining the sparkle of a blade slicing through the air to impale him.

Then he got hold of the handle.

At that moment, when he was at the apex of his stretch and was just reversing direction to pull the door shut, he first felt, then heard footsteps on the carpet directly behind him. Without looking, barely thinking, he swung down with the bat and felt it connect with something—someone! In the edge of his vision, he saw a man, big, with something raised over his head. He used his grip on the door handle to propel himself forward. He felt wind on his back. Something made contact, shearing pain just below his shoulder blade. He swung his leg around and through the opening. In two steps he was at, then over the railing . . . falling through darkness.

The grassy earth below caught him with unkind arms. He crumpled, slamming his head painfully against it. He sprang up and ran for the woods where his backyard ended. He heard a thunk! and a divot of grass exploded near him, flying into the air and back down.

He was being shot at!

Fifty feet to the woods.

An irregular dot of blood-red light hovered like a firefly on the grass in front of him. Allen realized that the assailant was using a laser sight to target him. It spasmed back and forth, then vanished as it found his back. He jerked to the right. Immediately he heard the thunk! again. Another divot erupted from the yard.

Twenty feet.

He crashed into the heavy foliage . . . tumbling over the first thick branches . . . rolling onto heavy loam, twigs, more branches, stones . . . smashing into a thick oak. A dozen small wounds opened on his naked body. He rose facing his yard and saw a shape, black against the gray silhouette of the house, leaping as he had over the railing. The laser shot off into the sky, visible only when it pierced some mist. Before the figure landed, Allen was running again, blindly crashing through the deep woods. The ground fell away sharply. His bare feet slammed down on bruising round rocks and cutting sharp ones. Skeletal fingers of tree branches clawed at his face, his arms, his legs.

He plunged madly down the hill, trying to recall the topography, the placement of the area's roads and houses below. He wondered wildly if he'd find refuge or if a bullet would find him first. He heard the crunch of twigs behind him and pushed harder, rebounding off trees, tumbling and leaping forward, tumbling again. Holly bushes raked their thorns across his skin. His chest slammed into an unyielding branch, knocking him off his feet. He landed hard . . . was up again . . . pounding down the hill. . . slipping on ferns . . . flinching as limbs lashed his face, back, legs . . . fighting the urge to stop, to rest, to think.

The night had robbed the leaves and wildflowers of their brilliant daytime colors, leaving them with only shades of gray. He plowed through them, scrambling into prickly brambles, falling into blankets of ankle-high plants.

The moonlight was more hindrance than help. It cast a maze of shadows before him, deceiving him time and again, causing him to flinch away from thickets of razor branches that weren't there, only to send him crashing into ones that were. Far worse, he imagined its apathetic glare illuminating his pale skin like a beacon for his pursuer.

Trying to avoid catching a bullet in his brain, he added to his chaotic scramble a series of erratic zigs and abrupt zags. He knew this method of escape was noisy and didn't care: speed was his advantage now, not stealth.

He leaped over a thick clump of tangled vines, roots, and shrubs. His foot came down hard on earth that gave away. His leg sank into the ground, broke through something with a sharp crack, and stopped when the surface was up to his waist. His head flew forward. He raised his hands before his face before it hit a large, flat rock.

The wind knocked out of him, he gasped for breath as a plume of dust mushroomed up from the hole. The soil around his sunken legs began to collapse into the hole, wedging him more firmly in the earth. His foot must have crashed through a dried and rotten root system, the broken ends of which were now digging painfully into his foot, ankle, and shin.

As his breath came back, he waved away the dust and found himself staring at a name etched in stone: Ed Johnson. A notorious name in these parts, belonging to a man hung in 1906 for rape. Allen was in the old Negro cemetery, which dated back to the Civil War. He had fallen into Ed's grave, and what he had thought was a dried root system was more likely a rib cage. The ancient bones gouged at his ankle, ripped at his calf. He leaned onto his side and wiggled his leg. Something chalky ground under his heel. He turned onto his stomach, reached for the top of the headstone, and tugged. The earth around him shifted, and he pulled free.

He scampered away from the hole on all fours, then rolled onto his back, breathing hard. Trees converged high above, forming a leafy canopy through which moonlight seeped like rain. Those tall leaves danced on a breeze that Allen couldn't feel. Beyond them, faint wisps of clouds drifted by, flush with lunar radiance. Between the canopy and loamy ground, a fine mist hovered, stirring faintly.

He remembered that the cemetery occupied a patch of land where the slope leveled before dropping off again. It was a disrupted place. Time had seen the surface either collapse in on rotted caskets or swell into great mounds, pushed by unknown forces from below. The result was land as wavy as windblown seas. The wood itself contributed to the sense of fracture. It had moved in to reclaim its estate, sending dense bushes in to obscure toppled headstones, pencil-thin pines to impale graves like vampire stakes, gnarled roots to reach up through the ground like hands of the dead pleading for release from this distressed place.

Resting now, Allen began to feel every bruise, every cut, every abrasion on his body. His muscles hurt and his lungs burned. Acid churned in his stomach. He couldn't stay there; he had to find help. He listened for the snap of a twig, the scuff of a shoe. He rose to a sitting position and started to tuck his legs under him. If he stood slowly and walked carefully, he might be able to quietly weave his way down the mountain . . .

He stopped.

The hazy red beam of a laser panned the night air on a plane three feet above his head and stopped on the trunk of a tree six feet away, a burning red dot as vicious as a demon's eye.

twenty-two

Julia woke, still sitting on the bed, her back against the wall. She moved her head, feeling her neck tendons stretch and pop. She wiped drool off her chin. Most likely she had been snoring as well. Drooling and snoring—the only time she did either was when she was exhausted. This time it wasn't physical but mental and emotional exhaustion she had succumbed to.

She looked at the clock. It was late, but she needed to check on her mother. If she was having a bad day, she may not have moved from her bed, which meant no food, no drink, no meds. She kept a bedpan handy, but she hated to use it, and having it sit there dirty was to Mae Matheson akin to messing on the carpet.

Julia rolled off the bed, fished an anonymous calling card out of the Wal-Mart bag, and left the room. She found a phone booth at a gas station a mile from the motel; calling home, she would be more vulnerable to a trace than if she were to call nearly any other number. Mae answered on the fifth ring, sounding groggy.

"Hi. Are you okay?"

"Julia? I didn't hear from you. Where are you?"

"Mom . . ." Her voice cracked. Tears marshaled in her eyes.

Not now. Mom first.

"Have you been up? How are you feeling?"

"Oh yes, I'm fine. I made a sandwich and watched American Idol. I'm telling you, if that Jesse wins, I'll be so angry. He can't carry a tune in a suitcase . . ."

Julia listened, smiling sadly. She could tell her mother was truly feeling okay—not good, but okay—and not just saying it, which she sometimes did even on the worst of days. She didn't want Julia changing her life to accommodate her illness—at least not more than she already had. But Julia suspected her denials had more to do with kidding herself that she wasn't as ill as she was.

"Mom, I gotta go. I won't be home tonight—something came up."

"Oh, I see."

No, you don't, but what you're thinking is better than the truth.

"Do you want me to call Homecare?"

"Don't be silly. I'm fine."

"I'll call tomorrow, then. You know the number if you need help?"

"I do, but I won't." Being stubborn now.

"I love you, Mom."

"Love you, honey."

She cradled the receiver and held on to it. She wished things were different. But who didn't? She sniffed, ran the back of her hand over her eyes, got in the car.

Before she arrived back at the motel, again her mind started grinding through the day's events, transcribing conversations, forming questions, following leads. She felt overwhelmed by the number of fragments of information to sift through. Her experience had taught her that while all the clues available might not lead to a solution, they always led to another clue. Eventually the solution presented itself. The next clue was somewhere among the known facts; she simply had to find it. She was overlooking something.

Goody said Vero was talking about a virus . . .

Looking, thinking, trying to understand . . .

twenty-three

The glowing red dot of the laser lingered on the tree an instant, then slid off and continued its sweep over the cemetery.

Allen hunched down on folded legs beside a massive bush, majestically draped in silky leaves and bejeweled in fat berries. Slowly he turned to look in the direction of the laser's origin. The bush blocked his view of the assailant's passage—and concealed him from his pursuer.

He heard the soft crunching of footfalls moving leftward as he looked up the hill. The assailant was coming down at an angle that allowed a controlled descent, not on the steep course Allen had barreled down. Most likely he was tacking, trying to stay as true to Allen's course as possible. Then he came into view on the left side of the bush, sixty feet away. A dark figure that seemed too angular and moved too fluidly to be human. No matter where he walked, he remained a shadow, black upon black. Only the bright red point of the pistol's laser sight at the tip of his right arm broke the inky monotone of the night.

The figure turned and strode toward him, rising and falling with the crests and depressions of the insane landscape. Mist swirled in his wake, spiking upward, then settling like flames.

Allen nearly bolted for the edge of the cemetery, where the hill continued its descent back to civilization. For a quarter of a second his muscles contracted, ready to spring. Instead, he inched under the bush, sliding his legs along the ground to avoid jiggling the leaves. He bent himself into a crescent and pushed his torso under the perimeter of the plant, using his hand to gently push the leaves over his hip and shoulder.

The assailant stopped ten feet from him, miraculously still in deep shadow. His body faced the shrub under which Allen shivered, but his head was rotating back and forth, scanning. Allen held his breath, hoping his body didn't scream for oxygen too soon, as it had in the hall outside his bedroom. The fierce shadow figure stood there, emitting a sound Allen couldn't place—

Chick-chu, chick-chu, chick-chu . . .

—and scanning, listening . . . twenty seconds . . . thirty . . .

Allen's chest hitched as his lungs started to protest.

. . . forty . . .

The man spun ninety degrees and strode toward the edge of the cemetery.

Gasping air as quietly as possible, it came to Allen that it was frustration, not discovery, that had motivated his pursuer's aggressive approach toward the shrub. The man had realized that his prey could be anywhere in the woods, or even out of them by now.