Snakehead

I

Margaret stood outside the NASA hangar, still in her gown and apron. The clear evening sky was turning pink as the dipping sun promised a spectacular sunset. Bombers, jets and Second World War fighters had been taking off and landing all day, swooping overhead, to the cheers of the crowds gathered along the edges of the tarmac. Drinks tents and hamburger stalls had kept them fed and watered as they watched displays by Russian Polikarpovs, British Hurricanes and American Wildcats, oblivious to the conveyer belt of bodies being processed in the large white hangar just a few hundred yards away. The car parks were full. The Wings over Houston Airshow had been a great success.

The last of the refrigerated semitrailers was gone, autopsies completed, the bodies now in the hands of the morticians who would prepare them for shipping back to their families in China once identities had been established. As yet, more than two-thirds of them remained John and Jane Does. Fifty-two men and fourteen women. All of them in their twenties. None had carried official papers of any kind, even forgeries. Their clothes were not their own. There had been clues in Wang’s diary as to several of the names, and others had carried personal items — letters, photographs, engraved jewellery — that would eventually identify them. A sad collection of anonymous young men and women whose dreams had turned to death on a hot day in Texas.

‘Going to be another scorcher tomorrow.’ She turned to find Steve standing beside her, almost as if he had read her mind. And she was flooded with a sudden guilt at the memory of what had happened the night before. He deserved better.

‘You look tired,’ she said. There were deep shadows under his eyes, and some of the sparkle had gone out of them.

‘Didn’t sleep too good,’ he said. Margaret glanced instinctively at the plaster on his finger. He caught the look. ‘That,’ he said, ‘among other things.’ And she felt a fresh prickle of guilt.

‘I take it there’s been no word back from Washington on the lab results.’ She knew there hadn’t, but she was desperate to deflect the conversation away from the subject of her and Steve. It was ironic, she thought, that just as she had met, for the first time in years, a man who might have interested her, Li Yan appeared back in her life, as if determined somehow to keep her trapped in her cycle of unhappiness. And then she remembered, with a slight tremor, how it felt when Li made love to her and she thought how she could take any amount of that kind of unhappiness.

‘I figure it’ll be tomorrow at the earliest before we get anything definitive,’ Steve said. ‘By which time,’ he added, ‘I’ll be back in DC.’

‘And I’ll be headed back to Huntsville to try and sort out the mess with my landlord.’

‘What mess is that?’

‘Oh, he’s trying to evict me because I changed the locks.’

‘Why d’you do that?’

‘Because the guy’s a real sleazeball. He’s been harassing me with suggestive comments ever since I signed a lease on the place. And then I caught him sneaking in and going through my underwear.’

‘So why don’t you just find somewhere else?’

‘Oh, because there’s still six months of the lease to run, and I paid up front. And I didn’t want to be bothered right now with trying to find a new place.’

He looked at her for a long time. Then finally he said, ‘Why do I get the feeling, Margaret, that you’re happy to talk about anything but us?’

‘Because there is no us!’ she snapped, angry that he was forcing her to confront this. And she turned and walked briskly back into the hangar, feeling like she had just inflicted hurt on some poor vulnerable animal who had trusted her. She pulled off her apron and gown, hopping briefly at her table to rip off plastic shoe covers, and headed for the row of sinks at the far end.

She scrubbed her hands and forearms vigorously with anti-bacterial soap as if she thought there might be blood on them, and that it might not come off. After a few moments she turned and saw Steve at the next sink calmly washing his hands.

‘Does this mean I don’t get to take you out to dinner tonight?’ he asked with a wry, resigned smile on his face.

‘Sir!’ The urgency in the call made both of them turn. One of the AFIP investigators was running down the hangar toward them. ‘Sir.’ He stopped in front of them, slightly breathless. ‘We’re outta here.’

Steve frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just got called back to Washington, sir. Urgent. There’s a flight from Hobby in just under an hour.’

Steve turned to Margaret. ‘Guess that answers my question.’

‘Your presence is required, too, ma’am,’ the investigator said.

Margaret was taken aback. ‘Me? Why?’

‘No idea, ma’am. Guess it’s a need-to-know basis.’

Steve turned to her again, grinning this time. ‘Hey, I know this great little place in Washington…’

II

Li stood in the car park of the Houston District Office of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service of the United States watching groups of immigrants, mainly Hispanics, gathered under the trees outside the door of the two-storey building on the corner of Greenspoint and Northpoint. Traffic on the Interstate, a couple of blocks away, was a distant rumble. A black uniformed officer approached him.

‘Sir, do you speak English?’ Li nodded. ‘Sir, you cannot hang around this area. Either get in line or move out to the street.’

Li sighed and took out his ID. ‘I’m waiting for Agent Hrycyk,’ he said.

The officer examined his plastic photocard with its US and PRC emblems. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, tipping his hat, ‘thought you was an immigrant.’ And he moved off, embarrassed, toward the groups by the door.

Li glanced up at the verdigrised miniature of the Statue of Liberty that stood on a plinth overlooking the car park. Many of the original immigrants who had come to populate this vast country had had to pass beneath the eagle eye of this lady on their approach to Ellis Island. More than two hundred years later, in Texas, they were still having to do the same thing.

Hrycyk came hurrying through the crowds of would-be Americans at the main entrance and flicked Li a look. ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said. ‘You are an observer here. You are not an active participant. If and when I want your help, I will ask.’ And he carried on across the car park to his battered old Volkswagen Santana. He had the driver’s door open before he realised that Li had not followed him. ‘Are you coming or not?’ he called. ‘’Cos if not, I’m quite happy to leave you here.’

Li sighed and walked over to the car and got in the passenger side. Hrycyk started the motor and lit up a cigarette. Li lowered the window on his side.

‘Did I tell you you could open the window?’ Hrycyk growled. ‘I did not tell you you could open the window. It fucks with the air-con. Please close it.’

‘I will if you put out your cigarette,’ Li said evenly.

Hrycyk glared at him, and then stubbed out his cigarette viciously in an overflowing ashtray. ‘I don’t know what gives you people the idea you can come over here and start telling us what to do, but if you think you’re gonna have me dancing to your tune, you got another think coming.’ He jammed the shift into drive, and they lurched forward at speed toward the exit, where an irritated Hrycyk then had to stand on the brakes and wait until there was a gap in the traffic.

On the opposite side of the street rows of single-storey brick buildings advertised passport photos in five minutes. They were doing brisk business, even at this hour of the day. Hrycyk glanced at Li and then followed his gaze. He snorted. ‘Fast food immigration. It’s a goddamned boom industry around here.’

He drove them south in heavy traffic on Interstate 45, turning west on to the 610, connecting eventually with Westheimer and heading into the setting sun toward the jewel in Houston’s shopping crown, the Galleria. They were going, he explained grudgingly, to meet an INS agent who had been working deep under cover in the Chinese community for nearly eighteen months.

‘He’s Chinese, I assume,’ Li said facetiously.

‘Of course he’s fucking Chinese!’ Hrycyk didn’t see the joke. ‘You don’t think we’d send a Caucasian in there with Yul Brynner make-up, do you?’ Li didn’t want to inflame him further by asking who Yul Brynner was. ‘When I say deep cover, I mean deep cover. We haven’t even had contact with this guy for more than three months. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d gone native on us, switched sides. I wouldn’t trust any of you people as far as I could throw you.’

Li let all of Hrycyk’s aggressive anti-Chinese prejudice slip by him. One day, perhaps, there would be a reckoning. But right now it was not politic. ‘So why are you making contact now?’

‘Why do you think? Ninety-eight dead Chinese in a truck, and the brass in Washington crawling all over the Justice Department demanding results. We don’t want to blow this guy’s cover if we can avoid it. But it’s time for us to know what he knows. And if we have to, we’ll pull him.’

The Galleria was a shopping mall of typically Texan proportions, on three levels and with tentacles spreading out, it seemed, in all directions. It was still jam-packed with early evening shoppers, and Li hurried after Hrycyk past a bewildering display of shops and fast food outlets. They stopped at an open-plan Starbucks coffee shop overlooking a huge ice-rink. Hrycyk looked around as if he expected to see someone there. Then he approached the counter and ordered a cappuccino. He turned to Li and said brusquely, ‘Sorry, they don’t do tea?’

‘I’ll have a white mocha,’ Li said and drew a look of surprise from the INS man. He shrugged. ‘I’ve developed a taste for the stuff.’

‘First Chinese I ever knew that didn’t have his face stuffed in a jar of green tea,’ Hrycyk growled. ‘I suppose you think I’m paying?’

‘Good of you to offer,’ Li said.

They sat at a table by the rail looking down on the ice-rink. A dozen or so kids, watched by proud parents, careened across the ice performing triple salcos with the fearless ease of the young. Their yells of glee echoed up into the arched glass roof fifty feet above them, punctuated by occasional sprinklings of applause.

Hrycyk stuffed his shirt back into his pants where the stretch of his belly had pulled it free, and took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Any objections?’

Li shook his head.

Hrycyk lit up. ‘By the way, we found out who owned the truck. It was bought five days ago by a company which was only registered in Mexico City the week before. The names on the registration are phony, of course. No way of tracing them.’ He took a long slug of his cappuccino and a deep draw on his cigarette, then glanced at his watch.

‘So what are we doing here?’ Li asked, sipping at the hot sweet chocolate-coffee mixture.

‘You ever seen a Chinese in a Starbucks?’ Hrycyk asked.

‘You’re looking at one,’ Li said.

‘Jesus Christ, apart from you!’ Hrycyk’s patience with Li was wearing thin.

Li thought about it. He regularly drank at a Starbucks in Georgetown, but the only Asians he had ever seen in there were second- or third-generation Americans. Chinese, as a rule, did not drink coffee. ‘Guess not,’ he said.

‘You see?’ Hrycyk pointed an accusing finger at him. ‘That’s the thing about you people. You think you’re so fucking superior. You come to America, make no attempt to integrate. You take over a corner of whatever city you end up in, call it Chinatown and turn it into the place you just came from. That’s why it’s safe to meet our man here. Because the Chinese hardly ever leave Chinatown, and they don’t drink coffee. Oh, sure, you’ll try it sometime, but you always turn up your noses. ’Cos it’s not Chinese. It’s too goddamned American!’

Li looked at Hrycyk with an intense dislike. Conveniently the INS agent appeared to have forgotten he was sitting drinking coffee with a Chinese who liked the stuff. ‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘how everything “American” seems to come from somewhere else.’

Hrycyk glared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, that cappuccino you’re drinking…isn’t that Italian? And isn’t the coffee itself probably Colombian?’ He paused to let Hrycyk stew on this for a moment, then added, ‘And isn’t Hrycyk a Polish name?’

‘Ukrainian,’ Hrycyk growled.

‘Very American,’ Li said.

Hrycyk thought about a comeback. But it was either too strong or not clever enough, and he clearly decided against it. He looked at his watch again. ‘Bastard’s late,’ he said. ‘He should have been here waiting for us.’ The air fibrillated with the distant sound of Hrycyk’s cellphone and he fumbled in his pocket to retrieve it. He snapped it open and barked, ‘Hrycyk,’ into the mouthpiece. He listened intently for several moments, then said, ‘Shit,’ and flipped the phone shut. He looked at Li. ‘Our undercover man is late in more ways than one.’

Yu Lin lived in a terraced pink brick condominium on Ranchester, in the heart of suburban Chinatown. Living accommodation was on the second level, up green-painted metal stairs. Several squad cars, a paramedic van, a forensics vehicle and other, unmarked cars, were crammed into the small parking area out front. A large crowd of Asian onlookers had gathered in the street, demonstrating that indefatigable Chinese quality of curiosity. Flashing police lights cut through the twilight, illuminating dark eyes and patient faces.

Hrycyk drew his Santana in under a dusty tree and Li followed him as he brandished his badge and pushed his way through the crowd of police officers at the foot of the stairs. They clattered up the steps, turning left on the balcony and along to the open door of what had been Yu’s apartment. It comprised a small open-plan kitchen-living area and one tiny bedroom. Yu was in the bedroom, sprawled on his back across a bed coloured dark red by his blood. He had been hacked almost to pieces. Hrycyk looked at him dispassionately. ‘That was careless,’ he said softly.

The apartment was full of police officers and medics. Li had half-expected to find Margaret there, but of course she was otherwise occupied. A pathologist from the Medical Examiner’s office was examining the body, the flash of his photographer’s camera throwing the scene into bleak relief. The lead homicide officer shook Hrycyk’s hand and said, ‘Doc thinks it was a machete. Maybe several. He’s counted thirty-six wounds so far.’

‘Who reported it?’ Hrycyk asked, and Li realised that racist though he might be, Hrycyk was nobody’s fool. He had gone straight to the key question.

‘His girlfriend found him.’ The homicide man nodded toward the living room. ‘She’s out there. Doesn’t speak a word of English. She was hysterical, apparently. It was a neighbour who called it in.’

Li leaned into Hrycyk and said quietly, ‘Does she know who he was?’

Hrycyk shook his head. ‘I doubt it.’

‘Do you want me to speak to her?’

Hrycyk hesitated. It probably stuck in his craw, but he didn’t have much choice. ‘Go ahead,’ he said curtly.

Li made his way back into the living room where a slight, long-haired girl sat on the sofa. She could only have been eighteen or nineteen and there was very little flesh on her bones. A female police officer sat beside her holding her hand. Li nodded to the officer who stood aside to let him sit next to the girl.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ he said in Mandarin.

The girl looked at him for the first time, startled. Fear was written all over her face. She drew back. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m a police officer,’ Li said. He took her hand gently in both of his. ‘No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to make you do or say anything you don’t want to. Okay?’

She nodded, reassured by his tone and his manner. ‘Okay.’

‘Have you known Yu Lin for long?’

‘Couple of months,’ she said.

‘And you don’t speak any English.’

‘No.’

‘How long have you been in America?’ Li asked. She cast him a look of concern. ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell them. It doesn’t matter a damn to me if you’re illegal or not.’

‘Eight months,’ she said. ‘I came with my brother. My uncle is with one of the tongs here in Houston. He paid our shetou, and now we work for him. Already my brother is a dai lo, you know, a gang leader.’

Li nodded. ‘And Yu Lin?’

‘I met him at the club where I work. But my brother doesn’t like me seeing him. We are Fujian. He is Taiwanese. My brother says he is not a real Chinese.’

Li flicked his head toward the bedroom. He said, ‘Do you think your brother did this?’

Her bottom lip quivered for a moment, like jelly on a spoon, and then her face crumpled and she burst into tears. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Take it easy.’ And he put both his arms around her and she pressed her face into his chest, and he felt the sobs shake her fragile frame. There was nothing, he knew, that he could do for her. Her lover had been hacked to death. Her brother was shaping up as a suspect. It would not be long before the authorities discovered that she was an illegal alien, and she would be hauled up before the immigration court and threatened with repatriation. Her American Dream was very quickly turning into a nightmare.

He nodded to the female officer who came to offer comfort in his place as he gently disentangled himself. He found Hrycyk outside on the balcony, leaning on the rail smoking a cigarette. Hrycyk turned a pensive gaze on him. ‘Well?’

‘Looks like Yu got himself into conflict with the girl’s brother,’ Li said. ‘Could be that simple.’

‘Or it could be that he’d been rumbled and they decided that he knew too much.’

‘That’s possible, too,’ Li said. ‘In which case you’ve got a leak in the agency.’

Hrycyk straightened up, bridling. ‘What the hell d’you mean?’

‘It’s a bit of a coincidence that they should decide to take him out the very day he’s scheduled to break cover and meet up with you. I mean, how would they know that?’

Hrycyk glared at him, but the implications of what Li was saying were not lost on him. Hrycyk’s cellphone rang again. He threw his cigarette butt down into the street and answered it. He listened in silence, flicked Li a glance, then said, simply, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. He thought for a moment, then looked at Li again. ‘We got fifty minutes to get across town to Hobby and catch the next flight to Washington.’

III

The rain was driving horizontally across the tarmac at Dulles. The temperature had tumbled to just a few degrees above freezing. Their airport security vehicle ploughed through the darkness on the apron, the lights of the main terminal receding behind them, the rain caught in their headlights like stars at warp speed. Li peered through the windshield trying to see where they were going. Hrycyk had been less than illuminating, and Li suspected that was because he had no idea where they were going, or why.

There were lights up ahead now, and the roar of an engine. As they drew close, an army-camouflaged helicopter took shape in the dark, buffeted by the wind, lights blazing, rotors turning. It was waiting for them. Their driver drew up alongside it, and Hrycyk cursed when he realised he was going to have to get out in the wet. He pulled up his collar, hunching himself against the downdraught and the rain, and slipped out into the night. Li ran across the tarmac in his wake. Uniformed arms extended from an open doorway and drew them up into the belly of the chopper. In the faint yellow electric light of the interior, he saw colourless faces looking up at him. Margaret, Fuller, Major Cardiff in his Air Force blue. Someone handed him a helmet with a built-in headset, and strong hands pushed him down into a canvas seat. The door was pulled shut as he slipped on his helmet and heard Hrycyk’s voice. ‘What’s all this about, Sam?’ They lurched to one side as the helicopter lifted off into the night.

Fuller shouted above the roar of the engine, ‘They’re flying us up to a little town in Maryland called Frederick. The army base at Fort Detrick.’

‘What the hell’s there?’ Hrycyk demanded to know.

‘USAMRIID,’ Fuller said, and when Hrycyk looked blank, spelled it out for him. ‘The United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.’

‘Jesus!’ It was the first time Li had seen Hrycyk overawed by anything. ‘That’s the biowarfare defence place.’ He thought about it for a moment, glanced at Li, then turned back to Fuller. ‘Christ, and they’re going to let a foreign national in there? A Chinese?’ Fuller just shrugged. Hrycyk was completely nonplussed. ‘For God’s sake, Sam, what is going on here?’

‘You’ll find out when we get there, Mike,’ Fuller shouted.

Li looked to Margaret for some kind of elucidation. She gave the merest shrug of her shoulders. And he saw that Steve Cardiff, sitting next to her, was pale as a ghost.

By the time their chopper touched down on the landing pad at Fort Detrick, the rain had stopped. Stars twinkling in a very black sky, were periodically obliterated by occasional scurrying clouds. An almost full moon cast its silver light across the landscape, and in the distance you could see the outline of the Catoctin mountains of western Maryland traced against the sky. The group was driven across the base in two army jeeps, and Li saw the flashing orange lights at the security gates, before they turned into the car park outside the USAMRIID building. It was a collection of ugly, windowless concrete blocks, designed to contain the most dangerous organisms on earth. It wouldn’t win any prizes for its architecture.

In the front reception area they had to fill out forms and were in turn handed guest security passes by a silver-headed security man. A young uniformed woman with hair neatly plaited up the back led them along a wood-panelled corridor. Portraits of past USAMRIID commanders followed their progress to the Joel M. Dalrymple conference room, where a large oblong table had been set up with more than twenty seats around it. There were already a dozen other people standing about in groups talking, several of them in uniform. Li took the opportunity of whispering to Margaret, ‘What are we doing here?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said grimly. ‘But I have a real bad feeling about it.’

Steve brought over an older man in a dark suit to meet Margaret. Li drifted away.

‘Margaret, this is Dr. Jack Ward,’ Steve said. ‘Dr. Ward is the Armed Forces medical examiner.’

Dr. Ward shook Margaret’s hand solemnly. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Campbell. I’ve heard a very great deal about you.’

Margaret glanced at Steve then back to Dr. Ward. ‘Have you?’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘You have…’ he chose his words carefully, ‘…something of a reputation.’

‘Really?’ said Margaret. ‘Reputations can be good or bad. I hope it’s not the latter.’

‘I’m far too much of a gentleman to say,’ the doctor said, and allowed himself the most distant of smiles.

Margaret looked to Steve to see if he had shared in this obscure joke. But he was standing with a glazed look in his eyes, staring into the middle distance. He became aware of her looking at him and quickly refocused. ‘What?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ she said.

‘Oh.’ He seemed flustered. ‘Sorry. Stuff on my mind.’

A commanding voice cut above the hubbub in the conference room. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, would everyone like to take a seat around the table?’ It took a few minutes for the assembled to settle and for the possessor of the voice, in full army uniform, to introduce himself as Colonel Robert Zeiss, Commander of the USAMRIID facility which was hosting this hastily arranged meeting. He, apparently, was going to chair it, and he began by introducing everyone at the table. There were a couple of doctors from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, several senior USAMRIID officers; two representatives of the FBI in addition to Fuller; three representatives of an organisation that Zeiss referred to as FEMA, but without explanation; a middle-aged man in a grey suit from the CIA; and a secretary seconded from the Commander’s office to take notes. Curious eyes fell on Li and Margaret as they were introduced. Hrycyk sat at the far end of the table with his arms folded, watching and listening, and not saying much.

‘We’re also expecting someone from the CDC very shortly,’ Zeiss said. He looked at Li. ‘For the uninitiated, that’s the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.’

Steve’s attempted smile at Margaret across the table lacked conviction, and the sense of impending doom that had been descending on her over the last couple of hours started to become acute. Why were they here? And why the need for all these high-ranking military medical people?

She had her back to the door and did not turn until Zeiss said, ‘Oh, and this is Felipe Mendez, emeritus professor of genetics, formerly of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.’

Margaret felt a sudden restriction across her chest. She turned to see Professor Mendez shuffle into the conference room with what he probably imagined was haste. He was just as dishevelled as she remembered him, his overcoat hanging open, buttons missing from his jacket, trousers two sizes too big, belted at the waist and gathered in folds around his loafers. His hair was whiter than when she had last seen him, thinner, but just as unruly. The only thing about him that reflected any measure of care and attention were his neatly trimmed white goatee beard and moustache.

His watery brown eyes smiled at the faces around the table. ‘Apologies,’ he muttered. ‘So sorry to be late.’ He found an empty seat opposite Margaret, put his battered old leather briefcase on the table and sat down. For a moment she thought he hadn’t seen her, until he looked up and smiled beatifically. ‘Hello, Margaret my dear,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

She had no opportunity to respond. Colonel Zeiss was anxious to get the meeting underway. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, just so that none of you are labouring under any illusions, the reason you are all here tonight is that in our view we are facing a full-scale national emergency.’ He had everyone’s attention now. ‘As some of you already know, blood and tissue samples taken from the bodies found in the truck at Huntsville have revealed that the victims appear to have been injected with the virus which caused the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.’ His announcement prompted a mixed reaction around the table.

‘Flu?’ Hrycyk said dismissively. ‘Is that all? I get a shot against the flu every year.’

Dr. Ward spoke for the first time. ‘The Spanish flu was the most pathogenic flu virus in history,’ he said. ‘It killed more people in three months than the Great Plague in three hundred years. And there is no shot that will protect you against it, Agent Hrycyk.’ He leaned forward. ‘Your own figures for illegal immigration should tell you that the ninety-eight Chinese we found in that truck are probably just the tip of the iceberg. They died by accident. We have no idea how many others successfully crossed into the United States bringing the virus with them.’

Margaret was puzzled. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How do you know it’s the Spanish flu virus? I don’t remember being off the day they did virology, and my understanding was that we didn’t even know about the existence of viruses in 1918. So you’ve nothing to compare it with.’

Dr. Ward responded coolly, ‘Perhaps, Dr. Campbell, you were too busy helping out the Chinese police to keep up with the news. A research team at AFIP managed to partially sequence the Spanish flu virus at the end of the last decade.’

Margaret felt her face colour. ‘Then perhaps you’d like to enlighten me, Doctor,’ she said, trying to retain as much dignity as possible.

‘There are others around the table besides yourself, Ms Campbell, who require enlightenment,’ Dr. Ward said. By now Margaret had the very firm impression that she didn’t like the good doctor very much. He took a moment to compose himself. ‘Back in the nineties,’ he said, ‘a team of researchers at AFIP HQ in Washington, led by Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, discovered that tissue from seventy Spanish flu victims had been stored at AFIP’s National Tissue Repository. They were able to recover fragments of viral RNA from the lung tissue of a twenty-one-year-old private who died from the flu at Fort Jackson, Carolina, in 1918. Along with other samples, and soft tissue recovered from an Eskimo grave in Alaska, they were able to sequence enough of the recovered fragments to establish for the first time that the 1918 pandemic was caused by an H1N1 type virus, and that it was completely unlike any other human flu virus identified during the past seventy years.’ The doctor paused to let his words sink in. There were others around the table to whom this was also news.

He went on, ‘The closest match they could find was with a strain known as Swine Iowa 30, a pig flu isolated in 1930 and kept alive at various culture repositories ever since. It lent some credence to those who had always believed that the virus mutated from a strain found in birds, was passed on to pigs and then ultimately to humans — a unique sequence of mutations giving the virus its unparalleled pathogenic qualities.’ He sat back. ‘And of course, it was by a unique sequence of good, or bad, fortune that we actually identified the virus in these Chinese immigrants. The viral panel requested by Dr. Cardiff included a routine test for flu virus. But it was sheer chance that one of Dr. Taubenberger’s team got to cast an eye over the results. She immediately recognised part of the sequence, and initiated further, specific tests that proved positive.’ He leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers interlocked. This was his moment and he was making the most of it. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are 99 percent certain that what we are dealing with here is the original Spanish flu virus. Last time around it killed anything up to forty million people. This time, it could be a whole helluva lot more.’

‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ Margaret said, cutting short Dr. Ward’s moment, ‘but I’m beginning to wonder now if I was off the day they did virology. I mean, if all of these people were injected with this virus, how come none of them showed any flu-like symptoms?’

‘Because they weren’t suffering from the flu, my dear.’ Mendez’s interjection took Margaret by surprise. She turned toward him, blinking.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They were only carrying it,’ he said. ‘In a noninfectious form. They weren’t affected by it at all.’ He now had the attention of everyone around the table. He ran nicotine-stained fingers through his pure white whiskers. ‘The virus with which they were injected was genetically manipulated so that the DNA in their genomes would be transformed to contain its code.’

Margaret was struggling to keep up with this. ‘I thought that RNA viruses couldn’t get into the human genome.’

Mendez smiled. ‘My dear, if you want to be technical about it, then you are absolutely right. But by using standard gene therapy methods, it’s not too difficult.’ He leaned forward and looked around the faces at the table, intoxicated by his own knowledge. ‘All you have to do is to take a retrovirus called Moloney leukemia virus and use it to nest the code for the RNA flu virus along with a few genes required to make the nested virus into an active transcript.’

‘Woah…Hey, hold on there!’ It was Hrycyk. ‘This is going wa-ay over my head.’

Mendez looked at him appraisingly. ‘I’ll try to make it simple, then.’ And Hrycyk shifted uncomfortably, as if in having to make it simple, Mendez was passing comment on the perceived level of Hrycyk’s intelligence. The professor said, ‘Viruses are made either of DNA or RNA. In this instance, our flu virus is made of RNA. Simply put, what you do is splice the code for the RNA flu virus into the Moloney leukemia virus, which is going to act as your vector, or carrier. Then you coat that virus to make it into a retrovirus that can convert its RNA into DNA and integrate into the DNA of its host.’

‘Hang on.’ Hrycyk cut in again, at the risk of looking even more ignorant. ‘Doc, you said you were going to make this simple.’

Mendez smiled patiently. He had always had a good way with his students, and for him this was just like any other class. There was always one obstinately ignorant student. ‘In the simplest terms, for the gentleman at the end of the table,’ he said, ‘these Chinese hopefuls had their DNA transformed to make them, effectively, into walking-talking flu viruses.’ He raised an eyebrow in Hrycyk’s direction inviting a further question. When it did not come, he added, ‘However, the flu would not have become active until their DNA got converted back into its infectious RNA form.’

‘And how would that happen?’ This from one of the AFIP doctors.

‘Good question.’ Mendez leaned back in his chair, still smiling. ‘I don’t know. At least, I know how the change would be triggered, but not what would trigger it.’ He placed his hands, palm down, on the table in front of him. ‘That’s what I’ve been brought out of retirement to find out.’ There was an odd tone to this, and he leaned forward and looked along the table toward Zeiss. ‘That’s the party line, isn’t it, Colonel?’

Zeiss looked uncomfortable. ‘The Department of Defence considers you to be the foremost expert in this field, Professor,’ he said.

Mendez nodded. ‘Yes, when it suits them.’

Hrycyk said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry to butt in on this mutual admiration society. I mean, call me stupid, but I still don’t quite get this.’

Margaret said, ‘Agent Hrycyk prefers his English in words of one syllable.’

‘What exactly is it you don’t understand, Agent Hrycyk?’ Mendez asked, still with his patient smile.

‘All this stuff about triggers and nests…’ He glared at Margaret. ‘I don’t know about words of one syllable, but just plain English would help.’

‘Okay,’ Mendez said. He thought for a moment. ‘The Moloney leukemia virus has been used to disguise our flu virus to get it into the genome. It has also been genetically manipulated — there is no point in me trying to explain the process to you, because you simply wouldn’t understand it. But it has been manipulated to contain certain genes required to make the disguised flu virus active by transcribing it back to its infectious RNA form.’ He put a hand up to stop Hrycyk’s protests. ‘Let me finish, Agent. These genes have been programmed to be activated by some kind of protein encountered in the environment — most likely some sort of taste or smell found in a particular food or drink.’

Hrycyk said, ‘What, you mean they eat a pork chop and suddenly they get the flu?’

‘Crudely put, but broadly accurate,’ Mendez said. ‘The trouble is that we don’t know what will trigger that response.’ He waved his hand toward the ceiling. ‘And finding it is going to be like searching for…’ he searched himself for an appropriate simile, ‘…a speck of dust in the Milky Way.’

A long silence settled on the table as everyone around it fully digested the substance of what they had just heard. Margaret, the tension in her chest making her feel almost physically sick, was the first to break it. She avoided looking at Steve and directed her question to Professor Mendez. ‘Professor, you’re telling us that these people have been injected with a form of Spanish flu that will only become active when they eat, or drink, or smell some specific thing.’ She paused. ‘Why? I mean, why would anybody do that?’

It was Zeiss who responded. ‘I think we have to take the view that what we are dealing with here is a bioterrorist attack on the United States. A very clever, very subtle, attack with a lethally effective potential.’

Margaret shook her head in disbelief. ‘But that’s insane! Something like the Spanish flu doesn’t recognise national boundaries. It’s not just Americans who’ll die. A virus like that will kill people all over the world.’

Zeiss said, ‘We are not necessarily dealing with a rational enemy, Dr. Campbell. We could be looking at fanatical extremists who just don’t care about the consequences. Anyone from Islamic fundamentalists to extreme right-wing militia groups intent on discrediting the Chinese.’

Hrycyk cut in from the end of the table. ‘Or maybe the Chinese themselves, trying to bring America to its knees.’ He glared at Li. Li returned the look with an implacable sense of what Fuller would probably have called inscrutability.

Margaret was scathing. ‘By killing their own people?’ she asked.

‘The Japs used kamikaze pilots, didn’t they?’ Hrycyk said, with what he clearly imagined was reason on his side.

‘Jesus…’ Margaret’s exasperation escaped in an oath. She pushed her chair back. ‘I’m not sitting here to listen to this.’

‘Sit down, Dr. Campbell!’ Zeiss’ voice cut sharply across the table. And then he quickly turned his focus on Hrycyk. ‘And shut up, Agent Hrycyk. We’re not hear to listen to your anti-Chinese ramblings.’ Hrycyk’s face reddened, more from anger than embarrassment. He turned his glare from Li to Margaret.

Zeiss continued, ‘The whole purpose of this meeting tonight is to put together the basis of a task force to deal with this emergency in its initial stages. We require to hunt down these people smugglers and take their organisation apart. We need to know who injected the illegal aliens and why. And we need to know how many of them are walking around out there carrying the virus into the population, and how it is going to be triggered.’ He nodded toward the professor. ‘Which is why Professor Mendez has been brought on board.’

‘Without any guarantee of success, I would hasten to add,’ Mendez said. ‘Even if I can identify the trigger, we may still be too late. It may be that the genie is already out of the bottle, and we just don’t know it yet.’

‘Until we have information to the contrary,’ Zeiss said firmly, ‘we must proceed on the basis that we are still in the preventive stage of this operation.’ He glanced at his watch and sighed. ‘Unfortunately we are still waiting for Dr. Anatoly Markin from the CDC. Dr. Markin is an expert on viral bioterrorism. He was among the top echelon of scientists who ran the Soviet biowarfare programme, Biopreparat, right up until the mid-nineties. Now he works for us.’ He stood up. ‘I suggest we take a break until he gets here. Then he can brief us on exactly what kind of pandemonium we can expect if this virus gets activated.’

There was a shocked sense of anticlimax as the meeting broke up, albeit temporarily. The implications of the information that had been disseminated around the table were terrifying, and hard to take on board. Li stood up slowly. It had been a difficult meeting for him. No matter how good his English, he had struggled to keep up with the technical jargon. But its meaning, in the end, had become all too painfully clear to him. Illegal immigrants from his country were being injected with a lethal flu virus which they were unwittingly carrying into the United States. The ease with which such a situation could blow up into full-scale confrontation between the US and China was clear to him. Hrycyk’s attitude was likely to be shared by many millions of Americans. The decision to involve Li in the investigation, even if only at ground level, was almost certainly a political one, designed to maintain some kind of equilibrium between the two countries. If, and when, it ever became public, however, there was no telling how popular reaction might shape political responses. Li felt as if he were being asked to perform a balancing act on the razor-sharp blade of a knife. If he didn’t fall to one side or the other, he was in danger of being cut in two. It was not something, he realised, that he could afford to think about. All he could do was keep his head down and focus as narrowly as possible on the investigation. He would ignore everything else and do what he was good at. He turned to see where Margaret was, but only in time to catch sight of her hurrying out into the corridor.

Steve was halfway along it before Margaret caught up with him. ‘Steve…?’ He stopped, and she thought she saw death in those eyes that only twenty-four hours earlier had been sparkling and so alive. ‘Have they tested your blood samples for the virus?’ He nodded. She could barely bring herself to ask. ‘And?’

He said bleakly, ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t had the results.’

‘Oh, Steve…’ Margaret took his hand. ‘Until you know otherwise, you’ve got to believe you’re okay.’

‘I can’t,’ he said simply. ‘Margaret, I’m frightened to eat or drink anything. If I have got the virus, who knows what might trigger it?’

Margaret said, ‘Then you’ve got to eat Chinese.’

He looked at her with incredulity. ‘Even I don’t think that’s funny, Margaret.’

‘I’m not being funny,’ she insisted. ‘Think about it. If Chinese food triggered the virus it would have happened by now. It has to be something else.’

‘Steve?’ Dr. Ward walked briskly up to them. He looked grim. ‘They tell me the results have come through. We’d better go along and find out the worst.’ He cast a sideways glance at Margaret that made her feel like an intruder on someone else’s private grief.

Steve nodded, oblivious. ‘See you later,’ he told Margaret. And she watched him walk stiffly along the corridor with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, and she could not imagine what kind of hell he must be going through right now. An arm slipped through hers and she found herself being steered toward the door. Professor Mendez smiled at her affectionately.

‘So much catching up to do, my dear, and so little time to do it,’ he said. And her heart sank, for the catching up could only mean a confrontation with a past she would rather forget.

Li watched from the door of the conference room as Margaret disappeared with Professor Mendez. His sense of loneliness and alienation was immense. Hrycyk pushed past him. ‘Where are you going?’ Li called after him, feeling that he knew what the answer would be.

Hrycyk turned his now familiar glare on Li. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘If you are going for a smoke, I will join you.’

Hrycyk frowned. ‘I thought you didn’t.’

Li confessed, ‘I have been trying to stop. But I could do with one right now.’

Hrycyk snorted his derision. ‘And I suppose you’ll be wanting to bum one of mine?’

‘Good of you to offer.’

Hrycyk glared again. ‘That’s the second time today you’ve got me with that,’ he growled. He paused, then, ‘I figure I can spare one,’ he said, ‘but we’ll have to go outside.’

The camaraderie of the smoker, even between two men who disliked each other so intensely, was irresistible — and increased by the sense of exclusion created by the need to stand out in the cold and wet to share their habit.

The break room was quiet. Margaret recognised a handful of faces from around the table in the conference room. There were one or two others, mostly women wearing camouflage fatigues, on a break from the night shift. She hit several buttons on the drinks dispenser and got her coffee black and sweet. ‘How do you take yours?’ she asked Mendez.

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Never have. Got an allergy to the damn stuff. Plain water’ll do me.’

She got him a cup of cold water and they wandered over to a free table. There was a bleak desolation about the place. The smell of stale carry-out food hung in the air, the harsh glare of fluorescent light reflecting back off hard melamine surfaces.

‘This place has one of the few level four laboratories in the world,’ Mendez said. ‘They can deal with the most virulent and nasty bacteria and viruses known to man. In fact, they nurture and feed them in little glass petri dishes. Have you been here before?’ Margaret shook her head. ‘I have,’ he said. ‘Several times. And I always spend the next day and a half washing. Not that washing is going to stop the Ebola virus from turning my organs to mush, or anthrax from filling my lungs with fluid. But I always feel…’ he chose his word carefully, ‘…contaminated.’ He smiled. ‘The windows that look into the level four labs are very small, and the glass is several inches thick. They have a notice on the windows that says No Photographs. Not because you could photograph anything particularly secret or incriminating. They’re just scared the flash on your camera might startle the guy in the space suit working inside, and he might just drop one of those little glass dishes. Then the shit would really hit the fan.’

‘How in God’s name do they keep that stuff contained?’ Margaret asked.

Mendez shrugged. ‘You want to see the huge decontamination showers they have just for the monkey cages. Poor little things get pumped full of every disease they figure Bin Laden is preparing to use against us. And then all the water and waste from levels three and four go into a separate sewage outlet for decontamination before rejoining the main sewage supply. The air is taken in through a high-efficiency particulate air filter and passed out through another two. In fact, when you go out you’ll see a row of chimneys at the back. That’s effectively the exhaust system for the labs.’ He chuckled. ‘But you know, no matter what they say, I wouldn’t like to live in Frederick. If anything ever goes wrong here, that nice little German town with its antique shops and church spires is going to be the first to know about it.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘And, you know, they say this place is used for defence only. But the government lies to us about so much else…’ He sat back and let Margaret draw her own conclusions. He shrugged again. ‘Who really knows?’ he said, and sipped at his water. Then without warning he changed the subject. ‘I read about your appointment in the Houston papers. Kept meaning to look you up.’

Margaret said, ‘I had no idea you were at Baylor. Last time I heard you were still in Chicago.’

‘Oh, it’s quite a few years since I moved, my dear. But, then, you’d have known that if we’d kept in touch.’ There was the faintest hint of an accusation in this. ‘How is Michael?’

‘Dead.’ She hadn’t meant to be quite so brutal. But that faintest hint of an accusation had stung her. Mendez had been her late husband’s mentor at the University of Chicago before Michael had graduated and taken, against Mendez’s advice, an unfashionable post lecturing in genetics at the Roosevelt. Margaret never knew exactly what had happened between them — Michael had never confided — but there had been some kind of falling out.

The colour drained from Mendez’s face, and he appeared to be genuinely distressed. ‘Poor Michael,’ he said. ‘I had no idea. You hear nothing in Texas about what’s going on in the rest of the union. I have often thought they still believe themselves to be a separate country down there.’ He paused. ‘What happened?’

Margaret shook her head. ‘Honestly, Felipe, I’d rather not talk about it. At least, not now. Some other time, maybe.’

He put a hand over hers. It was warm and comforting. ‘I am sorry, my dear. I have no wish to resurrect painful memories. I am just so…shocked. Such a brilliant mind, such a bright future.’

Yes, Margaret thought bitterly, and a libido he could not control. She said, ‘You took early retirement?’

A little colour returned to his face, and an edge to his voice. ‘I’m afraid my retirement was forced rather than voluntary. I had a good few years left in me, I think.’

Margaret was taken aback. ‘What on earth happened?’

For a long time he seemed lost in his own thoughts, before becoming aware of her watching him. He must quickly have replayed her question, because a sad smile crept over his face. ‘I was based at the Michael E. DeBakey Center for Biomedical Education and Research at the Texas Medical Center. It was a wonderful position. We were working at the cutting edge of gene therapy, on the verge of some extraordinary breakthroughs.’ He paused to draw a deep breath and steady himself for his revelation. ‘And then a couple of my patients died during the course of clinical trials.’

Margaret put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered.

Resentment now crept into the voice of the old genetics professor. ‘I, or at least my department, had failed to obtain adequate informed consent. There was a major scandal. A lawsuit. It was suggested to me, as a remedy, that I take early retirement. The alternative was the humiliation of dismissal. Not being particularly drawn to the prospect of humiliation, I opted for the former.’ He sat back, forcing himself to smile. ‘A premature end to a promising career.’ Then he leaned forward again, in confidential mode. ‘Of course, the government conveniently chooses to forget all that every time it wants my help.’

Margaret knew how hard it must have been for a brilliant mind just to switch itself off, for a man like Mendez to find suddenly that his talents were no longer required. He had never been the easiest of men to like, but she felt genuinely sorry for him now. ‘That must have been a nightmare, Felipe,’ she said.

But he recognised the look in her eyes. ‘Good God, my dear, I don’t want your pity. I’d rather have your company. A little of that acerbic wordplay we used to indulge in when you so disapproved of Michael being a disciple.’

‘I didn’t disapprove of you,’ Margaret countered quickly. ‘I just thought Michael was too easily led. He needed to develop a mind of his own.’

‘Are you telling me it was his idea and not yours to go to the Roosevelt?’

‘It was a joint decision.’

‘Ah. And that was Michael developing a mind of his own, was it?’

Margaret took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Felipe. That was all way in the past. And I’d rather it stayed there.’

Mendez appeared to relax, and his smile became beatific once again. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to drag up old, painful memories. Believe me, they are just as painful for me.’ He took both of her hands, now, in his. ‘But I would like to hear, someday, when you feel up to it, what happened to Michael. I understand you have a place up at Huntsville.’

She felt uncomfortable, her hands trapped in his. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘And I have a place just thirty miles down the road at Conroe. An old ranch house on the lake. I can get pretty lonely rattling about in that old place all on my own sometimes.’ He squeezed her hands. ‘I’d appreciate a visit. I really would.’

She said, ‘I’ll stop by sometime.’ But knew that she wouldn’t.

Li shivered in the cold wind that blew, almost uninterrupted, across the wide-open spaces of the two-hundred-acre Fort Detrick. In the moonlight, you could see the rows of new, young trees that lined the sprawling parking lots and hear the wind in their leaves. Lights still twinkled in low, huddled, buildings, and white water towers on stilts stalked the perimeter. The first cigarette had felt rough in his throat, and not as pleasurable as he had anticipated. The second, with which Hrycyk had parted very grudgingly, was altogether more satisfying.

The two men haunted the front of the building, walking in slow silence together along the tree-lined main drag of Porter Street and back again. They had decided on a second cigarette after there appeared to be no activity inside. Eventually Hrycyk said, ‘So you people still wear those blue Mao suit things over there?’

‘Not for a long time,’ Li said.

Hrycyk looked at him as if he suspected him of lying. ‘I’ve seen pictures on TV.’

‘Probably stock footage from the days of the Cultural Revolution. And some of the old folk still wear them. They were cheap and hard-wearing.’

‘But you still go around on bikes, right?’

‘Most people own a bicycle,’ Li conceded. ‘But a lot of people now own a car as well. In fact, there are so many cars in Beijing that the traffic just grinds to a halt at rush hour. It’s one of the most polluted cities in the world.’

‘No kidding!’ Apparently Hrycyk approved. As if pollution somehow meant civilisation.

Li said, ‘The average young Beijinger today works for a private company, might even be self-employed. He smokes the same brand of cigarettes as you, carries the same make of cellphone and drives the same kind of car.’

Hrycyk looked sceptical. ‘A Santana? Gimme a break.’

‘Actually, we build them in China,’ Li said. ‘Millions of them, in a factory near Shanghai.’ He smiled, ‘Who knows, Agent Hrycyk, you might even be driving a Chinese-built car, contributing in your own small way to the growth of the Chinese economy.’

‘My worst fucking nightmare,’ Hrycyk said, and flicked his cigarette butt into the night. ‘Next time I’ll make sure I buy something totally American, like…’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Like a Chrysler Jeep.’

‘Oh, we build those in China, too,’ Li said. ‘In a factory on the outskirts of Beijing. We call them Beijing Jeeps.’

Hrycyk scowled at him, for once at a loss for words. He thrust his hands in his pockets, and they walked in silence back toward the main entrance. Finally he muttered, ‘Can’t believe we’re here in the middle of the night talking about a fucking flu epidemic. I mean, the flu! Jesus! It can’t be that serious, can it?’

The lights of a car raked the line of trees and swung past them on the road. It pulled up outside the USAMRIID building, and a small man hunched in a big coat hurried inside.

Li said, ‘Looks like the man who’s about to tell us just got here.’