Snakehead

I

Anatoly Markin was a short man. No more than five-five. Margaret put him at about fifty. His skin was pasty white, flesh hanging loosely on a round face, dirty fair hair oiled and scraped back over a flaking scalp. Around his eyes and nose and mouth, his skin was crusting and red, and it had shed itself down the front of his crumpled suit. Margaret noticed, too, what looked like psoriasis around the knuckles on his fingers. His eyes, beneath strangely blond eyebrows, were an odd, pale blue and had a disconcerting quality when turned in your direction. He looked like a reptile that had been out of water for too long.

Markin sat at the head of the table and blinked at all the faces assembled around it. Dr. Ward was sitting further along from Margaret. But he had returned without Steve. She felt sick, fearing the worst, but had not had the chance to ask. Incongruously, Li and Hrycyk were sitting together near the far end.

Colonel Zeiss made the introductions and sat back, effectively handing the meeting over to Markin, who sat in silence for a long time, just looking at them, breathing in short, shallow bursts that crackled in his chest. At length, in a cartoon Russian accent, he said, ‘My hair, ladies and gentlemen, used to be jet black.’ He ran a scaly finger along one of his thick, blond eyebrows. ‘My eyebrows, too.’ He had their full attention now, and his breath wheezed and gurgled in the silence of the conference room. ‘I have not gone prematurely grey. My hair never regained its colour after it was bleached blond by the hydrogen peroxide disinfectant we sprayed into the air in zone one of Building 107 at Omutninsk. That is where we first developed tularemia for the purposes of biological warfare. We put it into little bomblets, and managed to kill a lot of monkeys with it on Rebirth Island. That was in the early eighties. Ten years after we signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.’ He smiled. ‘We lied a lot.’

He placed his hands on the table in front of him, as if to draw their attention to the dry, cracked skin and red, flaking knuckles. ‘Over the years,’ he said, ‘I have been vaccinated against almost everything you can imagine, from anthrax to plague. Many, many times over.’ He paused for effect. ‘You see the result before you. A man whose immune system has been shot to hell.’ A bitter laugh turned into a cough, and phlegm rattled in his throat. ‘I have more allergies than you people can count. I have lost my sense of smell, my sense of taste. My skin falls off me in drifts. If I did not spend an hour rubbing moisturisers and oils into my hands and face and scalp each morning, I would be red raw.’

His eyes grew suddenly very intense and he leaned forward on his elbows. ‘And you people thought that smallpox was dead! That there were only two remaining repositories in the world — one here in America, and the other at the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow.’ A momentary silence, then, ‘Hah!’ he shouted and slapped his palms on the table and sat back. ‘We developed a weapons-grade variety of it at a secret laboratory at Zagorsk and were producing a hundred tons a year of the stuff at Koltsovo.’ He shrugged, as if in apology. ‘Okay, so mortality rate is low — only 50 percent. But morbidity is excellent. Up to 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed to the virus will contract it.’ He seemed to be enjoying himself now.

‘Then there is anthrax. Wonderful mortality rate. Up to 90 percent if untreated in the first two days. Horrible way to die. The bacteria takes over your lymphatic system before entering the blood and producing toxins that attack your organs. Your skin turns blue and your lungs fill with fluid and you drown. We knew just how effective it was when we had our own little biological Chernobyl at Sverdlosk. Spores were released accidentally from our plant there and killed most of the night shift at a ceramics factory across the road. Given the right atmospheric conditions, the release of a hundred kilos of spores in any big US city would kill around three million people. We were developing a strain of anthrax that could be deployed in an SS-18 missile. A single one of which would have wiped out the population of New York City. At Stepnogorsk, we were producing two tons of anthrax a day.’

Some of those around the table had undoubtedly heard this before. But it was news to Margaret. She sat in stunned and horrified silence as Markin continued to catalogue the monstrous affront to civilised behaviour that had been perpetrated by the former Soviet Union with its hugely funded biowarfare programme. He appeared to draw succour from their disapproval.

‘Of course, smallpox and anthrax were not the only concoctions we were preparing for the arming of the SS-18s. There was plague, the bubonic variety of which killed a quarter of the population of Europe in the Middle Ages. And then there was Marburg, a rare filovirus that acts in much the same way as Ebola. And all that,’ he added, ‘when you Americans were hailing Mikhail Gorbachev as the great reformer, the man who would draw the world back from the brink of super-power confrontation. Well, I’ll let you into a little secret. In terms of biowarfare, there was only one super power. And that was the Soviet Union.’ He grinned, the whole superiority of his tone condensed in his next words. ‘And you know what? You people didn’t even know it.’

He stood up, as if his seat had suddenly become very hot. ‘I’m telling you this because you need to know that we knew what we were doing. We spent billions on research, built massive plants capable of bacterial and viral weapons production on the grand scale. We had thousands of scientists and researchers working full-time on ways to destroy the population of the West with infective agents.’ He took his time looking around the table, meeting the eyes that were all turned toward him. ‘And then suddenly it was over. The Soviet Union was no more. The money stopped, the programme was pulled, weapons stocks destroyed.’ He shrugged extravagantly. ‘They have a limited life anyway. A use-by date, just like you’d find in the supermarket.’ He drew a deep crackling breath. ‘But the know-how didn’t go away. What do you think happened to all these thousands of scientists when the government stopped paying them?’ He stabbed a finger into his own chest. ‘Like me, they went to work for the highest bidder.’ His eyes were alight now. ‘But unlike me, they didn’t all go to work for the good guys.’ And he sat down again just as suddenly.

‘My friends, we have scattered the seeds of our own destruction to the four corners of the earth. Many of my former colleagues, I believe, now work for the new republics. Others are in the employ of the Russian Mafia. Yet more went abroad. To Iraq — Saddam paid well — and to other Arab countries. To India and Pakistan. Some are working for multinationals, others for entrepreneurs. I have heard that Arab terrorists would pay handsomely for some of that know-how. And who knows who else is out there itching to spend money on killing Americans with the superbugs we created.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Hrycyk muttered under his breath. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

Margaret looked at her hands. They were trembling. The picture Markin was painting of a world filled with abominable viral and bacterial creations, and a whole community of educated and intelligent people only too happy to unleash them, was as grotesque as he was himself.

Markin knew very well the effect he was having. A slow grin spread itself across his face as he took in their expressions.

The same question Margaret had asked earlier occurred to her again. ‘Why?’ she said.

Markin looked at her, perplexed. ‘Why what?’

‘Why did you do it? Break the Convention? Spend all those billions on creating biological weapons of mass destruction?’

Markin held out his hands, palms up, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Because we thought you were doing it, too,’ he said.

‘And we weren’t?’ Hrycyk asked.

Markin sighed. ‘Apparently not.’ He smiled. ‘I know — difficult to believe, isn’t it? We thought so, too.’ He shrugged again. ‘Although I doubt, as you people would claim, that it had anything to do with your moral superiority. More likely the fact that it would have been impossible for your government to spend the billions of dollars required without anyone knowing about it. The difference, I suppose, between democracy and totalitarianism. We could get away with it, you couldn’t. But I digress.’ And he leaned forward, tightly focused now. ‘The point is that the kind of gene technology that was employed on these Chinese immigrants is not the preserve of a handful of scientists at the cutting edge of their discipline. Any number of my former colleagues would have been capable of performing the kind of manipulation required. But not all of them would have been smart enough. Because make no mistake, what we are looking at here is a very clever piece of work. This has not been cobbled together by some half-baked terrorist. It is the work of a polished professional employing the kind of perverse logic we can only stand back and admire.’

Fuller spoke for the first time. ‘I can’t say I find much to admire in it, Mr. Markin.’ Margaret glanced at him. He looked grim.

‘Ah, but you must always respect your enemy,’ Markin said. ‘Admire him, even. Never underestimate him. In this particular instance, we are dealing with a mind of great ingenuity. Even the use of the Spanish flu virus is ingenious. Because there is no vaccine against it.’

‘So how did these people manage to get hold of the virus,’ Margaret asked, ‘if there were never any preserved live cultures?’

Markin was dismissive. ‘Oh, there have been several attempts to recover soft tissue and culture the live virus. There was one expedition to dig a bunch of miners out of the permafrost in Norway. Soft tissue was also recovered from the crew of a submarine trapped under the Arctic ice pack during the pandemic in 1918.’ He nodded toward the AFIP contingent. ‘Yet more found in an Eskimo grave in Alaska.’ He rubbed his jaw, and skin showered on to the table like snowfall. ‘Of course, none of them was able to culture live virus.’

‘Why would they want to?’ This from Hrycyk.

‘You have to understand, sir,’ Markin said, ‘that we know virtually nothing about why the 1918 flu was so virulent and so deadly. And many doctors believe that it is only a matter of time before a similar pandemic strikes again, that we are in fact merely in an interpandemic period. For medical science to be able to study the Spanish flu virus and to know what made it such a killer would go a long way to enabling us to protect ourselves against a future attack.’

‘But you haven’t answered the question,’ Margaret persisted. ‘If no one has been able to culture the live virus, where did it come from?’

Markin waved his hand dismissively. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t need live virus. If you can retrieve a reasonably intact sample of the viral RNA from soft tissue, you can transcribe it to DNA. Amplify the DNA by adding it to genes in a bacteria called plasmids, then inject the plasmids into human or monkey cell cultures and bingo, you produce live virus. Effectively, you have cloned an identical replica of the original.’

‘Just like that,’ Hrycyk muttered, and had the situation not been so grave, Margaret would have laughed.

Markin was oblivious. ‘The Spanish flu was a particularly good choice,’ he said gleefully. ‘Usually a flu will attack the weakest in a community. The very young and the elderly. But the Spanish flu, for some reason, went for the fittest and strongest. Usually in the fourteen to forty age group. And it acted with extraordinary speed. It could reduce a strong, vigorous adult to a quivering wreck in a matter of hours, completely overwhelming the body’s natural defences. There are many, many accounts of how people were affected by it.

‘Usually influenza victims die of a secondary infection. Pneumonia. Which nowadays is treatable with antibiotics. But the Spanish flu acted so fast it killed its victims even before pneumonia set in. The virus caused an uncontrollable haemorrhaging that filled the lungs, and victims drowned in their own blood. It swept across the United States in little over seven days, in the process killing more Americans than would later die in the whole of the Second World War. In three months, worldwide, it is estimated that it killed between 30 and 40 million people. Only 9 million died during the four years of World War One.’

Markin took a long pause to let his facts and figures sink in. He held his audience absolutely in his thrall, and he knew it. He went on, ‘The Spanish flu was incredibly infectious. In 1918 American people stopped going out of their homes. If they did, they wore face masks. Shops were shut, public meetings were cancelled, funerals were banned. Some more isolated communities put armed guards on the roads into their towns and villages and shot anyone who approached. Today, with modern travel, increased communications, increased populations, the death toll would be devastating. We could be talking about hundreds of millions of people. Hospitals and public health services simply couldn’t cope. They would quickly break down. No one would be immune. Soldiers, police officers, health workers. They would all be as vulnerable as anyone else. A complete breakdown of law and order would almost certainly follow. Believe me, I know. We did a lot of research into the effects of a full-scale biological attack.’

He reached for a glass, and filled it with water from a jug, and drank while everyone sat in silence watching him. They knew there was more to come.

When he had emptied his glass, he ran a tongue over cracked lips and said, ‘One of the problems we had in the Soviet Union in developing efficient biological weapons was finding an effective method of delivery. Most organisms are obliterated in the blast generated by a warhead on impact. Creating some kind of aerosol spray fine enough to carry the bacterium or virus and be delivered by air was next to impossible. I have often heard promulgated a scenario whereby a small private plane flies over Washington DC releasing anthrax spores in an aerosol spray, like a fine crop duster. In this scenario, no one even knows it has happened, and millions inhale the spores and die. In truth that would be almost impossible to achieve. So fine would be the spray required that any remotely adverse weather conditions would disperse it and destroy its efficacy. There would be only a handful of victims. On the other hand, mankind has, built-in, the most efficient aerosol spray in existence — human breath. And in close contact with other human beings it is extraordinarily efficient at passing on infectious diseases. Coughing, sneezing, even just breathing in a confined space, will fill the air around you with your invisible, contaminated spray. You cough into your hand and you have coated it with the virus. You shake hands with someone else, or they handle a sheet of paper that you have touched and then rub their eyes or eat a sandwich. They are now infected. Almost nothing else in nature is as efficient at passing on disease as human beings themselves. Which, of course, makes people the perfect delivery system for a biological attack. And the illegal Chinese immigrants in our midst, ideal unwitting carriers. Trojan horses awaiting activation.’ He paused momentarily before delivering his coup de grâce. ‘And when their disease becomes active,’ he said, ‘it will be apocalyptic.’

As the meeting broke up, Margaret saw that Li had been cornered by Colonel Zeiss and they were in a huddle with Fuller and Hrycyk. Dr. Ward was making a hurried exit with the Commander’s secretary. As she turned to go after him, Mendez caught her arm. ‘Margaret…’

But she said, ‘I’m sorry Felipe, I’ll catch up with you later.’ And she hastened after the Armed Forces medical examiner. She called to him and caught up with him at the end of the corridor as the commander’s secretary flashed an electronic ID at a reader on the wall and the double fire doors ahead of them opened. Ward seemed irritated by Margaret’s pursuit. ‘What is it, Doctor?’ he asked irritably.

‘Where’s Steve?’

Ward’s face darkened. ‘We have received confirmation that Major Cardiff has been infected with the flu virus,’ he said grimly. ‘He’s been confined to the isolation ward here on the base until further notice.’

II

A young female orderly in green camouflage fatigues led her through a maze of corridors, fluorescent ceiling lights set at regular intervals reflecting off a shiny white floor. Hessian-lined walls were pasted with notices and posters. Electronic doors opened ahead of them as the orderly waved her magnetic ID. And then Margaret could hear the hubbub of voices, and at the end of the corridor the two women turned into an open area with an L-shaped desk, like the admitting desk in any hospital. Except that all the staff wore army camouflage. On her left, a door stood open to a room where pale blue protective biosuits hung in rows from hooks on the wall. On her right, the door to the isolation ward was firmly shut. It had a window at eyelevel, and beneath it a secure hatch where foodstuffs and other items were fed into the ward via a chamber that bathed everything in ultraviolet light. To the right of it, a two-way autoclave was built into the wall for the retrieval of potentially infected material. On the left, there was a door into the changing area that led to the decontamination showers, providing a germ-free airlock for staff entering and leaving the ward.

Margaret was trembling. She felt as if she might throw up at any moment. And she remembered the words Mendez had used to describe how he felt after each visit to this place. I always feel contaminated, he had said. She was an experienced doctor, but in that moment she knew how he felt, and she was almost overcome by an enormous sense of vulnerability. She became aware of the orderly talking to her. ‘This is Ward 200,’ she was saying. ‘Originally it was a part of the Walter Reed Military Hospital in Washington. In theory it’ll take four beds, but we have it set up with just one in each room. We haven’t had anyone in here for more than fifteen years.’ She indicated a unit mounted on the wall to the right of the door. ‘You can use this intercom to communicate with the patient.’ She pressed a buzzer and said, ‘Doctor, you got your first visitor.’

Margaret peered apprehensively through the window. There was an anteroom with white painted brick walls. To the left was the stainless steel door to the main decontamination shower. Through the back wall were doors leading to the two single-bed care rooms. Thick, corkscrewed yellow cables hung from the walls at regular intervals. Nursing and medical staff who entered the ward in their protective biosuits could plug into them and move around with independently supplied air. Steve was sitting on the edge of the bed in the room on the left. He was wearing white cotton pyjamas and what looked like paper slippers. Beyond him, Margaret could see banks of life-support equipment, monitors and cables. A cartoon was playing on a wall-mounted TV. He jumped off the bed and wandered through with a broad grin on his face. When he reached the intercom on his side of the glass, Margaret heard his voice crackle across the speaker. ‘What a relief, huh?’

Margaret frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, now that I know I have it, I can stop worrying about whether I’m going to get it. Which means I can do all my worrying about what’s going to trigger it.’

She felt tears pricking her eyes. ‘Oh, Steve…’

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Don’t get all soppy on me. If I’m going to get sick, this is probably the best place in the whole world to be. And it’s only the flu, after all. Did they tell you this is really part of Walter Reed?’ She nodded, afraid even to try to speak. He spread out his arms to either side. ‘So welcome to Wally World.’ Then he lowered his voice. ‘You know, they call this ward “The Slammer”. I’m beginning to think maybe I’m only here for failing to pay my parking tickets.’ And, as an afterthought, ‘Didn’t George Dubya make that a capital offence when he was Texas Governor? Good thing we’re in Maryland, or I could be on Death Row.’

There was something manic about his relentless attempts to be funny, as if perhaps in stopping for a moment reality might encroach. Margaret could only raise a pale smile. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ she asked.

‘Books,’ he said. ‘Something to read. I’ve spent my life avoiding watching television, and that’s all they’ve got here. I’ve passed the last hour reading the instruction labels on every bit of equipment in the place. Not particularly edifying, but a cut above South Park.’ He flicked his head over his shoulder toward the TV set. ‘I had no idea that American humour had descended to the level of schoolboy vulgarity. Do you think we caught it off the British?’

Margaret couldn’t even bring a smile to her lips this time. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah, my personal stereo. It’s in my desk in the office. My tapes are on the bookshelf.’

‘They’ll not let me go rifling through things in your office, Steve,’ she said. ‘Can’t one of the guys get that stuff for you?’

He looked suddenly embarrassed. ‘Well…there was something else. I kind of don’t like to ask the guys, you know?’

Margaret couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘What could you ask me to get that you couldn’t ask the guys?’

He shrugged, and to her horror she saw tears filling his eyes. ‘I keep a picture on my desk. In one of those little silver frames. It’s my kid, you know? Little Danni.’ He tried to grin. ‘They’d probably think I was just being soft.’

Margaret looked at him, surprised that he would be embarrassed by a thing like that. Sometimes men could be strange about sharing their emotions with other men. As if it was somehow a sign of weakness. She would not have put Steve in that category. But, then, she realised, she had only known him a matter of days. In truth she didn’t really know him at all. All that she knew for certain was that he was vulnerable and scared and desperately trying to hide it — particularly from himself. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll do that for you — if your boss’ll let me.’

It was Steve’s turn to be surprised. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t think he likes me much, Steve.’

‘Nah, he’s just a grumpy old bastard,’ Steve said. ‘He’s like that with everyone.’

But Margaret was not convinced. ‘So why doesn’t he wear a uniform? Or does he consider himself above all that?’

‘Oh, no. He doesn’t wear one because he’s not in the services.’

Margaret frowned. ‘How come? I mean, you are. And all the other pathologists.’

‘Yeah, but we’re all from different services. The Armed Forces medical examiner is a civilian; not answerable to any one service. So there’s no risk of bias.’

‘Well, he’s biased against me, I don’t care what you say.’ She knew that by just keeping him talking she was making him take his mind off himself.

‘Well, if he is, I’m going to have to sort him out,’ Steve said. ‘Boss or no boss. And, I can hardly get in any worse trouble than I am already. Can I?’

Margaret grinned. ‘I guess not.’ And for a moment neither of them knew what else to say. Small talk had been exhausted. Then Margaret said, ‘Well, you’re just going to have to hurry up and get out of there. I don’t much care for men who break their promises.’

He half smiled, half frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You promised to take me to this little place you knew in Washington.’

His smile faded. ‘And I suppose the only reason you’d go now is because you felt sorry for me.’

It was a strange, unexpected slap in the face. But she supposed she deserved it. After all, it was only a matter of hours since she had turned him down for dinner that night. ‘I’d go,’ she said, ‘because I enjoy your company.’

He looked at her long and hard through the window, and she saw him bite his lower lip. He put his hand up on the glass, and she placed her hand on the other side of it, a mirror image, palm to palm. But there was no warmth or comfort in it. Just the cold hard surface of the glass.

‘I’m sorry, Steve,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

His eyes filled again. He said, ‘You’ve no idea how lonely it is in here.’ He swallowed, fighting to control himself. ‘I’m scared, Margaret.’

Margaret found Dr. Ward in the reception area of the main entrance, in discussion with a number of Steve’s colleagues, and several of the USAMRIID officers who had attended the meeting.

‘Could I have a word, Dr. Ward?’ she asked.

Ward turned and glared at her. ‘I’m busy right now.’ And he turned back to the others.

Margaret stood smarting for a moment at his rebuff. Then she said, ‘So one of your people is dying in an isolation ward and you’re “too busy” to talk to me about it.’

She saw the back of his neck flush deep red. A hush fell over the group. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said, and he turned to lay a dark look on her. ‘I don’t care to be spoken to like that, Doctor,’ he said tightly.

‘Well, at last you and I have found something in common,’ Margaret said, meeting his eye with an unwavering stare. She saw red spots appear high on his cheeks. Contained anger.

‘What do you want?’ he asked evenly.

‘Steve asked me to get some stuff for him from his office. I wondered if I could drop by tomorrow.’

‘I’ll get one of the secretaries to have it sent up to him,’ Ward said.

‘No. Steve asked me to get it,’ Margaret said. ‘Some of it’s personal.’

‘Personal?’ Ward tried out the word, and from his expression did not appear to like the taste of it. ‘Why would he ask you to get something personal for him?’

‘With the greatest respect,’ Margaret said, showing no respect at all, ‘that’s none of your fucking business, Doctor.’

Ward blanched. He gave her a long, hard look. ‘You’re a very hostile young woman,’ he said.

‘Actually, I’m not,’ she said. ‘But when people make it clear they don’t like me, as far as I’m concerned they lose all right to my civility.’ She thrust her jaw out defiantly. ‘So what is it you don’t like about me, Dr. Ward? I’m not aware of having done anything to offend you — at least, before tonight.’

Ward took a long time considering his response, or perhaps deciding whether or not to make one at all. Finally he said, ‘My father was a medic in Korea in the fifties, when I was just a teenager. He died at the hands of the Chinese. Rather horribly, I’m led to believe.’

Margaret stared at him. ‘And your point is?’

‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ he said.

And Margaret knew then that her relationship with Li was likely to prove just as difficult in the United States as it had in China. She looked at Ward with contempt. ‘I used to think, Dr. Ward, that intelligence and reason were one and the same thing. Clearly I was wrong.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’ll come by and pick up Steve’s things tomorrow.’ She turned toward the door, but stopped and, half turning back, added, ‘By the way, I think you’ll find there are a lot of men and women in China who lost their fathers in Korea, too.’ She tossed her guest security pass on the desk and walked out.

The chill air stung her hot cheeks, and she felt the wind cut through her like a cold steel blade. There was a line of cars sitting at the curbside, engines running. Uniformed drivers sat waiting patiently for their passengers, and it suddenly occurred to Margaret that she was a long way from home with no way of getting back. The rear passenger door of the car second from front opened and Li leaned out. ‘Are you coming?’ he called.

She didn’t need a second invitation. As she slid into the rear seat beside him she said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Washington,’ he said. ‘The military have laid on transport.’

‘But I’ll not get a flight back to Houston at this time of night.’ Even as she said it, she realised that she had not the faintest idea what time it was. She looked at her watch. ‘Jesus!’ It was nearly one a.m. ‘Are the military going to put us up in a hotel as well?’

‘I was thinking,’ Li said, ‘that you could stay over with me. I live in Washington, remember? Or, more accurately, in Georgetown.’

It came as something of a shock for Margaret to realise that although she was back in America, the country of her birth, she was still on Li’s home patch. ‘Well, that would be cheaper,’ she said, ‘and in keeping with the government budget cuts.’ She smiled. ‘Provided, of course, you have a spare room.’

‘I didn’t think we’d need that,’ Li said. And Margaret was immediately self-conscious. Their conversation was certainly being overheard by their driver. Then she thought of Dr. Ward and his disapproval and immediately felt guilty at her self-consciousness. And guilty about Steve, and the images that flooded her mind of the face behind the glass in the isolation ward telling her how scared he was.

‘Sure,’ she said. And leaning forward, ‘Georgetown, please, driver.’ But when she sat back again, her mind was filled with confusion and uncertainty. Last night it had been so easy making love to Li. Tonight she knew that the world was never going to let it be an easy relationship.

III

There was very little traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. The occasional restaurant or club was tipping its last customers out into the early morning. The odd group of university students on their way home from some party wandered by, engaged in still animated chatter, as if they had not had enough of the night already for talking. Margaret smiled, remembering her own student days. How the most trivial things had been of such crucial importance, how she and her group were going to change the world. She guessed it was the same for each successive generation. What disappointments lay ahead with the realisation that it was they who changed, and not the world.

Li told the driver to let them off on the corner of Wisconsin and O. Peter’s Flower Stand was all closed up. A few forlorn stalks and crushed flowerheads lay scattered across the redbrick sidewalk. Margaret reflected on the strange coincidence that she and Li both rented houses in streets called ‘O’. The shadow of the trees lay darkly along the street in the strong moonlight. The first few leaves of fall were gathered in the gutters, wet and sad after the earlier rain.

As they walked silently along the sidewalk, side by side but not touching, Margaret looked at the two- and three-storey brick townhouses painted green and red and white, the Georgian windows, the wrought ironwork, the expensive cars parked at the kerb. She glanced at Li. ‘How can you afford to live here?’ she asked. The two-bedroomed police apartment he had shared with his uncle in Beijing had been extravagant by Chinese standards, modest by American. But this was millionaire territory. Rich people lived here. She knew that the Kennedys had owned a house somewhere close by, in one of the streets off Wisconsin, while he was a senator. Their last home before his final move to the White House.

‘The embassy pays for it,’ Li said. ‘Before I took the job, I had a long conversation with the man I would replace. Like most of the rest of the staff he had a tiny apartment in the embassy building over on Connecticut. He said you could never escape from the job. When it was night-time here, it was daytime in China, and vice versa. And because he was in the building he was on call twenty-four hours a day. So I made it a condition of accepting the post that they got me an outside apartment.’

‘And they agreed?’ Just like that?’

He shrugged. ‘Apparently they have owned the house here on O Street for many years. I don’t know who used it before, or what for, but I had another very good reason for needing a bigger place.’

‘What was that?’

‘I was not alone.’

Margaret stopped and looked at him with a mixture of consternation and anger. ‘Are you telling me you’ve brought a woman here with you?’

He nodded solemnly. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you. But somehow the moment just never seemed right.’

Margaret stared at him in disbelief. ‘And do I know her?’ she asked facetiously.

Li nodded again. Then he said, ‘She really misses those cold winter days when you used to take her kite-flying in Tiananmen Square.’

Margaret felt like a big, soft gloved hand had swung out of the night and knocked her over. She caught her breath. ‘Xinxin?’ Her incredulity almost robbed her of speech. ‘Xinxin is here in America?’ It had been almost as hard to leave the child as it had been to leave Li.

‘I’ve adopted her now, officially,’ Li said. ‘Her father is having a child with another woman. He did not want her back. And no one has heard anything from my sister since she went south to have her baby boy.’ He shrugged. ‘So I needed a room for her, and another for her nanny.’

The house was set back behind a small garden. It had blue-painted shutters at the windows and was smothered in ivy. Red-tiled steps and a path led through lush green shrubbery to the front door. A security lamp clicked on as they approached it, flooding the garden and the street with a bright, cold light. Li unlocked the door and turned on a sidelamp in a long, narrow hallway. There was a staircase on the right leading steeply up to the second floor. Margaret squeezed in past a bicycle leaning against the wall. Li smiled. ‘I still like to cycle to my work.’

Almost immediately, a young Chinese woman appeared, blinking, at the top of the stairs. She wore a long nightshirt and was in her bare feet. She had short, dark, club-cut hair above a round, flat, almost Mongolian face. She put her hand up to her eyes. ‘Is that you, Mr. Li?’

‘Yes, Meiping. I have a guest with me. Dr. Campbell. She will be staying the night.’ He paused. ‘Is Xinxin sleeping?’

‘Yes, Mr. Li.’

‘We’ll maybe look in on her before we go to bed.’

‘Sure, Mr. Li. Anything you want?’

‘No, it’s alright, Meiping. You can go back to bed.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Li. Goodnight, Mr. Li.’ And she padded off back to her bedroom.

‘She has been a remarkable find,’ Li told Margaret. ‘The Embassy got her for me. Xinxin adores her.’

He took her into a front room that overlooked the street through Georgian windows. The furniture was lacquered Chinese antique, formal and not very comfortable. Li shrugged. ‘It came with the house.’ She followed him into a fitted kitchen with a small, round table at its centre. A pull-down lamp lit the circle of it very brightly, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. Li threw a switch and concealed lights beneath the wall units flickered briefly and lit the perimeter of the room. He opened a tall refrigerator. ‘Drink?’

Margaret said, ‘I’d rather see Xinxin first. I promise I won’t wake her.’

The house was tall and very narrow, but extended a long way back from the street. At the top of the stairs a hallway ran to a room at the front of the house, and another ran crookedly toward the back, down three steps, past a small bathroom, and up another two to where doors led off to the back bedrooms. Meiping’s room was on the left. Li gingerly turned the handle on Xinxin’s door and they crept into the darkness of her room. The reflected light from the hall cast itself faintly across Xinxin’s face where her head lay on the pillow, tilted to one side, her mouth slightly open. The room was filled with the slow, heavy sound of her breathing. Margaret perched herself gently on the edge of the bed and looked at the little face, marvelling both at its familiarity and at the way it had changed in not even a year and a half. It was a long time in the life of a seven-year-old child. Her face had become a little thinner, her features more well defined. Her hair, which Margaret had always tied in pigtails high up on each side of her head, was longer and fanned out across the pillow. A single strand of it fell across her cheek and into her mouth. Very carefully, Margaret drew it away from her lips, and the child’s eyes flickered open. They were bleary and sleepily distant and looked up at Margaret, unblinking, for a very long, silent moment. Then a little hand clutched Margaret’s. ‘You gonna read me story tonight, Magret?’ she asked in a tiny voice thick with sleep.

‘Tomorrow, little one,’ Margaret whispered, and she tried very hard to stop her eyes filling with tears.

‘We gonna make dumplings tomorrow?’

‘Sure we are, sweetheart.’

A little smile flickered across Xinxin’s lips. ‘I love you, Magret.’ And her eyes closed, and the slow heavy sound of her breathing filled the room again.

Margaret stood up quickly, the light from the hall blurring in her eyes, and she hurried out past Li, wiping them quickly dry as he pulled the door shut behind him. It was as if she had never left. But one thing at least had changed. She turned to Li. ‘You know what?’ she said hoarsely. ‘That’s the first time I ever had a conversation with her in English.’

Back in the kitchen, she sat watching as Li poured her a vodka tonic in a glass filled with ice and fresh cut lemon. He remembered how to make it just the way she liked it. The fizz of the bubbles tickled her lip and nose as she took a long pull at the drink, and she felt the alcohol hit her bloodstream almost immediately. With it came a wave of fatigue, and she remembered it was a long time since she had slept — there had been precious little of it the night before.

Li sat astride a chair opposite her, leaning into the ring of light with a bottle of cold beer in his hand. He had pulled on a tee-shirt and kicked off his shoes, moving barefoot around the cold kitchen tiles. Now, as he took a long suck at the neck of his bottle, she looked at his fine, strong arm, and saw the contours of his muscles below the stretch of his tee-shirt. She felt that same falling sensation inside again. She took another drink of her vodka and forced her mind to focus on other things. And as she did, the events of the day flooded back into it, along with a big wedge of depression. She thought about the bodies she had autopsied, the injection sites in the the semi-lunar fold of the buttock, the revelations about the Spanish flu, and the box of horrors that the vile Anatoly Markin had opened up at Fort Detrick. And she thought about poor Steve through the glass in the isolation ward there and wondered how many more poor souls were lying sleeping tonight with the virus nested away in their DNA, awaiting some unknown trigger to unleash it upon an unsuspecting world.

She said, ‘I don’t understand why they want me on this task force. They have the entire resources of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at their disposal.’

Li said, ‘You are the medical examiner in Houston. That is where the investigation will be focused. It is essential that you are on board.’

She looked at him. ‘And you?’

‘I am a political inclusion,’ he said, his voice laden with irony. ‘But my people want me involved, too. They want an end to this just as much as the Americans. Contacts have already been set up between FEMA and my Embassy.’

‘FEMA,’ Margaret said, and she remembered the three unexplained FEMA representatives who had sat at the table at Fort Detrick. ‘I know I should probably know, but what the hell is FEMA?’

‘The Federal Emergency Management Agency,’ Li said. ‘Since this is a multiagency task force, FEMA will finance and administer it.’

She looked at him in wonder. ‘How do you know all this, Li Yan?’

He smiled. ‘It is my job, Margaret. I have spent ten months in Washington familiarising myself with every law-enforcement agency they’re prepared to tell me about, and some they aren’t.’ He shook his head. ‘There has been a great deal of empire building here over a great many years, and now a huge number of vested interests are jealously guarding their budgets and their turf. US law enforcement is the most labyrinthine and arcane field of study I have ever undertaken. I was never quite sure if there was any real point to it, until now.’

She drained her glass. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’

He rounded the table as she stood up, taking her by the wrist and turning her into him almost before she knew it, his body hard and strong, pressed against hers, his arms enveloping her. She felt his breath on her face, and smelled the sweet fresh alcohol on it. He kissed her softly, and she looked up into his eyes. She sighed. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, Li Yan,’ she said. And she felt his hold on her slacken and he moved very slightly away from her.

‘What do you mean?’ She heard both the disappointment and the hurt in his voice.

She struggled to give form to her thoughts. ‘I think maybe we should, you know, keep things between us on a professional basis for a while. When we start getting personal, you and I…’ she gasped, exasperated by her own inability to find the right words, ‘…we only ever seem to generate pain.’

‘I don’t remember there being much pain between us last night.’

And he was right. There had been only pleasure. But how could she tell him that the pleasure never made up for the pain that followed. Seeing Xinxin tonight had brought it all flooding back. She needed time and space to find her perspective again. ‘Things are always just too complicated with us, Li Yan,’ she said feebly. And she wondered if she wasn’t simply taking the coward’s way out. Afraid to confront the contradictions of a cross-cultural relationship in her own country, afraid to face the disapproval of her peers. Or maybe she was just afraid to grasp the thing she wanted most in the world in case it all slipped away from her again.

The telephone shattered the tension between them, its long, single ring spiking the dark like electricity. Li moved catlike across the kitchen to answer it before it woke Xinxin.

‘Wei?’ He spoke automatically in Chinese, then quickly corrected himself. ‘Hello.’

A voice heavy with sleazy innuendo said, ‘Didn’t get you out of your bed, did I?’ It took Li a moment to realise it was Hrycyk.

‘No,’ he said.

‘She’s there, though, huh?’

‘What do you want, Hrycyk?’

‘I want you both on the seven a.m. flight to Houston. My people have set up a series of raids in Chinatown. We’re going to start pulling in as many illegals as we can find. And I want my agents properly protected in case any of them have got the flu. So we need the little lady along.’ He paused. ‘Is she there, or do I need to track her down somewhere else?’

Li said reluctantly, ‘She’s here.’

There was an almost imperceptible chuckle at the other end of the line. ‘Thought so. Sweet dreams, Chinaman.’ And he hung up.

Li stood for a moment, anger and humiliation smouldering inside him. Slowly he replaced the receiver and turned to tell Margaret what Hrycyk had told him.

She listened in silence, and then nodded. ‘We’d better get some sleep then.’

And when he had taken her upstairs and left her in his room to go off and sleep on an unmade bed somewhere else, she stood by the window bathed in the moonlight that slanted in through the trees, and wished she had told him to stay. She was lonely and confused, and then with a sudden sickening start remembered her promise to take Steve the photograph of his little girl tomorrow. Impossible now. Another failure. Her great talent, it seemed, was for inflicting hurt on the people she cared about most.