The Hades Factor

CHAPTER ONE

A cold October rain slanted down on Knightsbridge where Brompton Road intersected Sloan Street. The steady stream of honking cars, taxis, and red double-decker buses turned south and made their halting way toward Sloan Square and Chelsea. Neither the rain nor the fact that business and government offices were closed for the weekend lessened the crush. The world economy was good, the shops were full, and New Labor was rocking no one's boat. Now the tourists came to London at all times of the year, and the traffic this Sunday afternoon continued to move at a snail's pace.

Impatient, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jonathan (“Jon”) Smith, M.D., stepped lightly from the slow-moving, old-style No. 19 bus two streets before his destination. The rain was letting up at last. He trotted a few quick steps beside the bus on the wet pavement and then hurried onward, leaving the bus behind.

A tall, trim, athletic man in his early forties, Smith had dark hair worn smoothly back and a high-planed face. His navy blue eyes automatically surveyed vehicles and pedestrians. There was nothing unusual about him as he strode along in his tweed jacket, cotton trousers, and trench coat. Still, women turned to look, and he occasionally noticed and smiled, but continued on his way.

He left the drizzle at Wilbraham Place and entered the foyer of the genteel Wilbraham Hotel, where he took a room every time USAMRIID sent him to a medical conference in London. Inside the old hostelry, he climbed the stairs two at a time to his second-floor room. There he rummaged through his suitcases, searching for the field reports of an outbreak of high fever among U.S. troops stationed in Manila. He had promised to show them to Dr. Chandra Uttam of the viral diseases branch of the World Health Organization.

Finally he found the reports under a pile of dirty clothes tossed into the larger suitcase. He sighed and grinned at himself ― he had never lost the messy habits acquired from his years in the field living in tents, focusing on one crisis or another.

As he rushed downstairs to return to the WHO epidemiology conference, the desk clerk called out to him.

“Colonel? There's a letter for you. It's marked `Urgent.' ”

“A letter?” Who would mail him here? He looked at his wristwatch, which told him not only the hour but reminded him of the day. “On a Sunday?”

“It came by hand.”

Suddenly worried, Smith took the envelope and ripped it open. It was a single sheet of white printer paper, no letterhead or return address.

Smith's chest contracted. There was only one person who called him Smithy ― Bill Griffin. He had met Bill in third grade at Hoover elementary school in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Fast friends from then on, they had gone to high school together, college at the University of Iowa, and on to grad school at UCLA. Only after Smith had gotten his M.D. and Bill his Ph.D. in psychology had they taken different paths. Both had fulfilled boyhood dreams by joining the military, with Bill going into military intelligence work. They had not actually seen each other in more than a decade, but through all their distant assignments and postings, they had kept in touch.

Frowning, Smith stood motionless in the stately lobby and stared down at the cryptic words.

“Anything wrong, sir?” the desk clerk inquired politely.

Smith looked around. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Well, better be on my way if I want to catch the next seminar.”

He stuffed the note into his trench-coat pocket and strode out into the soggy afternoon. How had Bill known he was in London? At this particular secluded hotel? And why all the cloak-and-dagger, even to the extent of using Bill's private boyhood name for him?

No return address or phone number.

Only an initial to identify the sender.

Why midnight?

Smith liked to think of himself as a simple man, but he knew the truth was far from that. His career showed the reality. He had been a military doctor in MASH units and was now a research scientist. For a short time he had also worked for military intelligence. And then there was the stint commanding troops. He wore his restlessness like another man wore his skin ― so much a part of him he hardly noticed.

Yet in the past year he had discovered a happiness that had given him focus, a concentration he had never before achieved. Not only did he find his work at USAMRIID challenging and exciting, the confirmed bachelor was in love. Really in love. No more of that high-school stuff of women coming and going through his life in a revolving door of drama. Sophia Russell was everything to him ― fellow scientist, research partner, and blond beauty.

There were moments when he would take his eyes from his electron microscope just to stare at her. How all that fragile loveliness could conceal so much intelligence and steely will constantly intrigued him. Just thinking about her made him miss her all over again. He was scheduled to fly out of Heathrow tomorrow morning, which would give him just enough time to drive home to Maryland and meet Sophia for breakfast before they had to go into the lab.

But now he had this disturbing message from Bill Griffin.

All his internal alarms were ringing. At the same time, it was an opportunity. He smiled wryly at himself. Apparently his restlessness still was not tamed.

As he hailed a taxi, he made plans.

He would change his flight tickets to Monday night and meet Bill Griffin at midnight. He and Bill went too far back for him to do otherwise. This meant he would not get into work until Tuesday, a day late. Which would make Kielburger, the general who directed USAMRIID, see red. To put it mildly, the general found Smith and his freewheeling, field-operations way of doing things aggravating.

Not a problem. Smith would do an end run.

Early yesterday morning he had phoned Sophia just to hear her voice. But in the middle of their conversation, a call had cut in. She had been ordered to go to the lab immediately to identify some virus from California. Sophia could easily work the next sixteen or twenty-four hours nonstop and, in fact, she might be at the lab so late tonight, she would not even be up tomorrow morning, when he had been planning to share breakfast. Smith sighed, disappointed. The only good thing was she would be too busy to worry about him.

He might as well just leave a message on their answering machine at home that he would arrive a day late and she should not be concerned. She could tell General Kielburger or not, her call.

That was where the payoff came in. Instead of leaving London tomorrow morning, he would take a night flight. A few hours' difference, but a world to him: Tom Sheringham was leading the U.K. Microbiological Research Establishment team that was working on a potential vaccine against all hantaviruses. Tonight he would not only be able to attend Tom's presentation, he would twist Tom's arm to join him for a late dinner and drinks. Then he would pry out all the inside, cutting-edge details Tom was not ready to make public and wangle an invitation to visit Porton Down tomorrow before he had to catch his night flight.

Nodding to himself and almost smiling, Smith leaped over a puddle and yanked open the back door of the black-beetle taxi that had stopped in the street. He told the cabbie the address of the WHO conference.

But as he sank into the seat, his smile disappeared. He pulled out the letter from Bill Griffin and reread it, hoping to find some clue he had missed. What was most noteworthy was what was not said. The furrow between his brows deepened. He thought back over the years, trying to figure out what could have happened to make Bill suddenly contact him this way.

If Bill wanted scientific help or some kind of assistance from USAMRIID, he would go through official government channels. Bill was an FBI special agent now, and proud of it. Like any agent, he would request Smith's services from the director of USAMRIID.

On the other hand, if it were simply personal, there would have been no cloak-and-dagger. Instead, a phone message would have been waiting at the hotel with Bill's number so Smith could call back.

In the chilly cab, Smith shrugged uneasily under his trench coat. This meeting was not only unofficial, it was secret. Very secret. Which meant Bill was going behind the FBI. Behind USAMRIID. Behind all government entities… all apparently in the hopes of involving him, too, in something clandestine.

CHAPTER TWO

Located in Frederick, a small city surrounded by western Maryland's green, rolling landscape, Fort Detrick was the home of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. Known by its initials, USAMRIID, or simply as the Institute, it had been a magnet for violent protest in the 1960s when it was an infamous government factory for developing and testing chemical and biological weapons. When President Nixon ordered an end to those programs in 1969, USAMRIID disappeared from the spotlight to become a center for science and healing.

Then came 1989. The highly communicable Ebola virus appeared to have infected monkeys dying at a primate quarantine unit in Reston, Virginia. USAMRIID's doctors and veterinarians, both military and civilian, were rushed to contain what could erupt into a tragic human epidemic.

But better than containment, they proved the Reston virus to be a genetic millimeter different from the extremely lethal strains of Ebola Zaire and Ebola Sudan. Most important was that the virus was harmless to people. That exciting discovery skyrocketed USAMRIID scientists into headlines across the nation. Suddenly, Fort Detrick was again on people's minds, but this time as America's foremost military medical research facility.

In her USAMRIID office, Dr. Sophia Russell was thinking about these claims to fame, hoping for inspiration as she waited impatiently for her telephone call to reach a man who might have some answers to help resolve a crisis she feared could erupt into a serious epidemic.

Sophia was a Ph.D. scientist in cell and molecular biology. She was a leading cog in the worldwide wheels set in motion by the death of Maj. Keith Anderson. She had been at USAMRIID for four years, and like the scientists in 1989, she was fighting a medical emergency involving an unknown virus. Already she and her contemporaries were in a far more precarious position: This virus was fatal to humans. There were three victims ― the army major and two civilians ― all of whom had apparently died abruptly of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) within hours of one another.

It was not the timing of the deaths or the ARDS itself that had riveted USAMRIID; millions died of ARDS each year around the planet. But not young people. Not healthy people. Not without a history of respiratory problems or other contributing factors, and not with violent headaches and blood-filled chest cavities.

Now three cases in a single day had died with identical symptoms, each in a different part of the country ― the major in California, a teenage girl in Georgia, and a homeless man in Massachusetts.

The director of USAMRIID ― Brig. Gen. Calvin Kielburger ― was reluctant to declare a worldwide alert on the basis of three cases they had been handed only yesterday. He hated rocking the boat or sounding like a weak alarmist. Even more, he hated sharing credit with other Level Four labs, especially USAMRIID's biggest rival, Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control.

Meanwhile, tension at USAMRIID was palpable, and Sophia, leading a team of scientists, kept working.

She had received the first of the blood samples by 3:00 A.M. Saturday and had immediately headed to her Level Four lab to begin testing. In the small locker room, she had removed her clothes, watch, and the ring Jon Smith gave her when she agreed to marry him. She paused just a moment to smile down at the ring and think about Jon. His handsome face flashed into her mind ― the almost American Indian features with the high cheekbones but very dark blue eyes. Those eyes had intrigued her from the beginning, and sometimes she had imagined how much fun it would be to fall into their depths. She loved the liquid way he moved, like a jungle animal who was domesticated only by choice. She loved the way he made love ― the fire and excitement. But most of all, she just simply, irrevocably, passionately loved him.

She had had to interrupt their phone conversation to rush here. “Darling, I have to go. It was the lab on the other line. An emergency.”

“At this hour? Can't it wait until morning? You need your rest.”

She chuckled. “You called me. I was resting, in fact sleeping, until the phone rang.”

“I knew you'd want to talk to me. You can't resist me.”

She laughed. “Absolutely. I want to talk to you at all hours of the day and night. I miss you every moment you're in London. I'm glad you woke me up out of sound sleep so I could tell you that.”

It was his turn to laugh. “I love you, too, darling.”

In the USAMRIID locker room, she sighed. Closed her eyes. Then she put Jon from her mind. She had work to do. An emergency.

She quickly dressed in sterile green surgical scrubs. Barefoot, she labored to open the door to Bio-Safety Level Two against the negative pressure that kept contaminants inside Levels Two, Three, and Four. Finally inside, she trotted past a dry shower stall and into a bathroom where clean white socks were kept.

Socks on, she hurried into the Level Three staging area. She snapped on latex rubber surgical gloves and then taped the gloves to the sleeves to create a seal. She repeated the procedure with her socks and the legs of the scrubs. That done, she dressed in her personal bright-blue plastic biological space suit, which smelled faintly like the inside of a plastic bucket. She carefully checked it for pinholes. She lowered the flexible plastic helmet over her head, closed the plastic zipper that ensured her suit and helmet were sealed, and pulled a yellow air hose from the wall.

She plugged the hose into her suit. With a quiet hiss, the air adjusted in the massive space suit. Almost finished, she unplugged the air hose and lumbered through a stainless steel door into the air lock of Level Four, which was lined with nozzles for water and chemicals for the decontamination shower.

At last she pulled open the door into Level Four. The Hot Zone.

There was no way she could rush anything now. As she advanced each step in the cautious chain of protective layers, she had to take more care. Her one weapon was efficient motion. The more efficient she was, the more speed she could eke out. So instead of struggling into the pair of heavy yellow rubber boots, she expertly bent one foot, angled it just right, and slid it in. Then she did the same with the other.

She waddled as fast as she could along narrow cinder-block corridors into her lab. There she slipped on a third pair of latex gloves, carefully removed the samples of blood and tissue from the refrigerated container, and went to work isolating the virus.

Over the next twenty-six hours, she forgot to eat or sleep. She lived in the lab, studying the virus with the electron microscope. To her amazement, she and her team ruled out Ebola, Marburg, and any other filovirus. It had the usual furry-ball shape of most viruses. Once she had seen it, given the ARDS cause of death, her first thought was a hantavirus like the one that had killed the young athletes on the Navajo reservation in 1993. USAMRIID was expert on hantaviruses. One of its legends, Karl Johnson, had been a discoverer of the first hantavirus to be isolated and identified back in the 1970s.

With that in mind, she had used immunoblotting to test the unknown pathogen against USAMRIID's frozen bank of blood samples of previous victims of various hantaviruses from around the world. It reacted to none. Puzzled, she ran a polymerase chain reaction to get a bit of DNA sequence from the virus. It resembled no known hantavirus, but for future reference she assembled a preliminary restriction map anyway. That was when she wished most fervently that Jon was with her, not far away at the WHO conference in London.

Frustrated because she still had no definitive answer, she had forced herself to leave the lab. She had already sent the team off to sleep, and now she went through the exiting procedure, too, peeling away her space suit, going through decontamination procedures, and dressing again in her civilian clothes.

After a four-hour on-site nap ― that was all she needed, she told herself firmly ― she had hurried to her office to study the tests' notes. As the other team members awakened, she sent them back to their labs.

Her head ached, and her throat was dry. She took a bottle of water from her office mini-refrigerator and returned to her desk. On the wall hung three framed photos. She drank and leaned forward to contemplate them, drawn like a moth to comforting light. One showed Jon and herself in bathing suits last summer in Barbados. What fun they had had on their one and only vacation. The second was of Jon in his dress uniform the day he'd made lieutenant colonel. The last pictured a younger captain with wild black hair, a dirty face, and piercing blue eyes in a dusty field uniform outside a Fifth MASH tent somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

Missing him, needing him in the lab with her, she had reached for the phone to call him in London ― and stopped. The general had sent him to London. For the general, everything was by the book, and every assignment had to be finished. Not a day late, not a day early. Jon was not due for several hours. Then she realized he was probably aloft now anyway, but she wouldn't be at his house, waiting for him. She dismissed her disappointment.

She had devoted herself to science, and somewhere along the way she had gotten extremely lucky. She had never expected to marry. Fall in love, perhaps. But marry? No. Few men wanted a wife obsessed with her work. But Jon understood. In fact, it excited him that she could look at a cell and discuss it in graphic, colorful detail with him. In turn, she had found his endless curiosity invigorating. Like two children at a kindergarten party, they had found their favorite playmates in each other ― well suited not only professionally but temperamentally. Both were dedicated, compassionate, and as in love with life as with each other.

She had never known such happiness, and she had Jon to thank for it.

With an impatient shake of her head, she turned on her computer to examine the lab notes for anything she might have missed. She found nothing of any significance.

Then, as more DNA sequence data was arriving, and she continued to review in her mind all the clinical data so far on the virus, she had a strange feeling.

She had seen this virus ― or one that was incredibly similar ― somewhere.

She wracked her brain. Dug through her memory. Rooted through her past.

Nothing came to mind. Finally she read one of her team members' reports that suggested the new virus might be related to Machupo, one of the first discovered hemorrhagic fevers, again by Karl Johnson.

Africa pushed none of her buttons. But Bolivia…?

Peru!

Her student anthropology field trip, and ―

Victor Tremont.

Yes, that had been his name. A biologist on a field trip to Peru to collect plants and dirts for potential medicinals for… what company? A pharmaceutical firm… Blanchard Pharmaceuticals!

She turned back to her computer, quickly entered the Internet, and searched for Blanchard. She found it almost at once ― in Long Lake, New York. And Victor Tremont was president and Chief Operating Officer now. She reached for her phone and dialed the number.

It was Sunday morning, but giant corporations sometimes kept their telephones open all weekend for important calls. Blanchard did. A human voice answered, and when Sophia asked for Victor Tremont, the voice told her to wait. She drummed her fingers on the desk, trying to control her worried impatience.

At last a series of clicks and silences on the far end of the line were interrupted by another human voice. This time it was neutral, toneless: “May I ask your name and business with Dr. Tremont?”

“Sophia Russell. Tell him it's about a trip to Peru where we met.”

“Please hold.” More silence. Then: "Mr. Tremont will speak with you now.

“Ms…. Russell?” Obviously he was consulting the name handed to him on a pad. “What can I do for you?” His voice was low and pleasant but commanding. A man clearly accustomed to being in charge.

She said mildly, “Actually, it's Dr. Russell now. You don't remember my name, Dr. Tremont?”

“Can't say I do. But you mentioned Peru, and I do remember Peru. Twelve or thirteen years ago, wasn't it?” He was acknowledging why he was talking to her, but giving nothing away in case she was a job seeker or it was all some hoax.

“Thirteen, and I certainly remember you.” She was trying to keep it light. “What I'm interested in is that time on the Caraibo River. I was with a group of anthropology undergrads on a field trip from Syracuse while you were collecting potential medicinal materials. I'm calling to ask about the virus you found in those remote tribesmen, the natives the others called the Monkey Blood People.”

In his large corner office at the other end of the line, Victor Tremont felt a jolt of fear. Just as quickly, he repressed it. He swiveled in his desk chair to stare out at the lake, which was shimmering like mercury in the early-morning light. On the far side, a thick pine forest stretched and climbed to the high mountains in the distance.

Annoyed that she had surprised him with such a potentially devastating memory, Tremont continued to swivel. He kept his voice friendly. “Now I remember you. The eager blond young lady dazzled by science. I wondered whether you'd go on to become an anthropologist. Did you?”

“No, I ended up with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology. That's why I need your help. I'm working at the army's infectious diseases research center at Fort Detrick. We've come across a virus that sounds a lot like the one in Peru ― an unknown type causing headaches, fever, and acute respiratory distress syndrome that can kill otherwise healthy people within hours and produce a violent hemorrhage in the lungs. Does that ring a bell, Dr. Tremont?”

“Call me Victor, and I seem to recall your first name is Susan… Sally… something like…?”

“Sophia.”

“Of course. Sophia Russell. Fort Detrick,” he said, as if writing it down. “I'm glad to hear you remained in science. Sometimes I wish I'd stayed in the lab instead of jumping to the front office. But that's water over a long-ago dam, eh?” He laughed.

She asked, “Do you recall the virus?”

“No. Can't say I do. I went into sales and management soon after Peru, and probably that's why the incident escapes me. As I said, it was a long time ago. But from what I recall of my molecular biology, the scenario you suggest is unlikely. You must be thinking of a series of different viruses we heard about on that trip. There was no shortage. I remember that much.”

She dug the phone into her ear, frustrated. “No, I'm certain there was this one single agent that came from working with the Monkey Blood People. I didn't pay a lot of attention at the time. But then, I never expected to end up in biology, much less cell and molecular. Still, the oddness of it stuck with me.”

“ `The Monkey Blood People'? How bizarre. I'm sure I'd recall a tribe with such a colorful name as that.”

Urgency filled her voice. “Dr. Tremont, listen. Please. This is vital. Critical. We've just received three cases of a virus that reminds me of the one in Peru. Those natives had a cure that worked almost eighty percent of the time ― drinking the blood of a certain monkey. As I recall, that's what astonished you.”

“And still would,” Tremont agreed. The accuracy of her memory was unnerving. “Primitive Indians with a cure for a fatal virus? But I know nothing about it,” he lied smoothly. “The way you describe what happened, I'm certain I'd remember. What do your colleagues say? Surely some worked in Peru, too.”

She sighed. “I wanted to check with you first. We have enough false alarms, and it's been a long time since Peru for me, too. But if you don't remember…” Her voice trailed off. She was terribly disappointed. “I'm certain there was a virus. Perhaps I'll contact Peru. They must have a record of unusual cures among the Indians.”

Victor Tremont's voice rose slightly. “That may not be necessary. I kept a journal of my trips back then. Notes on the plants and potential pharmaceuticals. Perhaps I jotted down something about your virus as well.”

Sophia leaped at the suggestion. “I'd appreciate your looking. Right away.”

“Whoa.” Tremont gave a warm chuckle. He had her. “The notebooks are stored somewhere in my house. Probably the attic. Maybe the basement. I'll have to get back to you tomorrow.”

“I owe you, Victor. Maybe the world will. First thing tomorrow, please. You have no idea how important this could be.” She gave him her phone number.

“Oh, I think I know,” Tremont assured her. “Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

He hung up and rotated once more to gaze out at the brightening lake and the high mountains that suddenly seemed to loom close and ominous. He stood up and walked to the window. He was a tall man of medium build, with a distinctive face on which nature had played one of her more kindly tricks: From a youth's oversized nose, gawky ears, and thin cheeks, he had grown into a good-looking man. He was now in his fifties, and his features had filled out. His face was aquiline, smooth, and aristocratic. The nose was the perfect size ― straight and strong, a fitting centerpiece for his very English face. With his tan skin and thick, iron-gray hair, he drew attention wherever he went. But he knew it was not his dignity and attractiveness that people found so appealing. It was his self-confidence. He radiated power, and less-assured people found that compelling.

Despite what he had told Sophia Russell, Victor Tremont made no move to go home to his secluded estate. Instead, he stared unseeing at the mountains and fought off tension. He was angry… and annoyed.

Sophia Russell. My God, Sophia Russell!

Who would have thought? He had not even recognized her name initially. In fact, still did not remember any of the names of that insignificant little student group. And he doubted any would recall his. But Russell had. What kind of brain retained such detail? Obviously the trivial was too important to her. He shook his head, disgusted. In truth, she was not a problem. Just a nuisance. Still, she must be dealt with. He unlocked the secret drawer in his carved desk, took out a cell phone, and dialed.

An emotionless voice with a faint accent answered. “Yes?”

“I need to talk to you,” Victor Tremont ordered. “My office. Ten minutes.” He hung up, returned the cell phone to the locked drawer, and picked up his regular office phone. “Muriel? Get me General Caspar in Washington.”

CHAPTER THREE

As employees arrived at USAMRIID that Monday morning, word quickly spread through the campus's buildings of the weekend's fruitless search to identify and find a way to contain some new killer virus. The press still had not discovered the story, and the director's office ordered everyone to maintain media silence. No one was to talk to a reporter, and only those working in the labs were kept in the loop about the agonizing quest.

Meanwhile, regular work still had to be done. There were forms to be filed, equipment to be maintained, phone calls to be answered. In the sergeant major's office, Specialist Four Hideo Takeda was in his cubicle sorting mail when he opened an official-looking envelope emblazoned with the U.S. Department of Defense logo.

After he read and reread the letter, he leaned over the divider between his cubicle and that of Specialist Five Sandra Quinn, his fellow clerk. He confided in an excited whisper, “It's my transfer to Okinawa.”

“You're kidding.”

“We'd given up.” He grinned. His girlfriend, Miko, was stationed on Okinawa.

“Better tell the boss right away,” Sandra warned. “It means teaching a new clerk to deal with the goddamned absentminded professors we got here. She'll be pissed. Man, they're all out of their minds today anyway with this new crisis, aren't they?”

“Screw her,” Specialist Takeda swore cheerfully.

“Not in my worst nightmare.” Sgt. Maj. Helen Daugherty stood in her office doorway. “Would you care to step in here, Specialist Takeda?” she said with exaggerated politeness. “Or would you prefer I beat you senseless first?”

An imposing six-foot blonde with the shoulders to offset all her whistle-producing curves, the sergeant major looked down with her best piranha smile at the five-foot-six Takeda. The clerk hurried out of his cubicle with a nervous show of fear not entirely faked. With Daugherty, as befitted any good sergeant major, you were never fully sure you were safe.

“Close the door, Takeda. And take a seat.”

The specialist did as instructed.

Daugherty fixed him with a gimlet eye. “How long have you known about the possibility of this transfer, Hideo?”

“It came out of the blue this morning. I mean, I just opened the letter.”

“And we put it in for you… what, almost two years ago?”

“Year and a half, at least. Right after I came back from leave over there. Look, Sergeant, if you need me to stick around awhile, I'll be―”

Daugherty shook her head. “Doesn't look like I could do that if I wanted to.” With her finger she stabbed a memo on her desk. “I got this E-mail from the Department of the Army about the same time you must've opened your letter. Looks like your replacement's already on her way. Coming from Intelligence Command over in Kosovo, no less. She must've been on a plane before the letter even got to the office.” Daugherty's expression was thoughtful.

“You mean she'll be here today?”

Daugherty glanced at the clock on her desk. “A couple of hours, to be exact.”

“Wow, that's fast.”

“Yes,” Daugherty agreed, “it sure is. They've even cut travel orders for you. You've got a day to clear out your desk and quarters. You're to be on a plane tomorrow morning.”

“A day?”

“Better get at it. And best of luck, Hideo. I've enjoyed working with you. I'll put a good report in your file.”

“Yessir, er, Sergeant. And thanks.”

Still a little stunned, Takeda left Sergeant Major Daugherty contemplating the memo. She was rolling a pencil between her hands and staring off into space as he enthusiastically dumped out his desk. He repressed a war whoop of victory. He was not only tired of being away from Miko, he was especially tired of living in the USAMRIID pressure cooker. He had been through plenty of emergencies here, but this new one had everyone worried. Even scared. He was glad to get the hell out.

Three hours later, Specialist Four Adele Schweik stood at attention in the same office in front of Sergeant Major Daugherty. She was a small brunette with almost black hair, a rigid carriage, and alert gray eyes. Her uniform was impeccable, with two rows of medal ribbons showing service overseas in many countries and campaigns. There was even a Bosnian ribbon.

“At ease, Specialist.”

Schweik stood at ease. “Thank you, Sergeant Major.”

Daugherty read her transfer papers and spoke without looking up. “Kind of fast, wasn't it?”

“I asked to be transferred to the D.C. area a few months ago. Personal reasons. My colonel told me an opening had suddenly come up at Detrick, and I jumped at it.”

Daugherty looked up at her. "A little overqualified, aren't you? This is a backwater post. A small command not doing much and never going overseas.

“I only know it's Detrick. I don't know what your unit is.”

“Oh?” Daugherty raised a blond eyebrow. There was something too cool and composed about this Schweik. “Well, we're USAMRIID: U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. Scientific research. All our officers are doctors, vets, or medical specialists. We even have civilians. No weapons, no training, no glory.”

Schweik smiled. “That sounds peaceful, Sergeant Major. A nice change after Kosovo. Besides, haven't I heard USAMRIID is on the cutting edge, working with pretty deadly Hot Zone diseases? Sounds like it could be exciting.”

The sergeant major cocked her head. “It is for the docs. But for us it's just office routine. We keep the place running. Over the weekend there was some kind of emergency. Don't ask any questions. It's none of your business. And if any journalist contacts you, refer them to public affairs. That's an order. Okay, there's your cubicle next to Quinn's. Introduce yourself. Get settled, and Quinn will bring you up to speed.”

Schweik came to attention. “Thank you, Sergeant Major.”

Daugherty rotated her pencil again, studying the door that had just closed behind the new woman. Then Daugherty sighed. She had not been completely truthful. Although there was plenty of routine, there were moments like this when all of a sudden the army didn't make a damn bit of sense. She shrugged. Well, she had seen stranger things than an abrupt shift in personnel that made both transferring parties happy. She buzzed Quinn, asked for a cup of coffee, and put out of her mind the latest lab crisis and the strange personnel transfer. She had work to do.

At 1732, hours, Sergeant Major Daugherty locked her cubicle door, preparing to leave the empty office. But the office was not empty.

The new woman, Schweik, said, “I'd like to stay and learn as much as I can, if that's all right, Sergeant Major.”

“Fine. I'll tell security. You have an office key? Good. Lock up when you're finished. You won't be alone. That new virus is driving the docs crazy. I expect some of them will be on campus all night. If this goes on much longer, they're going to start getting cantankerous. They don't like mysteries that kill people.”

“So I've heard.” The small brunette nodded and smiled. “See, plenty of action and excitement at Fort Detrick.”

Daugherty laughed. “I stand corrected,” she said, and went out.

At her desk in the silent office, Specialist Schweik read memos and made notes for another half hour until she was sure neither the sergeant major nor security was coming back to check on her. Then she opened the attache case she had brought inside during her first coffee break. When she had arrived at Andrews Air Force Base this morning, it had been waiting in the car assigned to her.

From the case she withdrew a schematic diagram of the phone installations in the USAMRIID building. The main box was in the basement, and it contained connections for all the internal extensions and private outside lines. She studied it long enough to memorize its position. Then she returned the diagram, closed the case, and stepped into the corridor, carrying it.

With innocent curiosity on her face, she looked carefully around.

The guard inside the front entrance was reading. Schweik needed to get past him. She inhaled, keeping herself calm, and glided silently along the rear corridor to the basement entrance.

She waited. No movement or noise from the guard. Although the building was considered high security, the protection was less to keep people out than to shield the public from the lethal toxins, viruses, bacteria, and other dangerous scientific materials that were studied at USAMRIID. Although the guard was well trained, he lacked the aggressive edge of a sentry defending a lab where top-secret war weapons were created.

Relieved that he remained engrossed in his book, she tried the heavy metal door. It was locked. She took a set of keys from the case. The third one opened the basement door. She padded soundlessly downstairs, where she wound in and out among giant machines that heated and cooled the building, supplied sterile air and negative pressure for the labs, operated the powerful exhaust system, supplied water and chemical solutions for the chemical showers, and handled all the other maintenance needs of the medical complex.

She was sweating by the time she located the main box. She set the attache case on the floor and withdrew from it a smaller case of tools, wires, color-coded connections, meters, switching units, listening devices, and miniature recorders.

It was evening, and the basement was quiet but for the occasional snap, gurgle, and hum of the pipes and shafts. Still, she listened to make sure no one else was around. Nervous energy sent chills across her skin. Warily she studied the gray walls. At last she opened the main box and went to work on the multitude of connections.

Two hours later, back in her office, she checked her telephone, attached a miniature speaker-earphone set, flipped a switch on the hidden control box in her desk drawer, and listened. “… Yeah, I'll be here at least two more hours, I'm afraid. Sorry, honey, can't be helped. This virus is a bear. The whole staff's on it. Okay, I'll try to get there before the kids go to bed.”

Satisfied her listening and rerouting equipment was working, she clicked off and dialed an outside line. The male voice that had contacted her last night and given her instructions answered. “Yes?”

She reported: “Installation is complete. I'm connected to the recorder for all phone calls, and I've got a line on my set to alert me to any from the offices you're interested in. It'll connect me with the shunt to intercept calls.”

“You were unobserved? You are unsuspected?”

She prided herself on her ear for voices, and she knew all the major languages and many minor. This voice was educated, and his English was good but not perfect. A non-English speech pattern, and the smallest trace of a Middle-Eastern accent. Not Israel, Iran, or Turkey. Possibly Syria or Lebanon, but more likely Jordan or Iraq.

She filed the information for future reference.

She said, “Of course.”

"That is well. Be alert to any developments that concern the unknown virus they are working on. Monitor all calls in and out of the offices of Dr. Russell, Lieutenant Colonel Smith, and General Kielburger.

This job could not last too long, or it would become too risky. They would probably never find the body of the real Specialist Four Adele Schweik. Schweik had no known relatives and few friends outside the army. She had been selected for those reasons.

But Schweik sensed Sergeant Major Daugherty was suspicious, vaguely disturbed by her arrival. Too much scrutiny could expose her.

“How long will I remain here?”

“Until we do not need you. Do nothing to call attention to yourself.”

The dial tone hummed in her ear. She hung up and leaned forward to continue familiarizing herself with the routines and requirements of the sergeant major's office. She also listened to live conversations in and out of the building and monitored the light on the desk phone that would alert her to calls from the Russell woman's laboratory. For a moment she was curious about what was so important about Dr. Russell. Then she banished the thought. There were some things it was dangerous to know.

CHAPTER FOUR

Washington's magnificent Rock Creek park was a wedge of wilderness in the heart of the city. From the Potomac River near the Kennedy Center it wound narrowly north to where it expanded into a wide stretch of woods in the city's upper Northwest. A natural woodland, it abounded in hiking, biking, horse trails, picnic grounds, and historical sites. Pierce Mill, where Tilden Street intersected Beach Drive, was one of those historical landmarks. An old gristmill, it dated from pre-Civil War days when a line of such mills bordered the creek. It was now a museum run by the National Park Service and, in the moonlight, a ghostly artifact from a faraway time.

Northwest of the mill, where the brush was thick in the shadows of tall trees, Bill Griffin waited, holding a highly alert Doberman on a tight leash. Although the night was cold, Griffin sweated. His wary gaze scanned the mill and picnic grounds. The sleek dog sniffed the air, and its erect ears rotated, listening for the source of its unease.

From the right, in the general direction of the mill, someone approached. The dog had caught the faint sounds of autumn leaves being crunched underfoot long before they were audible to Griffin. But once Griffin heard the footfalls, he released the animal. The dog remained obediently seated, every taut muscle quivering, eager.

Griffin gave a silent hand signal.

Like a black phantom, the Doberman sprang off into the night and made a wide circle around the picnic grounds, invisible among the ominous shadows of the trees.

Griffin desperately wanted a cigarette. Every nerve was on edge. Behind him something small and wild rustled through the underbrush. Somewhere in the park a night owl hooted. He acknowledged neither the sounds nor his nerves. He was highly trained, a complete professional, and so he maintained watch, vigilant and unmoving. He breathed shallowly so as to not reveal his presence by clouds of white breath in the cold night air. And although he kept his temper under control, he was an angry, worried man.

When at last Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith came into view, striding across the open area in the silver-blue moonlight, Griffin still did not move. On the far side of the picnic grounds, the Doberman went to ground, invisible. But Griffin knew he was there.

Jon Smith hesitated on the path. He asked in a hoarse whisper, “Bill?”

In the umbra of the trees, Griffin continued to concentrate on the night. He listened to the traffic on the nearby parkway and to the city noises beyond. Nothing was unusual. No one else was in this part of the massive preserve. He waited for the dog to tell him otherwise, but he had resumed his rounds, apparently satisfied, too.

Griffin sighed. He stepped out to the edge of the picnic grounds where the moonlight met the shadows. His voice was low and urgent. “Smithy. Over here.”

Jon Smith turned. He was jumpy. All he could see was a vague shape wavering in the moonlight. He walked toward it, feeling exposed and vulnerable, although he did not know to what.

“Bill?” he growled. “Is that you?”

“The bad penny,” Griffin said lightly and returned deep into the shadows.

Smith joined him. He blinked, willing his eyes to adjust quickly. At last he saw his old friend, who was smiling at him. Bill Griffin had the same round face and bland features Smith remembered, although he looked as if he had lost ten pounds. His cheeks were flatter, and his shoulders appeared heavier than usual since his torso and waist were slimmer. His brown hair hung mid-length, limp and unruly. He was two inches shorter than Smith's six feet ― a good-sized, strong-looking, stocky man.

But Smith had also witnessed Bill Griffin make himself appear neutral, ordinary really, as if he had just gotten off work from a factory job assembling computer parts or was on his way to the local cafe where he was the head hamburger flipper. It was a face and body that had stood him in good stead in army intelligence and in the FBI monitoring covert operations, because under that bland exterior was a sharp mind and iron will.

To Smith, his old friend had always been something of a chameleon, but not tonight. Tonight, Smith looked at him and saw the star Iowa football player and man of opinions. He had grown up to be honest, decent, and daring. The real Bill Griffin.

Griffin held out his hand. “Hello, Smithy. Glad to see you after so long. It's about time we caught up. When was it last? The Drake Hotel, Des Moines?”

“It was. Porterhouses and Potosi beer.” But Jon Smith did not smile at the good memory as he shook Griffin's hand. “This is a hell of a way to meet. What have you got yourself into? Is it trouble?”

“You might say.” Griffin nodded, his voice still light. “But never mind that right now. How the hell are you, Smithy?”

“I'm fine,” Smith snapped, impatient. “It's you we're talking about. How'd you know I was in London?” Then he chuckled. “No, never mind. Stupid question, right? You always know. Now, what's the―”

“I hear you're getting married. Finally found someone to tame the cowboy? Settle down in the suburbs, raise kids, and mow the lawn?”

“It'll never happen.” Smith grinned. “Sophia's a cowboy herself. Another virus hunter.”

“Yeah. That makes sense. Might actually work.” Griffin nodded and gazed off, his eyes as restless and uneasy as the now-invisible Doberman. As if the night might explode into flames around them. “How're your people doing on the virus anyway?”

“Which virus? We work on so damn many at Detrick.”

Bill Griffin's gaze still traversed the moonlight and shadows of the park like a tank gunner searching for a target. He ignored the sweat collecting under his clothes. “The one you were assigned to investigate early Saturday.”

Smith was puzzled. “I'd been in London since last Tuesday. You must know that.” He swore aloud. “Damn! That must be the 'emergency' Sophia was called in about while we were talking. I've got to get back―” He stopped and frowned. “How do you know Detrick's got a new virus? Is that what this is all about? You figure they told me all about it while I was away, and now you want to tap me for information?”

Griffin's face revealed nothing. He scrutinized the night. “Calm down, Jon.”

“Calm down?” Smith was incredulous. “Is the FBI so interested in this particular virus that they sent you to pump me in secret? That's damn stupid. Your director can call my director. That's the way these things are done.”

Griffin finally looked at Smith. “I don't work for the FBI anymore.”

“You don't…?” Smith stared into the steady eyes, but now there was nothing there. Bill Griffin's eyes, like the rest of his featureless face, had gone empty. The old Bill Griffin was gone, and for a moment Smith felt an ache in the pit of his stomach. Then his anger rose, every sensor of his military and virus-hunter experience sounding loudly. “What's so special about this new virus? And what do you want information for? Some sleazy tabloid?”

“I'm not working for any newspapers or magazines.”

“A congressional committee, then? Sure, what better for a committee looking to cut science funding than using an ex-FBI man!” Smith took a deep breath. He did not recognize this man whom he had once thought of as his best friend. Something had changed Bill Griffin, and Griffin was showing no signs of revealing any of it. Now Griffin seemed to want to use their friendship for his own ends. Smith shook his head. “No, Bill, don't tell me who or what you're working for. It doesn't matter. If you want to know about any viruses, go through army channels. And don't call me again unless you're my friend and nothing more.” Disgusted, he stalked away.

“Stay, Smithy. We need to talk.”

“Screw you, Bill.” Jon Smith continued toward the moonlight.

Griffin gave a low whistle.

Suddenly a large Doberman bounded in front of Jon Smith. Snarling, it spun to face him. Smith froze. The dog planted all four paws, lifted his muzzle, and growled long and deep. His sharp teeth glistened white and moist, so pointed that with one slash they could tear out a man's throat.

Smith's heart thundered. He stared unmoving at the dog.

“Sorry.” Griffin's voice behind him was almost sad. “But you asked if there was bad trouble. Well, there is ― but not for me.”

As the dog continued to make low growls of warning in his throat, Smith remained immobile, except for his face. He sneered in contempt. “You're saying I'm in some kind of trouble? Give me a break.”

“Yes.” Griffin nodded. “That's exactly what I'm saying, Smithy. That's why I wanted to meet. But it's all I can tell you. You're in danger. Real danger. Get the hell out of town, fast. Don't go back to your lab. Get on a plane and―”

“What are you talking about? You know damn well I'd never do that. Run away from my work? Damn. What's happened to you, Bill?”

Griffin ignored him. “Listen to what I'm saying! Call Detrick. Tell the general you need a vacation. A long vacation. Out of the country. Do it now, and get as far away as possible. Tonight!”

“That won't cut it. Tell me what's so special about this virus. What danger am I in? If you want me to act, I've got to know why.”

“For Christ's sake!” Griffin exclaimed, losing his temper. “I'm trying to help. Go away. Go fast! Take your Sophia.”

Before he had finished speaking, the growling Doberman abruptly lifted his front paws off the path and whirled, landing ninety degrees south. His gaze indicated the far side of the park.

Griffin said softly, “Visitors, boy?” He gave a hand signal, and the dog raced into the trees. Griffin turned on Smith and exploded, “Get out of here, Jon! Go. Now!” He dashed after the Doberman, a stocky shadow moving with incredible speed.

Man and dog vanished among the thick trees of the dark park.

For a moment Smith was stunned. Was it for him Bill was afraid or for himself? Or for both of them? It appeared his old friend had taken a great risk to warn him and to ask him to do what neither would have once considered ― abandon job and accountability.

To go this far, Bill's back had to be slammed up against a very unyielding wall.

What in God's name was Bill Griffin mixed up in?

A shiver shot up Smith's spine. A pulse at his temple began to throb. Bill was right. He was in danger, at least here in this dark park. Old habits resettled themselves on him like a long-forgotten cloak. His senses grew acute, and he expertly surveyed the trees and lawns.

He sprinted away along the edge of the dark trees while his mind continued to work. He had assumed the way Bill had found him was through FBI channels, but Bill was no longer in the FBI.

Smith's stay at the Wilbraham Hotel had been known only to his fiancée, to his boss, and to the clerk who had made his travel arrangements at Fort Detrick. No way would any of them have revealed his whereabouts to a stranger, no matter how convincing the stranger was.

So how had Bill ― a man who claimed to be out of government ― managed to learn where he had been staying in London?

An unlighted black limousine lurked in the shadow of the old mill near the Tilden Street entrance to Rock Creek park. Alone in the backseat sat Nadal al-Hassan, a tall man with a dark face as narrow and sharp as a hatchet. He was listening to his subordinate, Steve Maddux, who leaned inside the window, reporting.

Maddux had been running, and his face was red and sweaty. “If Bill Griffin's in that park, Mr. al-Hassan, he's a goddamn ghost. All I saw was the army doc taking a walk.” He breathed hard, trying to catch his breath.

Inside the luxury car, the bones and hollows of the tall man's face were deeply pocked, the mark of a rare survivor of the once-dreaded smallpox. His black eyes were hooded, cold, and expressionless. “I have told you before, Maddux, you will not blaspheme while you work for me.”

“Hey, sorry. Okay? Jesus Chr-”

Like a cobra striking, the tall man's arm snaked out, and his long fingers clamped on Maddux's throat.

Maddux went pasty with fear, and he made strangling sounds as he bit off the curse. Still, the unsaid syllables hung in the darkness through an ominous silence. Finally, the hand on his throat relaxed a fraction. Sweat dripped off Maddux's forehead.

The eyes inside the car were like mirrors, glistening surfaces no one could see behind. The voice was deceptively quiet. “You wish to die so soon?”

“Hey,” the scared man said hoarsely, “you're a Muslim. What's wrong with―”

“All the prophets are sacred. Abraham, Moses, Jesus. All!”

“Okay, okay! I mean, Jes-” Maddux quaked as the claw tightened on his throat. “How'm I s'posed to know that?”

For another instant, the fingers squeezed. Then the tall man let go. His arm withdrew. “Perhaps you are right. I expect too much from stupid Americans. But you know now, yes, and you will not forget again.” It wasn't a question.

Wheezing, Maddux gasped, “Sure, sure, Mr. al-Hassan. Okay.”

The sharp-faced man, al-Hassan, examined Maddux with his cold, mirrored eyes. “But Jon Smith was there.” He sat back in the gloom of the car, talking softly as if to himself. “Our man in London finds Smith changed his flight and was missing from London all day. Your men pick him up at Dulles, but instead of driving home to Maryland, he comes here. At the same time, our esteemed colleague slips away from our hotel and I follow him to this vicinity before he eludes me. You fail to find him in the park, but it is a strange coincidence, wouldn't you say? Why is the associate of Dr. Russell here if not to meet our Mr. Griffin?”

Maddux said nothing. He had learned most of his boss's questions were spoken aloud to some unseen part of himself. Nervously he let the silence stretch. Around the limo and the two men, the wild park seemed to breathe with a life of its own.

Eventually al-Hassan shrugged. “Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it is a mere coincidence, and Griffin has nothing to do with why Colonel Smith is here. It does not really matter, I suppose. The others will take care of Colonel Smith, yes?”

“You got it.” Maddux nodded emphatically. “No way he gets out of D.C.”

CHAPTER FIVE

In her office, Sophia Russell flicked on her desk lamp and collapsed into her chair, weary and frustrated. Victor Tremont had called this morning to report that nothing in his Peru journals mentioned the strange virus she had described or the Indian tribe called the Monkey Blood People. Tremont was her best outside lead, and she was devastated he had been unable to help.

Although she and the rest of the Detrick microbiology staff had continued to work around the clock, they were no closer to resolving the threat posed by the virus. Under the electron microscope the new virus showed the same globular shape with hairlike protrusions of some of its proteins, much like a flu virus. But this virus was far simpler than any influenza mutation and far more deadly.

After they had failed to find a match among the hantaviruses, they had rechecked Marburg, Lassa, and Ebola, even though those related killers had no microscopic similarities to the unknown virus. They tried every other identified hemorrhagic fever. They tried typhoid, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, meningitis, and tularemia.

Nothing matched, and this afternoon she had finally insisted General Kielburger reveal the virus and enlist the aid of the CDC and the other Level Four installations worldwide. He had still been reluctant; there were still only the three cases. But at the same time, the virus appeared to be totally unknown and highly lethal, and if he did not take the proper steps and a pandemic resulted, he would be responsible. So, grumbling, he had finally acquiesced and sent off full explanatory memos and blood samples to the CDC, the Special Pathogens Branch of WHO, Porton Down in the U.K., the University of Anvers in Belgium, Germany's Bernard Nocht Institute, the special pathogens branch of the Pasteur Institute in France, and all the other Level Four labs around the globe.

Now the first of the reports were coming in from the other Hot Zone labs. Everyone agreed the virus seemed like a hantavirus, but matched nothing in any of their data banks. All the reports from the CDC and the foreign laboratories showed no progress. All contained desperate, if informed, guesses.

In her office, tired to the marrow, Sophia leaned back in her desk chair and massaged her temples, trying to ward off a headache. She glanced at her watch and was shocked to see the time. Good God, it was nearly 2:00 A.M.

Worry lines furrowed her brow. Where was Jon? If he had arrived home last night as scheduled, he would have been in the lab today. Because of her frantic work schedule, she had not thought too much about his absence. Now, despite her tiredness and headache and her initial worries about Jon, she could not help smiling. She had a forty-one-year-old fiancé who still had all the curiosity and impulsiveness of a twenty-year-old. Wave a medical mystery in front of Jon, and he was off like a racehorse. He must have found something fascinating that had delayed him.

Still, he should have called by now. Soon he would be a full day late.

Maybe Kielburger had ordered him somewhere in secret, and Jon could not call. That'd be just like the general. Never mind she was Jon's fiancée. If the general had sent Jon off, she would learn about it with the rest of the staff, when the general was good and ready to announce it.

She sat up in her chair, thinking. The scientific staff was working through the night, even the general, who never passed up an opportunity to be noticed in the right way. Abruptly furious and anxious about Jon, she marched out, heading for his office.

Brig. Gen. Calvin Kielburger, Ph.D., was one of those big, beefy men with loud voices and not too many brains the army loved to raise to the rank of colonel and then freeze there. These men were sometimes tough and always mean but had few people skills and less diplomacy. They tended to be called Bull or Buck. Sometimes officers with those nicknames made higher rank, but they were small, feisty men with big jaws.

Having achieved one star beyond what he could reasonably have expected, Brigadier General Kielburger abandoned actual medical research in the heady illusion of rising to full general with troop command. But to lead armies, the service wanted smart officers who could work well with the necessary civilian officials. Kielburger was so busy promoting himself he did not see his smartest move was to be intelligent and tactful. As a result, he was now stuck administering an irreverent gang of military and civilian scientists, most of whom did not take well to authority in the first place, particularly not to narrow-minded bombast like Kielburger's.

Of the unruly lot, Lt. Col. Jon Smith had turned out to be the most irreverent, the most uncontrollable, the most irritating. So in answer to Sophia's question, Kielburger bellowed, “I sure as hell didn't send Colonel Smith on any assignment! If we had a sensitive task, he'd be the last one I'd send, exactly because of stunts like this!”

Sophia was as frosty as Kielburger was choleric. “Jon doesn't pull `stunts.' ”

“He's a full day late when we need him here!”

“Unless you phoned him, how would he know we needed him?” Sophia snapped. “Even I didn't know how bad the situation was until I started examining the virus. Then I was busy in the lab. Working. I'm sure you remember what that's like.” The truth was, she doubted he had any memories of the pressures and excitement of lab work, because she had heard that even in those days he had preferred to shuffle papers and critique other scientists' notes. She insisted, “Jon must have a reason for being late. Or something he can't control is detaining him.”

“Such as what, Doctor?”

“If I knew, I wouldn't be wasting your valuable time. Or mine. But it's not like him to be late without calling me.”

Kielburger's florid face sneered. “I'd say it's very much like him. He's a goddamn pirate looking for the next chest of gold, and he always will be. Take my word for it, he's run into an `interesting' medical problem or treatment or both and missed his flight. Face it, Russell, he's a goddamn loose cannon, and after you're married you're going to have to deal with that. I don't envy you.”

Sophia compressed her lips, fighting a strong desire to tell the general exactly what she thought of him.

He stared back, idly undressing her in his mind. He had always liked blondes. It was sexy the way she pulled back her pale hair in a ponytail. He wondered whether she was blond everywhere.

When she made no answer, he went on in a more conciliatory voice. “Don't sweat it, Dr. Russell. He'll turn up soon. I hope so, anyway, because we need everyone we can get on this virus. I suppose you have nothing to report?”

Sophia shook her head. “To be frank, I'm about out of ideas, and so is the rest of the staff. The other labs are struggling, too. It's early, but all we're getting so far from everyone is negatives and guesses.”

Kielburger tapped his desk in frustration. He was a general, so he felt obligated to do something. “You say this is a totally unique virus of a type never seen before?”

“There's always a first one to be discovered.”

Kielburger groaned. This could ruin any chance he had to break out of the medical ghetto and move into line command.

Sophia was studying him. “May I make a suggestion, General?”

“Why not?” Kielburger said bitterly.,

“The three victims we have are widely separated geographically. Plus two are about the same age, while one is much younger. Two are male; one is female. One in active service, one a veteran, and one civilian. How did they get the virus? What was the source? It has to have been centered somewhere. The odds are astronomical against three outbreaks within twenty-four hours of the same unknown virus thousands of miles apart.”

As usual, the general did not get it. “What's your point?”

“Unless we begin to see other victims centered in one of the three locations, we have to find the connection among the three we do have. We need to start investigating their lives. For instance, maybe they were all in the same hotel room in Milwaukee six months ago. Maybe that's when all three contracted it.” She paused. “At the same time, we should comb the medical records in the three areas for signs of previous infections that could have produced antibodies.”

At least it was a positive step, and it would make Kielburger look as if he was acting decisively. “I'll instruct the staff to begin at once. I want you and Colonel Smith to fly out to California first thing in the morning to talk to the people who knew Major Anderson. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, General.”

“Good. Let me know when Smith decides to return to work. I'm going to chew his ass!”

So mad she could not even enjoy the spectacle of Kielburger acting out his Hollywood conception of a tough, no-nonsense American hero, Sophia stalked out of his office.

In the corridor, she looked up at the wall clock: 1:56 A.M. Fresh worry overwhelmed her. Had something happened to Jon? Where was he?

As he drove his small Triumph through the night city, Jon Smith, mulled what Bill Griffin had told him, trying to comprehend even the unspoken hints.

Bill said he had left the FBI. Voluntarily or by request?

Either way, Bill was connected somehow to a new virus sent from some armed forces unit for USAMRIID to study. Probably for the lab identify and suggest the best method of treatment. To Smith, it sounded routine ― one of the vital tasks Fort Detrick had been established to handle.

Still, Bill Griffin claimed Smith was in danger.

His trained Doberman said more about Griffin's state of mind than any words he had uttered. Obviously, Griffin believed there was peril, and not just for Jon but for himself.

After their meeting, Jon had made his way carefully along the park's dark paths, stopping often to melt into the trees to make certain he was not being followed. When at last he had reached his restored 1968 Triumph, he had looked carefully around before getting in the car, then had driven south out of the park, heading away from Maryland and home, the opposite of what a pursuer would expect. Despite the late hour, traffic had been moderate. Not until the depths of night, sometime around 4:00 A.M., would the bustling metropolis finally grow weary and its main arteries empty.

At first he had thought a car was pacing him. So he had turned corners, sped up and slowed down, and wound his way to Dupont Circle and Foggy Bottom and then north again. It had taken him more than an hour of driving, but now he felt certain no one was following him.

Still warily watching, he turned south again, this time on Wisconsin Avenue. Traffic was very light here, and street lamps cast wide yellow pools of illumination against the dark night. He sighed wearily. God, he wanted to see Sophia. Maybe it was safe at last to go to her. He would cross the Potomac and take the George Washington Parkway to 495 north ― heading to Maryland. To Sophia. Just thinking about her made him smile. The longer he was gone, the more he missed her. He could not wait to hold her in his arms. He was nearing the river and driving tiredly between Georgetown's long rows of trendy boutiques, elegant bookstores, fashionable restaurants, bars, and clubs when a mammoth truck, its engine rumbling, pulled up in the left lane next to his small car.

It was a six-wheel delivery truck, the kind that dotted every beltway and interstate around every city from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast. At first Smith wondered what a truck was doing here since businesses and restaurants would not open for deliveries for another three or four hours. Interestingly, neither the cab nor the white cargo section displayed a company name, address, logo, slogan, phone number, or anything to mark what it was delivering or for whom.

Thinking longingly of Sophia, Smith did not dwell on the truck's unusual anonymity. Still, the events of the evening had activated the finely honed sense of danger he had developed over the years of practicing medicine and commanding at the front lines where violence could erupt minute to minute, where death was close and real, where disease waited to strike from every hut and bush. Or maybe some movement, action, or sound inside the truck had caught his attention.

Whatever it was, a split second before the behemoth vehicle suddenly pulled ahead and moved to cut off Smith's sports car, Smith knew it was going to do it.

Adrenaline jolted him. His throat tightened. Instantly he assessed the situation. As the truck turned into him, he yanked his steering wheel to the right. His car skidded and bounced up over the curb and onto the deserted sidewalk. He had not been going all that fast ― just thirty miles an hour ― but driving on a sidewalk, not even a wide one like this, at thirty miles an hour was insanity.

As the truck roared alongside, he fought to control his car. With explosive crashes, he sideswiped a mailbox and litter bin and smashed a table off its pedestal. He careened past the closed, silent doors of shops, bars, and clubs. Darkened windows flashed past like blind eyes winking at him. Sweating, he glanced left. The huge truck continued to parallel him out on the street, waiting for a chance to bore in again and squash him against the facade of a building. He said a silent prayer of thanks that the sidewalk was empty of people.

Dodging trash cans, he saw the truck's passenger-side window suddenly lower. A gun barrel thrust out, aimed directly at him. For an instant he was terrified. Trapped on the sidewalk, the truck blocking the avenue from him, he could neither hide nor evade. And he was unarmed. Whatever their plans had been earlier, now they were counting on shooting him dead.

Smith tapped his brake and swerved so the thug in the truck cab would have to contend with a shifting target as he tried to find his aim.

Sweat beaded on Smith's brow. Then for an instant he felt a sense of hope. Ahead lay an intersection. His hands were white on the steering wheel as he pushed the Triumph toward it.

Just as he accelerated, the gun in the truck fired. The noise was explosive, but the bullet was too late. It blasted across the Triumph's tail and shattered a store window. As glass burst into the air, Smith inhaled sharply. That had been too damn close.

He glanced warily again at the gun barrel as it bounced in the truck's open window. Fortunately, he was closing in on the intersection. A bank stood on one corner, while retail businesses occupied the other three.

And then he had no more time. The intersection was immediately ahead, and this might be his only chance. He took a deep breath. Gauging distance carefully, he slammed his brakes. As the Triumph shuddered, he swung the steering wheel sharply right. He had only seconds to check the truck as his fleet sports car swerved away off onto the cross street. But in those few moments he saw what he had hoped for: The victim of its own speed, the truck hurtled ahead down the avenue and out of sight.

Exulting inside, he gunned to full speed, hit the brakes again, and turned another corner, this time onto a leafy street of Federalist row houses. He drove on, turning more corners and watching his rearview mirror the whole time even though he knew the long truck could not possibly have made a U-turn despite the light traffic of the late night.

Breathing hard, he stopped the car at last in the lacy shadows of a branching magnolia on a dark residential street where BMWs, Mercedeses, and other artifacts of the rich indicated that this was one of Georgetown's most elite neighborhoods. He forced his hands from the steering wheel and looked down. The hands were trembling, but not from fear. It had been a long time since he had been in trouble like this ― violent trouble he had not anticipated and did not want. He threw back his head and closed his eyes. He inhaled deeply, amazed as always at how quickly everything could change. He did not like the trouble…Yet there was an older part of him that understood it. That wanted to be involved. He thought his commitment to Sophia had ended all that. With her, he had not seemed to need the outside peril that in the past had affirmed he was fully, actively alive.

On the other hand, at this point he had no choice.

The killers in the truck who had attacked him had to be part of what Bill Griffin had tried to warn him about. All the questions he had been mulling ever since leaving their midnight meeting returned:

What was so special about this virus?

What was Bill hiding?

Warily, he shoved the car into gear and drove onto the street. He had no answers, but maybe Sophia did. As he thought that, his chest contracted. His mouth went dry. A terrible fear shot ice into his veins.

If they were trying to kill him, they could be trying to kill her, too.

He glanced at his watch: 2:32 A.M.

He had to call her, warn her, but his cell phone was still at his house. He had seen no compelling reason to take it to London. So now he needed a pay phone quickly. His best chance would be on Wisconsin Avenue, but he did not want to risk another attack from the truck.

He needed to get to Fort Detrick. Now.

He hit his gas pedal, rushing the Triumph toward O Street. Tall trees passed in a blur. Old Victorians with their ornate scrollwork and sharply pointed roofs loomed over the sidewalks like ghost houses. Ahead was an intersection with lamplight spilling across it in silver-gray splashes. Suddenly car headlights appeared ahead, bright spotlights in the dark night. The car was approaching the same intersection as Smith's Triumph, but from the opposite direction and at twice the speed.

Smith swore and checked the crosswalk. Bundled against the cool night air, a solitary pedestrian had stepped off the sidewalk. As the man swayed and sang off-key from too much whiskey, he staggered toward the other curb, swinging his arms like a toy soldier. Smith's chest tightened. The man was heading heedlessly into the path of the accelerating car.

The drunk pedestrian never looked up. There was a sudden scream of brakes. Helplessly Smith watched as the speeding car's fender struck him, and he flew back, arms wide. Without realizing it, Smith had been holding his breath. Before the drunk could land in the gutter, Smith slammed his brakes. At the same time, the hit-and-run driver slowed for a moment as if puzzled and then rushed off again, vanishing around the corner.

The instant his Triumph stopped, Smith was out of the car and running to the fallen man. All the night sounds had disappeared from the street. The shadows were long and thick around the artificial illumination of the intersection. He dropped to his haunches to examine the man's injuries just as another car approached. Behind him, he heard a screech of brakes, and the car stopped beside him.

Relieved, he lifted his head and waved for help. Two men jumped out and ran toward him. At the same time, Smith sensed movement from the injured man.

He looked down: “How do you feel? — ” And froze. Stared.

The “victim” was not only appraising him with alert, sober eyes, he was pointing a Glock semiautomatic pistol with a silencer up at him. “Christ, you're a hard man to kill. What the hell kind of doctor are you anyway?”

CHAPTER SIX

A part of Jon Smith was already in the past, back in Bosnia and his undercover stint in East Germany before the wall came down. Shadows, memories, broken dreams, small victories, and always the restlessness. Everything he had thought he had put behind him.

As the two strangers pulled out weapons and sped toward him through the intersection's light, Smith grabbed the wrist and upper arm of the thug at his feet. Before the man could react, Smith expertly pushed and pulled, feeling the tendons and joint do exactly what he wanted.

The man's elbow snapped. He screamed and jerked, and his face turned white and twisted in pain. As he passed out, the Glock fell to the pavement. All this happened in seconds. Smith gave a grim smile. At least he did not have to kill the man. In a single motion, he scooped up the weapon, rolled onto his shoulder, and came up on one knee with the pistol cocked. He fired. The silenced bullet made a pop.

One of the two men running at him pitched forward, twisting in agony on the cold pavement. As the man grabbed his thigh where Smith's bullet had entered, the second man dropped beside him. Lying on his belly, he lifted his head as if he were on a firing range and Smith were a stationary target. Big mistake. Smith knew exactly what the man was going to do. Smith dodged, and his attacker's silenced gunshot burned past his temple.

Now Smith had no choice. Before the man could shoot again or lower his head, Smith fired a second time. The bullet exploded through the attacker's right eye, leaving a black crater. Blood poured out, and the man pitched facedown, motionless. Smith knew he had to be dead.

His pulse throbbing at his temples, Smith jumped up and walked cautiously toward them. He had not wanted to kill the man, and he was angry to have been put in the position where he had to. Around him, the air seemed to still vibrate from the attack. He gazed quickly up and down the street. No porch lights turned on. The late hour and the silenced bullets had kept secret the ambush.

He pulled an army-issue Beretta from the limp hand of the man he had shot in the eye and, with little hope, checked his vital signs. Yes, he was dead. He shook his head, disgusted and regretful, as he removed weapons from the reach of the two injured men. The man with the broken elbow was still unconscious, while the one with the bullet through his thigh swore a string of curses and glared at Smith.

Smith ignored him. He hurried back toward his Triumph. Just then the night rocked with the sound of a large truck's approach. Smith whirled. The broad white expanse of the unmarked, six-wheel delivery truck sped into the intersection. Somehow these killers had found him again.

How?

In combat, there is a time to stand and fight, and a time to run like hell. Smith thought about Sophia and sprinted down a row of looming Victorian houses close to the sidewalk. In some backyard a lonely dog barked, followed instantly by an answering bark. Soon the animals' calls echoed across the old neighborhood. As they died away, Smith slid into the black shadows of a three-story Victorian with turrets, cupolas, and a wide porch. He was at least a hundred yards from the intersection. Crouched low, he looked back and studied the scene. He memorized the parked cars and then focused on the truck, which had stopped. A short, heavy man had jumped from the cab to bend over the three wounded men. Smith did not recognize him, but he knew that truck.

The man waved urgently. Another two men exited the cab and ran to carry away the injured attackers while the first man raised the truck's rear accordion door. A half-dozen men piled out over the tailgate and waited, their heads swiveling as they examined the night. Even in the capricious moonlight, Smith could see the heavy man's face glisten with sweat as he issued orders.

The two wounded men and the corpse were put into the car that had pulled up alongside Smith, and one of the men drove it quickly away, heading north. Then the big delivery truck left, too, going south toward the river, while the leader sent his men off in pairs, no doubt to search for Jon Smith. With luck, each would assume he was more than a match for a forty-year-old, sedentary research scientist, despite the reports of their two surviving comrades. An ivory-tower freak who wore a military uniform as a courtesy and had gotten lucky ― people had made that mistake about Smith before.

He listened from his hiding place until two of them drew close. This pair he would have to neutralize somehow. He turned and loped off into the shadows, making sure they heard him. They took the bait, and a wide gap opened between the pair and the others as they pursued him. All his nerves were afire as he trotted across dark yards, watching everywhere. Four blocks beyond the intersection, he found a combination that would work: A white, Colonial-style mansion stood lightless up at the end of a short drive, while off to the side was a gazebo, nearly invisible in the camouflage of night and the thick trees and bushes that marked the property.

He coughed and scuffed his shoes against the driveway to make sure they would hear and think he was heading off to hide at the mansion.

Then he slipped into the secluded gazebo. He had been right ― through its latticed walls he had a clear view of the property. He set the Glock and Beretta on a bench; he did not plan to use them for anything more than intimidation. No, this work had to be done in silence and with speed.

One long minute passed.

Could they have somehow guessed what he was doing and called in the rest of the team? At this moment, were they circling to come up from behind? He wiped a hand across his forehead, removing sweat. His heart seemed to thunder.

Two minutes… three minutes…

A shadow emerged from the trees and ran toward the left side of the big house.

Then a second ran toward the right side.

Smith inhaled. Thugs, civilian or military, were predictable. Without much imagination, their tactical ideas were rudimentary ― the direct charge of the bull, or the simple ruse of a schoolboy quarterback who always looked the opposite way from where he intended to throw the football.

The two closing in like pincers in the night were better than most, but like Custer at Little Big Horn or Lord Chelmsford at Isandhlwana against the Zulu, they had done him the favor of splitting their forces so he could take them on one at a time. He had hoped they would.

The bolder padded around the mansion's right side, between it and the gazebo. That was a break for Smith. As the man continued on, Smith crept toward him from behind. He stepped on a twig. It was a soft snap, but loud enough to alert the attacker. Smith's heart seemed to stop. The man whirled around, pistol rising to fire.

Smith acted instantly. A single powerful right fist to the throat paralyzed the vocal cords, a sweeping arc of right leg smashed a size-twelve shoe to the side of the man's head, and he dropped quietly.

Smith slid back into the gazebo.

One… two minutes.

The more cautious of the pair materialized in a patch of moonlight between the gazebo and the fallen man. He had had the sense to circle his partner out of sight. But that was where his imagination ended, and he hurried to kneel over the fallen man.

“Jerry? Jesus, what―” Smith's appropriated Beretta smashed across the back of the bent head.

Smith dragged both unconscious men into the gazebo. Crouched over them, he panted as he listened to the night. The only distinctive sound was of a distant car heading south. With relief, he left the gazebo and loped through the shadows of houses and trees back the way he had come. As he neared the intersection where he had been attacked, he slowed and listened again. The only noise was what sounded like the same car driving in the opposite direction, this time north.

On elbows and knees, a pistol in each hand, he crawled to within a front yard of the intersection. The sprinkling of parked cars on either side had not changed, and his Triumph still waited at the curb where he had left it to go to the aid of the fake victim. No one was in sight.

There was no way the six-wheeler truck could have found him first on Wisconsin Avenue and then here. No one had that kind of luck. Yet the truck, the car, and the “drunk” had created a diversion, intending his death.

They had to have known exactly where he was.

He waited as the moon went down. The night grew darker, a large owl hunted through the trees, and the distant car continued to drive south, then north, then south again, slowly making its way closer to the intersection.

Satisfied that no one was lurking there, Smith jumped up and ran to his Triumph. He took a small flashlight from the glove compartment and slid under the car's rear. And there it was. No imagination, no originality. The bright funnel of his flashlight revealed a transmitter no larger than his thumbnail attached to the car's undercarriage by a powerful mini-magnet. The tracking device's reader was probably in the truck or with the short, heavy leader.

He flicked off the flashlight, slipped it into his pocket, and removed the tracking device. He admired the creativity that had manufactured such delicate engineering. As he crawled out from under the Triumph, he noticed the car he had been monitoring was almost at the intersection. He knelt beside the Triumph, watching. The car was moving slowly as the driver pitched newspapers from his rolled-down window onto the lawns and driveways of the neighborhood.

The driver made a U-turn.

Smith stood up and whistled. As the car slowed in the intersection, he ran toward the open window. “Can I buy a paper from you?”

“Yeah, sure. I've got some extras.”

Smith reached into his pocket for change. He dropped a coin, bent to pick it up, and with a cool smile he stuck the microtransmitter to the car's undercarriage.

Straightening, he took the newspaper and nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”'

The car drove on, and Smith jumped into the Triumph. He peeled away, hoping his trick would occupy his assailants long enough for him to reach Sophia. But if these attacks where part of what Bill Griffin had warned him would happen, they knew who he was and where to find, him. And where to find Sophia.

The report from the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium was the third Sophia read after plunging back into work, the last scientist still there. She was too worried to sleep. If the damned general was right that Jon was off on one of his enthusiasms over some medical development, she would be furious. Still, she hoped Kielburger was right, as that would mean she had no reason to be concerned.

She continued studying the latest reports, but not until she reached the one from the Prince Leopold lab did something finally offer hope: Dr. Rene Giscours recalled a field report he had read years ago while doing a stint at a jungle hospital far upriver in Bolivian Amazonia. He had been preoccupied at the time battling what appeared to be a new outbreak of Machupo fever, not far from the river town of San Joaquin where Karl Johnson, Kuns, and MacKenzie had first found the deadly virus many years before. He had had no time for even thinking about an unconfirmed rumor from far-off Peru, so he had made a note and forgotten about it.

But the new virus had jogged his memory. He had checked through his papers and found his original note ― but not the actual report. Still, the note to himself back then had emphasized an apparent combination of hantavirus and hemorrhagic fever symptoms, as well as some connection to monkeys.

A surge of angry justification rushed through Sophia. Yes! After Victor Tremont had been unable to help her, she had doubted herself. Now Giscours's report confirmed her recollection. What contact did USAMRIID have down there? If she was right, there had been no major or even minor outbreaks of that virus since. Which meant it must still be confined to the narrow, deep jungle in a remote part of Peru.

In her daily logbook, she described her reaction to the Prince Leopold report, and she summarized what she recalled of the strange virus and her two conversations with Victor Tremont, since they might be relevant now. She also wrote some speculations about how a Peruvian virus could have been transmitted beyond the jungle.

As she was writing, she heard the door to her office open. Who ―? Hope filled her.

Excited, she spun her chair around. “Jon? Darling. Where the hell―”

In the instant before her head exploded in violent pain and color, she had a glimpse of four men surrounding her. None was Jon. Then darkness.

Nadal al-Hassan, disguised from head to foot in lab scrubs, methodically searched the female scientist's office desk. He read each document, report, notebook, and memo. He studied every file. The task was offensive, even though he was protected by surgical gloves. He knew such modern blasphemies occurred in his own country as well as many. other Islamic, even Arab, nations, but he made no secret of his distaste. Allowing females to study and work beside men was not only heresy, it defiled both the dignity of the men and the chastity of the women. Touching what the woman had touched defiled him.

But the search was necessary, so he performed it meticulously, leaving nothing unexamined. He found the two damaging documents almost at once. One was the only report open on her desk ― from the Prince Leopold Institute, by a Dr. Rene Giscours. The other was her handwritten phone record of outgoing calls that the USAMRIID director apparently required all personnel to complete each month.

Then he found her logbook musings about the Belgian report. Fortunately, it filled an entire page, beginning at the top and ending at the bottom. From a small leather case, he took out a pen-shaped, razorsharp draftsman's blade. With care and delicacy, he excised the page. He examined the cut to be certain it was invisible, then hid the page in his scrubs. After that he found nothing more of importance.

His three men, dressed in identical scrubs, were completing their search of the rows of file cabinets.

One said, “Got a new memo in a file 'bout Peru.”

Another said, “Couple of old files talked about stuff down in South America.”

The third just shook his head.

“You read every document?” al-Hassan snapped. “Every file? Looked in every drawer?”

“Like you told us.”

“Under everything? Behind anything that moved?”

“Hey, we ain't stupid.”

Al-Hassan had strong doubts about that. He found most Westerners lazy and incompetent. But from the mess in the office, he decided they had been thorough this time.

“Very well. You will now erase any indications of a search. Everything is to be as it was.”

While they grumbled and returned to work, al-Hassan slipped on a second, thicker pair of white rubber gloves. He took a small refrigerated metal container from a leather case, released a pressure seal, and extracted a glass vial. He carefully removed a hypodermic syringe from the case, filled it from the sealed vial, and injected Sophia in the vein of her left ankle.

At the prick of the needle, she stirred and moaned.

The three men heard. They turned to look, and their faces went ashen.

“Complete your tasks,” al-Hassan said harshly.

The men dropped their gazes. As they finished straightening the office, al-Hassan put the used syringe inside a plastic container, sealed it, and returned it to the leather case. His men indicated they were finished. Al-Hassan inspected the office once more. Satisfied, he ordered them to leave. He gave one final glance at the now-motionless Sophia and saw the sweat that had beaded up on her face. When she groaned, he smiled and followed them out.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A light wind rustled through bushes and trees, carrying the stink of apples rotting on the ground. Jon Smith's three-story, saltbox-style house was set back into the looming shoulder of Catoctin Mountain. The place was dark, not even a porch light to welcome him home, which made him think Sophia must still be at the lab. But he had to be sure.

He was a block away, crouched behind an SUV, as he studied his house, yard, and street. He saw telltale signs: The trunk of the old apple tree was too thick where someone stood behind it, watching. Farther up the block, almost hidden by two tall oak trees, the hood of a black Mercedes protruded from a driveway of neighbors Smith knew owned only a 2000 Buick Le Sabre, which they always parked in the garage.

Considering how quickly he had driven home from Georgetown on the almost-deserted highway and roads, there was no way the pair waiting here could have arrived first. Which meant this was a second surveillance team, and that alarmed him.

The sentry in front could see the driveway and garage doors. There was probably a man in back, too, to cover the rear of the house and garage. But Smith could see no reason to waste a man on the side of the garage away from the house.

He felt the familiar hollow of fear in his stomach every soldier knows, but also the hot rush of adrenaline. He slipped down an alley and sprinted behind the houses until past his street. Then he recrossed out of sight of the hunters. Beginning to sweat again, he worked through a stand of sycamores to the near side of his garage and slithered the last, five yards on his elbows and belly.

He listened. There was no sound behind the house. He raised up to peer inside the garage.

And sighed with relief. It was empty. Sophia's old green Dodge was gone. She must have been at Fort Detrick all this time. If so, she had never received his message, and that explained the lack of a porch light. He breathed deeply, instantly feeling better.

Retracing his path, he hurried back to his Triumph and drove to a phone booth a quarter mile away. He could not wait to hear her voice. He dialed her work number. After four rings, the machine picked up. “I'm out of my office or in the lab. Please leave a message. I'll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you.”

The bright sound of her strong voice gave him a sharp pang and another feeling he could not explain. Loneliness?

He dialed again. The voice that answered was all business, which was reassuring, particularly considering the circumstances: “United States Army, Fort Detrick. Security.”

“This is Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith, USAMRIID.”

“Base ID, Colonel?”

He gave his number.

There was a pause. “Thank you, Colonel. How can we help you?”

“Connect me to the desk guard at USAMRIID.”

Clicks, beeps, and a new voice. “USAMRIID. Security. Grasso.”

“Grasso, Jon Smith. Listen―”

“Hey, Colonel, you're back. Everything okay? Doc Russell's been askin'―”

“I'm fine, Grasso. It's Dr. Russell I'm calling about. She's not answering her phone. You know where she is?”

“She's on the night list I got when I came on, and I ain't seen her leave.”

“What time did you come on?”

“Midnight. She's probably in the lab and not hearing nothing.”

Smith glanced at his watch: 4:42 A.M.

“Could you go up and check?”

“Sure, Colonel. Call you back.”

Smith recited the phone number. Every second seemed like a minute, and every minute it was harder to breathe. The cool night seemed stifling. The phone booth suffocated him.

When the phone rang at last, he almost jumped. “Yes?”

“Not there, Colonel. Office and lab are both closed up.”

“Any sign of trouble?”

“Nope. Everything's packed away and covered up.” Grasso sounded a little defensive. “Damned if I know how I missed her. I guess she could've gone out one of the other exits. You could check with the gate guard.”

“Thanks, Grasso. You want to transfer me?”

“Hold on, Doc.”

A different and very sleepy voice spoke: “Fort Detrick. Gate. Schroeder.” “This is Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith, USAMRIID. Did Dr. Sophia Russell leave the base tonight, Schroeder?”

“Don't know, Colonel. Don't know Dr. Russell. Try the guy at USAMRIID.”

Smith swore under his breath. The civilian security guards were always changing, and they worked longer shifts than MPs. It was not unknown for them to doze in the gate kiosk. The barrier would stop any cars trying to enter, and if it did not, the noise would certainly wake them up. But no barrier stopped cars leaving.

He hung up. It sounded as if she could have been too tired to drive all the way to Thurmont. Which meant she was likely at her old condo in Frederick, which she had just sold but had not yet fully moved out of. He could call the condo, but that would tell him nothing. When they worked around the clock, they always turned off their phone's ringer to get a few hours sleep.

As he sped the car away, his mind raced. She had been so tired she left the lab through one of the side doors, not wanting to run into anyone. That was logical. Just what she would have done. The gate guard had missed her, probably asleep. She would go to her condo. He would slip into bed beside her. She would sense his presence without waking up. She would smile in her sleep, murmur, and move close to touch him. Her hip would press warm against him. He would smile, kiss her shoulder lightly, watch her sleep before he fell asleep himself. He would.

Few guidebooks listed Fort Detrick as one of the attractions to the historic City of Frederick. With its chain-link fence and guard post at the entrance, Detrick was a medium-secure army base set in the middle of a residential area. Sophia's condo was five blocks away. Parked up the street again, Smith saw no signs of anyone watching here. He stepped from the Triumph, closed the door softly, and listened. He heard the distant coughs of sleepers. The occasional laughter or a voice raised in drunken anger. A solitary car squealing around a turn. The constant low hum that was the city itself.

But no clandestine sounds or movements he could identify as threatening.

He used his key to the lobby of the three-story condo building and strode across the exposed expanse of the tile and carpet to the elevators. All were empty at this hour.

On the third floor, the Glock in his hand, he stepped off warily. The corridor echoed to his footfalls like the empty rooms of an ancient tomb. When he reached her door, he listened again. He heard nothing from inside. He turned the key, the quiet tumblers clicking in his mind loud as explosions.

Silently he pulled open the door and dropped flat to the carpeting inside.

The apartment was dark. Nothing stirred. His hand felt a film of dust covering the side table near the door.

He stood and glided through the shadowy living room to the short corridor that led to the two bedrooms. Both were empty, the beds made, and unused. The kitchen showed no sign that anyone had eaten a meal or prepared even a cup of coffee. The sink was dry. The refrigerator was silent, turned off weeks ago.

She had not been here.

Feeling numb, Smith walked like a robot back into the living room. He turned on lights. He inspected for signs of an attack, an injury, even a search.

Nothing. The condo was as clean and undisturbed as an exhibit in a museum.

If they had killed or kidnapped her, it had not been here.

She was not at the lab. She was not at the house in Thurmont. She was not here. And he had no indications that anything had happened to her at any of those places.

He needed help, and he knew it.

The first step was to call the base and alert them to her disappearance. Then the police. FBI. He grabbed the portable telephone to dial Detrick.

His hand froze midair. Outside in the corridor, footsteps echoed along the walls.

He switched off the lights and set the phone on the table. He dropped to one knee behind the couch, the Glock in his hand trained on the door.

Someone advanced haltingly toward Sophia's condo, bumping into walls, progressing in fits and starts. A drunk staggering home?

The steps stopped with a hard thump against Sophia's door. There was ragged breathing. A key probed for the lock.

He tensed. The door swung open as if flung.

In the shaft of light, Sophia swayed. Her clothes were torn and stained as if she had been crawling in a gutter.

Smith leaped forward. “Sophia!”

She staggered in, and he caught her before she collapsed. She gasped, battled for breath. Her face burned with fever.

Her black eyes stared up at him, tried to smile. “You're. back, darling. Where. where were you?”

“I'm so sorry, Soph. I had an extra day, I wanted…”

Her hand reached up to interrupt him. Her voice sounded delirious. “…lab…at the lab…someone…hit…”

She fell back in his arms, unconscious. Her skin was pasty. Two bright fevered spots glowed on her cheeks. Her beautiful face was pinched with pain. She was terribly ill. What had happened to her? This was not just simple exhaustion.

“Soph? Soph! Oh my God, Soph?”

There was no response. She was limp, unconscious.

Shaken and terrified, he fell back on his medical training. He was a doctor. He knew what to do. He laid her on the couch, grabbed the portable phone, and dialed 911 as he checked her pulse and breathing. The pulse was weak and rapid. She breathed in labored gasps. She burned. The symptoms of acute respiratory distress plus fever.

He yelled into the phone, “Acute respiratory distress. Dr. Jonathan Smith, dammit. Get here. Now!”

The unmarked van was almost invisible beneath the tree on the street outside Sophia Russell's apartment. Above, a weak streetlight hardly pierced the night, giving the van's inhabitants exactly what they wanted ― darkness and camouflage. From the interior gloom, Bill Griffin watched the paramedic van, its beacons flashing blue and red, in front of the three-story condo building that blazed with light across the street.

Nadal al-Hassan's hatchet face spoke from the driver's seat, “Dr. Russell should not have been able to leave her laboratory alone. She should never have reached this far.”

“But she did both.” Griffin's round face was neutral. In the darkness, his brown, mid-length hair was ebony. His big shoulders and muscular body appeared relaxed. This was a different, harder, colder man than the one who had met his friend Jon Smith just hours ago in Washington's Rock Creek park.

Al-Hassan said, “I did what was ordered for the woman. It was the only way she could be handled without suspicion.”

Griffin's silence covered the turmoil inside him. The sudden and unforeseen involvement of Jon was something he had never imagined. He had tried to warn Jon off, but al-Hassan had sent Maddux after Jon in Washington before Jon even had a chance to think about running. That would have told Jon the warning was true, but with the woman attacked, too, Jon would not back away. How in hell was he going to save his oldest friend now?

He and al-Hassan had been waiting for the others to locate Smith again when the call from their spy inside USAMRIID, fake Specialist Four Adele Schweik, came in on al-Hassan's cell phone. The motion sensor she had planted in Sophia Russell's office and lab had gone off, and when she had activated the hidden video camera, she had seen Sophia staggering from her office. She had rushed to Fort Detrick, but by the time she had gotten there, Russell had vanished.

“She couldn't drive in her condition,” Schweik had told al-Hassan, “so I checked her file. She owns a condo close to the fort.”

They had driven straight to the building only to find the paramedics already there, and the whole building awakened by the commotion. There was no way they could get inside without attracting attention.

Bill Griffin said, “Only way or not, if she can talk and tells Smith too much, the boss isn't going to be happy. And look at this.”

Four paramedics pushed a gurney out through the lobby doors. Jon Smith strode alongside the gurney holding the hand of the woman on the stretcher as he bent close to talk to her. He appeared oblivious to anything else. He went on talking and talking.

Al-Hassan cursed in Arabic. “We should have known of the condo.”

Griffin had to take the chance of making al-Hassan hate him more than he already did in hopes of goading the Arab into making a mistake. “But we didn't, and now they're talking. She's alive. You blew it, alHassan. Your hide's going to be stretched for this. Now what do we do?”

Nadal al-Hassan's words were soft. “We follow them to the hospital. Then we make her dead for certain. And him, too.” He turned to stare at Griffin.

Griffin knew al-Hassan was watching his reaction for even the slightest hint of discomfort with the idea of killing Jon. A faint stiffening, a flinch, a microscopic shudder.

Instead, Griffin nodded at the paramedic van. His expression was arctic. “If necessary, we may have to kill them, too. Maybe they heard her say something. I hope you're prepared for that. You're not going to wimp out on me, are you? Turn soft?”

Al-Hassan bristled. “I had not thought of the paramedics. Of course, if it is necessary, we will kill them.” His eyes narrowed. He paused. “It is possible Jon Smith is conversing with a corpse. Love makes fools of even the most intelligent. We will see whether she dies on her own. If so, then we have only Jon Smith to eliminate. That makes our jobs easier, yes?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sophia lay in the curtained ICU bed gasping for breath, even under oxygen. Hooked to all the machines of a modern hospital, she was held captive by apparatus untouched by who she was or what was wrong with her. Smith held her fevered hand and wanted to yell at the machines: “She's Sophia Russell. We talk. We laugh. We work together. We make love. We live! We're going to be married this spring. She's going to get well, and we'll marry in just a few months. We're going to live together until we're old and gray and still in love.”

He leaned close and said in a strong voice, “You'll be fine, Soph, my darling.” As he had told countless young soldiers lying shattered in a MASH unit at some front line, he reassured, “You're going to be well soon. You'll be up and about and feeling a lot better.” He kept the fear and worry from his tones. He had to bolster their morale; there was always hope. But this was Sophia, and he had to fight harder than he had ever fought in his life to hide his despair. “Just hang on, darling. Please, darling,” he whispered. “Hang on.”

When she was conscious, she tried to smile up at him between shuddering gasps for breath. She squeezed his hand weakly. The fever and struggle to breathe were draining her.

She tried to smile. “…where…were…you…”

Tenderly he laid a finger on her lips. “Don't try to talk. You need to concentrate on getting well. Sleep, darling. Rest, my beautiful darling.”

Her eyes fell closed as if they were curtains dropping at the end of a play. She seemed to be concentrating, directing all her faculties inward to battle whatever was attacking her. He studied the translucent skin, the fine bones, the graceful arches of her brows. Her face had always had a kind of refined beauty that was somehow made more appealing by the intelligence that lay beneath. But now that fever wracked her, she looked thin and frail against the white hospital sheets. Her skin was almost transparent. Her fevered face had a touch of brilliance to it that frightened him.

A trickle of blood appeared at her left nostril.

Surprised, Smith dabbed at it with a tissue and motioned to the nurse. “Stop that bleeding.”

The nurse took the box of gauze pads. “She must've broken a capillary in her nose, poor dear.”

Smith didn't answer. He strode across the room of machines and blinking lights to where Dr. Josiah Withers, the hospital's pulmonary specialist, Dr. Eric Mukogawa, the internist from Fort Detrick, and Capt. Donald Gherini, USAMRIID's best virologist, were consulting in low voices. They looked up as Smith reached them, concern on their faces.

“Well?”

“We've tried every antibiotic we can think of that might help,” Dr. Withers told him. “But it appears to be a virus, Dr. Smith. All our efforts to alleviate the symptoms have been useless. She's responded to nothing.”

Smith swore. “Come up with something. At least stabilize her!”

“Jon” —Captain Gherini put a hand on Smith's shoulder ― “it looks like the virus we got in the lab last weekend. We have every Level Four lab in the world working on it, and so far we haven't a clue what it is or how to treat it. It looks like a hantavirus, but it isn't. At least not like any hanta we know.” He grimaced and shook his head sadly. “She must've somehow been contaminated―”

Smith stared at Gherim. “You're saying she made a mistake in the lab, Don? In the Hot Zone? No way! She's a hell of a lot more careful and skilled than that!”

The base internist said quietly, “We're doing everything we can, Colonel.”

“Then do more! Do better! Find something, for God's sake!”

“Doctors! Colonel!”

The nurse stood over the ICU bed where Sophia's whole body had jerked up into a bow of agony, as if trying to draw one single long breath.

Smith slammed the others aside and ran. “Sophia!”

As he reached her side, she tried to smile.

He took her hand. “Darling?”

Her eyes fell closed, and her hand went limp.

“No!” he roared.

She settled into the bed as if she were weary from a long journey. Her chest stopped moving. After her long battle of gasps and pants, there was sudden, irrevocable silence. And before that could really register, blood gushed from her nose and mouth.

Horrified, unbelieving, Smith jerked his head up to check the monitor. A green line plodded steadily across the screen. Flat. A flatline. Death.

“Paddles!” he bellowed.

The nurse bit back a sob and produced the shock resuscitation electrodes.

He fought panic. He reminded himself that he had treated injured bodies in bloody skirmishes in hot spots around the world. He was a trained physician. He saved lives. That was his job. What he did best. He was going to save Sophia's life. He could do it.

His gaze on the monitor, he initiated the shock. Sophia's body curved silently in an arc and fell back.

“Again! ”

Five times he tried, increasing the shock each time. He thought he had brought her back a couple of times. He was almost sure she had responded at least once. She could not be dead. It was impossible.

Captain Gherini touched his wrist. “Jon?”

“No!”

He shocked her again. The monitors remained flat, unresponsive. It had to be a mistake. Certainly a nightmare. He must be asleep and having a nightmare. Sophia was alive. Full of vitality. Beautiful as a summer day. And a smart-aleck. He loved the way she teased him ―

He snapped, “Again!”

The pulmonary specialist, Dr. Withers, put his arm around Smith's shoulders. “Jon, let go of the paddles.”

Smith looked at him. “What?”

But he released the paddles, and Withers took them.

The internist, Dr. Mukogawa, said, “I'm very sorry, Jon. We all are. This is horrible. Unbelievable.” He motioned to the others. “We'll leave you alone. You'll need some time.”

They filed out. The curtains closed around Sophia's bed, and a wasteland of pain took over Smith's heart. He shook. He dropped down on his knees and pressed his forehead against Sophia's limp arm. It was warm. He wanted to keep telling himself she was alive. He wanted her to move, to sit up and laugh, to tell him it was all just a bad joke.

A tear slid down his cheek. Angrily he wiped it away. He removed the oxygen tent so he could really see her. She looked so alive still, her skin pink and moist. He sat beside her on the bed. He picked up both her hands and held them in his. He kissed her fingers.

I remember when I first saw you. Oh, you were lovely. And giving that door researcher hell because he had misread the slide. You're a great scientist, Sophia. The best friend I've ever had. And the only woman I ever loved ―

He sat and talked to her in his thoughts. He poured out his love. Sometimes he squeezed her hands just as he did when they went to the movies together. Once he looked down and saw his tears had puddled on the sheet. It was a long time before he finally said, “Good-bye, darling.”

In the hospital waiting room, the long, slow night was over but the morning bustle had yet to begin. Miserable and numb, Smith sat slumped alone in an armchair.

The first day Sophia had walked into the lab at USAMRIID she had started talking before he had even taken his gaze from his microscope. “Randi hates your guts,” she had told him. “I don't know why. I kind of like the way you took the blame for whatever you did to her and that you were sorry. It was clear you meant it, and you were suffering for it.”

He had turned then, took one look, and knew again why he had badgered the army into bringing her to Fort Detrick. He had seen her first in the NIH lab where she had castigated a careless researcher, and he had been shocked to meet her again at her sister's place, but those two encounters had been enough to know he wanted to spend time with her. He had sat there under Randi's angry gaze admiring Sophia. She had long cornsilk hair pulled back in a ponytail and a slim figure full of curves.

She had not missed his interest. That first day in the USAMRIID lab, she had told him, “I'll take the empty bench over there. You can stop staring at me, and I'll get to work. Everyone tells me you're a hotshot combat doctor. I respect that. But I'm a better researcher than you'll ever be, and you'd better get used to it.”

“I'll remember that.”

She had stared him straight in the eye. “And keep your dick in your pants until I say take it out.”

He nodded, smiled, and told her, “I can wait.”

The hospital's waiting room was an island out of time. In his mind the world was somewhere else. Crazy memories rampaged through his brain. He seemed to be out of control. He would have to call the wedding off. Cancel everything. The caterers, the limousine, the…

My God, what was he doing?

He shook his head violently. Tried to focus his mind. He was in the hospital.

Dawn's light reflected pink and yellow on the buildings across the street. He would have to put his dress uniform back into mothballs.

Where had she been in recent weeks? He should have been with her. He should never have gotten her the job at USAMRIID.

How many people had they invited to the wedding? He had to write each one. Personally. Tell them she was gone… gone…

He had killed her. Sophia. He had made USAMRIID make an offer so good she had taken the job at Detrick, and he had killed her. He had known he wanted her the moment he saw her at Randi's. When he had tried to tell Randi how sorry he was her fiancé had died, Randi had been too angry to listen. But Sophia had understood. He had seen it in her eyes ― those black eyes, so intense, so lively, so alive…

He had to tell her family. But she had no family. Only Randi. He had to tell Randi.

He lurched to his feet to find a pay telephone, and Somalia came back to him in a rush. He had been posted to a hospital ship in the minor invasion to bring order and protect our citizens in a country torn apart by the war raging between two warlords who had divided Mogadishu and the country. They summoned him into the remote bush to treat a major with fever. Exhausted from a twelve-hour shift, he had diagnosed malaria, but then it had turned out to be the far-less-known and far-more-deadly Lassa fever. The major had died before the diagnosis could be corrected and better treatment begun.

The army exonerated him of wrongdoing. It was a mistake many more experienced doctors ― unfamiliar with virology ― had made before and would make again, and Lassa usually killed even with the best treatment. There was no cure. But he knew he had been arrogant, so full of himself that he had not called for help until too late. He blamed himself. So much so that he had pressured the army to assign him to Fort Detrick to become an expert in virology and microbiology.

There, after he really understood the rarity of Lassa compared to malaria, he finally accepted his error as a risk of field medicine in distant and unfamiliar places. But the major had been Randi Russell's fiancé, and Randi had never forgiven Smith, never stopped blaming him for his death. Now he had to tell her he had killed another person she loved.

He slumped back onto the couch.

Sophia. Soph. He had killed her. Darling Sophia. They would marry in the spring, but she was dead. He should never have brought her to Detrick. Never!

“Colonel Smith?”

Smith heard the voice as if from under miles of water at the bottom of a murky lagoon. He saw a shape. Then a face. And burst through the surface to blink in the hard light.

“Smith? Are you all right?” Brigadier General Kielburger stood over him.

Then it struck him and left him chilled to the marrow. Sophia was dead.

He sat up. “I have to be there at the autopsy! If―”

“Relax. They haven't started yet.”

Smith glared. “Why the hell wasn't I told about this new virus? You knew damn well where I was.”

“Don't use that tone with me, Colonel! You weren't contacted at first because the matter didn't seem urgent ― a single soldier in California. By the time the two other cases were reported, you were due home in a little over a day anyway. If you'd returned when your orders instructed, you would have known. And perhaps―”

Smith's stomach clenched into an enormous fist, and his hands followed suit. Was Kielburger suggesting he might have saved Sophia had he been here? Then he slumped back. He did not need the general to do what he was already doing himself. Over and over as he sat in the dawn waiting room he blamed himself.

He stood up abruptly. “I have to make a call.”

He walked to the telephone near the elevators and dialed Randi Russell's home. After two rings the machine picked up, and he heard her precise, get-to-the-point voice: “Randi Russell. Can't talk now. After the beep, leave a message…. Thanks.”

That “thanks” came grudgingly, as if an inner voice had told her to not be all business all the time. That was Randi.

He dialed her office at the Foreign Affairs Inquiries Institute, an international think tank. This message was even crisper: “Russell. Leave a message.” No thanks this time, not even as an afterthought.

Bitterly, he considered leaving the same kind of message: “Smith here. Bad news. Sophia's dead. Sorry.”

But he simply hung up. There was no way he could leave a death message. He would have to keep trying to reach her, no matter how much it hurt. If he could not get her by tomorrow, he would tell her boss what had happened and ask him or her to have Randi call him. What else could he do?

Randi had always been a sometime thing, frequently away on long business trips. She saw Sophia rarely. After he and Sophia grew close, Randi seldom called and never came around.

Back in the waiting room, he found Kielburger impatiently swinging a knife-creased uniform leg and polished boot.

Smith dropped into a chair beside the general. “Tell me about this virus. Where did it break out? What kind is it? Another hemorrhagic like Machupo?”

“Yes to all of that, and no to all of that,” Kielburger told him. “Major Keith Anderson died Friday evening out in Fort Irwin of acute respiratory distress syndrome, but it was not like any ARDS we'd ever seen. There was massive hemorrhaging from the lungs, and blood in the chest cavity. The Pentagon alerted us, and we got blood and tissue samples early Saturday morning. By then two other deaths had occurred in Atlanta and Boston. You weren't here, so I put Dr. Russell in charge, and the team worked around the clock. When we did the DNA restriction map, it turned out to be unlike any known virus. It failed to react to any of the antibody samples we had for any virus. I decided to bring in CDC and the other Level Four facilities worldwide, but everything is still negative. It's new, and it's deadly.”

In the corridor, Dr. Lutfallah, the hospital pathologist, passed with two orderlies pushing a sheet-draped gurney. He nodded to Smith.

The general continued talking. “What I want you to do is―”

Smith ignored him. What he had to do was more important than anything Kielburger wanted. He jumped up and followed the procession to the autopsy rooms.

Hospital orderly Emiliano Coronado slipped out into the service alley behind the hospital to have a cigarette. Proud of his distant ancestor's daring and fame, he stood erect, his shoulders squared, and in his imagination he stared off into the vast distances of Colorado four centuries ago, looking for the Cities of Gold.

A sudden pain sliced across his throat. His cigarette dropped from his mouth, and his vision of glory sank into the refuse littering the dark alley. A knife blade had cut a thin trickle of blood from his neck. The blade pressed against the wound.

“Not a sound,” the voice said from behind.

Terrified, Emiliano could only grunt.

“Tell me about Dr. Russell.” Nadal al-Hassan dug the razor-sharp knife deeper as encouragement. “Is she alive?”

Coronado tried to swallow. “She die.”

“What did she say before she died?”

“Nothin'…she don' say nothin' to no one.”

The knife dug in. “You are sure? Not to Colonel Smith, her fiancé? That does not sound possible.”

Emiliano was desperate. “She unconscious, you know? How she gonna talk?”

“That is good.”

The knife did its work, and Emiliano Coronado lay unconscious and dying as his blood soaked the refuse of the shadowed alley.

Al-Hassan looked carefully around. He left the alley and circled the block to where the van waited.

“Well?” Bill Griffin asked as al-Hassan climbed in.

“According to the orderly, she said nothing.”

“Then maybe Smith knows nothing. Maybe it's good Maddux missed him in D.C. Two murders at USAMRIID increases the risk of someone figuring it out.”

“I would prefer Maddux had killed him. Then we would not be having this discussion.”

“But Maddux didn't kill him, and we can rethink the necessity.”

“We cannot be certain she did not speak in her condominium.”'

“We can if she was unconscious the whole time.”

“She was not unconscious when she went into her building,” al-Hassan replied. “Our leader will not like the possibility she told him of Peru.”

Griffin shot back: “I've got to say it again, al-Hassan, too many unexplained deaths and killings can draw a lot of attention. Especially if Smith's told anyone about the attacks on him. The boss could like that even less.”

Al-Hassan hesitated. He distrusted Griffin, but the ex-FBI man could be right. “Then we must let him decide which course of action he likes least.”

Bill Griffin felt a weight lift from him. Not all the way off, because he knew Smithy. If Jon even suspected that Sophia's death was not an accident, he would never back off. Still, Bill hoped the hardhead would believe she had made a mistake in the lab, and the attacks on him had no relation to her death. When there were no more attacks, he would give it up. Then Smithy would be out of danger, and Griffin could stop worrying.

In the tile and stainless-steel autopsy room in the basement of the Frederick hospital, Smith looked up as pathologist Lutfallah stepped from the dissecting table. The air was cold and singed with the stink of formaldehyde. Both men were dressed completely in green scrubs.

Lutfallah sighed. “Well, that's it, Jon. No doubt at all. She died of ” a massive viral infection that destroyed her lungs."

“What virus?” Smith's masked voice demanded, although he was pretty sure he knew the answer.

Lutfallah shook his head. “I'll leave that part to you Einsteins at Detrick. The lungs and almost nothing else… but it's not pneumonia, tuberculosis, or anything else I've ever seen. Swift and devastating.”

Smith nodded. With a giant effort of will, he blanked his mind against who was lying cut open on the stainless-steel table with its channels and slopes to catch blood. He and Lutfallah began the grim business of collecting tissue and blood samples.

Only later after the autopsy was finished and Smith had taken off his green cap and mask and gloves and scrubs and sat outside the autopsy room alone on a long bench did he let himself grieve for Sophia again.

He had waited too long. He had let his excited chase of science and medicine around the globe keep him away too much. He had been lying a to himself that with Sophia he was no longer a cowboy. It was not true. Even after he had asked her to marry him, he had still left her for his pursuits. And now he could not get that lost time back.

The pain of missing her was sharper than anything physical he had ever felt. With a rush of aching comprehension, he tried to come to terms with the fact that they would never be together again. He leaned forward, and his face fell into his hands. He yearned for her. Thick tears poured through his fingers. Regret. Guilt. Mourning. He shook with silent sobs. She was gone, and all he could think about was that his arms ached to hold her one more time.

CHAPTER NINE

Most people think of the behemoth National Institutes of Health as a single entity, which is far from the truth. Set on more than three hundred lush acres in Bethesda, just ten miles from the Capitol's dome, the NIH consists of twenty-four separate institutes, centers, and divisions that employ sixteen thousand people. Of those, an astounding six thousand are Ph.D.s. It is a collection of more advanced degrees in one location than most colleges and some entire states are able to boast.

Lily Lowenstein, RRL, was thinking about all that as she stared out her office suite's windows on the top floor of one of the seventy-five campus buildings. Her gaze swept over the flower beds, the rolling lawns, the tree-rimmed parking lots, and the office structures where so many highly educated and intelligent people labored.

She was looking for an answer where there was none.

As director of the Federal Resource Medical Clearing house (FRMC), Lily was herself highly educated, well-trained, and at the top of her profession. Alone in her office, she stared out at the prestigious NIH, but she did not see the people or buildings or anything else. What she was actually seeing and thinking about was her problem. A problem that had grown almost imperceptibly over many years until it weighed her down like the proverbial thousand-pound gorilla.

Lily was a compulsive gambler. It made no difference what kind; she was addicted to them all. At first she spent her vacations in Las Vegas. Later, after she took her first job in Washington, she went to Atlantic City because she could get to the tables faster. She could play Atlantic City on weekends, or on a single day off, or even a one-night stand in recent years as the compulsion grew with the size of her debts.

If it had stopped there ― casino gambling and an occasional trip to the track at Pimlico and Arlington ― perhaps it would have remained a minor monkey. It would have been annoying, draining away her good salary, causing rifts in her family when she canceled visits and failed to send Christmas or birthday presents to her nieces and nephews. It would have left her with few friends, but it would never have grown into the terrifying beast she now faced.

She placed bets by telephone with bookmakers, placed bets in bars with other bookmakers, and, finally, borrowed money from those who lent money to faceless, frantic souls like herself. Now she owed more than fifty thousand dollars, and a man who would not give his name had called to tell her he had bought up all her debts and would like to discuss payment. It shot chills up her spine. Her hand shook as if from palsy. He was polite, but there was an implied threat in his words. At exactly nine-thirty she was to meet him at a downtown Bethesda sports bar she knew only too well.

Terrified, she had tried to figure out what to do. She had no illusions. She could, of course, go to the police, but then everything would come out. She would lose her job and probably go to prison because, inevitably, she had cut a few corners in buying office supplies, and she had pocketed the difference. She had even dipped into petty cash. That was what compulsive gamblers did.

There were no more friends or family who would lend her money, even if she were willing to let them know she had a problem. One of her two cars, the Beemer, had been repossessed, and her house was mortgaged to the maximum. She had no husband, not anymore. Her share of her son's private school tuition was in arrears. She had no bonds, no stocks, no real estate. No one was going to help her, not even a loan shark. Not anymore.

She could not even run away. Her only means of support was her job. Without her job she had nothing. She was nothing.

From a rear booth in the sports bar, Bill Griffin watched the woman enter. She was about what he had expected. Middle-aged, middle-class, almost prim, nondescript. A few inches taller, maybe five-foot-nine. A few pounds heavier. Brown hair, brown eyes, heart-shaped face, small chin. There was a certain telltale carelessness about her clothes: Her suit bordered on shabby and did not fit as well as it should on the director of a big government facility. Her hair was ragged, and her gray roots were showing. The gambler.

But she was also a shade haughty as she stood inside the door looking for someone to come forward and claim her, the sign of the middle-rank bureaucrat.

Griffin let her stew.

Finally he stepped out of the booth, caught her eye, and nodded. She walked stiffly past tables and booths toward him.

“Ms. Lowenstein,” he said.

Lily nodded to control her apprehension. “And you are?”

“That doesn't matter. Sit down.”

She sat, nervous and uneasy, so she went on the attack. “How did you find out about my debts?”

Bill Griffin smiled thinly. “You don't really care about all that, Ms. Lowenstein, do you? Who I am, where I got the debts, why I bought them up. None of it matters a damn, right?” He gazed at her trembling cheeks and lips. She caught his look and stiffened her face. Inwardly he nodded. She was terrified, which made her vulnerable to alternatives. “I have your markers.” He watched her brown eyes as they shifted uneasily. “I'm here to offer you a way to get out from under.”

She snorted derisively. “Out from under?”

No gambler cared much about simply erasing debt. Gambling was a compulsion, an illness. Debt was an embarrassment and danger, but it had little impact until it meant the tracks, the bookmakers, anyone who ran a game would refuse to let you play without cash on the table. Griffin knew Lily was in a daily scramble to come up with enough to place more than a five-dollar track bet.

So he offered her the bone that wagged this dog's tail: “You can start fresh. I wipe away your debts. No one ever knows, and I give you enough to start over. Sound good?”

“A fresh start?” An excited flush appeared above Lowenstein's collar. For a moment, her eyes were bright with excitement. But just as quickly, she frowned. She was in trouble, but she was not an idiot. “That depends on what I have to do for it, doesn't it?”

In his military intelligence days, Griffin had been one of the army's best recruiters of assets behind the Iron Curtain. Lure them with the personal advantages, the moral principles, the rightness of the cause until they were compromised. Then when they balked at what you asked them to do, and they always did sooner or later, drop the carrot, tighten the screws, and lean. It was not the aspect of his job he had liked most, but he had been good at it, and it was time to lean on this woman.

“No, not really.” His voice dropped thirty degrees. “It depends on nothing. You can't pay me off, and you can't be exposed. If you think you can do either, get up and walk out now. Don't waste my time.”

Lily turned red. She bristled. “Now you listen to me, you arrogant―”

“I know,” Griffin cut her off. “It's hard. You're the boss, right? Wrong. I'm the boss now. Or tomorrow you'll be out of a job, with no chance of getting another. Not in the government, not in D.C., probably not anywhere.”

Lily's stomach turned to stone. Then to mush. She started to cry. No! She would not cry! She never cried. She was the boss. She…

“It's okay,” Griffin said. “Cry. Get it out. It's hard, and it's going to get harder. Take your time.”

The more he spoke compassionately, the harder Lily wept. Through her tears, she watched him lean back, relaxed. He waved to the waitress and pointed at his glass. He did not point at her or ask what she wanted. This was not social; this was business. Whoever he was, she realized suddenly, it was not he who was blackmailing her. He was only the messenger. Doing a job. Indifferent. Nothing personal.

When the waitress brought his beer, Lily turned her head away, ashamed to be seen red-eyed and crying. She had never had to deal with anything like this, anyone like this, and she felt terribly alone.

Griffin sipped his beer. It was time to produce the carrot again. “Okay, feel better? Maybe this'll help. Think about it this way ― the ax was going to fall someday. This way, you get it over with, wipe the slate clean, and I give you a little extra, say fifty thousand, to get you started again. All for a couple of hours' work. Probably less time, if you're as good at your job as I think you are. Now, that's not so bad, is it?”

Wipe the slate clean… fifty thousand… The words burst into her brain like a blaze of sunshine. Start again. The nightmare over. And money. She could really start over. Get help. Therapy. Oh, this was never going to happen again. Never!

She dabbed her eyes. She suddenly wanted to kiss this man, hug him. “What… what do you want me to do?”

“There, right to the point,” Griffin said approvingly. “I knew you were smart. I like that. I need a smart person for this.”

“Don't try to flatter me. Not now.”

Griffin laughed. “Feisty too. Got the spirit back, right? Hell, no one's even going to get hurt. Just a few records erased. Then you're home free.”

Records? Erased? Her records! Never. She shuddered, and then she took hold of herself. What had she expected? Why else would they need her? She was a record librarian. Chief of Federal Resource Medical Clearing House. Of course, it was medical records.

Griffin watched her. This was the critical moment. That first shock of a new asset knowing what he or she was actually going to have to do. Betray their country. Betray their employer. Betray their family. Betray a trust. Whatever it was. And as he watched, he saw the moment pass. The internal battle. She had gotten a grip on herself.

He nodded. “Okay, that's the bad part. The rest is all downhill. Here's what we want. There's a report to Fort Detrick and CDC and probably to a lot of other places overseas, too, that we need deleted from all the records. Wiped out, erased clean. All copies. It never existed. The same with any World Health Organization reports of virus outbreaks and/or cures in Iraq in the last two years. Those, plus all records of a couple of telephone calls. Can you do that?”

She was still too shocked to speak. But she nodded.

“Now, there's one other condition. It must be done by noon.”

“By noon? Now? During office hours? But how ―?”

“That's your problem.”

All she could do was nod again.

“Good.” Griffin smiled. “Now, how about that drink?”

CHAPTER TEN

Smith worked feverishly in the Level Four lab, pushing against a wall of fatigue. How had Sophia died? With Bill Griffin's warning ringing in his head, and considering the lethal attacks on him in Washington, he could not believe her death had been an accident. Yet there was no doubt how she had died ― acute respiratory distress syndrome from a deadly virus.

At the hospital, the doctors had told him to go home, to get some sleep. The general had ordered him to follow the doctors' advice. Instead, he had said nothing and driven straight to Fort Detrick's main ate. The guard saluted sadly as he passed. He had parked in his usual of near USAMRIID's monolithic, yellow brick-and-concrete building. Exhaust ventilators on the roof blew an endless stream of heavily filtered air from the Level Three and Four labs.

Walking in a semi-trance of grief and exhaustion, carrying the refrigerated containers of blood and tissue from the autopsy, he had showed his security ID badge to the guard at the desk, who nodded to him sympathetically. On automatic pilot, he had continued walking. The corridors were like something in a hazy dream, a floating maze of twists and turns, doors and thick glass windows on the containment labs. He paused at Sophia's office and looked in.

A lump formed in his throat. He swallowed and hurried on to the Level Four suite where he suited up in his containment suit.

Using Sophia's tissue and blood, he worked alone in the Hot Zone lab against advice, orders, and the directives of safe procedure. He repeated all the lab work she had done with the samples from the three other victims ― isolating the virus, studying it under the electron microscope, and testing it against USAMRIID's frozen bank of specimens from previous victims of various viruses from around the world. The virus that had killed Sophia reacted to none. He ran yet another polymerase-chain-reaction-driven DNA sequencing analysis to identify the new virus, and he made a preliminary restriction map. Then he transmitted his data to his office computer and, after seven minutes of decon showering in the air lock, removed his space suit and scrubs.

Dressed again, he hurried to his office, where he checked his data against Sophia's. At last he sat back and stared into space. The virus that had killed Sophia matched none he had ever heard of or seen. It had been close here and there, yes, but always to a different known virus.

What it did match was the unknown virus she had been working on.

Obsessed as he was with Sophia's death, he still felt horror at the potential threat to the world from this new, deadly virus. Four victims might be only the beginning.

How had Sophia contracted it?

If she had had an accident in which she had any possible contact with the new virus, she would have reported it instantly. Not only was that a standing order, it was insanity not to. The pathogens in a Hot Zone were lethal. There was no vaccine and no cure, but prompt treatment to bolster the body's resistance and maintain the best possible health, plus normal medical steps for any virus, had saved many who all but certainly would have died untreated.

Detrick had a biocontainment hospital where the doctors knew everything there was to know about treating victims. If anyone could have saved her, it would have been them, and she knew it.

On top of everything, she was a scientist. If she had thought there was the remotest possibility she could have contracted the virus, she would have wanted everything that had happened to her recorded and analyzed to add to the body of knowledge about the virus and perhaps save others.

She would have reported anything. Anything at all.

Add to that the violent attacks on him in Georgetown, and Smith could draw only one conclusion: Her death had been no accident.

In his mind, he heard her gasping voice “…lab…someone…hit…”

The tortured words had meant nothing to him in the horror of the moment, but now they reverberated in his mind. Had someone entered her lab and attacked her the way they had attacked him?

Galvanized, he read again through her notes, memos, and reports for any clue, any hint of what had really happened.

And saw the number in her careful printing at the top of the next-to-last page of her logbook. Her logbook detailed each day's work on the unknown virus. The entry number was PRL-53-99.

He understood the notation. “PRL” referred to the Prince Leopold stitute in Belgium. There was nothing special about that, simply her way to identify a report from some other researcher she had used in her work. The number referred to a specific experiment or line of reasoning or a chronology. What was important about this reference and number was that she always ― always ― wrote them at the end of her report.

At the end.

This notation was at the top of a page ― at the beginning of a commentary concerning the problem of three victims separated widely by geography, circumstances, age, gender, and experience dying from the same virus at the same time, and no one else in the surrounding areas even contracting it.

The commentary mentioned no other reports, so the log number was in the wrong place.

He examined the two last pages carefully, pushing apart the sheets so he could study the gutter where the paper was sealed into the book's spine. His magnifying glass revealed nothing.

He thought a moment and then carried the open logbook to his large dissecting microscope. He positioned the book's exposed gutter under the viewing lens and peered into the binocular eyepiece. He slid the spine under the viewer.

He inhaled sharply when he saw it ― a cut almost as straight and delicate as a laser scalpel. But although very good, it was not good enough to hide the truth from the powerful microscope. A knife-edge showed, faintly jagged.

A page had been cut out.

Brig. Gen. Calvin Kielburger stood in the open doorway to Jon Smith's office. His hands clasped behind his back, legs spread apart, beefy face set firmly in a severe expression, he looked like Patton on a tank in the Ardennes inspiring the Fourth Armored.

“I ordered you to go home, Colonel Smith. You're no good to anyone out on your feet. We need a full, clear-thinking staff on this effort. Especially without Dr. Russell.”

Smith did not look up. “Someone cut a page from her logbook.”

“Go home, Colonel.”

Now Smith raised his head. “Didn't you hear me? There's a page missing from the last work she did. Why?”

“She probably removed it because she didn't want it.”

“Have you forgotten everything you know about science since you got that star? No one destroys a research note. I can tell you what was cut out was connected to some report she had read from the Prince Leopold Institute in Belgium. I've found no copy of such a report in her papers.”

“It's probably in the computer data bank.”

“That's where I'm going to look next.”

“You'll have to do it later. First I want you to get some rest, and then I need you to go to California in Dr. Russell's place. You've got to talk to Major Anderson's family, friends, anyone and everyone who knew him.”

“No, dammit! Send someone else.” He wanted to tell Kielburger about the attacks on him in Washington. That might go a long way to making the general believe that he had to keep trying to find out how Sophia had contracted the virus. But Kielburger would want to know what he had been doing in Washington in the first place when he was supposed to be back at Detrick, which would force him to reveal his clandestine meeting with Bill Griffin. He could not expose an old friend until he knew more, which meant he had to convince the general to let him go on. “Something's wrong about Sophia's death, I know it. I'm going to find out what.”

The general bristled. “Not on the army's time, you're not. We've got a far bigger problem than the death of one staff member, Colonel, no matter who she was.”

Smith reared up from his seat like a stallion attacked by a rattlesnake. “Then I'm out of the army!”

For a moment Kielburger glared, his thick fists clenched at his sides. His face was beet red, and he was ready to tell Smith to go ahead and quit. He had had enough of his insubordination.

Then he reconsidered. It would look bad on his record ― an officer unable to command loyalty in his troops. This was not the time to deal with Smith's arrogance and insubordination.

He forced his face to relax. “All right, I suppose I don't blame you. Continue working on Dr. Russell's case. I'll send someone else to California.”

Even though she had rushed, it took Lily Lowenstein the entire morning to do what the nameless man had ordered. Now she was finishing a celebratory lunch at her favorite restaurant in downtown Bethesda. On the other side of the window, the city's tall buildings, reminding her again of a mini-Dallas, reflected the bright October sunlight as she sipped her second daiquiri.

Surprisingly, tapping into WHO's worldwide computerized medical network had turned out to be the simplest of her tasks. Nobody had thought it necessary to put stringent security on a scientific and humanitarian information network. So it had been child's play to erase all trace of a series of reports from WHO records concerning the victims and survivors of two minor viral outbreaks in the cities of Baghdad and Basra.

The Iraqi computer system was five years out of date, so going in to remove the originals of the same reports at the source was almost as easy. Oddly, Lily had found most of the original information from Iraq had already been erased by the Saddam Hussein regime. Not wanting to reveal any weakness or need, no doubt.

Clearing the single Belgian report from all electronic records of her own FRMC master computer, from USAMRIID and CDC's databases, and from all the other databases worldwide had been more time consuming. But the hardest task proved to be erasing the item from the telephone log at Fort Detrick. She had been forced to call in favors from high-level phone company contacts who owed her.

Curious, she had attempted to comprehend the reason behind the blackmailer's demands, but there seemed to be no common ground among the items she deleted except that most dealt with a virus. There had been hundreds of other research reports flying back and forth over the electronic circuits among a dozen Level Four research institutions worldwide, and her blackmailer had shown no interest in those.

Whatever he had wanted, her part was successfully completed. She had not been discovered, had left no trace, and would soon be free of her financial problems for good. She would never get in so deep again, she promised herself. With fifty thousand dollars in cash, she could go to Vegas or Atlantic City with enough to recoup everything she had lost. With a carefree smile, she quickly decided she would begin with a thousand on the Capitals to win tonight.

She almost laughed aloud as she left the restaurant and turned the corner toward the bar where her favorite bookmaker had his private booth. She felt a fiery surge that told her she could not lose. Not now. Not anymore.

Even when she heard the screams behind her, the screech and rumble of rubber and metal, and turned to see the big black SUV careening along the sidewalk directly at her, she had a wide smile on her face. The smile was still there when the SUV struck her and swerved back onto the street, leaving her dead on the sidewalk.

Smith pushed away from the computer screen. There were five reports from the Prince Leopold Institute, but none had arrived yesterday or early today, and none reported anything but more failure to classify he unknown virus.

There had to be a report with new information in it ― at least one fact important enough for Sophia to be inspired in some new line of investigation she had chronicled as a full-page note last night. But he had searched Detrick's database, CDC's database, and tied into the army's supercomputer to search every other Level Four lab in the world, including the Prince Leopold itself.

There was nothing.

Frustrated, he stared at the uncooperative screen. Either Sophia had made a mistake, put the wrong code on her designation, and the report had never existed, or ―

Or it had been erased from every database in the world, including its source.

That was difficult to believe. Not impossible to do, but hard to believe someone would go to such trouble over a virus when it was in everyone's best interests to investigate. Smith shook his head, trying to dismiss the idea that there had been anything critical on that missing page, but he could not. The page had been cut out.

And by someone who had gotten on and off the base unseen. Or had they?

He reached again for the phone to find out who else had been in the lab last night, but after speaking to the whole staff and Sergeant Major Daugherty, he was no closer to an answer. All of Daugherty's people had gone home by 6:00 P.M. while the scientific staff had stayed until 2:00 A.M., even Kielburger. After that, Sophia had been here alone.

On the night desk, Grasso had seen nothing, not even Sophia's leaving, as Smith already knew. At the gate, the guards swore they had seen no one after 2:00 A.M., but they had obviously missed Sophia staggering out on foot, so their report meant little. Besides, he doubted anyone skilled enough to cut out the page without leaving a trace to the naked eye would have drawn attention to himself as he entered or left.

Smith was at a dead end.

Then, in his mind, he heard Sophia gasp. He closed his eyes and saw once again her beautiful face, contorted in excruciating pain. Falling into his arms, struggling to breathe, yet managing to blurt out, “…lab…someone…hit…”

Dr. Lutfallah was annoyed. “I don't know what more we can find out, Colonel Smith. The autopsy was clear. Definite. Shouldn't you take a break? I'm surprised you can function at all. You need some sleep…”

“I'll sleep when I know what happened to her,” Smith snapped. “And I'm not questioning what killed her, only how it killed her.”

The pathologist had reluctantly agreed to remeet Smith in the hospital's autopsy room. He was not happy to have been pulled away from a perfectly good Tanqueray martini.

“How?” Lutfallah's eyebrows shot up. This was too much. He made no effort to keep the scathing sarcasm from his voice. “I'd say that'd be the usual way any lethal virus kills, Colonel.”

Smith ignored him. He was bent close to the table, fighting to keep from breaking down again at the sight of his vibrant Sophia so pale and lifeless. “Every inch, Doctor. Examine her inch by inch. Look for anything we missed, anything unusual. Anything.”

Still bristling, Lutfallah began to search. The two medical men worked in silence for an hour. Lutfallah was starting to make annoyed sounds again when he gave a muffled exclamation through his surgical mask. “What's this?”

Smith jerked alert. “What? What do you have? Show me!”

But it was Lutfallah who did not answer this time. He was examining Sophia's left ankle. When he spoke, it was a question. “Was Dr. Russell diabetic?”

“No. What have you found?”

“Any other intravenous medications?”

“No.”

Lutfallah nodded to himself. He looked up. “Did she do drugs, Colonel?”

“You mean narcotics? Hell, no.”

“Then take a look.”

Smith joined the pathologist, who was standing on Sophia's left side. Together they bent close to the ankle. The mark was all but invisible ― a reddening and swelling so small no one had noticed, or perhaps it had not been there before, a late manifestation of the virus.

In the center of the reddening was a single, tiny needle mark for an injection, as expertly administered as the page had been cut from her notebook.

Smith stood up abruptly. Fury enveloped him. He gripped his hands in white-hard fists as his head pounded. He had guessed it. Now he knew it.

Sophia had been murdered.

Jon Smith slammed into his office and stalked to his desk. But he did not sit. He could not. He paced the room, back and forth, a wild animal in a corral. Despite the turmoil in his body, his mind was diamond sharp. Concentrating. For him right now, despite the needs of the world… there was one single goal ― to find Sophia's killer.

All right, then. Think. She must have learned something so dangerous she had to be killed, and all physical evidence of what she had learned or deduced eliminated. So what else did researchers in a worldwide scientific investigation do? They talked.

He grabbed the telephone. “Get me the base security commander.”

His fingers tapped a tattoo on the desk like a drummer beating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regiments into battle.

“Dingman speaking. How can I help you, Colonel?”

“Do you keep a record of incoming and outgoing phone calls from USAMRIID?”

“Not specifically, but we can get one of a call made to or from the base. May I ask what in particular you're interested in?”

“Any and all made by Dr. Sophia Russell since last Saturday. Incoming, too.”

“You have authorization, sir?”

“Ask Kielburger.”

“I'll get back to you, Colonel.”

Fifteen minutes later, Dingman phoned with a list of Sophia's incoming and outgoing calls. There had been few, since Sophia and the rest of the staff had been buried in their labs and offices with the virus. Five outgoing, three overseas, and only four incoming. He called the numbers. All checked out as discussions of what had not been found, of failure.

Disappointed, he sat back ― and then shot forward out of his chair. He ran through the corridor into Sophia's office, where he pawed through everything on her desk again. Checked the drawers. He was not wrong ― her monthly telephone log, the one Kielburger insisted they keep faithfully, was also missing.

He hurried back to his office and made another call. “Ms. Curtis? Did Sophia turn her October phone log in early? No? You're sure? Thank you.”

They had taken her phone log, too. The murderers. Why? Because there had been a call that revealed what they were trying to hide. It had been erased along with the Prince Leopold report. They were powerful and clever, and he had hit a seemingly impenetrable wall trying to discover what Sophia had done, or knew, to make someone think he needed to kill her.

He would have to find the answer another way ― look into the history of the victims. Something must have connected them before they died, something tragically lethal.

He dialed again. “Jon Smith, Ms. Curtis. The general in his office?”

“He surely is, Colonel. You hold on now.” Ms. Melanie Curtis was from Mississippi, and she liked him. But tonight he did not feel like their usual flirtatious banter.

“Thank you.”

“General Kielburger here.”

“Still want me to go to California tomorrow?”

“What's changed your mind, Colonel?”

“Maybe I've seen the light. The bigger danger should get the priority.”

“Sure.” Kielburger snorted in disbelief. “Okay, soldier. You'll fly out of Andrews at 0800 tomorrow. Be in my office at 0700, and I'll give you your instructions.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Contrary to the assumptions of most of the world, two-thirds of New York was not skyscrapers, jammed subways, and ruthless financial centers. As Victor Tremont, COO of Blanchard Pharmaceuticals, stood on his deck in the vast Adirondack State Park looking west, in his mind's eye he could see the map: stretching from Vermont on the east nearly to Lake Ontario on the west, Canada on the north to just above Albany on the south, some six million acres of lush public and private lands rose from rushing rivers and thousands of lakes to forty-six rugged peaks that towered more than four thousand feet above the Adirondack flatlands.

Tremont knew all this because he had the kind of honed mind that automatically grasped, stored, and used important facts. Adirondack Park was vital to him not only because it was a stunning woodland wilderness, but because it was sparsely settled. One of the stories he liked to tell guests around his fireplace was about a state tax chief who had bought a local summer cabin. When the tax man decided his county bill was too high, he had investigated. In the process, he had ― here Tremont would laugh heartily ― discovered county tax officials were involved in massive corruption. The official was able to get an indictment against the lowlifes, but no jury could be impaneled. The reason? There were so few permanent residents in the county that all were either involved in the illegal scheme or related to someone who was.

Tremont smiled. This isolation and backwoods corruption made his timbered paradise perfect. Ten years ago he had moved Blanchard Pharmaceuticals into a redbrick complex he had ordered built in the forest near Long Lake village. At the same time, he had made a hidden retreat on nearby Lake Magua his main residence.

Tonight as the sun faded in a fiery orange ball behind pines and hardwoods, Tremont was standing on the roofed veranda of the first floor of his lodge. He studied the play of the brilliant sunset against the rugged outlines of the mountains and drank in the affluence, power, and taste that this view, this lodge, this lifestyle proved.

His lodge had been part of one of the great camps established here by the wealthy toward the end of the nineteenth century. Built with the same log-and-bark siding as the lodge at Great Camp Sagamore on nearby Raquette Lake, his sprawling hideaway was the only surviving structure from the old days. Concealed from above by a thick canopy of trees and from the lake by a dense forest, it was all but invisible to outsiders. Tremont had planned his restoration that way, allowing the vegetation to grow high and wild. There was neither an address post on the road nor a dock in the lake to reveal its presence. No public nor corporate access was provided, or wanted. Only Victor Tremont, a few trusted partners in his Hades Project, and the loyal scientists and technicians who worked in the private high-tech lab on the second floor knew it existed.

As the October sun dropped lower, the chilly Adirondack night bit at Tremont's cheeks and seeped through his jacket and trousers. Still, he was in no hurry to go inside. He savored the thick cigar he smoked and the taste of the fifty-year-old Langavulin he sipped. It warmed his blood and coated his throat with a satisfying burn. The Langavulin was perhaps the globe's finest whiskey, but its heavy peat-smoke flavor and incredibly balanced body were little known outside Scotland. That was because Tremont bought the entire supply each year from the distillery on Islay.

But as he stood in the last golden rays of the sunset on the veranda, it was the wilderness rather than the whiskey that brought a smile to his patrician lips. The pristine lake was only a short canoe portage from overpopulated Raquette. The tall pines swayed gently, and their pungent scent filled the air. In the distance, the naked peak of 5,344-foot Mount Marcy shone like a finger pointing at God.

Tremont had been attracted to the mountains since he had been an unruly teenager in Syracuse. His father, a professor of economics up on the hill at the university, had not been able to control him then any more than the fat-ass chairman of Blanchard could control him now. Both were always insisting upon what could not be done, that no one could do everything he wanted. He had never understood such narrowness. What limitation was there except your imagination? Your abilities? Your daring? The Hades Project itself was an example. If they had known in the beginning what he envisioned, both would have told him it was impossible. No one could do it.

Inwardly he snorted with disgust. They were puny, small men. In a few weeks, the project would be a total success. He would be a total success. Then there would be decades of profits.

Maybe it was because this was the final stage of Hades, but he had found himself occasionally drifting off in reverie, thinking about his long-dead father. In a strange way, his father had been the only man he had ever respected. The old man had not understood his only son, but he had stood by him. As a teen, Tremont had been fascinated by the movie Jeremiah Johnson. He had seen it a dozen times. Then, in the dead of an icy winter, he had taken off for the mountains, determined to live off the land just as Johnson had. Pick berries and dig roots. Hunt his own meat. Fight Indians. Pit himself against the elements in a heroic venture few had the courage or imagination to attempt.

But there had been little that was noble about the experience. He killed two deer out of season with his father's 30–30 Remington, mistakenly shot at and almost killed some hikers, got violently sick on the wrong berries, and damn near froze to death. Fortunately, because of his missing rifle, parka, and backpack, plus his constant talking about the film, his father had guessed where he had headed. When the forest service wanted to give up the hunt, his father had raged and pushed all the levers of academia and state politics. The result was the forest service grumbled but soldiered on, eventually finding him, miserable and frostbitten, in a cave on the snowy slopes of Marcy.

Despite everything, he counted it as one of the most important experiences of his life. He had learned from the mountain fiasco that nature was hard, indifferent, and no friend to humanity. He had also discovered physical challenge held little allure for him; it was too easy to lose. But his greatest lesson was the critical point of why Johnson had gone to the mountains. At the time, he had thought it was to challenge nature, to fight Indians, to prove manhood. Wrong. It was to make money. The mountain men were trappers, and everything they did and suffered was for one goal ― to get rich.

He had never forgotten that. The boldness and simplicity of the goal had shaped his life.

As these thoughts flickered through his mind on the rustic veranda, he realized he wished his father were here for the conclusion of Hades. The old man would finally recognize that a man could do anything he wanted as long as he was smart enough and tough enough. Would his father be proud? Probably not. He laughed aloud. Too bad for the old man. His mother would be, but that was meaningless. Women didn't count.

Abruptly he came alert. He cocked his head, listening. The chop-chop of helicopter rotors was growing louder. Tremont knocked back his scotch, left his cigar in a large serpentine ashtray to die a natural death, and strode into the enormous high-beamed living room. Peering down from the log walls were the glass eyes of mounted trophy heads. Adirondack wood-and-leather furniture stood on hand-knotted rugs around the walk-in fireplace. Tremont continued past the crackling fire and along a back hall where the aroma of hot baking-powder biscuits scented the air from the kitchen.

Finally he stepped out on the other side of the lodge into the cool dusk. The chopper, a Bell S-92C Helibus, was settling down in a clearing a hundred yards away.

The four men who descended were in their mid-forties or early fifties, like Tremont himself. Unlike Tremont, who was dressed in custom-made chinos, pewter-colored bush shirt, Gore-Tex lined safari jacket, and a broad-brimmed safari hat that hung from its chin strap down his back, they wore expensive, tailored business suits. They were smooth-looking men with the sophisticated manners of the privileged business class.

As the noisy rotors thundered, Tremont greeted each with the broad smile and vigorous handshake of an old friend. The chopper copilot jumped out to unload luggage. Tremont waved toward the lodge and turned to lead his visitors there.

Moments after the Helibus took off into the twilight, a smaller 206B JetRanger III helicopter settled into the clearing. Two men very different from the occupants of the first helicopter stepped from the JetRanger. They wore ordinary, off-the-rack suits no one would look at twice. The tall, swarthy man in the dark blue suit had a pockmarked face with heavy-lidded eyes and a nose as curved and sharp as a scimitar. The round-faced, bland-looking man with the big shoulders and lanky brown hair wore charcoal gray. Neither had luggage. It was not only the ordinary clothes and lack of suitcases that marked them as different. There was something about the way they moved… a trained predatory manner that anyone who knew about such things would recognize as dangerous.

The pair ducked under the JetRanger's flashing rotors and followed the others toward the lodge.

Although Victor Tremont never looked back, the four other men noticed the last two. They glanced at each other uneasily, as if they had seen both men before.

Nadal al-Hassan and Bill Griffin showed no reaction to either Tremont's indifference or to the nervousness of the other four. Silently, their gazes swept all around, and they entered the lodge by a different door.

At the long Norwegian banquet table, Victor Tremont and his four guests dined on a feast that could have come from Valhalla itself ― wild duck confit with shitaki mushrooms, poached local lake trout, and venison shot by Tremont himself, with braised Belgian endive, potatoes dauphin, and a Rhone Hermitage reduction sauce. Flushed and sated, the men chose overstuffed chairs in the vast living room. They indulged in cognac, Remy Martin Cordon Bleu, and cigars ― Cuban Maduros made exclusively for Tremont. After they were settled in around the blazing fire, Tremont finished his status report on the project that had consumed their imaginations, hopes, and lives for the last dozen years.

“…we'd always hypothesized the mutation would take place in the American subjects as much as a year later than it did in the non-American subjects. A matter of general health, nutrition, physical fitness, and genetics. Well…”

Tremont paused for emphasis and to study their faces. They had all been with him from the start ― a year after he had returned from Peru with the odd virus and the monkeys' blood. There was George Hyem far off to the right, like a wing gunner. Tall and ruddy, in those days he had been a young accountant who had seen the financial potential instantly. Now he was chief accountant for Blanchard while actually working for Tremont. Next to him was Xavier Becker, going to fat, a computer genius who had shortened research on improving the virus and the serum by five years. Opposite Tremont sat Adam Cain, postdoc virologist who had seen George's numbers and decided his future was with Blanchard and Tremont, rather than with the CDC. He had found a way to isolate the lethal mutated virus and keep it stable for as much as a week. On Becker's other side was Blanchard's security chief, Jack McGraw, who had covered all their asses from the start.

His four clandestine associates were ready and eager for the payoff.

Tremont held the pause another beat. “The virus has surfaced here in the United States. Soon it's going to appear across the world. Country by country. An epidemic. The press doesn't know about it yet, but they will. No way to stop them or the virus. The only recourse governments will have is to pay our price.”

The four men grinned. Their eyes shone with dollar signs. Big dollar signs. But there was something else, too ― triumph, pride, anticipation, and eagerness. They were already professional successes. Now they were going to be financial successes, hugely wealthy, achieving the pinnacle of the American dream.

Tremont said, “George?”

George abruptly reset his face. He looked sad, crestfallen. “The profit projection for the stockholders is ready any time.” He hesitated. “I'm afraid it's less than we'd hoped. Perhaps only five… six at best… billion dollars.” And laughed uproariously at his joke.

Xavier Becker, frowning severely at George's levity, did not wait to be asked. “What about the secret audit I discovered?”

“Jack says that only Haldane has actually seen it,” Tremont told them, “and I'll handle him when we meet before the board dinner at the annual meeting. What else, Xavier?” Mercer Haldane was chairman of Blanchard Pharmaceuticals.

“I've manipulated the computer logs to show we've been working on the cocktail of recombinant antibodies that form our serum the whole ten years, improving it since we got the patent, and that we've finished our final tests and submitted it for FDA approval. The logs also now show our astronomical costs.” Excitement was in Xavier's voice. “Supply's in the millions of doses and climbing.”

Adam laughed. “No one suspects a damn thing.”

“Even if they suspect, they'll never find the trail.” Jack McGraw, the security chief, rubbed his hands, pleased.

“Just tell us when to move!” George begged.

Tremont smiled and held up his hand. “Don't worry, I've got a complete timetable based on how fast they realize they've got an epidemic on their hands. I'll make my move on Haldane before the board meeting.”

The five men drank, their futures growing brighter every second.

Then Tremont put down his brandy. His face grew somber. He again raised a hand to silence them. “Unfortunately, we've run into a situation that could be more of a problem than the audit. How big or small the danger is, or whether there's any danger at all after some, ah, steps we were forced to take, we can't be certain yet. But rest assured it's being watched and thoroughly dealt with.”

Jack McGraw scowled. “What kind of problem, Victor? Why wasn't I told?”

Tremont eyed him. “Because I don't want Blanchard even remotely connected.” He expected Jack to be jealous of security, but in the end Tremont made all decisions. “As for the problem, it was simply one of those events no one could anticipate. When I was in Peru on that expedition where I found the virus and the potential serum, I ran into a group of young undergraduates on a field trip. Beyond being polite, we paid little attention to each other because we were interested in different studies.” He shook his head in wonderment. "But three days ago one called. When she said her name, I vaguely recalled a student who had shown a lot of interest in my work. She went on to become a cell and molecular biologist. The problem was she's now at USAMRIID, which is studying the first deaths. As we expected, they hadn't been able to figure out the virus. But the unique combination of symptoms suddenly brought that trip to Peru back into her mind. She remembered my name. She called me.''

“Jesus!” George exclaimed, his ruddy face gone white.

“She tied the virus to you?” Jack McGraw growled.

“To us!” Xavier exploded.

Tremont shrugged. “I denied it. I convinced her she was wrong, that there'd been no such virus. Then I sent Nadal al-Hassan and his people to eliminate her.”

There was a collective relaxation in the giant living room. Sighs of relief as the tension eased. They had worked hard and long for more than a decade, had risked their professions and livelihoods on this one visionary gamble, and none had any intention of losing the riches that were now within reach.

“Unfortunately,” Tremont went on, “we were unsuccessful in doing the same to her fiancé and research partner. He escaped us, and it's possible she had time to speak to him before she died.”'

Jack McGraw understood. “That's why al-Hassan is here. I knew something was up.”

Tremont shook his head. “Don't make more of this than there is. I sent for al-Hassan to report on how we stood. While I have the most to lose, we're all in it together.”

The silence in the room was louder than any noise.

Xavier broke it. “Okay. Let's hear what he's got to say.”

The fire had died down to glowing coals and a few flickering flames. Tremont moved to the side of the stone fireplace. He pressed a button in the carved mantlepiece. First Nadal al-Hassan and then Bill Griffin entered the cavernous room. Al-Hassan joined Victor Tremont before the fireplace, while Griffin remained unobtrusive in the background. Al-Hassan related details of Sophia Russell's call to Tremont, her death, and his removal of everything that could connect the virus to the Hades Project. He described Jonathan Smith's reactions. He detailed Griffin's blackmailing of Lily Lowenstein and the subsequent erasure of all electronic evidence.

“Nothing remains to connect us to Russell or the virus,” al-Hassan finished, “unless she told Colonel Smith.”

Jack McGraw growled, “That's a pretty damn big `unless.' ”

“That is what I think,” al-Hassan agreed. “Something has made Smith suspicious that her death was not an accident. He has been investigating vigorously, ignoring his share of the scientific work on the virus itself.”

“Can he find us?” the accountant, George, asked nervously.

“Anyone can find anyone if they look long enough and hard enough. That is why I think we must eliminate him.”

Victor Tremont nodded to the rear of the room. “But you don't agree, Griffin?”

Everyone rotated to stare at the former FBI man, who was leaning against a wall behind them. Bill Griffin was thinking about Jon Smith. He had done his damnedest to warn his friend off. He had used his old FBI credentials to learn from Jon's office that he was out of town, and then he had gone through a Rolodex of agencies acquiring one bit of information after another until he had finally uncovered which conference Jon was attending and, from there, where in London he had been staying.

So as his canny gaze swept the five who stared at him, he did what he had to do to save himself, while trying to distract the heat from Jon: He shrugged, noncommittal. “Smith's been working so hard to find out what happened to the Russell woman that I think she must've told him nothing about Peru or us. Otherwise, he'd likely be here right now, knocking on the door to talk to you, Mr. Tremont. But our mole inside USAMRIID says Smith's stopped investigating her death and is back concentrating on the virus with the team. He's even flying to California tomorrow to do the routine interviews with the family and friends of Major Anderson.”

Tremont nodded thoughtfully. “Nadal?”

“Our contact in Detrick says General Kielburger ordered Smith to California, but he refused,” al-Hassan reported. “Later he volunteered to go, and that is a very different matter. I believe he is seeking corroboration in California for what he already suspects.”

Griffin said, “He's a doctor, so he was at the autopsy. No big deal. They found nothing. There's nothing to suspect. You've taken care of everything.”

“We do not know what Smith found at the autopsy,” al-Hassan said.

Griffin grimaced. “Kill him, then. That solves one problem. But every new murder increases the danger of questions and discovery. Especially the murder of Dr. Russell's fiancé and research partner. And especially if he's already told General Kielburger about the attacks on him in D.C.”

“To wait could be too late,” al-Hassan insisted.

The silence in the room seemed heavy enough to crush the lodge itself. The conspirators glanced at one another and settled their uneasy gazes on their aristocratic leader, Victor Tremont.

He paced slowly in front of the fire, a frown creasing his forehead.

At last he decided, “Griffin could be right. Better we not risk another killing involving the Detrick staff so soon.”

Again they looked at one another. This time they nodded. Nadal alHassan watched the silent vote, then he moved his hooded eyes to study Bill Griffin where the ex-FBI agent lurked in the room's shadows.

“Well,” Tremont said, smiling, “that's settled. We'd better get some sleep. With final plans to make, tomorrow will be a busy day.” He shook each man's hand warmly, the gracious host and leader, as they exited the imposing living room.

Al-Hassan and Griffin were last.

Victor Tremont gestured them to him. “Watch Smith carefully. I don't want him to shave without your knowing when, where, and how close.” He looked down at the glowing coals of the fire as if they were oracles for the future. Suddenly he lifted his head. Al-Hassan and Griffin were just turning away to leave. He called them back.

When they stood close in front of him, he said in a low, hard voice, “Don't misunderstand me, gentlemen. If Dr. Smith proves to be trouble, of course he has to be purged. Life is a balance of risk and security, victory and loss. What we might lose in a few pointed questions about the coincidences of his and his fiancée's deaths could prove to be more than offset by stopping him from revealing the circumstances of her death.”

“If he's really digging around.”

Tremont aimed his analytical gaze at Bill Griffin. “Yes, if. It's your job to discover that, Mr. Griffin.” His voice was abruptly cold, a warning. “Don't disappoint me.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The C-130 transport from Andrews Air Force Base touched down at the Southern California Logistical Airport near Victorville at 1012 on a warm, windy morning. A military police Humvee met Smith on the runway.

“Welcome to California, sir,” the driver greeted Smith as he grabbed his bag and held the vehicle's door open.

“Thanks, Sergeant. Are we driving to Irwin?”

“To the helicopter landing area, sir. There's a chopper from Irwin waiting for you there.”

The driver heaved Smith's bag into the rear, climbed behind the wheel, and careened off across the tarmac. Smith hung on as the big combat vehicle bounced across ruts and potholes until it reached a waiting helicopter ambulance marked with the logo of the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment ― a rearing black stallion on a diagonal red-and-white field. Its rotors were already pivoting for takeoff.

An older man wearing the gold leaf of a major and a medical caduceus stepped out from beneath the long blades. He held out his hand and shouted, “Dr. Max Behrens, Colonel. Weed Army Hospital.”

An enlisted man took Smith's bag, and they climbed into the vibrating ambulance chopper. It lurched into the air and banked at a steep angle, low across the desert. Smith looked down as they passed over two-lane highways and the buildings of small towns. Soon they were following the broad four lanes of Interstate 15.

Dr. Behrens leaned toward him to yell over the wind and noise “We've kept close watch on all units on the base, and no other cases of the virus have appeared.”

Smith said loudly, “Mrs. Anderson and the others ready to talk with me?”

“Yessir. Family, friends, everyone you need. The colonel of OPFOR said you're to have anything you want, and he'd be glad to speak with you himself if that'd help.”

“OPFOR?”

Behrens grinned. “Sorry, forgot you've been at Detrick awhile. That's our mission ― Opposing Force. What the Eleventh Cav does here is act the role of enemy to all the regiments and brigades that come through for field training. We give them one hell of a hard time. It entertains us and makes them better soldiers.”

The helicopter flew across a four-lane highway and plunged deeper into the rock-strewn desert until Smith saw a road below, a WELCOME sign, and at the top of a hill a jumble of piled rocks all painted with the brightly colored logos and patches of units that had been stationed there or passed through Irwin over the years.

They swept on above lines of fast-moving vehicles trailing clouds of dust. It was startling how much the visually modified American vehicles looked like Russian mechanized infantry BMP-2s, BRDM-2s, and armored division T-80 tanks. The chopper swooped over the main post and settled to the desert floor in a cloud of sand. A reception committee was waiting, and Smith was jolted back to why he was here.

Phyllis Anderson was a tall woman and a little heavy, as if she had eaten too many transient meals on too many army bases. Her full face was drawn as they sat on packing boxes in the silent living room of the pleasant house. She had the frightened eyes Smith had seen on so many relatively young army widows. What was she going to do now? She had spent her entire married life living from camp to camp, fort to fort, in on-base or off-base housing that was never her own. She had nowhere to call home.

“The children?” she said in answer to Smith's question. “I sent them to my parents. They're too young to know anything.” She glanced at the packed boxes. “I'll join them in a few days. We'll have to find a house. It's a small town. Near Erie, Pennsylvania. I'll have to get some work. Don't know what I can do…”

She trailed off, and Smith felt brutal bringing her back to what he needed to ask.

“Was the major ever sick before that day?”

She nodded. “Sometimes he'd run a sudden fever, maybe a few hours, and then it'd go away. Once it went on for twenty-four hours The doctors were concerned but couldn't find a cause, and he always got better without any problem. But a few weeks ago he came down with a heavy cold. I wanted him to take some sick days, at least stay out of the field, but that wasn't Keith. He said wars and hostile skirmishes didn't stop for a cold. The colonel always says Keith can outlast anyone in the field.” She looked down at her lap where her hands twisted a ragged tissue. “Could.”

“Anything you can tell me that might be connected to the virus that killed him?”

He saw her flinch at the word, but there was no other way to ask the question.

“No.” She raised her eyes. They held the same pain he felt, and he had to fight to keep it from reflecting in his own eyes. She continued, “It was over so fast. His cold seemed better. He took a good afternoon nap. And then he woke up dying.” She bit her lower lip to stop a sob.

He felt his eyes moisten. He reached out and put his hand on top of hers. “I'm so sorry. I know how difficult it is for you.”

“Do you?” Her voice was forlorn, but there was a question in it, too. They both knew he could not bring back her husband, but might he have a magic remedy to wipe away the endless, bottomless pain that made her ache from every cell?

“I do know,” he said softly. “The virus killed my fiancée, too.”

She stared, shocked. Two tears slid down her cheeks. “Horrible, isn't it?”

He cleared his throat. His chest burned, and his stomach felt as if it had just been invaded by a cement mixer. “Horrible,” he agreed. “Do you think you can go on? I want to find out about this virus and stop it from killing anyone else.”

She was still a soldier's wife in her mind, and action was always the best comfort. “What else do you want to know?”

“Was Major Anderson in Atlanta or Boston recently?”

“I don't think he was ever in Boston, and we haven't been in Atlanta since we left Bragg years ago.”

“Where else besides Fort Bragg did the major serve?”

“Well…” She reeled off a list of bases that covered the country from Kentucky to California. “Germany, too, of course, when Keith was with the Third Armored.”

“When was that?” Marburg hemorrhagic fever, a close cousin of Ebola, had first been discovered in Germany.

“Oh, 1989 through '91.”

“With the Third Armored? Then he went to Desert Storm?”

“Yes.”

“Anywhere else overseas?”

“Somalia.”

That was where Smith had his fatal encounter with Lassa fever. It had been a small operation, but had he known everything that happened there? An unknown virus was always possible deep in the jungles and deserts and mountains of that unfortunate continent.

Smith pressed on. “Did he ever talk about Somalia? Was he sick there? Even briefly? One of those sudden fevers that went away? Headaches?”

She shook her head. “Not that I remember.”

“Was he ever sick in Desert Storm?”,

“No.”

“Exposed to any chemical or biological agents?”

“I don't think so. But I remember he did say the medics sent him to a MASH for a minor shrapnel wound and some doctors said the MASH could've been exposed to germ warfare. They inoculated everyone who went through.”

Smith's gut did a flip, but he kept the excitement from his voice. “Including the major?”

She almost smiled. “He said it was the worst inoculation he ever got. Really hurt.”

“You don't happen to recall the MASH number?”

“No, I'm sorry.”

Soon after that he ended the interview. They stood in the shade of her front porch, talking about nothing. There was solace in the normal interactions of everyday life.

But as he stepped off the porch, she said in a tired voice, “Are you the last one, Colonel? I think I've told everything I know.”

Smith turned. “Someone else questioned you about the major?”

“Major Behrens over at Weed, the colonel, a pathologist from Los Angeles, and those awful government doctors who called here on Saturday asking terrible things like poor Keith's symptoms, how long he lived, how he looked at the―” She shuddered.

“Last Saturday?” Smith puzzled. What government doctor could have called on Saturday? Both Detrick and the CDC had barely started their investigations of the virus. “Did they say who they worked for?”

“No. Just government doctors.”

He thanked her again and left. In the glaring sun and hard wind of the high desert, he walked to his next interview thinking about what he had learned. Could the virus have been contracted by Major Anderson in Iraq ― or given to him there ― and then lain dormant over the next ten years, except for unexplained mild fevers, finally erupting into what seemed like a simple heavy cold… and death?

He knew no virus that acted that way. But then no virus they had known had acted like HIV-AIDS until it exploded from the heart of Africa onto the world.

And who were the “government doctors” who had called Phyllis Anderson before anyone outside the CDC and Fort Detrick was even aware that there was a new virus?

Congressman Benjamin Sloat mopped his balding head and took another gulp of Victor Tremont's single malt. He and Tremont were sitting in the dark sunroom that looked out over the nighttime deck and grassy lawn. While they had been talking, a large-eyed doe had strolled across the deck as if she owned it, and Victor Tremont had merely smiled. Congressman Sloat had decided long ago he would never understand Tremont, but then he did not need to. Tremont meant contacts and campaign contributions and a big chunk of Blanchard Pharmaceuticals stock, an unbeatable combination in this high-priced political age.

The congressman grumbled, “Dammit, Victor, why didn't you clue me in earlier? I could've headed this Smith off. Got him and the woman shipped overseas. We wouldn't have a murder to cover up and a damned snooper nosing in the closet.”

From his armchair, Tremont gestured with his cigar. “Her call was such a shock all I could think of was getting rid of her. It's only now that we know how close she and Smith were.”

Sloat drank moodily. “Can we just ignore him? Hell, the woman'll be buried and forgotten soon, and it sure looks like Smith doesn't know much yet. Maybe it'll blow over.”

“You want to take that chance?” Tremont studied the sweating chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “All hell's going to break loose around the world soon, and we'll be the white knights to the rescue. Unless someone stumbles onto something incriminating and blows the whistle on us.”

Half-hidden in the flickering shadows of the farthest corner of the sunroom, Nadal al-Hassan warned, “Dr. Smith is at Fort Irwin at this moment. He may hear of our `government doctors.' ”

Tremont contemplated the thick ash of his cigar. “Smith's come a long way already. Not far enough to hurt us, but enough to get our attention. If he gets too close, Nadal will eliminate him without drawing attention to us or the death of Sophia Russell. Something very different. A tragic accident. Isn't that right, Nadal?”

“Suicide,” the Arab offered from the shadows. “He is obviously distraught over Dr. Russell's death.”

“That could be good, if you can make it airtight,” Tremont agreed. “Meanwhile, Congressman, block his investigation. Keep hiin in the lab. Get him reassigned. Anything.”

“I'll call General Salonen. He'll know the right man,” Sloat decided. “We'll need to keep the virus under wraps. Extreme sensitivity. Smith's only a doctor, an amateur, and this is a job for the pros.”

“That sounds about right.”

Sloat finished his single malt, smacked his lips, nodded in appreciation, and stood. “I'll call Salonen right away. But not from here. Better to use a pay phone in the village.”

After the congressman left, Tremont continued to smoke. He spoke without looking at Nadal al-Hassan. “We should've eliminated Smith. You were right. Griffin was wrong.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps, in his view, he was quite right.”

Tremont turned. “How so?”

“I have wondered how Dr. Smith appeared to be so alert for our initial attacks. Why was he in that park so late, so far from his home in Thurmont? Why was he so ready to suspect murder?”

Tremont studied the Arab. “You think Griffin warned him. Why? Griffin stands to lose as much as the rest of us if we're exposed.” He paused thoughtfully. “Unless he's still working for the FBI?”,

“No, I checked that. Griffin is independent, I am sure. But perhaps he and Dr. Smith had some association in the past. My people are investigating.”

Victor Tremont had been frowning. Now he suddenly smiled. He told. al-Hassan, “There's a solution. An elegant solution. Keep checking the pasts of the two men, but at the same time tell your associate, Mr. Griffin, that I have changed my mind. I want him to personally find Smith… and eliminate him. Yes, kill him quickly.” He nodded coldly and smiled again. “This way we'll discover where Mr. Griffin's loyalties actually lie.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The rest of his interviews at Fort Irwin yesterday had added nothing more to what he had learned from Phyllis Anderson. After the last interview, Smith had flown all night from Victorville, sleeping fitfully most of the way. From Andrews, he drove straight to Fort Detrick, seeing no suspicious vehicles either following him or waiting at Detrick. The reports from the other family and associates interviews were in. They told him the homeless victim in Boston and the late father of the dead girl in Atlanta had also been in the army during the Gulf War. He searched the service records of all three soldiers.

Sgt. Harold Pickett had been in 1-502 Infantry Battalion, Second Brigade, 101st Air Assault Division in Desert Storm. He had been wounded and treated at 167th MASH. Specialist Four Mario Dublin had been an orderly at the 167th MASH. There was no record of the then-lieutenant Keith Anderson having been treated at the 167th, but units of the Third Armored had been at the Iraq-Kuwait border near the 167th.

The results made Smith reach once more for the telephone. He dialed Atlanta.

“Mrs. Pickett? Sorry to call you so early. I'm Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. May I ask, you a few questions?”

The woman at the other end was close to hysterics. “No more. Please, Colonel. Haven't you people―”

Smith pressed on. “I know it's terribly difficult for you, Mrs. Pickett, but we're trying to prevent more girls like your daughter from dying the way she did.”

“Please―”

“Two questions.”

As the silence stretched, he thought she might have just walked away from the phone. Then her voice sounded again, low and dull. “Go ahead.”

“Was your daughter ever injured badly enough to need a blood transfusion, and did your husband donate the blood?”

Now the silence radiated fear. “How… how did you know?”

“It had to be something like that. One last question: Did government doctors call you on Saturday to ask questions about her death?”

He could almost hear her nod. “They certainly did. I was shocked They were like ghouls. I hung up on them.”

“No identification beyond just `government doctors'?”

“No, and I hope you fire them all.”

The line went dead, but he had what he needed.

All three soldiers had almost certainly been inoculated against “possible bacteriological warfare agent contamination” at the same MASH unit in Iraq-Kuwait ten years ago.

Smith dialed Brigadier General Kielburger's extension to tell him about the interviews.

“Desert Storm?” Kielburger almost squeaked in alarm. “Are you sure, Smith? Really sure?”

“As sure as I am of anything right now.”

“Damn! That'll explode the Pentagon after all the medical headaches and lawsuits about Gulf War syndrome. Don't talk to anyone until I've checked this with the Pentagon. Not a word. You understand?”

Smith hung up in disgust. Politics!

He went to lunch to think and decided the next thing to do was to locate the “government doctors.” Someone had ordered them to make those calls, but who?

Four long, wasted hours later, it was Smith who was ready to explode as he repeated into the telephone receiver, “…Yes, doctors who called Fort Irwin, California, Atlanta, and probably Boston. They asked nasty questions about the virus victims' deaths. The families are steamed, and I'm getting damn mad, too!”

“I'm just doing my job, Dr. Smith.” The woman on the other end of the line was testy. “Our director was killed in a hit-and-run accident yesterday, and we're shorthanded. Now tell me your name and your company again.”

He took a long breath. “Smith, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan. From U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick.”

There was silence. She seemed to be writing down his name and “company.” She came back on. “Hold, please.”

He fumed. He had been running into the same bureaucratic red tape for the past four hours. Only the CDC had confirmed that they had not called the families. The surgeon general's office told him to put his request in writing. The various possible institutes at NIH referred him to general information, and the man there said they had been ordered to not discuss anything to do with those deaths. No matter how much he had explained that he was a government researcher already working on those deaths, he had gotten nowhere.

By the time he was turned away by the departments of the navy and air force and Health and Human Services, he knew he was being stonewalled. His last chance was the NIH's Federal Resource Medical Clearing House (FRMC). After that he was out of options.

“This is Acting Director Aronson of FRMC. How can I help you, Colonel?”

He tried to speak calmly. “I appreciate your talking to me. There seems to be a team of government doctors interested in the virus at Fort Irwin, Atlanta, and―”

“Let me save you time, Colonel. All information on the viral incident at Fort Irwin has been classified. You'll have to go through channels.”

Smith finally blew up. “I have the virus! I'm working with it! USAMRIID is the information. All I want is―”

The dial tone buzzed angrily in his ear.

What in hell was going on? It looked as if some idiot had clamped a lid on anything to do with the virus. No information without clearance. But from whom? And why?

He rushed out the door, strode furiously along the corridor, and barged past Melanie Curtis and into Kielburger's office. “What the hell's going on, General? I try to find out who had those teams of `government doctors' call Irwin and Atlanta and everyone yells `top secret' and won't talk.”

Kielburger leaned back in his desk chair. He knitted his thick fingers over his beefy chest. “It's out of our hands, Smith. The whole investigation. We're top secret. We do our research and then report to the surgeon general, military intelligence, and NSC. Period. No more detectives.”

“In this investigation, we are the detectives.”

“Tell the Pentagon that.”

In a flash of understanding, the past frustrating three hours suddenly made sense. This could not be merely government red tape. There was too much of it, too many agencies were involved. And it was illogical. You did not take an investigation away from those who knew what was going on. Certainly not a scientific investigation. If there were other teams of “government doctors,” there was no reason to keep that from him or anyone else at USAMRIID.

Unless they were not government doctors at all.

“Listen, General. I think―”

The general interrupted, disgusted. “Your hearing gone, Colonel? Don't you understand orders anymore? We stand down. The professionals will work on Dr. Russell's death. I suggest you go back to your lab and focus on the virus.”

Smith took a deep breath. Now he was not only furious, he was scared. “Something's very wrong here. Either someone very powerful is manipulating the army, or it's the army itself. They want to stop the investigation. They're stonewalling this virus, and they're going to end up killing one hell of a lot of people.”

“Are you crazy? You're in the army. And those were direct orders!”

Smith glared. He had been fighting grief all day. Every time Sophia's face flashed into his mind, he had tried to banish her. Sometimes he would see something of hers ― her favorite pen, the photos on her office wall, the little bottle of perfume she kept on top of her desk ― and he would start to fall apart. He wanted to sink to his knees and howl at the unseen forces that had stolen Sophia, and then he wanted to kill them.

Smith snarled, “I resign. You'll have the paperwork this afternoon.”

Now Kielburger lost his temper. “You can't quit in the middle of a goddamn crisis! I'll have you court-martialed!”

“Okay. I've got a month's leave coming. I'm taking it!”

“No leave! Be in your lab tomorrow or you're AWOL!”

The two men faced each other across Kielburger's desk. Then Smith sat down. “They murdered her, Kielburger. They killed Sophia.”

“Murdered?” Kielburger was incredulous. “That's ridiculous. The autopsy report was clear. She died as a result of the virus.”

“The virus killed her, yes, but she didn't contract it by any accident. We missed it at first, maybe because the reddening didn't appear for a few hours. But when we took a second look, we spotted the needle mark in her ankle. They injected the virus.”

“A needle mark in her ankle?” Kielburger had a concerned frown. “Are you sure she wasn't―”

Smith eyes were hard blue agates. “There was no reason for an injection except to give her the virus.”

“For God's sake, Smith, why? It makes no sense.”

“It does if you remember the page cut from her logbook. She knew ― or suspected ― something they didn't want her to know. So they cut out her notes, stole her phone log, and killed her.”

“Who are they?”

“I don't know, but I'm going to find out.”

“Smith, you're upset. I understand. But there's a new virus loose to run across the world. There could be an epidemic.”

“I'm not sure about that. We've got three widely separated cases that haven't infected anyone else in their areas. Did you ever hear of a virus breakout in which only one single person in an area was infected?”

Kielburger considered the question. “No, I can't say I have, but―”

“Neither has anyone else,” Smith told him grimly. “We still get new viruses, and nature confounds us all the time. But if the virus is as deadly as it appears, why haven't there been more cases in each of the three areas since? At best it indicates this virus isn't very contagious. The victims' families and neighbors didn't get it. No one in the hospitals got it. Even the pathologist who was sprayed with blood didn't get it. The only person we can be sure of who got it from someone else is the Pickett girl in Atlanta, who had a direct blood transfusion from her father years ago. That indicates two facts: One, the virus, like HIV, appears to exist in a dormant state inside a victim for years, and then it suddenly turns virulent. Two, it seems to take a direct injection into the bloodstream for infection, either in the dormant state or the virulent state. In any event, an epidemic looks remote.”

“I wish you were right.” Kielburger grimaced. “But you're dead wrong this time. There are already more cases. People are sick and dying. This crazy virus may not be highly contagious in the usual ways, but it's still spreading.”

“What about Southern California? Atlanta? Boston?”

“Not in any of those places. It's in other parts of the world ― Europe, South America, Asia.”

Smith shook his head. “Then it's still all wrong.” He paused. “They murdered Sophia. You understand what that means?”

“Well, I'm―”

Smith stood up and leaned across the desk. “It means someone has this virus in a test tube. An unknown, deadly virus no one's been able to match or trace. But someone knows what this virus is, and where it comes from, because they've got it.”

The general's heavy face turned purple. “Got it? But―”

Smith hammered his fist on the desk. “We're dealing with people who have given the virus to other people! To Sophia. They're willing to use it like a weapon!”

“My God.” Kielburger stared at him. “Why?”

“Why and who, that's what we've got to find out!”

Kielburger's burly body seemed to quiver in shock. Then he abruptly stood up, his florid face as white as it had ever been. “I'll call the Pentagon. Go and write up what you told me and what you want to do from here on.”

“I've got to go to Washington.”

“All right. Get whatever you need. I'll cut official orders for you.”

“Yessir.” Smith stood back, relieved and a little stunned that he had finally gotten through Kielburger's thick brain. Maybe the general was not as rigid and stupid as he had thought. For a moment he almost felt affection for the irritating man.

As he ran out the door, he heard Kielburger pick up his phone. “Get me the surgeon general and the Pentagon. Yes, both of them. No, I don't care which one first!”

Specialist Four Adele Schweik flipped the intercept shunt on her telephone inside her cubicle, warily listening for any sound of Sergeant Major Daugherty leaving her office. At last she lied briskly into her phone, “Surgeon General Oxnard's Office. No, General Kielburger, the surgeon general isn't in the office. I'll have him call as soon as he returns.”

Schweik glanced around. Fortunately, Sandra Quinn was busy in her cubicle, and the sergeant major was in her office. Kielburger's office was calling out again. Schweik answered in a different voice, “Pentagon. Please hold.”

She quickly dialed a number she read from a list in her top drawer. “General Caspar, please? Yes, General Kielburger calling urgently from USAMRIID.” She took him off hold, returned to her own line, and dialed again. She spoked softly but rapidly, hung up once more, and went back to her work.

Smith finished packing in the empty house under the shoulder of Catoctin Mountain. He felt a little ill, and he figured that was no surprise. Sophia was everywhere, from the bottled water in the kitchen to the scent of her in their bed. It broke his heart. The emptiness of the house echoed through him. The house was a tomb, the sepulchre of his hopes, filled with Sophia's dreams and laughter. He could not stay here. He could never live here again.

Not in the house, and not in her condo. He could think of nowhere in the world he wanted to be. He knew he would have to figure that out eventually, but not now. Not yet. First he had to find her killers. Smash them. Crush them into screaming masses of blood and bones and tissue.

In his office after he had left Kielburger, Smith had written up his reports and notes, printed them out, and driven a circuitous route home, watching behind. He had seen no one follow to the big saltbox house he had shared for so many happy months with Sophia. When he had finished packing for a week of any weather, loaded his service Beretta, and grabbed his passport, address book, and cell phone, he dressed in his uniform and waited for Kielburger's call with the word from the Pentagon.

But Kielburger did not call.

It was growing dark at 1800 as he drove back to Fort Detrick. Ms. Melanie Curtis was not at her secretary's desk, and when he checked the general's office, the general was gone, too, but neither office looked as if it had been tidied up for the night. Very unusual. He looked at his watch: 1827. They must be on coffee breaks. But at the same time?

Neither was in the coffee room.

Kielburger's office was still empty.

The only explanation Smith could think of was the Pentagon had called Kielburger to Washington in person, and he had taken Melanie Curtis with him.

But would not Kielburger have called to tell him?

No. Not if the Pentagon had ordered him not to.

Uneasy, and telling no one, he went back down to his battered Triumph. Pentagon permission or not, he was going to Washington. He could not sleep another night in the Thurmont house. He turned on the ignition and drove out the gate. He saw no one watching from outside, but to be sure, he circled the streets for an hour before driving to I-270 and heading south for the Capital. His mind roamed over the past with Sophia. He was beginning to find comfort in remembering the good times. God knew, that was all he had left.

He had had one good night's sleep in three days and wanted to be sure no one was tailing him, so he pulled off abruptly at Gaithersburg and watched the exit to see whether anyone followed. No one did. Satisfied, he drove to the Holiday Inn and checked in under a false name. He drank two beers in the motel bar, ate dinner in the motel dining room, and went back to his room to watch CNN for an hour before dialing Kielburger at the office and at home. There was still no answer.

Suddenly he sat bolt upright, shocked. It was the third item on the national report: “The White House has reported the tragic death of Brig. Gen. Calvin Kielburger, medical commander of the United States Army Medical Research Institute o f Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The general and his secretary were found dead in their homes, apparently victims of an unknown virus that has already killed four people in the United States, including another research scientist at Fort Detrick. The White House emphasizes these tragic deaths are isolated, and there is no public danger at this time.”

Stunned, Smith's mind quickly grappled with what he knew: Neither Kielburger nor Melanie Curtis had worked in the Hot Zone with the virus. There was no way they could have contracted it. This was no accident or natural spreading of the virus. This was murder… two more murders! The general had been stopped from going to the Pentagon and the surgeon general, and Melanie Curtis had been stopped from telling anyone the general's intentions.

And what had happened to the complete secrecy everyone working on the virus was supposed to maintain? Now the nation knew. Someone somewhere had done a complete reversal, but why?

“…in connection with the tragic deaths at Fort Detrick, the army is requesting all local police watch for Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith, who has been declared absent without leave from Detrick.”

He froze in front of the motel television. For a moment it seemed as if the walls were closing in on him. He shook his head; he had to parse this out clearly. They had enormous power, this enemy that had murdered Sophia, the general, and Melanie Curtis. They were out there looking for him, and now the police wanted him, too.

He was on his own.