Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  “But you can tell they’re moving? What direction?”

  “South. Over Florida right now.”

  Stephen nodded, picturing the plane cutting through the night sky, Allen inside, hurt, scared. The gravity in the van grew heavier, pulling his face down, adding weight to his internal organs. His insides hurt.

  After an hour of aimless wandering, he began feeling the weight of Allen’s absence. It radiated from the blackness beside him, where Allen should have been sitting: a nothingness so great it threatened to swallow him whole and leave nothing but an aching heart as a testament to his inability to protect his brother …

  “Julia?” he said, making his voice sound strong.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Could you come sit up here? For a few minutes?”

  “I really want to keep my eye on this.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  The briefest pause.

  “Sure,” she said pleasantly, as if it had been her idea.

  He heard what he imagined were the sounds of a woman extricating herself from a tangle of wires. Then she slipped under the table and popped up next to him. She placed a hand on his forearm, squeezed it, then slid back into the other captain’s chair.

  Stephen didn’t look at her but stared straight ahead, trying to gauge the void. It was still there, but weaker. Like smoke, it had swirled away when her body had moved into its space. He felt that none of it had actually dissipated; it was simply less threatening, not all gathered in one spot.

  He also felt foolish. He supposed she was used to working with professional investigators who didn’t need handholding, who didn’t let things like despair and regret interfere with getting the job done, who’d rather hear the ratcheting lock of handcuffs than a comforting word. But that wasn’t him. His practical side insisted that she continue setting up the equipment needed to find Allen. But he also had to contend with his emotional side, which still felt the warmth of her hand on his arm and felt as good about that as an investigator would about a break in a case. He could not erect a wall between these sides.

  Yes, they would find Allen and rescue him. His determination to do so was solid and big, a mountain that could not be moved. But they would have to do it as themselves, with only the gifts God had given each of them. With her technical brilliance, knowledge of the criminal mind, and prowess at executing covert operations and tracking people, Julia obviously held the greater advantage to accomplish their goal. They’d simply have to find a way to utilize his skills as well. Which were what, precisely? Physical strength. Okay, good, that’s one. What else? Friends in high places? Definitely. But there had to be something else …

  “Something else?” she said, startling him.

  “Just thinking out loud, I guess. Thanks for coming up front.”

  They traveled in silence awhile, Stephen taking comfort from the splashes of light against Julia’s face in his peripheral vision. He kept expecting her to suggest finding a motel or at least a place where they could park the van for the night, but she never did. She seemed to be thinking, working things out, and the impermanence of the view outside helped her do that. Finally he said, “How about a restaurant?” A glowing orange sign was approaching on the right.

  She hesitated. “I really should get back to …”

  Her voice trailed off, and he felt her gaze. He wondered how much of his urgency to get away from the van, from its muted shadows and its smell of Allen’s cigarettes, showed.

  “You know, I could eat,” she said.

  They rejected the first table to which the waitress led them, a cramped two-top, and settled for a big round booth in the corner. The fluorescent lights that cast the place in an unnatural, sterile luminance were bright in Stephen’s eyes, a welcome change from the gloom of the van. Something about the artificiality of the place—its orange Formica tabletops, brick veneer wall, plastic plants, Naugahyde seat covers—made the harsh reality of life seem very far away.

  Julia scanned the decor, examined her hands, rearranged the napkin dispenser, salt and pepper shakers, sugar packets, and small decanter of maple syrup.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  For twenty minutes, he turned away an ancient waitress trying to take his order, her lipsticked smile failing to hide her boredom. Finally Julia returned, an extra wrinkle or two around her eyes.

  “Trouble?” he asked. “Or should I say, what now?”

  “My mother. She has MS. Most times, she’s fine; I mean it hasn’t gotten really bad yet. But you never know when she’ll get an attack. They can be debilitating and pretty scary. She gets trigeminal neuralgia, these stabbing pains in her face.” Her eyes moistened, and he handed her a napkin. “Sometimes she can’t move, can’t feed herself or go to the bathroom or pick up the phone. I bought her a medical alarm she’s supposed to wear around her neck, but she says she’s too young for ‘one of those I’ve-fallen-and-can’t-get-up things.’ She keeps it on her nightstand.” Julia touched the napkin to her eyes.

  “Did you call her?”

  “I went across the street and up the block, in case they trace the calling card. No answer. She might be sleeping. I asked a home health agency to check in on her. I got their answering service. I left the pay phone number and waited, but I didn’t want to stand around too long. Maybe the wrong people would show up.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “I don’t like to leave her for long.” She laughed humorlessly. “Picked up my messages. Nothing from Mom or the health agency, but a bunch of calls from my boss. I forgot I was supposed to meet him this morning. I lost all track of time. Not that I’d have gone in, but I can’t believe it’s been two days.”

  “Allen called me to get him about this time last night.” He shook his head. “All that’s happened.”

  The waitress appeared at the table. Talking to the pad and pencil in her hands, she said, “Ready?”

  Julia sniffed, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and smiled.

  Stephen realized she had put her mother worries in a box. Allen had always been good at that, compartmentalizing. Stephen, on the other hand, tended to trip over every little concern until he addressed it.

  Julia said, “Short stack, one egg over easy, two strips of bacon, coffee.”

  Stephen ordered just coffee, thanks, and relinquished the menus.

  “You should eat,” she said. “Soldiers are taught, ‘Eat when you can, sleep when you can. You never know when you’ll get the chance again.’”

  “You were in the military?” He couldn’t quite see her with a helmet on her head, blasting an Ml6 at a beat-up car that had run a roadblock.

  “Goody was. He used to regale me with words of wisdom from his time in the Marines. ‘A good plan today is better than a perfect one tomorrow.’ ‘Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.’”

  “He meant a lot to you.”

  “The world.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was his turn to squeeze her arm.

  She smiled away a frown, shook her head, said, “So eat.”

  “I’ll grab something later. If my stomach settles.”

  The waitress returned with a carafe of coffee. She filled two cups and sauntered to a table with four men chatting half a room away. They were dressed in dirty coveralls, and two of them still wore the orange vests of the city’s road-work crew. Only irregular snatches of conversation drifted to Stephen’s ears, but Julia acted as though she could hear every word—and it fascinated her.

  “Julia?” he whispered, leaning toward her. “What are you—?”

  She held up her hand: Hold on. Concentration furled her brow, her lips moved in silent conversation.

  “I know what Allen said in the hangar,” she said. “I know what he wants us to do.”

  sixty-nine

  Lying on his stomach, his face submerged in a down pillow, Kendrick Reynolds once again could not sleep. Every time the stage of his mind grew dim, a memory would dance on
and the lights would come up. He raised his head, turned it the other direction, and plopped it down, letting the pillow slowly engulf it. His hand snaked out to the other side of the bed—years after her passing, the instinct to touch his wife was still strong. He rubbed his palm on the smooth bottom sheet where she should have been. It felt cold.

  Nine years. She was nine years gone. It seemed only days ago she was chiding him for being gruff with the staff the defense department provided. She had always brought them fresh-baked cookies and lemonade: quaint and cliched and absolutely adorable. The staff had been more relaxed when she was there; as efficient, but not as tense. That defined him as well. Since her passing, he’d felt an ache right at the center of his torso, as if he were late for an appointment, but he didn’t know where he was supposed to go.

  As a young man, new to the state department and just starting to make real money, he’d purchased an MG TC roadster. He’d driven to Norfolk, taking the winding roads fast and hard. Several times he felt the rear end wanting to slide out from under him, inching toward an embankment; more than once he edged around a vehicle, barely missing a swerving, horn-blaring car coming the other direction. Afterward, alone with a bottle in his father’s vacation chalet, his hands shook, his heart raced. He had the sense that Death’s fingers had brushed his neck and he’d slipped away, and he was waiting for the Reaper’s knock at the door. He felt like that all the time now. He suspected that Death had returned for him nine years ago, had reached and grabbed Elizabeth in error.

  She had been a wonderful woman, tolerant of his many faults, his arrogance, his absences, his betrayals.

  He missed her terribly.

  Not for the first time, he wondered how his grief, his yearning to have her back, differed from Karl’s feelings for his lost family. He was certain there was a difference, given how the two men reacted to their loss. Kendrick grieved quietly and moved on. Karl had— The only way Kendrick could describe it was that Karl had gone mad. And maybe Kendrick would have, too, under the circumstances.

  What had Karl said—that Kendrick had wanted Rebecca and Jessica and Joe out of the picture? It was true that Kendrick believed Litt’s family was a distraction, that his life as head biologist of a covert lab was incongruous with tending to a wife and rearing children. When he’d first conceived of staffing a secret lab with the German children, for whom there were no official records of their existence, he thought he could keep them unofficial and nonexistent. Soon he realized all life left footprints—there was simply no way to keep thirty-five children off the books indefinitely. They needed caregivers and tutors, food and sunshine. He’d wanted a secret staff of scientists, but not scientists who functioned in reality.

  After many of Kendrick’s staff became the children’s foster parents and he and Elizabeth adopted Karl, they had seemed like a normal family.

  He smiled at the memory of Elizabeth’s giddiness over having the boy in their house, falling into the rhythms of maternal servitude, incessantly checking on him in bed those first weeks. For his part, Karl had been moody but had slowly warmed to Elizabeth’s charms. How could he not?

  All of the children were taught at a very private school consisting of only them and a handful of academics on the government payroll. As Joseph Litt had promised, the children’s scientific acuity proved well beyond their years. When Karl was twelve, Kendrick moved all the children and their families to Elk Mountain, Wyoming. At the time, it was a small town of seventy people. The Department of Defense owned much of the surrounding land, originally intended for missile silos and never developed. Kendrick had one of the nearby hills hollowed out and turned into a laboratory. A fence went up, enclosing dorms, a playground, a cafeteria, and other assorted necessities. The whole thing was billed as a weather-monitoring station and education center, governed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Harvard University.

  Of course, he and Elizabeth could not relocate. They tried to visit at least once a month, but still her heart ached; twelve was too young for a child to move out. She once told Kendrick that she coped by pretending they’d divorced and he had gotten custody. He suspected that in her heart she had indeed divorced herself from him for sending Karl away.

  However, the wisdom of giving the children their own lab soon became apparent. At fourteen, Karl developed an aerosol strain of the Clostridium botulinum bacterium—botulism. He even provided the plans for a delivery system using a V-2 rocket. As the children developed, it was clear they needed advanced education and social experience. In groups of three and four, they attended top-ranked universities.

  It was there that Karl met Rebecca. Kendrick discouraged the relationship, but his efforts went wherever it is that common sense hides in the face of young love. He knew Karl enough to understand that blocking his romantic pursuits would result in Karl’s determination to never again provide what Kendrick wanted from the lab. A dozen years later, the union produced a baby boy, named Joseph, after

  Karl’s father. Baby Jessica came when Joe was six. Kendrick learned to loosen his grip, and the family seemed content in their small compound outside Elk Mountain.

  Until the accident.

  Kendrick pushed himself up from the pillow, rolled, and collapsed on his back. The room was so dark, nothing was visible. His eyes ached. He closed them.

  Karl and his team had developed a virulent, airborne strain of rabies—a Level 4 biohazard—a dozen years before the CDC developed the four-level biosafety designations, and well before the techniques and equipment currently in use to safely handle and contain them. An aerosol canister fell over and its valve broke off, releasing the virus and triggering an emergency evacuation. Security immediately air-lifted lab scientists and staff to a site sixty miles away. There had been no evac plans for civilians, who were in or around the surface buildings. When Karl learned this, he frantically pleaded and threatened the security officers to return for them. He called Kendrick, who stressed the importance of following established procedures.

  “There is the general public to think about,” he told Karl.

  “I don’t care about them! Rebecca! The kids! Kendrick, you can circumvent procedures. Do it!”

  “Put Major McCafferty on the line.”

  Kendrick had been told the hot zone was limited to a relatively small teardrop-shaped area around the facility, the shape a result of prevailing winds. There was an 88 percent chance family members in the dorms were already exposed; a 15 percent chance that Elk Mountain townsfolk were exposed. Kendrick could not risk pulling the infected people out of the quarantined area. He told Major McCafferty to act as though Kendrick had ordered him to retrieve the families at all cost. His true orders had been to stay clear of the compound.

  When the helicopter sent to get the families never returned, Karl became a demon fighting to get out of hell. He tried to wrangle the sidearm away from one of the security officers and was about to be restrained to a cot when he settled down. Two hours later, he was gone. They stopped him at a roadblock, his desperately ill family with him. Their deaths were slow and excruciating. The baby succumbed on day four. Joe, day thirteen. Rebecca lasted nearly three weeks.

  Kendrick threw off the bedcovers. He turned to sit on the edge of the bed. His fingers found a water glass on the nightstand, and he raised it to his lips. The water was tepid and smelled metallic. He set it down and missed, and it tumbled off. The room’s thick carpet saved it from breaking; its contents splashed up his pajama legs and over his feet. He hardly noticed.

  Karl had been infected as well. His symptoms matched his family’s; however, where theirs pulled them into the grave, his lessened and reversed. The physicians could not say he’d recovered fully, but that he did at all had shocked them. His respiration was weakened, his eyesight noticeably diminished. The pallor of death on his skin never fully retreated.

  “You’re a lucky man,” Kendrick had said, embracing him on the day he grew strong enough to step away from the hospital bed.


  “You think so?” His voice was thin, raspy.

  “You almost died.”

  “I wish I had.”

  Mumbled so quietly, Kendrick later wondered if Karl had really spoken. He squeezed Karl’s shoulder.

  “I won’t pretend to fully grasp the extent of your pain, Karl, but I believe you’ll learn to live again. Maybe even to love again.”

  Karl shuffled away. At the door, he leaned on the jamb and looked back. “You could have saved them.”

  Six weeks later he was back to work. Two weeks after that he disappeared.

  Kendrick pushed his wet feet under the sheets and flipped the covers back over his body. Maybe he needed noise to lull him to sleep, to distract his mind. One of those sound boxes that imitated rain or a brook or a fan. Anything was better than counting his own heartbeat as the blood pulsed past his eardrums. Absently, he rubbed his feet against the sheets to dry them.

  He’d heard nothing from or about Karl for years. He had assumed he’d taken his life, as his father had done. Then reports filtered in about a new dealer on the global bioweapons market. His scientists analyzed a culture of what he recognized as the Zorn virus from an outbreak in Africa, and he knew.

  Karl was back.

  seventy

  “Send what?” Stephen looked at her in utter confusion.

  “The data from the memory chip. We talked about sending the chip to Reynolds. That has to be what Allen meant.”

  “But he was against the idea,” Stephen said.

  “He must have seen or heard something that convinced him Kendrick can help.” She glanced at the talkative road crew. Their mouths, framing the sounds she could barely hear, had acted like a lip-reading primer for her eager mind. They had given her the key. “He used what could have been his last breath …”

  Stephen flinched.

  “But wasn’t,” she added quickly. “At the time, he was in big trouble. A world-class assassin had him by the neck. He was turning blue. Yet he chose then to try to communicate that we should send the data. That’s serious. That’s important.”