by Ann Benson
“When the time is opportune,” Adele said on their last day together, “I shall speak privately with Isabella about our betrothal. It will then be your obligation to petition the king directly for my hand, but I swear you shall not go before him without Isabella’s blessing to support your claim. It can only be to our benefit to make her our ally in this matter.”
“I regret now my earlier diligence in confining her,” he said.
“She will not remember it when she is busy with other concerns.”
He remembered Isabella’s sometimes vicious treatment of him, privately thinking that he did not share Adele’s trust in the mercurial princess. “Let us hope you are correct,” he said.
As they stood in the courtyard, ready to depart, the spring air was fresh with the scent of pine and flowers, and the breeze played with the loose ends of Adele’s flaming hair, which gleamed like polished copper in the bright sunlight. He kissed her hand, as he had done at their first meeting, and once again his lips lingered hungrily on her fragrant skin.
“I shall think of nothing but holding you until we meet again,” he said softly.
And again, he did not give the day to the task of searching the countryside for apothecary necessities. Nor did he return to Mother Sarah’s cottage in search of the pathway between the oaks, which he knew in his heart was far more important than the mission on which he now sallied forth.
As he rode over the muddy roads, Alejandro cursed their dismal condition, in the same disparaging manner once used by Eduardo Hernandez. But despite its condition Alejandro was very glad to have found this road, for it would keep him on proper course toward the place to which he traveled, a place he had been only once before.
And reach it he did, wearily, after a hard ride. Before him was the small church where he and Adele had stopped on their first journey back to Windsor. At the top of the steps he pulled a bell cord, and waited nervously, staring down at his dirty boots without focus, his heart alternately full of joy, then painfully heavy. He had known of many Jews who had abandoned their faith and their God in order to prolong and simplify their lives. He had always despised such weakness. Now, as he stood ready to do the same, his heart softened, and he understood that there are some things that drive a man to redefine himself and leave his past behind.
Still, he burned with shame, and he recalled those unfortunate Jews in France who had died on the stake, saved from their fiery agony only by the well-aimed arrows of a sympathetic Christian soldier. He remembered, too, the distrusting look that gruff captain had given him after the regrettable incident. Had he known about the murder of the false-hearted bishop, it would have been my own soul departing for their fiery hell.
It seemed to be his inescapable fate to fall short of complete contentment in this life, he thought with sad resignation. He knew that whichever faith he chose, there would always be something for him to hide or regret. Ah, well, Alejandro mused, their Jesus was nothing more than a renegade Jew, and so am I.
In the midst of that thought, the door before him opened, and there stood the same priest who had heard Adele’s confession. The candle in his hand flickered gently in the soft evening breeze, casting a strange and frightening glow on the cleric’s stern features.
“Yes, my son?” he said slowly, eyeing the physician suspiciously.
“I am Alejandro Hernandez, a heathen from Aragon. I seek instruction in your faith.”
Two days later, as he rode back to Windsor, he mulled over the strict lessons he had been given. So few people had come to the monastery seeking conversion or instruction since the onset of the plague that the priest had stored up an enormous amount of religious zeal for just such a challenge.
Emboldened with righteous fervor, the cleric made a diligent attempt to scare Alejandro into subservience with his threats of hell and damnation. Wisely holding his tongue, for to speak truthfully would arouse suspicion, Alejandro would say only, “I confess my sins,” but would not elaborate. “Such matters are between myself and God alone, and God is surely wise enough to know the sins committed within His creation without having to be advised by those who have committed them,” he had told the insistent cleric.
Moreover, he thought, his anger beginning to rise as he rode along, one needs to be a complete fool to believe some of their ridiculous teachings. That one could buy admittance to everlasting glory was a claim too outrageous for any intelligent man to accept. And the matter of this supposed virgin, the mother of their Jesus, and her “immaculate” conception by the visit of the Holy Spirit, was beyond logic.
This was a woman who truly deserves worship, he had thought to himself as the priest railed at him, for through her quick wit she managed to accomplish one of the most fantastic ruses of all time! A poor peasant woman is unfaithful to her betrothed, and makes up an incredible story to justify her pregnancy, so that half of the world will follow her delusional child when he is grown. And she manages to convince the duped “father” to help her raise this child to believe the story himself. Too remarkable! How different she would have been in real life from the suffering, mystical martyr the priests painted her to be.
She was a crafty and clever Jewess, using her considerable wits to survive, as had many of her ancestors, as would many who came after her.
As Alejandro himself did now. Thoughts of Adele, and the peace he hoped they would know together, were all that had kept him from laughing aloud at the priest as he raved on and on about the certain doom and desolation Alejandro would face for his failure to confess. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I am a lonely Jew trying to find a home after wandering across the whole of Europa, a journey that I undertook after the vile duplicity and betrayal of your pompous bishop, who richly deserved exactly what he got from me. I seek peace by falsely converting to the preposterous Christian faith in order to establish a home with a woman whose blind adherence to your madness is little deserved, for she is far too good to be tangled up with the likes of you! And though I will confess to great shame over my eagerness to deceive her, she will always know that my love for her is the truest love of all.
So lost was he in these considerations that he did not realize how far he had traveled, and suddenly, to his surprise, Windsor Castle was visible against the greening landscape. Here, he thought joyfully, a truly new life awaits me! He kicked his heels sharply into the horse’s sides, and the animal neighed loudly before dashing down the hill toward the distant fortress.
Amen, he thought. So be it.
Twenty
The palm-print reader was now on its thirtieth repetition of the cleaning ritual. Each time it self-scanned it detected bacteria that had survived the last zapping, so it kept on shocking itself. After so many jolts the program became punch drunk and looped hopelessly into the shocking cycle, completely bypassing the customary cooling-off period between zaps. The wiring overheated, and on the thirty-first round of self-immolation it finally shorted out. There was a small flash of blue electricity as one of the wires melted, and a tiny puff of smoke rose up to the ceiling.
It was enough to set off an overhead smoke alarm wired directly into the London office of Biopol. The signal also went over the airwaves to the local Emergency Response Unit, and within a minute there was a full company of ERU field personnel on the way to the lab, sirens blaring as their vehicles sped through the crowded streets of London.
At Biopol headquarters the response was not quite as fast, but far more deliberate. The members of the responding unit took the time to climb into their protective gear before heading off to the scene shown on their computerized map. Within five minutes ten men and women in bright green spacesuits climbed into the back of a biocontainment vehicle. As they sped off, each Biocop grabbed a weapon from the mounting rack on the van’s inside wall and checked to see that it was properly loaded.
Bruce was dialing the number to report the presence of Yersinia pestis when Janie put a hand on his arm to stop him.
“What’s that?” she said.
Bruce stopped in mid-dial and listened. “Some sort of alarm,” he said. He listened more carefully. “It sounds like the smoke alarm system.” He hung the phone up before completing the sequence of numbers.
Janie ran to the lab’s main door and tried to open it. “We’re locked in!” she said. “I can’t get the door to open!”
“Then the smoke alarm must have gone off in the hallway,” Bruce said, coming to her side. He pressed a few buttons in a wall panel to try to override the automatic lock, but when he tried the door himself, it wouldn’t budge. “The security system automatically activates the lock to keep the fire outside the lab.” He tried the override again and failed to get the door open. “We won’t be able to get out this way.”
Janie rushed to the lab’s small window and looked out to see the ERU team arrive. As soon as their siren stopped, she heard another one in the distance.
Bruce was at her side by then, and he, too, heard the second siren. “Those will be Biocops. We’ve got to get out of sight right now.”
“My God,” she said. “Why are they coming here?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Bruce said, “but by sheer dumb luck I think we managed to be in here when the smoke alarm went off. I don’t think we should stick around to find out if I’m right.”
Across the lab they heard the handle of the locked door as someone tried to open it. Janie looked at Bruce in alarm and pointed toward the door. “Someone’s trying to get in!”
They heard the muffled sound of a voice from the corridor calling Bruce’s name. “Probably the same security guard we saw before,” he said.
She looked around quickly, searching for another exit, but saw none. “How are we going to get out of here?”
She did not like Bruce’s silence or the look on his face as he considered her question. “It’s not going to be easy, is it?” she said.
Bruce furrowed his eyebrows in concentration. “There’s only one other way I can think of to get out of here, and it’s going to be a tight fit. We’ll have to go through an air duct in the main storage freezer. There are a lot of filters in the way. It’s actually only supposed to be an outflow for releasing purified air back outside again, but we may be able to get through. Come on,” he said, waving her toward the freezer. “We don’t have much time. And don’t forget to take your briefcase! They’ll be able to place you in here.…”
She stopped short when she saw the red trilobed biohazard warning on the door, with its doomsday message:
ALL PERSONNEL MUST WEAR COMPLETE BIOSUITS
WHEN ENTERING THIS UNIT
“Bruce!” she said as she held him back. “We can’t just go in there! It’s hotter than hell!”
“Janie, if we don’t get out of here now we’re going to be in very big trouble!” The look on his face said, Don’t argue.
But she continued to protest. “But that room is crawling with bacteria and viruses! We’ll die, anyway!”
“Not if we don’t touch anything or breathe any unfiltered air.” He opened a small cabinet next to the unit’s door and took out two masks. Handing her one, he said, “Put this on. It’s rated for plasmids. Nothing big enough to hurt you is going to get through it if we’re careful.”
She took the mask from him and stared at it. It weighed only a few ounces; once inside the freezer, the lightweight plastic contraption would be all that separated her lungs from untold billions of infectious beasties. She looked back up at him apprehensively. “But it’s so small, and there’s nothing to it. I just can’t believe it’s going to be enough—”
The door rattled again.
“Come on!” Bruce said.
She slipped it on and tightened the strap at the back of her head. They had just enough time to add gloves and boots.
“Take a deep breath!” he told her. He opened the door to the airlock and they hurried inside. As they waited precious seconds for the automatic air exchange to be completed, Janie looked aside and saw the mechanical arm, now at rest, with its weirdly human fingers. She imagined a skilled technician maneuvering the delicate device to retrieve a sample rather than risking exposure to the deadly agents stored in the freezer, a thought that served as an immediate reminder that she was about to enter a place she had no business entering.
They passed through the second door, which clicked closed behind them as they entered the actual freezer unit. Almost immediately, their masks fogged with condensation. “Shit!” Bruce said. “We should’ve cooled them before we came in. They’ll clear in a minute or two, but we’d better stay still until they do.”
Janie looked around through her own rapidly fogging mask as they stood in a forest of glass tubes. It was eerily beautiful in the silent freezer, everything was clear glass or brushed chrome, and softened by the haze of condensation on her mask. Here and there, renegade icicles, unauthorized in the dry treated air, clung rebelliously to the sides of the tubes. Their breath came out of the mask filters in small clouds, which crystallized to invisibility almost instantly, and Janie realized where the occasional icicles came from: they were the residue of warm, moist human breath.
Farther on she saw an assortment of randomly placed storage tanks, all bolted to the floor. She suspected they contained some of the deadliest samples, stored separately and at even lower temperatures.
She heard a noise, and turned around quickly. Her mask was defogging but her vision was still cloudy enough that she couldn’t determine the source.
“Get down!” Bruce whispered as he pushed her down with his gloved hand. They crouched behind a large storage tank and looked back out as the security guard they’d seen earlier in the corridor came into view through the glass partition. Just as Janie’s mask finally cleared, she saw something explode on the back of his neck and the man collapsed instantly.
They both gasped through their masks; the sounds were distorted and muffled, but the meanings were clear.
“My God, they shot him!” Janie said.
“Oh, Jesus,” Bruce said, “and with a chemical bullet!”
“They killed him, just like that?”
He held his finger to his mask in a shushing gesture and whispered, his eyes always on the glass partition, “They assume that everyone is infectious in a lab incident. That’s been their policy since that arbovirus accident two years ago. Shoot first, justify later.”
“And that’s what will happen if they find us here?”
“There’s no way to tell,” he said nervously. “They might think twice about shooting blindly into this freezer. Take a look around—even a chemical bullet could do a lot of damage.”
She didn’t have to look far to understand what he meant. Marked on the tank that shielded them were the words Ebola Zaire, followed by the name of the African nurse who had been patient zero in a five-hundred-death miniepidemic several years earlier. Janie remembered reading a medical-journal report describing the swift progress of the symptoms, which caused the victim to die horribly by bleeding from every organ and blood vessel in the body. The virus had since undergone multiple mutations and the current version was even more deadly.
“But then again, these guys are good, and the guns have heat sensors set for 98.6, so we can’t assume that they absolutely won’t shoot,” Bruce whispered, his eyes still fixed on the area where he’d seen the guard fall. “They don’t miss too often.”
Janie hung her head and said, “That should have been one of us instead of the guard.”
And that’s just the beginning, she thought, her stomach tightening. Ted is dead, too, and Caroline is out there somewhere, pestiferous and on the move, perhaps infecting hundreds of people, the newest member of the Patient Zero Club. Yersinia pestis will hook up with some other microbe and pick up a plasmid with the gene for antibiotic resistance, and it’ll be the fourteenth century all over again. Only, this time the rats don’t have to wait for sailing ships. They can ride on airplanes now.
This doomsday message looped through Janie’s brain like an endless tape as
they waited to see what might happen next. With aching legs they crouched behind the tank for what seemed like an eternity, listening to the electronically amplified voices of the Biocops outside the glass wall. Finally, unable to crouch any longer, they sat on the cold lab floor with their backs resting against a chrome storage unit. The temperature in the freezer was well below zero and the air was brutally dry. Janie shivered in her light, wet coat, which had begun to stiffen. As she moved her arm, tiny slivers of ice cracked off the sleeve and landed on the tile floor below.
Across the main pathway through the freezer she and Bruce could see the bright green of spacesuits reflected in the shiny steel surface of the cabinet opposite them. They waited in still silence, hoping and praying that the Biocops would not come up with any reason to search the unit.
After a few agonizing minutes Bruce said, “I don’t think they have any idea that there’s anyone else around. They’d be in here by now if they did. The guard was the only one who saw us come in.”
But Janie wasn’t convinced of their safety. “Wait until they find the hand,” she said, just loudly enough for Bruce to hear her. “Then they’ll tear this place apart. I didn’t have time to put it back in my briefcase before we ran for it. It’s still sitting on the floor in a plastic bag. If they get bacteria detectors going, they’ll find it in a flash.”
“Oh, they will—in a lab incident they’re required to. Then they’ll do a laser DNA scan and they’ll know it’s Ted’s hand,” Bruce said, “and they’ll figure out anyone who’s been in contact with him from residue on his skin. Then the real fun will start. Everyone who works here will be questioned, including me, and they’ll round up anyone else who shows up in the scan.”
Two green images suddenly appeared and came close to the glass wall. Janie and Bruce drew their legs up and huddled closer together. They held their breath for a few moments so the fog of condensation wouldn’t reveal their presence. They couldn’t move, because if they did, they might draw the notice of the searching Biocops, and their lack of movement made the cold seem even more biting as their circulations slowed. Despite the rush of adrenaline flooding into her system, Janie felt drowsy from the extreme cold. She looked over at Bruce and saw that he, too, was beginning to fade. It dawned on her that if they didn’t get out of there soon, they might both freeze to death, with Caroline still loose in London.
