by Tom Clancy
Leaving his desktop on, he swiveled around in his comfortable leather office chair and reclined to watch his coon cat toy with a favorite ball of yarn. She prodded it with her front paws to set it rolling and then crouched in readiness to pounce, her tail flicking back and forth on the floor.
“Okay, Missus Frakes,” he said in a fond tone. “Let’s see you go for it.”
The cat cooed at the sound of his voice. Then she sprang upon the wound-up yarn and twisted onto her back, holding the ball against her middle with her forelegs, kicking and raking at it with her sharp rear claws.
Lathrop smiled a little. She would work the thing till it became unraveled and spread loosely across the carpet. Just as he was working his own ball of yarn. The biggest he’d ever chanced upon.
He sat thinking about what he actually knew, what further information he’d been able to surmise from it, and what choices and opportunities the sum total presented to him.
His surveillances at Balboa and the harbor parking lot combined to tell a pretty amazing story. Whatever her identity might be, it was certain Blondie was a courier for El Tío. And her purpose in meeting Enrique Quiros had been to deliver the jewelry box for the obscure narco distributer and instruct Enrique to pass it along to the guy he’d then arranged to meet harborside. His name was Palardy. A member of the security or countersnoop team at UpLink International whose gambling jones had gotten him in over his head with some serious operators, and who’d paid off a piece of his debt by turning over classified information about the defense systems of UpLink’s manufacturing compound in Brazil. El Tío’s involvement in the terrorist raid on that base was unclear to Lathrop, but it probably didn’t have much importance at this stage, and he hadn’t concerned himself with it.
The main thing for him was to keep on top of what was happening now. Because events were already moving fast, and he had the sense they were about to kick up to a breathless pace.
It was interesting how sellout dupes like Palardy could be so utterly blind to the traps being set for them. How they never realized that the type of men who were using them would keep their hooks in until every bit of usefulness was exhausted. At the harbor, Palardy and his current user had talked about genetic blueprints, disease triggers, stuff Lathrop had needed to research afterward. And there was enough he still had to check out. But despite a lingering question mark or two, he’d gotten the gist of their encounter ... and stripped to the bone, it all came down to blackmail and murder. Palardy had been given some kind of biological agent, something new under the sun, and been ordered to take out Roger Gordian with it.
Lathrop tilted a little farther back in his chair, continuing to watch Missus Frakes relentlessly pull apart the yarn with her teeth and claws.
That’s the way, all right, he thought. Work the bastard.
In the Safe Car—ha—ha—Palardy had understandably squawked with resistance. Quiros’s errand would bounce him from the role of informant to killer, and he’d never planned for things to escalate that far. But Quiros pushed, bringing up what dirt he had on him, and that made him shut his mouth and agree to cooperate. It was a variation of a theme Lathrop had seen repeated time and again in the territory he chose to prowl, though one notable distinction about the enactment featuring Quiros and Palardy was that neither had been inclined to get mixed up in Gordian’s assassination. That Quiros was himself muscled into it. This had become apparent from his protestations to Blondie and a couple of indirect comments he’d made to Palardy—the latter being moments of commiseration and empathy that hadn’t exactly caused Lathrop’s eyes to mist. But he supposed he was a cynical audience, having maybe seen the basic plot unfold once too often.
After that night at the harbor, Lathrop had concentrated on the script he’d drafted for Quiros and Lucio Salazar without their knowledge. It had netted him a sweet take, and the blowout climax promised to be refreshing fun. But in another twenty-four hours, it would be time to move beyond it. Turn a bend, head on out toward virgin soil.
If he’d needed any incentive to urge him along, nothing could have been better than the news reports about Gordian’s hospitalization.
Lathrop glanced around at the pretty lady on his computer screen and remembered the afternoon he’d followed Enrique to his rendezvous with her. Remembered watching the carousel make its slow rotations with the “Blue Danube” piping in the background, the rowdy, stoned-out teenagers on the lead horses rising from their saddles, stretching their arms to reach for the silver and brass rings above them, only the gleaming brass worth a prize.
A smile ghosted at the corners of Lathrop’s mouth again.
The brass ring.
He’d gotten hold of it. Without ever climbing aboard the platform, stalking the periphery on his ceaseless, solitary hunt, he’d been the one who caught hold. And that left him having to make two major decisions.
Namely when to claim his prize and how best to trade on its indescribable value.
“Third time I’ve called, and still no answer except from his machine,” Ricci said. “Where the hell is Palardy?”
“Who knows? Maybe he went out for some groceries.”
“He’s supposed to be sick.”
“Doesn’t have to mean he’s bedridden. A person has to eat, no matter how lousy he feels. If there’s no food in the house, you live alone, you go buy some.”
“Third time in an hour, Pete. If I’m under the weather and need orange juice or something, I might run over to the corner deli. But I wouldn’t make a whole shopping excursion out of—”
“Whoa,” Megan said, putting up her hand. “I think you two are getting way ahead of yourselves.”
They looked at her from their chairs in Nimec’s office.
“How so?” Nimec said.
“It could be that he’s turned off the ringer on his phone to get some sleep, or doesn’t hear it, or just doesn’t want to answer.”
“Or maybe he was feeling better and went out for fresh air,” Scull said. “For all we know, the guy had a stomach bug and is already back to normal.”
“If that’s the case, why wasn’t he at work today?”
Scull shrugged. “He might not have felt normal till earlier tonight. I’m only agreeing with Meg that—”
“You see me phone his section chief ten minutes ago? You remember our conversation?”
“Sure I do—”
“What he told me, this section chief, was that the last time anybody heard from Palardy was when he phoned in yesterday, and that the guy sounded sick as a dog, and he was supposed to call back today to report how he was doing. And never did.”
“I said I remembered—”
“The section chief, his name’s Hernandez, also said he thought it was very odd that Palardy didn’t call. In fact, I’m pretty sure he started to use the word irresponsible, too, but checked himself.”
“Probably didn’t want to get him in hot water with us,” Thibodeau said.
“I agree. But that doesn’t change anything,” Nimec said. “The sweeps aren’t a haphazard affair. If they become disorganized, we start to have countersurveillance lapses.”
“Exactly,” Ricci said. “Guys on these teams show up for duty at five-thirty, six o’clock in the morning. And unless it happens that one of them wakes up feeling too sick to come in, like Palardy did Monday—”
“Or a last-minute emergency comes up ... car breaks down on the highway, kid’s got a fever—”
“Which wasn’t the case—”
“Then Hernandez has got to have his people give him notice the day before,” Thibodeau said, finishing Ricci’s sentence. “Arrange to pull a replacement off another team. Be sure every area in the building due for a sweep is covered.”
Ricci nodded.
“Especially when it’s a team leader who’s going to be out,” he said. “Hernandez is sticking with his man until he learns the score, and I’d do the same. But Palardy being MIA is a bigger deal than he wanted us to think.”
Meg
an shook her head. “I’m still not sure I understand what the three of you are saying—”
“What I’m saying is Palardy might be too sick to call. Might’ve passed out same as the boss.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”
“You’ve made quite a huge leap,” she said. “It’s possible we’ve hit on a disciplinary problem rather than anything having to do with Gord.”
“Meg’s right,” Scull said. “Don Palardy appears for work tomorrow morning, fit as a fiddle, your whole discussion’s moot. Like I said before, I can’t see reading a whole lot into his absence. Not at this stage.”
Ricci looked at him.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But I tell you something, Scull. He doesn’t show bright and early, I want to know his home address. Because wherever he lives, I’m heading over there to see what’s up.”
Dr. Eric Oh thought they resembled water lilies.
Clusters of beautiful, perfectly formed lilies floating on the surface of a quiet pond.
This quality of simple structural perfection was the essence of the virus’s enduring success as a life form. It was also what made them ideally suited for comparison study with an electron microscope. Every virion of a type was identical. An intact specimen of a virus from the blood of a patient in Mozambique would be the mirror image of a specimen of the same family, genus, and strain grown in culture at a California research laboratory, assuming it was likewise undamaged. To an experienced researcher it would look as though they had been manufactured at a single factory, on a single, orderly assembly line. You saw one, you’d seen them all.
At three o’clock in the morning, Eric was still at the Stanford lab, examining the photographs he’d snapped with its state-of-the-art Hitachi instrument beside those he’d called up on his computer from the vast database of EM pictures compiled and shared by medical and biological research facilities around the globe.
As with any sort of photography, setting up the shot was the difficult part of the process; once you got to the shutter click, you were home free. From the moment he’d scanned Gordian’s case report, Eric’s mind had been whispering virus. After he’d inspected the first-generation X rays sent by Lieberman, that whisper became an urgent shout. But the problem in taking pictures of viruses was that they tended to be camera shy. The tiniest were dwarfed even by common bacteria. Scientists measured their size in nanometers—billionths of a meter. On this infinitesimal scale, a single droplet of blood became a vast, unmapped sea of crests and troughs where they could remain undetected unless present in great numbers. And the greater their numbers, the worse the infection. It was therefore easier when investigating deadly viral illnesses to find colonies in samples from autopsies of the dead or patients in late-stage disease than in samples taken from less advanced cases.
Eric had hoped from the start that Roger Gordian wasn’t going to make life easy for him. When his viewing of an unconcentrated drop of serum failed to reveal any viruses after nearly two hours, he considered it a break. Better he’d needed to take the extra step of placing a sample in a centrifuge to pack as many organisms as possible into a concentrate than have an abounding population instantly jump out at his eyes. Viruses were unsparing, mechanistic parasites that used up the living cells of their hosts as they bred. Given Eric’s fears about the nature of Gordian’s infection, a sample that teemed with virus particles might have suggested a bleak prognosis indeed.
After centrifugation, Eric had used filter paper to drain the circular grid bearing his concentrated sample, then stained it with a solution of 2 percent phosphotungstate that was conductive to electrons. He had known that his processing would damage whatever viruses might be displayed, and that further deterioration could be expected from the ionizing effect of the microscope’s electron beam. But while there were methods of cryogenic preparation that could have substantially reduced, if not altogether eliminated, the loss of a specimen’s structural integrity, these techniques were finicky and took time. And Eric’s goal was to aid in Gordian’s diagnosis and treatment, not his postmortem, which meant he had to be expedient. He had weighed the two options against each other and decided to go ahead with conventional EM, reasoning that an adequate amount of the sample remained for the lab’s regular staff to perform cryo EM later on, should his own examination indicate it was advisable.
Now Eric removed his glasses and sat rubbing his eyes, strained from too many long, sleepless hours fixed on the visual panel of the EM. The only reminder that his stomach wasn’t completely empty was an occasional repeating of the ketchup-sopped burgers he’d picked up for dinner. He knew he ought to go home, pop some antacid tablets, and climb into bed. But the pictures wouldn’t let him budge.
He put the glasses back on and looked at his micrographs. Then at the electronic library shots on his computer screen. His gaze moving between them again and again.
Lilies. On a quiet pond.
As an epidemiologist with the CDC in the midnineties, Eric had been one of the primary investigators who had worked to identify the mystery illness that scourged the Four Corners Navajo tribal reservation in the Southwest and then gradually made its way eastward, killing better than half its victims—many of them young, otherwise healthy individuals—within days of their first symptoms. The infections began with mild flulike respiratory problems and rapidly progressed toward systemic crash, the walls of the capillaries in the lungs breaking down, developing tiny leaks that bled out into the surrounding tissues until they became inundated with fluid and sometimes swelled to double their normal size. In many of the fatal cases there was a similar breakdown of stomach membranes. The external signs of terminal-stage disease were especially horrible as the blood vessels in the body’s mucous membranes and subcutaneous tissues deteriorated, causing petechiae, pinpoint hemorrhages of the eyes, mouth, and skin.
In the early days of the contagion’s spread, the inhabitants of Four Corners came to refer to the epidemic simply—and for Eric chillingly—as sin nombre. Without a name. That designation stuck with it after intensive scientific detective work eventually determined the disease was a new strain of hantavirus, a lethal hemorrhagic fever whose occurrence was never previously recorded in North America.
The tingles Eric had felt on first perusal of Gordian’s case report had stemmed from the combination of his respiratory problems and the abnormal lymphocytes and diving platelet count in his bloodstream. Platelets were essential to the body’s healing factor, minuscule patches that gathered to stop bleeding and release clotting agents. A normal platelet count averaged 150,000 to 350,000 per microliter of blood. Gordian’s count had been 120,000 per microliter when he was admitted to San Jose Mercy—borderline low. It had then fallen to 90,000 Monday morning. On the most recent workup, it declined even more pronouncedly to 50,000 per microliter.
Eric had seen nearly the same profile in sin nombre patients entering the pulmonary edema phase of the disease. And changes in Gordian’s chest X rays had also been discomfortingly familiar. The vague skeins of shadow across his lungs evident on Sunday’s pictures had become linear opacities of the airspaces within twenty-four hours, visible as short perpendicular white streaks at their bases. By Tuesday afternoon, there were longer lines developing from the hilum, the crowded interchange where the blood vessels, nerves, and bronchi emerged into the lungs.
Sin nombre, he thought.
Without a name.
The liliform viruses now on Eric’s computer screen were micrographs that he and his colleagues on the CDC investigative team had taken eight years ago ... and the shots he’d gotten out of the EM’s photographic chamber tonight bore an undeniably striking similarity to them.
As in the original series, the organisms were circular in shape. As in the originals, their envelopes were ringed with binding proteins that enabled them to attach to the outer membranes of host cells. But the architecture of their nucleocapsids—the core material within the viral envelopes that held the genomic code for their replication and entry int
o the cell—showed a subtle variance.
Studying the set of images he’d isolated from Roger Gordian’s bloodstream, Eric could see none of the roundedness typical of the nucleocapsids on the database specimens of sin nombre, or for that matter in any of the related old-world hantavirus strains he’d encountered in his scientific career. Instead, they appeared long and straight, almost filamentous, even when computer-enhanced.
Eric couldn’t go beyond guessing whether this anomaly represented a difference in the genetic makeup of the separate specimens until a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, probe was conducted on Gordian’s samples, and the actual RNA sequences could be compared against the codes of all other known hantaviruses. But his immunogobulin capture assays—fluorescent dye screening tests developed in the late 1980s that produced results within three or four hours—had shown weak positives for several catalogued strains of the disease, with the brightest green glow on his lab slide appearing for sin nombre. While that, too, had been relatively pale, it had made Eric nervous as hell once added to the rest of the evidence before him.
His eyes hurting, his stomach hollow, he sat there tensely in the lab, frozen behind his computer as dawn crept its slow way into the sky outside. He could say very little absolutely except that Roger Gordian was in serious trouble. But he believed in his bones that if Gordian didn’t have sin nombre, he’d contracted something very much like it.
That a close relative to the disease without a name, one nobody had known about, had just shown up on the doorstep.
The doe strode softly into the thick stand of trees, her tracks like broken hearts in the fallen snow. Food was plentiful here, the low-hanging pine boughs bunched with cones, the needle buds on the saplings still succulent, only beginning to brown in their cold-weather dormancy.
Scanning a moment for predators, she saw nothing disturb the vegetation, heard nothing except the hushed whisper of the breeze. Then she lowered her head and tore at the young trees with her flat, blunt teeth, lacking incisors to bite into them.
