by Louise Voss
‘No way. I’m staying right here till she’s done.’
‘OK. But you realise you could have a long wait?’
Paul felt the anger coming straight back again. Fucking Harley. He had never met anyone who was able to wind him up so easily. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Harley shrugged. ‘It’s your choice. Anyway, it’s been a long day. We’re going to check in to a motel and rest up till the morning.’
‘Whatever,’ Paul replied, giving the floor once again to his inner teenager. Turning to the dusky landscape rolling by the window, he began counting to ten again.
Agent DiFranco pulled up by a motel on the west side of Bakersfield. Despite the hour, it was still stiflingly hot. Paul was desperate for a shower, and his eyes burned from lack of sleep. Harley was right; it had been a long, long day.
The motel clerk, a skinny brunette with her hair piled up on her head and a tattoo of a panther on her upper arm, checked them in to three rooms.
‘Y’all from England?’ she asked on hearing Harley and Paul’s accents. ‘Do you know Radiohead?’
‘Not personally,’ Harley replied drily.
Paul caught her eye, shooting her a look that said, ‘Yeah, this guy’s a jerk,’ and she smiled at him, revealing a gap in her teeth you could drive a motorbike through. She handed each of them a key and told them their room numbers. Paul and Harley were in adjacent rooms; DiFranco a few doors down.
‘Cellphone reception is lousy in the rooms,’ she said, ‘but we got wi-fi if you need it.’
‘Great,’ said Paul, drawing another smile from the receptionist. She reminded him a little of poor Amy Winehouse.
‘I don’t think we’ll be needing that,’ Harley said. DiFranco snickered, for no good reason Paul could tell. When the receptionist turned to get their keys, Paul saw DiFranco take a good, long look at her behind, actually tilting his head to one side. Creep.
As Paul unlocked his room, he heard DiFranco say to Harley, ‘Hey, we should have a talk.’ He kept the door open a crack and listened, hoping he might catch something they said, but they had moved out of earshot.
He stripped and showered, then took a clean T-shirt and pair of boxers out of his suitcase. The room was like the inside of a car that had been parked in the sun all day; dog-killing weather. He examined the air-con unit and concluded that it was a piece of junk. A great weariness washed over him. He didn’t have the energy to complain or ask for another room.
Instead, he opened the window, which gave a view of a row of cars and the freeway beyond, and lay down on the creaky bed. He picked up his iPhone, wanting to call or at least text Kate. The receptionist was right: he had half a bar of signal that flickered on and off; he sent a text telling Kate he loved her, was sorry about earlier and would call her in the morning. He added four kisses.
He closed his eyes. He’d slept in worse places – prison, for one.
When he next opened his eyes it was dark. It took him a few moments to remember where he was. A crap motel,
a long way from home. Alone.
He could hear someone talking outside the window. He rolled on to his side and groped for his phone to check the time. Half past midnight. He crept to the window and stood behind the curtain. The voice outside belonged to Harley. After a moment, when he couldn’t hear another voice, Paul realised Harley was on the phone, obviously forced outside by the poor mobile reception.
He pressed his face to the glass. Harley was standing by their car, his back to Paul, who could make out the odd word. ‘Report … spreading fast … Bakersfield …’
Paul quickly pulled a chair across the room and stood on it so he could listen through the open window, his body concealed by the curtain and the darkness inside the room. If he really strained he found he could hear almost everything.
‘So what do you want me to do?’ Harley went on. ‘No, I’m heading back to San Francisco in the morning. I’ve
got Paul Wilson with me. Yeah, yeah … I know.’ He laughed. Paul didn’t think the person on the other end of the phone was praising his good qualities. What was that expression about people who eavesdrop never hearing good things about themselves? ‘Thankfully, Kate Maddox is a lot more cooperative. Yeah, I know – I had to tell her a white lie to get her to agree.’
Paul got that feeling you get in your stomach when you go over a bump in the road. His suspicions were right: Harley couldn’t be trusted.
The MI6 man went on: ‘Yeah, Wilson is obsessed with what happened to his brother, Stephen. The guy that Gaunt was …’
To Paul’s great frustration, Harley began to wander away, his voice growing quieter until he couldn’t hear it any more. He slapped the wall with frustration.
Hearing Harley talk about Stephen in such a dismissive fashion enraged him, especially when Harley knew all too well what had happened, and why Paul found it hard to let go. There were still people out there who had been involved in Stephen’s death. Or rather, one man. Charles Mangold.
And then it came to Paul what he should do.
He wasn’t going to allow Harley to take him to San Francisco. Because now, for the first time, he had a chance to avenge his brother’s death – and maybe find the inner peace he craved.
11
There were six people already round the long refectory-style table when Kate and Junko came down for breakfast, including McCarthy, who proceeded to introduce Kate to everybody as though he’d been there for weeks. He seemed perfectly at ease in the situation, laughing and gesticulating – Kate would have assumed he was slightly drunk had it not been 6.30 a.m. It helped, though, having him there. He certainly broke the ice.
There was an epidemiologist, William, who was about her age with sandy thinning hair. His body was so slight that he looked as though a strong puff of mountain breeze would be enough to bear him away, but his features were strong, and he looked like a man on a mission. Then there were three lab technicians – two young men, one fat, and one very tall, whose names Kate instantly forgot, and one very pretty woman, small, busty and pouty, whose name was Annie. Kate and Junko were the only non-Americans.
The sixth person was the third virologist, Chip Oakley. He had the narrowest face Kate had ever seen, topped by an enormous pair of tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, and his welcome smile looked more like a frown. His eyes, magnified through the thick lenses of his glasses, seemed to pop out at her. He was wearing a knitted tanktop the likes of which Kate hadn’t seen since about 1978. No wonder we need the FBI and all this security, she thought; this lot wouldn’t have the strength to take the skin off a rice pudding. Although, even if they were all built like Marines, it wouldn’t be much good if someone set off another bomb.
‘He looks a bit weird,’ Kate whispered to Junko, trying to distract herself from thoughts of bombs and Isaac, as they took two seats at the end of the table furthest from Chip.
Junko grinned. ‘He’s all right, actually. Bit of an uber-geek, but knows his stuff. I worked with him on H1N1 at Berkeley a few years ago.’
‘Where’s Kolosine?’ She felt a slight flutter in her ribcage at the mere thought of the man.
Junko rolled her eyes. ‘He likes to make an entrance, if I remember rightly.’ She poured them both a glass of water from the jug on the table.
‘I’d kill for a cup of coffee,’ Kate said. ‘Is there any?’
Annie, who had been busily applying more lipgloss at the table, piped up: ‘Plenty of coffee, day and night. Nothing stronger, though, so don’t go expecting wine with your dinner tonight. This place is dry.’
‘Are you serious?’ Kate was aghast. Did they really expect her to be holed up here indefinitely, without even a relaxing glass of wine at the end of a long day? Outrageous!
‘’Fraid so. Prof. Kolosine’s orders. No alcohol on the premises for the duration of the project.’
‘That’s tantamount to cruelty,’ Kate said miserably, picking at a croissant from the basket on the table and suddenly missing Paul with a fierce long
ing.
‘You tell him that, honey,’ said Annie, snapping shut her compact. ‘No cellphone reception here, either, and no landline ’cept the one in Professor Kolosine’s locked office, which is for emergency use only, so we were told last night.’
‘What?’ Kate felt sick. How was she supposed to call Paul, or Jack?
‘More incentive for us to develop a vaccine as soon as possible, I guess,’ said Chip, in a surprisingly deep voice, completely at odds with his nerdy Junior High appearance. ‘They want us to be as isolated as possible so we can really focus.’
Adoncia pushed open the door of the dining room with her rump, dragging in behind her a trolley containing a big pot of coffee and a platter of scrambled eggs and sausage links, which she dumped wordlessly on the table. Kate’s stomach gurgled in anticipation.
There was silence for a few minutes while everyone helped themselves. ‘So, folks,’ McCarthy said. ‘Let’s hear it. What are we really up against here? And not too much of your scientific jargon, either – I am a simple man.’ He made a silly face, but no one except Annie laughed.
Junko pushed away her unfinished eggs and leaned her elbows on the table. ‘It appears to be an intense strain of Watoto, which is bad enough in its familiar state, but this one seems to kill people much more quickly – in four days, as opposed to the six or seven Watoto usually takes. The stats that William’s been receiving indicate that we’re dealing with a ninety-nine per cent mortality rate, which is one of the worst we’ve ever seen. It’s a filovirus – not a flu virus at all, despite the media calling it Indian flu. Its closest relatives are Ebola and Marburg – but this strain of Watoto is even more deadly than those.’
There was a roar from the corridor, and everyone’s heads jerked up. ‘Kolosine,’ mouthed Junko at Kate, and the door burst open. A huge, hirsute man stood framed in the doorway. He was wearing a checked plaid shirt, with a thatch of dark chest hair curling out of the top. He had longish brown hair, and the sort of beard that made Kate relieved that she hadn’t seen him eat soup. His eyes were bright green and very clear, and his voice seemed to boom out from the bottom of his sneakers. He completely ignored Kate.
‘Suits on, people – we’ve got a live one coming in any moment. The Aeromedical Isolation Team are bringing him in a VATI. Police sergeant in the LAPD, thirty-two years old, in advanced stages of the disease. This is our best shot: fresh tissue samples, a chance to observe the effects of the virus first hand – don’t fuck it up.’
‘What’s a VATI?’ asked McCarthy, helping himself to another croissant as, all around him, chairs were being pushed back and people were rising to their feet.
‘Vickers aircraft transport isolator – it’s a way of transporting very infectious patients,’ said Kate. ‘Looks like a gurney with a plastic tent over it.’
‘I knew that,’ McCarthy said, buttering the croissant.
Kolosine was still standing in the doorway, urging his team out. He looked more like a lumberjack than a world-renowned scientist, Kate thought. She walked up to him and held out her hand. ‘Hi, Professor Kolosine, I’m Kate Maddox. It’s an honour to meet you, and I’m—’
‘Yeah, yeah, hi, let’s get going,’ he said, ignoring her outstretched hand, and looking right over the top of her head. ‘We got work to do here. I’ll see you in the lab in twenty minutes.’ With that, he turned on his heel and strode out, leaving Kate standing with her mouth hanging open in disbelief. Junko came up behind her and squeezed her elbow.
‘Don’t take it personally,’ she said. ‘The great Professor Kolosine doesn’t have much time for mere mortals like us. Come on, I’ll show you where the lab is.’
Kate clenched her teeth together and shut her eyes tightly for a moment to try and contain her anger. Kolosine had better be as brilliant as everyone said he was.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Bring it on.’
12
Paul waited for Harley to come back, hoping to eavesdrop further on his conversation, but when Harley returned he had put his phone away. Paul heard him go into his room and shut the door.
Charles Mangold. Since Stephen’s death, finding Mangold had become an obsession for Paul. He felt like that Nazi hunter – what was his name? – who had sworn he wouldn’t rest until they were all brought to justice. But Paul’s efforts had been stymied because his criminal record meant he could only track Mangold online. But now he’d finally been allowed into the US he could pursue leads that would have been impossible over the internet.
He could almost feel Stephen watching him, urging him on, saying, ‘Do it, Paul. Find him. For me.’
He paced the room. First step would be to get online, look up Mangold and see if his name had appeared anywhere recently. That night at the lab, when Gaunt had been convinced he was invincible, and that Kate and Paul would never get out alive, Gaunt had let slip that Mangold lived in Utah. Yet Paul had never been able to find any online trace of an address in that state. His internet searches had established that Mangold had headed a company called Medi-Lab, which was based in a small city called Sagebrush, to the west of LA. There had been no fresh results in the last two years.
He grabbed his phone and turned on data roaming but, as he’d expected, there was no 3G connection here so he couldn’t get online via the mobile network, nor any wi-fi. He pulled on his jeans, socks and shoes and exited the room as quietly as he could, creeping along the front of the building, gratefully breathing in the cooler air.
At reception, the skinny girl with the panther tattoo had been replaced by a considerably less skinny man with a grey beard and bags under his eyes. He turned his basset hound-like gaze on Paul.
‘Hi. The girl on reception earlier said there was wi-fi available?’ Paul realised that he was whispering. He cleared his throat and spoke up. ‘Is that right?’
‘Only in the lobby. Ten bucks an hour.’
Outrageous. But he had little choice. He took out his wallet, thankful that he’d got some money changed at Heathrow, and handed over a ten-dollar bill. Armed with the password, he sneaked back to his room, noting that the light inside Harley’s room was off. It was 1 a.m. now and only the occasional car glided past on the freeway. He grabbed his MacBook Air and headed back down to reception. There, perched in an uncomfortably shiny plastic armchair in the corner, he connected to the wi-fi. The first thing he did was Google Charles Mangold and filter the results to the most recent.
Nothing he hadn’t seen before.
To refresh his memory, he went into a folder he had set up to save the scant details he had previously discovered about Mangold when searching at home.
The most useful item came from the online archive of the Ventura County Star. Paul read it over now, probably for the tenth time since he had first found it. The words never failed to make the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
Charles Mangold was the founder and president of Medi-Lab Research, a company based in Sagebrush that specialised in research into, and manufacture of, antiviral drugs. The company was heavily involved in research into HIV, as well as research into the common cold and flu viruses. Medi-Lab Research was one of Ventura County’s largest employers until a significant health scandal in 1991, when it was accused of endangering the lives of its employees and the wider community due to ‘safety violations’ and, more seriously, ‘misuse of biological agents’. The company’s headquarters and laboratories were shut down by the Department of Health. Two employees were taken seriously ill and diagnosed as suffering from a hemorrhagic virus, although precise details are not available. Both of the affected workers died.
Several key members of staff were arrested, but Mangold went to ground and has not been seen since.The company’s reputation was ruined and it ceased trading shortly afterwards.
Where was Mangold now? At the time of the scandal, in 1991, Mangold had been fifty-three. So, assuming he hadn’t died in the last couple of years, he would now be seventy-four. What would he be doing?
He read the line about th
e haemorrhagic virus again. Could it have been Watoto? Officially, there had never been an outbreak of Watoto in the US, but maybe there had, and the authorities had kept it under wraps.
He closed the laptop lid. Perhaps this was a foolish plan. But what was the alternative? Tomorrow, Harley and DiFranco would drive him to San Francisco and dump him in some cheap motel. He would go mad, sitting around with nothing to do, no way of contributing or helping.
Well, screw Harley and the BIT and MI6 and the FB sodding I. He wasn’t going to sit around on his arse, not when there was a man out there who needed to pay for what had happened to Stephen. This was his chance, and he wasn’t about to let it slip away.
He quickly packed again, and as he wound up all the chargers and leads, he noticed that Kate’s BlackBerry charger was among them. Shit. He remembered packing it, and he had forgotten all about it when they separated at the airfield. He hoped they would have a spare charger at the lab so he could contact her.
Dragging his duffelbag behind him, he slipped out of the door and walked down towards the freeway, heart pounding with the anger that propelled him onwards. He didn’t know how he was going to get there, or how long it would take, but Mangold’s trail would start in Sagebrush.
Paul was going to track him down, whatever it took.
13
Midday, on the San Bernardino Freeway. The sky was a sheer, metallic blue, the sun burning through the ozone, baking the earth, the air outside the vehicle lethally hot. Two women sat inside the car, protected from the scorching sun by the air-con that ruffled the golden hair of the woman in the passenger seat. She sat upright, sunglasses on, her beautiful face serene, while the driver thumped the radio with the palm of her hand.
‘Goddamn piece of junk.’ The driver stabbed buttons on the radio, eliciting one hiss of static after another, before punching it again, using the same move she would use to break a man’s nose. She switched it off, silence filling the car. She was solid and muscled, with a neck that bordered on bullish and a high colour in her wide cheeks, cropped curly dark hair and biceps like a Marine.
