Fever Dream

by Douglas Preston

  The road went into a long curve and Hayward soon caught up to the Rolls again, idling at the gate to the plant, Pendergast speaking with the guard inside the adjoining guardhouse. After a lengthy exchange in which the guard went back and forth to the telephone several times, both cars were waved through.

  She drove past a sign reading LONGITUDE PHARMACEUTICALS, INC, ITTA BENA FACILITY and into the parking lot in time to see Pendergast checking his Les Baer .45. “You’re not expecting trouble?” she asked.

  “One never knows,” said Pendergast, returning the gun to its holster and patting his suit.

  A crabgrass lawn led to a complex of low, yellow brick buildings surrounded on three sides by the fingers of a marshy lake, full of swamp lilies and floating duckweed. Through a screen of trees, Hayward could see more buildings, some of which looked to be overgrown with ivy and in ruins. And beyond everything lay the steamy fastness of Black Brake swamp. Staring toward the wetland, dark even in the bright light of day, Hayward shivered slightly. She had heard plenty of legends about the place, growing up: legends of pirates, ghosts, and things even stranger. She slapped away a mosquito.

  She followed Pendergast into the main building. The receptionist had already laid out two badges, one for MR. PENDERGAST and the other for MS. HAYWARD. Hayward plucked her badge and attached it to her lapel.

  “Take the elevator to the second floor, last door on your right,” said the gray-haired receptionist with a big smile.

  As they got into the elevator, Hayward said: “You didn’t tell them we were cops. Again.”

  “It is sometimes useful to see the reaction before that information is known.”

  Hayward shrugged. “Anyway, doesn’t this seem just a little too easy to you?”

  “Indeed it does.”

  “Who’ll do the talking?”

  “You did so well last time, would you care to do the honors again?”

  “Delighted. Only this time I might not be so nice.” She could feel the reassuring weight of her own service piece, snugged tight under her arm.

  The elevator creaked up a single floor, and they emerged to find themselves in a long linoleum hallway. They strolled down to the far end and came to a door, open, beyond which a secretary worked in a spacious office. A faded but still-elegant oak door stood closed at the far end.

  Hayward entered first. The secretary, who was quite young and pretty, with a ponytail and red lipstick, looked up. “Please take a seat.”

  They sat on a taupe sofa, beside a glass table piled with dog-eared trade magazines. The woman spoke from her desk in a brisk manner. “I’m Joan Farmer, Mr. Dalquist’s personal secretary. He’s going to be tied up all day and asked me to find out how we can help you.”

  Hayward leaned toward her. “I’m afraid you can’t help us, Ms. Farmer. Only Mr. Dalquist can.”

  “As I said, he’s busy. Perhaps if you explained to me what you needed?” Her tone had dropped a few degrees.

  “Is he in there?” Hayward nodded toward the shut door.

  “Ms. Hayward, I hope I’ve made myself clear that he is not to be disturbed. Now: one more time, how can we assist you?”

  “We’ve come about the avian flu project.”

  “I’m not familiar with that project.”

  Hayward finally reached into her pocket, removed the shield billfold, laid it on the table, and opened it. The secretary started momentarily, leaned forward, looked at it, and then examined Pendergast’s shield, which he had removed as well, following Hayward’s lead.

  “Police—and FBI? Why didn’t you say so up front?” Her startled look was quickly replaced by undisguised annoyance. “Please wait here.” She stood up and knocked softly on the closed door before opening it and disappearing, shutting it firmly behind her.

  Hayward glanced over at Pendergast. They both rose simultaneously, walked over to the doorway, and pushed through.

  They found themselves in a pleasant, although somewhat spartan, office. A man who looked more like a professor than a CEO, with glasses, a tweed jacket, and khaki pants, was conferring with the secretary in front of a large desk. His white hair was carefully combed, and a white brush mustache sat above lips pursed in irritation as he watched them enter.

  “This is a private office!” the secretary said.

  “I understand you people are police officers,” said Dalquist. “Now, if you have a warrant, I’d like to see it.”

  “We don’t have a warrant,” said Hayward. “We were hoping to speak to you informally. However, if we need a warrant, we’ll go get one.”

  A hesitation. “If I knew what this was all about, that might not be necessary.”

  Hayward turned to Pendergast. “Special Agent Pendergast, perhaps Mr. Dalquist is right and we should get a warrant after all. By the book, I always say.”

  “It might be advisable at that, Captain Hayward. Of course, word of the warrant might get out.”

  Dalquist sighed. “Please sit down. Miss Farmer, I’ll handle it from here, thank you. Please close the door on your way out.”

  The secretary left, but neither Hayward nor Pendergast sat down.

  “Now, what’s this business about avian flu?” asked Dalquist, his face flushing. Hayward stared but could see no glimmer of knowledge in his hostile blue eyes.

  “We don’t work on flu here at all,” Dalquist went on, stepping back behind his desk. “We’re a small pharmaceutical research company with a few products to treat certain collagen diseases—and that’s it.”

  “About thirteen years ago,” Hayward said, “Longitude conducted an illegal research project here into avian flu.”

  “Illegal? How so?”

  “Safety procedures weren’t observed. A diseased bird escaped the facility, infected a local family. They all died, and Longitude covered it up. And are still covering it up—as certain recent homicides would suggest.”

  A long silence. “That’s a monstrous charge. I know nothing about it. Longitude went through a bankruptcy about a decade ago. A complete Chapter Eleven reorganization. There’s nobody here from those days. The old management team is gone; we downsized, and we now concentrate on a few core products.”

  “Core products? Such as?”

  “Treatments for dermatomyositis and polymyositis, primarily. We’re small and focused. I’ve never heard of any work being done here on avian flu.”

  “Nobody is left from a decade ago?”

  “None as far as I know. We had a disastrous fire that killed the former CEO, and the entire facility was shut down for months. When we restarted, we were essentially a different company.”

  Hayward pulled an envelope from her jacket. “It’s our understanding that, at the time of your bankruptcy, Longitude closed down research lines on several important orphan drugs and vaccines. Just like that. You were the only facility working on those lines. It left millions of sick people in the Third World without hope.”

  “We were bankrupt.”

  “So you shut them down.”

  “The new board shut them down. Personally, I wasn’t involved with the company until two years after that period. Is there a crime in that?”

  Hayward found herself breathing hard. This wasn’t good. They were getting nowhere. “Mr. Dalquist, your corporate filings indicate you make almost eight million dollars a year in salary and benefits. Your few drugs are very profitable. What are you doing with all that money?”

  “Just what every other corporation does. Salaries, taxes, dividends, overhead, R and D.”

  “Forgive my saying so, but considering those profits, your research facility looks decidedly run-down.”

  “Don’t let appearances fool you. We’ve got state-of-the-art equipment here. We’re isolated, so we don’t have to run a beauty contest.” He spread his hands. “Apparently you don’t like the way we do business. Maybe you don’t like me. You may not like that I make eight million a year, and that we’re now quite a profitable company. Fine. But we’re innocent of these accusations
. Totally innocent. Do I look like the kind of man involved in murder?”

  “Prove it.”

  Dalquist came around his desk. “My first impulse is to stop you cold, make you get a warrant, fight this thing tooth and nail in the courts, use our highly paid attorneys to delay and harass you for weeks or months. Even if you prevailed, you’d end up with a limited search warrant and a mountain of paperwork. But you know what? I’m not going to do that. I’m going to give you a free pass, right here and now. You can go anywhere you like, look into anything, and have access to any documents. We’ve got nothing to hide. Will that satisfy you?”

  Hayward glanced at Pendergast. His face was unreadable, his silvery eyes hooded.

  “That would certainly be a start,” she said.

  He leaned over his desk and pressed a button. “Miss Farmer, please draft a letter for my signature giving these two people complete, total, and unlimited access to the entire facilities of Longitude Pharmaceuticals, with instructions that employees are to answer all questions fully and truthfully and provide access to even the most sensitive areas and documents.”

  He punched the button and looked up. “I just hope to see you off the premises as soon as possible.”

  Pendergast broke a long silence. “We shall see.”

  57

  BY THE TIME THEY REACHED THE FAR END of the Longitude Pharmaceuticals compound, Hayward felt exhausted. Dalquist had kept his word: they had been granted access to everything—labs, offices, archives. They had even been allowed to wander through the long-shuttered buildings that littered the sprawling campus. Nobody had accompanied them, no security harassed them; they were given free rein.

  And they had found absolutely nothing. Beyond a few low-level service employees, nobody at the facility remained from the pre-bankruptcy days. The company records, which went back decades, made no reference to an avian flu project. Everything appeared to be on the up-and-up.

  Which made Hayward suspicious. In her experience, everyone—even honest people—had something to hide.

  She glanced at Pendergast as they walked down the corridor of the last shuttered building. She could discern nothing about his thoughts from his cool, alabaster face.

  They exited the far door, a fire exit crash door that groaned as they opened it. It gave out onto a broken cement stoop and patchy lawn. To the right lay a narrow muddy lake, a stranded bayou, surrounded by bald cypress trees hung with Spanish moss. Straight ahead, through a tangle of vegetation, Hayward could see the remains of a brick wall covered with vines, and behind it a jutting, burned-out ruin tucked away at the far edge of the campus, surrounded on three sides by the dark fastness of Black Brake swamp. Beyond the ruin, an old pier, burned and ruined, hardly more than a series of pilings, fell away into the dark waters of the swamp.

  A fine rain had begun to fall, bedewing the grass, and ominous clouds rolled low in the sky.

  “I forgot my umbrella,” Hayward said, looking into the wet, dismal trees.

  Pendergast, who had been staring off in the direction of the pier and the swamp, reached into his suit. Oh, no, she thought, don’t tell me he’s got an umbrella in there. But instead he removed a small packet containing clear plastic rain covers, one for her and another for himself.

  In a few minutes, they were squishing across the lawn toward the tangled remains of an old chain-link security fence, topped with concertina wire. A gate lay on the ground, sprawled and broken, and they entered through a narrow gap. Beyond lay the remains of the burned building. It was of yellow brick like the rest, but the roof had collapsed, great charred beams sticking into the sky, the windows and door frames black holes with scorched streaks above. Massive carpets of kudzu crept up the walls and lay in heavy mats over everything.

  Hayward followed Pendergast through a shattered doorway. The detective paused to examine the door lying on the ground and the frame itself, and then he knelt and began fiddling with the door lock with some lock-picking tools.

  “Curious,” he said, rising.

  The entryway was strewn with charred pieces of wood, and the ceiling above had partially caved in, allowing a dim light to penetrate the interior. A flock of swallows burst out of the darkness and flew away, wheeling and crying at the disturbance. The odor of dampness clung faintly to everything. Water dripped from the black timbers, making pools on the once-tiled floor.

  Pendergast slipped a penlight out of his pocket and shone it around. They moved into the interior, stepping over debris, the thin beam of Pendergast’s light playing this way and that. Passing through a broken archway, they walked down an old corridor, burned-out rooms on either side. In places melted glass and aluminum had puddled on the floor, along with scorched plastic and the wire skeletons of furniture.

  Hayward watched as Pendergast silently flitted through the dark rooms, probing and peering. At one point, he stopped at the remains of a filing cabinet and poked among a sodden mass of burned papers in the bottom of a drawer, pushing them apart. The very center remained unburned, and he plucked out a few pieces, examining them. “ ‘Delivery completed to Nova G.,’ ” he read aloud from one of the papers. “This is just a bunch of old shipping manifests.”

  “Anything of interest?”

  More poking. “Unlikely.” Removing several charred fragments, he slipped them into a ziplock bag, which in turn disappeared into his suit jacket.

  They arrived in a large central room where the fire appeared to have been fiercest. The ceiling was gone and mats of kudzu had risen over the debris, leaving humps and nodding growths. Pendergast glanced around, then walked over to one and reached into it, grabbing the vine and yanking it aside, exposing the skeleton of an old machine thick with wires and gears whose purpose Hayward couldn’t begin to guess. He moved through the room, pulling aside more vines, exposing more melted, skeletal instrumentation.

  “Any idea what this stuff was?” Hayward asked.

  “An autoclave—incubators—and I would guess that was once a centrifuge.” He flashed the light toward a large half-melted mass. “And here we have the remains of a laminar flow cabinet. This was once a first-class microbiology lab.”

  He kicked aside some debris, bent down, picked something up. It glinted dully in the light, and he slipped it into his pocket.

  “The report of Slade’s death,” said Hayward, “indicated that his body was found in a laboratory. That must be this room.”

  “Yes.” Pendergast’s light flashed over a row of heavy, melted cabinets under a hood. “And there is where the fire started. Chemical storage.”

  “You think it was deliberately set?”

  “Certainly. The fire was necessary to destroy the evidence.”

  “How do you know?”

  Pendergast reached into his pocket and showed the thing he had picked up to Hayward. It was a strip of aluminum, about three-quarters of an inch long, that had evidently escaped the fire. A number was stamped into it.

  “What is it?”

  “An unused bird leg-band.” He examined it closely, then handed it to Hayward. “And no ordinary leg-band, either.” He pointed to its inner edge, where a band of silicon could be clearly seen. “Take a look. It’s been chipped with what is no doubt a homing transmitter. Now we know how Helen tracked the parrot. I was wondering how she was able to locate the Doanes before they presented any symptoms of avian flu.”

  Hayward handed it back. “If you don’t mind me asking, what makes you think the fire was deliberately set? The reports were pretty clear that they found no evidence of accelerants or foul play.”

  “The person who started this fire was a top-notch chemist who knew what he was doing. It is asking far too much of coincidence to believe this building burned accidentally, right after the avian flu project was shut down.”

  “So who burned it?”

  “I would direct your attention to the high security, the once-formidable perimeter fence, the special, almost unpickable locks on the doors, the windows that were once barred and covered w
ith frosted glass. The building was set apart from the others as well, almost into the swamp, protected on all sides. This fire was surely set by someone on the inside. Someone with high-level access.”

  “Slade?”

  “The arsonist burned up in his own fire is not an uncommon phenomenon.”

  “On the other hand,” said Hayward, “the fire might have been murder. Slade, as head of the project, knew too much.”

  Pendergast’s pale eyes turned on her slowly. “My thoughts exactly, Captain.”

  They stood in silence, the rain dripping through the ruins.

  “Seems like we’re at a dead end,” said Hayward.

  Silently, Pendergast removed the ziplock bag with the charred paper and handed it to Hayward. She examined it. One of the fragments was a requisition for a shipment of petri dishes, with a handwritten note at the bottom upping the number “as per the direction of CJS.” And it was signed with a single initial, J.

  “CJS? That must be Charles J. Slade.”

  “Correct. And this is of definite interest.”

  She handed it back. “I don’t see the significance.”

  “The handwriting evidently belongs to June Brodie, Slade’s secretary. The one who committed suicide on the Archer Bridge a week after Slade died. Except that this note scribbled on the requisition would suggest she did not commit suicide after all.”

  “How in the world can you tell?”

  “I happen to have a photocopy of the suicide note from her file at the Vital Records office, left in her car just before she threw herself off the Archer span.” Pendergast removed a piece of paper from his suit jacket, and Hayward unfolded it. “Compare the handwriting with that of the fragment I just discovered: a purely routine notation jotted down in her office. Very curious.”

  Hayward stared at one and then the other, looking back and forth. “But the handwriting’s exactly the same.”