“Understood, sir,” I emphatically agreed.
“Anything on Susan Perry?”
“One of our ace patrol units is on it, sir. This week got mighty close.”
“Only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” His hawklike eyes riveted on me.
“We’ll find them, sir.” As we entered a spacious laboratory, Lauren’s personal fiefdom, three white-coated assistants including old Joseph Hartman were working quietly with various lab equipment near the entrance to Lauren’s personal office. “And I do have good news about handling the overcrowded prisons. Think I’ve found an answer.”
As we entered, Lauren was hanging up the phone, and her eyes locked on Mitchell’s with private electricity that Mitchell returned. He knew Lauren and I had hooked up. Another man approaching fifty might have felt concern about his lover also enjoying the attentions of some younger cowboy. But Mitchell was so solidly entrenched in his power—and knew he could have his enforcer Dubrovski take me on a one-way trip instantly—that he seemed to have no insecurity. Plus I served him well and with good ideas, like the one I was about to present.
Lauren nodded toward the phone. “Did you hear the amounts of our latest dividends from Perini, Grenwald, and BioTeck Industries?”
Mitchell nodded. “Still only the beginning.” He stayed focused on Lauren as he spoke aside to me, “What answer for the prison overcrowding?”
“I’ve developed a . . .” I paused, selecting the word carefully, “. . . solution.” I noticed Joseph Hartman passing nearby, and I eased the door closed as I continued, “Which we’re just about to test up at Reidsville.”
CDC Sec Cam 4004 & 4005 Date: 04/17/21 Time: 19:37:37
Lab Cplx 4004 L. Fletcher. research room; 4005 L. Fletcher, private office
Transcript by: ATLPD-Op 12532 (no audio)
Visual Desc: 4004 shows research room: J. Hartman dismisses other assistants, then moves to eavesdrop at door to L. Fletcher’s private office. Simultaneously 4005 shows private office: L. Fletcher, B. Mitchell, listening to R. Hutcherson explain something, then Hutcherson shows small sealed lab container with a green substance, followed by similar container with crystal clear substance.
Courtesy ATL PD, FBI
Dr. Susan Perry. . .
I was prepping some microscope slides in the lab area of our funky headquarters and looked up at Lilly sitting in a ratty, orange vinyl La-Z-Boy recliner someone had rescued from the roadside. She was unconsciously twisting some strands of her frizzy hair with her usual lack of expression as she quietly turned page after page of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
Gwyneth set a sandwich down beside her. “Here you go, lass.”
Lilly glanced at it with her downcast eyes, “Peanut b-butter?”
“Aye, Lilly. With apricot preserves,” Gwyneth said in her irresistible Scottish accent. “Cut into triangles. Just as you like.”
Lilly nodded. “Nice and n-neat.” She picked up one, took a bite, and returned to her reading as though Gwyn weren’t there. Gwyn smiled, glancing at Lilly’s other books nearby: Hawking’s A Brief History of Time lay completed on a crate beside her, along with Pascal’s Pensées, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Happiness Is a Warm Puppy by Charles Schulz. Gwyn shook her ginger head in amazement, then headed back to her research efforts.
The others who shared our warehouse space completely accepted Lilly’s stoic presence. They were always kind to her, but unless they needed to draw information from her amazing memory, they moved around her as if she weren’t really there. Lilly wasn’t affected by their inattention, being constantly absorbed in her reading, iPad, or connect the dots. Katie, Eric, and a few like Gwyneth would talk to Lilly or answer a question she might ask in her halting voice. But the others, knowing that she was autistic, politely avoided much one-on-one contact, mostly out of their own awkward inability to know what to say. I knew this was the way people often dealt with anyone who had special needs. Chris was different. He got to know Lilly’s peculiarities well while we were colleagues and then a couple. He was always kind and open with her. Like many other scientists, he would also avail himself of the vast repository of CDC research stored in her exceptional brain. Lilly never disappointed, was always able to spew fountains of accurate data in her characteristic, flat tone.
While finishing up the slides, I saw Crash frustrated with an antiquated electrical junction box as he ran his fingers through his thick black hair. I asked, “Still no more juice?”
“Not yet, Doc. Wiring in this place looks like Aleppo in ’17.”
“I saw another transformer farther down the block; can you tap that one?”
“Mebbe.” I knew he’d been trying to avoid going that far. He headed off to do the dangerous job, and I called out, “Try not to have a shocking experience, huh?”
He paused to look back at me, chewing his cigar stub. “Nice to know you care.”
I looked into his dark eyes, making it clear that I certainly did. He nodded with a smile and continued away. I watched him go, appreciating his skills and smarts. When I turned back, I realized Chris had been watching me. He indicated the stack of my data he’d been studying and grudgingly said, “Not bad. Considering the conditions you’ve been under.”
I was slightly chafed. “Gee, almost a compliment. Thanks.”
“But you missed some obvious possibilities.”
“Naturally, Dr. Smith. That’s why I needed you—to spur me on.” With an acerbic smile, I added, “At least I wasn’t off playing a clarinet in some swamp.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. You were working. Remarkably, Susie.” His look conveyed genuine respect and even a feeling of our old affection. The moment warmed me. Him, too, I think.
Then Chris tapped at his laptop, beginning to restructure a molecule that floated three-dimensionally on the screen. “You ran an agarose gel electrophoresis of course?”
“Duh. Found no plasmids outside the virus’s DNA.”
Chris leaned back from the keyboard, drummed his fingers on the rickety arm of the old wooden chair he was sitting in. Then suddenly froze.
“What?” I said. “What is it?” No response. “. . . Chris?”
He was totally still. Staring ahead. “What if . . . What if the plasmids weren’t outside.”
I blinked. Was he nuts? “Chris, there’s never been a virus with plasmids inside.”
“Or a virus that rode in on a comet.” He raised his eyebrows.
I laughed in spite of myself. “Jesus! That’s brilliant! Grumpy, but brilliant.” My mind started flipping through how to explore his hypothesis. “We’d need an electron microscope to verify.”
“Is Chunhua making any headway with that old junker?”
I jumped up and hurried off across the warehouse. Glancing back, I was rewarded to see that he was watching me appreciatively. Maybe with renewed affection?
Jimmy-Joe Hartman. . .
Lots more guys wuz sleepin’ on the library floor. Seemed like every spot in the whole prison that’d been empty space had been took up. It was smelly and awful, but leastwise I had my books. I ain’t been sleepin’ more’n three, four hours a night ’cause I’d been readin’ lots. I couldn’t believe how gettin’ down in to a book could just take y’away to places. I wuzn’t inside no prison walls—I wuz hangin’ on them sea cliffs with that Count Monty Crisco guy, or chargin’ at windmills with ol’ Don Quicks-Oat, or listenin’ to Atticus Finch tellin’ Scout what makes a man trashy, or stompin’ around in moondust with Buzz Aldrin. Made me feel like I wuz right out there with ’em all.
Phil’d started me out with easier books, but pretty quick we seen my pumped-up brain could understand lotsa stuff my old pea-brain never woulda. Phil said I wasn’t just readin’ good, I wuz also “beginnin’ to recognize important ideas and concepts.” Mebbe, but main thing wuz I just liked it. Made me think ’bout Claire always bustin’ my balls to pick up a book. Funny how all it took was goin’ to stinkin’ prison to get me in to ’em. Couldn�
��t wait to tell Claire ’bout how I finally been hooked. She sure wuz gonna be surprised. And happy.
I felt that fer sure on the day I got to the last page of that huge one, Les Misérables. I just closed it real slow and sat there dead still. It wuz a hefty fuckin’ read. I knew I didn’t quite get it all, but wow. That Jean Valjean guy was some kinda hero. His amazin’ story stirred up stuff in me I didn’t even know wuz there. Deep down. Like, I dunno, in what they call soul-stuff I guess. Felt like I’d come flyin’ outta long, dark tunnel, and the world suddenly opened out around me, all spectacular-like.
I sat there lookin’ at that old book, amazed how it made me feel. Then I looked round at all the bookshelves, wonderin’ how many others had that kinda power. I laid my hand on the book in my lap, like I mighta touched an old friend. Made me think of when I wuz real little and Claire’d put her hand on my shoulder. I sniffed a little, then realized I had a fuckin’ tear in my eye. Damn. I blowed out a long breath. Tryin’ to get my head round all I wuz feelin’.
“Hey,” somebody whispered. I turned and seen it wuz that big guard Wazinski. He come up real close and slipped somethin’ in my shirt pocket. “From your ol’ man. He says for you to take it. Right away.”
“What is it?”
“He said tell you ‘Exodus nine, fourteen’—and to take it.” He headed off quick.
I frowned a sec, then went and pulled out a Bible. Searched out Exodus, ninth chapter, fourteenth verse. “‘For this time I will send all my . . . plagues . . . ’?”
I kept frownin’, tryin’ to puzzle out WTF. Then I reached in my pocket and pulled out the little packet Wazinski’d gived me. With one green capsule inside.
Dr. Susan Perry. . .
Lilly sat under that battered Tiffany lamp in one corner of the shadowy lab area of our Resistance warehouse. She was speed-reading The Gathering Storm, Churchill’s history of events leading up to World War II. Nearby Chris was peering in the viewer of the old electron microscope Chunhua had indeed gotten to work. Gwyneth, Rachel, Alex, and several others were huddled around their own investigations on the other side of the area. I set down two fresh cups of tea, but Chris didn’t glance up from the microscope’s binocular eyepiece. I also noticed something highly unusual. “Uh . . . that couldn’t be the faintest trace of a smile, could it?”
He moved aside from the scope and urged me to it. “Tell me what you see.”
I sat and looked at a grainy image of cell structure magnified 7.5 million times. “Filamentous phage. Couple thousand molecules. B protein?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Arranged around one strand of a DNA molecule about, what, two million AMU?”
“Actually, one million point eight. But who’s counting? And . . . ?”
I was beginning to get enthused. “Wait. A single larger molecule, of what? A protein?”
“Yeah.” He was enjoying my discovery.
I studied the image further. “About a hundred thousand AMU at the end of the phage, attaching it to its host?”
“Looks like it. And now, for twenty-five points and the game, what about just below it?”
I adjusted the critical focus and drew a sudden, excited breath, “Oh my God! There is a virion! A plasmid ring inside the helix! You were right! Oh, Chris!”
Lilly glanced up momentarily from her thick volume, hearing our enthusiasm and seeing we were like two nerdy kids in a molecular candy store. I gushed, “I’ll run a new agarose gel. Retarget the sequencing.”
“Yeah. I’ll start a serologic test.” He got to his feet. “If it’s capsid coated—”
I beamed, overlapping his words, “Or has a lipid envelope, then it might be susceptible to inactivation by some agent—”
Chris was nodding exuberantly. “As simple as chloroform—”
“Or ether, or—”
I was cut off because he kissed me. It took my breath away, but I instantly gave myself up to it. So did he. We were like two who’d been dying of thirst suddenly finding water. It was joyous. We were back to where we once belonged. Feeling the familiar warmth of each other’s breath on our cheeks. It was a wonderful loving, lingering kiss, full of hope and promise.
Then in the midst of it, something happened. Like a light switch being shut off. Like the tide suddenly rushing out. Chris cooled, weakened. Like a time-lapse video of a beautiful flower wilting, its petals withering, falling away. Chris sank onto a lab stool and stared at the floor, seemingly right through it, toward the center of the earth.
I was left standing, emotional, breathing hard. I looked down at him and understood. I rested my hands on his shoulder, spoke gently, “It hasn’t abated. After all this time.”
He shook his head, deeply tormented, voice choked. “How could it ever?” He chuckled bitterly. “They never even got an accurate body count. Just ‘a million or so.’”
I tried to find a new way to say what I often had before. “But it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t create a biological weapon, Chris . . . Your research was—”
“What enabled them to do it,” he said, sounding empty.
I ached for him, knowing this was why he’d left the CDC—and me—two years ago. This was Chris’s unrelenting nightmare demon that had melted his exuberance for science and for life into a mass of misery.
I stood beside him, breathing quietly. “Won’t you ever let yourself feel a moment of peace?”
“I want to, Susie. God knows you bring me right to the edge of it. But then . . .” He looked away, grieving. “I get this image . . . of all those people . . . seeing that strange dark cloud rolling toward them . . . wondering what it is . . . not knowing it’s going to invade their lungs, burst their capillaries . . .”
“Oh, Chris.” I cupped my hand tenderly behind his head.
He leaned his face against my side. His voice became a pained whisper, “. . . All those . . . children, Susie. All those little . . .”
He clenched his teeth. The veins on his forehead hardened as he struggled to contain his turbulent emotion. I felt him start to weep. I whispered, “Oh, my dear boy . . .” I rocked him gently as he quaked, silently, against me.
Eric Tenzer. . .
At the urban Atlanta high school where I’d gotten Katie in, she and I were always on the lookout for any sign that the Friends might be sniffing around about us. So when I saw Reverend Abraham Brown and his aides walking up the main hall with the principal, I got edgy.
But as they got closer, a TV news crew intercepted the reverend’s group, and I realized this was merely a video sound-bite op for the imposing Dr. Brown, not a posse out to arrest any accomplices of the fugitive Dr. Susan Perry.
I heard the reverend’s mellifluent voice resounding down the hallway, “. . . But the main thing I intend to focus on at today’s school assembly is co-op-er-a-tion.” Though he was talking to the principal, a smarmy bureaucrat, Brown’s words were clearly for the benefit of the news crew and ultimately the large audience of the local news. Brown’s face adopted a grave sincerity. “Many of us are very concerned about misguided radicals trying to form an unhelpful—even illegal—resistance movement against our local government and police forces that could prove dangerous to the general populace.” That felt a little too close for comfort, so I watched and listened carefully.
They stood talking outside the school auditorium where students were gathering. Brown was saying, “I am here to urge students to report anyone who’s working against the best interests of our society.” As he went on with his smooth litany, several tenth graders headed in, and I saw the reverend give a thorough once-over to several girls of fourteen or fifteen. One particularly caught his lascivious eye: she was wearing a formfitting, scoop-neck T-shirt. She had brown hair in a pixie haircut and horn-rimmed glasses.
She was Katie.
25
PASSAGES
Jimmy-Joe Hartman. . .
In Reidsville’s prison yard one of them beefy inmates who’d beat me up was sicker than shit. He had big purp
le patches under his skin. He was gurglin’ and gaspin’ and fell against me. I was wide eyed and scared ’cause all round the yard wuz dozens of cons even worse off. Some of ’em wuz lyin’ against the walls, squirmin’ in pain, chokin’ for breath. I knew they wuz dyin’.
The sun was goin’ down, but the guards had left most of us in the yard ’cause mosta the cons couldn’t even walk. Wazinski, the guard who’d gived me the green pill, and a prison doctor come to the guy longside me. The doctor checked him and was really shook, talkin’ fast. “Same here. Severe subcutaneous bleeding, lungs filling with fluid. Like Ebola. He’ll be dead in an hour. Like all the others.”
Wazinski looked up at the guards in the watchtowers and on top the admin building who wuz lookin’ down into the yard. None of them wuz sick. “Why’s it only the inmates?”
“I don’t know.” The doctor started examinin’ me, axed, “No symptoms yet?”
I shook my head. “Nuh uh.” My voice kinda quivered.
He was amazed. “You got a guardian angel, boy.” Me and Wazinski traded a private glance. Then the doctor prodded him. “Go! Make sure they called the CDC! We need major help!”
Wazinski run off toward admin. The concrete walls of that ol’ yard was echoin’ with the wails and moans of dyin’ men. The doctor looked round at the nightmare, then back at me. “If I was you, boy, I’d do me some serious praying.”
Then he got to his feet and run on to check another prisoner, leavin’ me to starin’ round at all the horror—scared shitless.
Katie McLane. . .
I was mad that night. Couldn’t believe it. Pursued Eric from the kitchen into the living room of the small house Maggie found us all those months ago. “But, Eric, me working for him is like the perfect opportunity!”
“It’s absolutely out of the question, Katie.” He was resolute. “You’re too young to play Mata Hari to that—that—!”
“Mata who?” I scrunched my face up.
“Google her!” Eric waved me away, picked up homework he had to check.
The Darwin Variant Page 35