Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

  Jim moved closer. “As you can see, rescue teams are on the scene. In just a minute here we ought to be able to see…” He continued to drone on, until something caught his eye. He bent at the waist and picked it up. A license plate, folded nearly in half. He put the mic under his arm and pried the bent metal open. Washington. He looked around and allowed himself a smile.

  They had the car right side up now and were carefully tending to the occupants. Pete was changing cassettes. Jim watched as the firemen sawed through the hinges on both passenger doors and then used the Jaws of Life to pry the doors completely off the frame, giving them far better access to the people inside the car.

  When Pete looked his way for guidance, Jim simply twirled his finger as if to say: “Keep it rolling. No sense in doing voice-over here. We’ll let the pictures tell the story.” Jim Sexton watched in silence as one by one the car’s occupants were eased out of the wreck, placed on rolling gurneys and then lifted into aid cars.

  He turned to Pete. “First the station. Then Harborview.”

  “Get Transportation on the line. Get me the make, model and plate number of whatever Gutierrez and Hart signed out and then put out an all-call on the vehicle.”

  Margy headed for the outer office at a lope. His voice stopped her halfway.

  “Route everything that comes into every precinct for the next hour through this office. I want to see everything.”

  She turned to leave but had to bring herself up short to avoid running head-on into her assistant Jamie Celestine, who was on her way in. As her presence in the inner office was somewhat out of the ordinary, she shrugged a silent apology.

  “Your wife, Chief,” she said. “Line four.”

  Harry nodded his thanks and then waited for the click of the door, before picking up the phone. “Hey,” he said in as light a voice as he could manage.

  “I know you’re busy,” she said.

  The degree of the understatement nearly caused Harry to laugh. He took a deep breath and swallowed his cynicism. “Whatcha need?” he asked affably.

  “Have you got time to talk?”

  He used his fingertips to massage his left temple. Seemed like there was a bulging vein there he’d never noticed before. “As a matter of fact…I’m…no, I don’t.”

  Her disappointment was palpable. “I just wanted to—”

  The office door opened. Margy stuck her head inside.

  Harry cut his wife off. “I gotta go.”

  “Oh…I…I didn’t—”

  “Bye,” he said and hung up.

  “Gold Ford Taurus. 879PLN.”

  “Get dispatch to—”

  “Already did.” She waggled the papers in her hand. “Got…”—she counted—“four domestic violence…a missing person…an assault…” She looked up. “Nothing you’d notice,” she said.

  And then Jamie Celestine was in the doorway again. Harry was sure it was Kathleen, calling back to say she was worried about him, or to finish whatever it was she’d called about, or both and so, for the briefest of moments, he felt a sense of relief when she began to speak. “Dispatch says the last contact with Detectives Hart and Gutierrez was from Capitol Hill.”

  Harry rolled his eyes and thrust one arm into his coat. “I’ll be at City Hall. Page me when you’ve got something solid.”

  Holmes nosed the front of the Mercedes hard against the garage wall and turned off the engine. Anybody wanted to look at the front, they’d have to tow it. He took a deep breath and again told himself how he’d done the right thing. How he and the cop had made eye contact. How there was no doubt whatsoever that the cop had recognized him. How he’d had no choice but to deviate from the plan and put the operation at risk. No choice at all.

  Took him a moment to pry his fingers from the steering wheel and look around. Three floors down and across the street, the hotel parking lot was three quarters full. The red Subaru was angled into one of the slots in the middle of the lot. The van was parked out near the sidewalk. He turned off the engine and sat back in the seat. The others had made it safely. He took what felt like his first breath in five minutes and looked over at Bobby Darling, who sat flushed and sweating in the passenger seat, his knuckles bone white as they gripped the overhead handle.

  “The others are here,” Holmes said. “Let’s go.”

  Only then did Bobby Darling drop his hand to his lap and look around. The Edgewater Hotel was just that…right at the edge of the water. An old-fashioned L-shaped structure that flowed along the jagged shoreline for half a block.

  “Let’s go,” Holmes said.

  Bobby looked at him as if he’d never seen him before.

  “Whatever they knew…”—Holmes snapped his fingers—“is gone now.”

  “That wasn’t…I mean…we weren’t supposed to—”

  Holmes jumped in. “Once the battle begins, all plans are out the window,” he said. “He knew me from the house. He knew it, and I knew it.” He pointed to the south.

  “It’s right there. Did you see it when we drove in?”

  Bobby looked away and nodded. “It’s much bigger than I thought possible,” he said. “It’s bigger than a mountain.”

  “Your moment will be bigger too.”

  Bobby mulled it over and then reached for the door handle.

  35

  Hans Belder flipped the plastic evidence bag containing the coaster onto the table. “Of course it’s possible,” he said. “The same technology used to accelerate the life cycle of a virus could…theoretically at least…be used to slow the process down.”

  Isaac Klugeman held up a moderating hand. “Much more difficult, however,” he said. “An abbreviated life cycle would be far more easily attained than…”—he gestured at the coaster with the back of his hand—“something like this.”

  Belder nodded gravely. “I concur. Life is always easier to shorten than to prolong. It is unfortunate but true.”

  “And, of course, there’s the matter of the host,” Helen Stafford said.

  “It cannot live without a host,” Belder added. “That fact is the very nature of the beast. A virus is neither dead nor alive. It’s somewhere in between, which is to say, a virus is alive only so long as it can move from host to host.”

  “Unless…” Klugeman began and then changed his mind.

  “Yes?” Belder threw the word out as a challenge.

  “Unless…” Klugeman pointed down at the coaster. “The thirty hours part is easy,” he said. “It could be done in the same manner as the material in the bus tunnel. Instead of a spore like ragweed or whatever they used…a spore that releases its load immediately upon contact with air…they would need one whose viability they could control.”

  “Something organic?”

  Klugeman shrugged. “Organic or engineered…it wouldn’t matter.”

  “But the viral life span?”

  “Once it was delivered into the air, the virus would have to be able to feed on some part of the host in order to survive for any length of time on its own.”

  “Like?”

  Klugeman thought it over. “Perhaps something as simple as a pinecone,” he said. “When the individual seed breaks off the cone, it takes a small piece of the cone with it. That small piece acts as a…”—he waved a hand—“as a placenta for the seed. It keeps the seed alive until the proper combination of moisture and soil makes it possible for the seed to take root on its own.”

  “Think about it,” said Colonel Hines. “They somehow introduce the virus into the hotel where we’re all staying. We inhale it. Suddenly we’re all carriers. We’re on our way home. We’ve got spores on our clothing that we pass on to our fellow passengers. We go home and interact with the other people in our lives…infecting them…they interact with others…” He cut the air with the flat of his hand. “You get the picture. For the next week or so…”

  “Longer,” Belder said. “If the Walsdorf Conjecture is correct…and it appears to be…then it’s likely that the incubation period
of the virus has been similarly extended. Which of course exponentially increases the number of contacts by individuals, which increases the number of…”—he rolled his hand in a circle as if to say “and so on and so on.” He seemed unwilling to go on.

  “You realize what we are talking about here of course,” Klugeman said.

  “The doomsday virus,” Hines said immediately. “You’re talking about the beginning of the goddamn end is what you’re talking about.”

  Belder turned away. Rubbed the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “At this point in history, I would like to think there could be no such thing as a doomsday virus. I would like to think our knowledge of both chemistry and genetics is sufficiently far along to prevent anything so dreadful.” He braced both arms on the table and looked out at those on the other side from beneath his thick bushy eyebrows. “I will say, however…the scenario which Dr. Klugeman has described…might push our systems as close to catastrophe as I am willing to imagine.”

  “It’s the apocalypse,” Hines said. “The end of the world as we know it.”

  “It would take the caregivers first,” Klugeman said. “They’d be treating people for headache…for nosebleeds…for fatigue…for any number of common ailments for days…weeks before they realized what they were dealing with.” He looked around the room. “The doctors, the nurses…the support staff…their colleagues, their families and friends…they would be among the second wave of dead.”

  “Without the professionals…”—Belder made a helpless gesture with his hands—“we would be at the mercy of the virus.”

  “Have you informed the federal authorities of this?” Klugeman asked Harry Dobson.

  “They laughed at me,” Harry said. “Told me somebody was having me on. Said they had a hot lead on a Hamas cell operating out of Portland.”

  As a buzz of conversation began to spread around the room, the pager on Harry’s right hip began to vibrate. He pulled it from his belt and checked the number. He excused himself, walked around the table and stepped out into the hall where he dialed for his messages. Margy’s voice. A half octave too high.

  “We’ve got an emergency report on a car being hit by a train down on the waterfront.” She paused. “The make on the plate comes up as one of ours.” He heard her breath catch. “879PLN.”

  36

  Corso and Charly Hart came up the hall together. Other than the stark white bandage they’d used to reassemble his right ear, Corso appeared little the worse for wear. In truth, however, he’d seldom felt as bad as he did at that moment. Every joint in his body ached. He had a pair of half-inch divots in his shins where the twisted sheet metal had pinned him to the backseat. It was all he could do not to groan every time his left foot hit the hard tile floor.

  Charly Hart had not been quite so fortunate. The process of being dragged by a locomotive had shattered one lens in his glasses, broken his right wrist, which now rested in a bright blue sling, ripped a four-inch gash above his right eye which had required thirty-seven stitches to close, and tweaked his back to such a degree that he now shuffled across the floor like a man who had quite recently been administered a spinal tap. Maybe two.

  More troubling to Charly Hart than his own injuries was the plastic tray he carried in his good hand. A tray containing his partner’s notebook, wallet and badge, his watch, his gun, his cell phone, his car keys and eighty-seven cents in change. Unless the docs were way off base, Reuben wasn’t going to be needing this stuff anytime in the foreseeable future. Some of it…maybe never again. Charly was also worried about Reuben’s wife Inez. She was a big-time drama queen. High-strung. Made a big deal out of everything. No doubt about it…she’d take the news real hard.

  The shuffling counterpoint of Charly’s feet was the only noise in the hall as they shouldered the swinging doors and entered the last fifty feet of corridor. Beyond the next set of doors lay the chaos of the Emergency Room. Chief Dobson and a guy in a tweed sport coat stood just inside the final set of doors, engaged in animated conversation.

  Some primal call pulled Corso’s eyes to the right, toward the storage area behind the admitting desk. The woman from the bus tunnel. She’d found herself a green lab coat and a stethoscope. Looking very nonchalant and official. Standing there like she owned the joint. Corso motioned to Charly Hart, but Charly was so beat up and fixated on getting to the end of the corridor he didn’t notice Corso turn right and belly his way through the swinging doors.

  She stood her ground. Didn’t move a muscle as Corso walked over and stood directly in front of her. She was better-looking than he’d imagined and a bit more exotic. Her eyes sloped down at the corners tending her a slightly Asian quality.

  “You seem to pop up in the strangest places,” he said, taking her in.

  She smiled. “So I’ve been told.” She reached up and touched the bandage on his ear. “For a man in a train wreck, you don’t seem very much the worse for wear.”

  “I come from hardy stock.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Good breeding material, eh?”

  “Train-resistant anyway.”

  Her laugh was girlish, but something in her eyes belied any notion of flirtatiousness.

  “Speaking of trains…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re on the right track.”

  “Oh really?”

  “This is not about Arabs.”

  “Maybe you ought to inform the feds of that.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  She stepped behind the deserted nurses’ station and leaned back into the shadows. A movement in Corso’s peripheral vision pulled his eyes toward the light in the hall, where Charly Hart’s facial expression and hand gesture signaled his confusion as to how he’d managed to lose track of Corso; he beckoned “come on” with his good hand. Corso smiled and indicated he’d be along in a minute.

  When he turned to say something to the woman, he found himself alone. He hurried around the counter and tried the knob on the door next to the desk. Locked. He smiled for the first time in days.

  Charly Hart stuck his head through the swinging doors. “Where the hell did you get to?”

  “Did you see—” Corso began.

  “See what?” Detective Hart wanted to know.

  Corso hesitated. “Never mind. I was just checking things out,” Corso said, walking toward Hart and the door.

  Together, they approached the chief and the guy in the sport coat, whose conversation had become, if anything, more animated.

  “Get them the hell out of here,” the chief was saying.

  “I can’t do that,” the other guy said.

  “It’s your hospital, isn’t it?”

  “We’ve been to court with them before about this…more than once…and lost. You know that, Chief. They have a right to be here. As long as they’re not interfering with hospital operations, they have every right to be on the premises.”

  “Make ’em wait outside.”

  “No can do.”

  Dobson pointed a finger Charly Hart’s way. “I’ve got officers here. Injured in the line of duty. They’ve got a right to some respect…to some privacy, for god’s sake.”

  The guy threw up his hands. “I agree with you, Chief. Unfortunately, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals doesn’t. As far as they’re concerned, the press has as much right to be here as we do.”

  The chief waved a disgusted hand and turned his back on the guy, who, seizing the opportunity to get out from under, ducked out the door.

  The chief waited for Corso and Hart to negotiate the last ten yards. He looked down at the tray Charly Hart carried and blanched.

  “How’s Gutierrez doing?”

  “Not so good,” Charly Hart said. “He was trying to get out of the car when the engine hit us. They think he had one foot out the door when the car rolled over on it and damn near severed his foot.”

  Harry Dobson looked away in pain. “What about Miss Dougherty?”

  “She
’s got a level two concussion and a knot on her head the size of a cantaloupe. They’re keeping her for a couple of days for observation,” Corso said.

  The chief was scowling now. “How does an accident like this happen? What…nobody saw the…”

  Corso and Charly Hart passed a quick look. For the first time since the wreck, they had a minute to think and realized they were the only ones who actually knew what had happened. Everybody else thought it had been an accident. Charly Hart motioned with his head for the chief to get back from the door. Dobson got the message, stepped in close.

  “Wasn’t an accident, Chief,” Charly whispered. “The car behind us pushed us out onto the tracks.”

  The chief looked from Hart to Corso and back. He was silent for a full minute. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said finally.

  “Me neither,” said Corso. “We must have touched a nerve somewhere in our travels today.”

  “But you’ve got no idea where?”

  Both men said they didn’t.

  “What kind of car?”

  Corso shook his head. Charly Hart shrugged. “Something big, square and dark. By the time I looked back, it was already locked on our back bumper, so I couldn’t see the grille.”

  “Gutierrez saw something,” Corso said. “He saw something that really got his attention…something in the rearview mirror.”

  “What?”

  “Had to be something in the car behind us. We were the only two cars waiting for the train.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And then?”

  “And then the car was on us.”

  “Can Detective Gutierrez—”

  Charly Hart jumped in. “He’s out of it, Chief. Everything goes well…the docs are saying he might be able to talk to us something like tomorrow night.”

  “By tomorrow night it might not matter.”