Reilly said, "None that we can see."
"And no one was following him. You're certain of that."
"Lancet had no enemies," Reilly said. "Not that he had any friends either. He didn't have anybody. Except us, and that he never knew."
Boone rose before the dresser. He was wire-haired and older than Reilly. "This is too much," he said. "We've moved out of the gray area now. Observation, surveillance: fine, okay." He pointed to the bed. "That's a corpse there."
The loss frustrated Maryk as much as it troubled him. "You were to watch him," Maryk said. "You were to monitor him and to make certain that he remained in Atlanta, and that he lived comfortably.
But above all you were to make certain, absolutely certain, that no harm came to him. That he remained viable and healthy."
Reilly and Boone looked at each other as men who have worked long hours together will. "What did you expect?" Boone said. "This guy was haunted. He was a ghost, and, he knew it. He lived for the past. Look at this."
There were display shelves next to the closet doors and Boone began pulling items off them. A sky blue box reading WINDOWS '95. A Frasier mug. An unopened foil pack of Beavis and Butt-head playing cards. A [ost World lunch box. An Entertainment Weekly guide to The X-Files.
Stacks of old VHS video cassettes. A red ribbon pin. "Pull all the phone taps," Maryk said. "Unwire his tablet. Then declare a Biohazard 3 and go through all the motions. Bring him out in a covered pod and get BioCon going on the hallway and the rest of the building. We want the neighbors inconvenienced as much as possible; it will lend legitimacy. Write up a death certificate, nothing too exotic, then contact his sister in Louisiana. Make certain she gets anything of value you find here."
Boone folded open the closet doors and pulled out a vinyl storage bag from among Lancet's personal effects. He drew the zipper down on a green canvas jacket with white sleeves and white snaps and a twilled green-and white collar. The face of a bulldog was sewn over the right breast and a white capital -letter P over the left. Script stitching beneath the dog face read: Plainville Class of '00. "How's this for nostalgia," said Boone.
Maryk only frowned. "You may dispose of that."
Quarantine Services had sealed off the auditorium and old cafeteria inside Building One for the sequestration of anyone who may have shared breathing space with Stephen Pearse following his return from Orangeburg. It was a "friendly" quarantine of international health care professionals requiring no ankle monitors and minimal security at each exit.
The shock of the director's illness was still setting in. A moroseness more eloquent than the usual moroseness of enforced quarantine pervaded the old building. Even the QS administrators in their contact suits sat tiredly on folding chairs or leaned dazed against walls. The administrative staff from Building Sixteen sat solemnly in groups and speculated about the future of the BDC.
Maryk strode through quarantine. No one approached or addressed him and no one spoke. of him until after he was gone.
Bobby Chiles entered the makeshift examining room and sat down before realizing that Maryk was seated across from him. "Peter," Bobby said anxiously. "How is he?"
Maryk was rearranging the blood-taking supplies on the standing tray between them. "Alive. Blood samples seem to indicate a slowdown."
Bobby's eyes brightened in amazement as he rolled up his shirtsleeve.
"Why, that's-that's remarkable, Peter. That's truly remarkable. So there's a chance, then."
Maryk pulled out a Betadine swab and smeared Bobby's exposed brown forearm orange-red. "I can slow the process enough to keep him alive for a few more days. A week, maybe more. Depends on how far gone he is, and how much we can learn about the virus in that time."
"But there's a chance he'll make it beyond that. I mean, there's always that chance."
Maryk broke the skin of Bobby's forearm and entered a vein. "No," he said. "Stephen's not going to make it." Bobby looked at him blankly as the small plastic barrel began to fill. "When can I see about moving him out of there?" Bobby said. -B4 is a laboratory, Peter.
People will want to visit."
Maryk was firm. "No visitors. Stephen stays where he is. Full rein, Bobby, remember? No distractions."
Bobby nodded distantly. "How could this happen?" he said.
Maryk raised his left hand. He opened it and pointed to the center of his latex palm.
Bobby said, "But he didn't report anything. What was he doing up in New York?"
"Running away. The guilt of infection."
"I knew that, of everyone we had out there, you'd be the one to find him. You two had a history."
"His parents' summer house was a long shot, but it paid off. We're picking apart his tablet now. His bank account shows only one service stop the entire trip."
"He had one of the government fleet. Eight cylinders of compressed natural gas. He could make it there with just one fill-up."
Maryk nodded. "It was a full-service CNG station. A bank account debit through his tablet. Never had to roll down the window."
"No spread, then."
"None yet." Maryk switched to a third barrel. "Except for the publicity woman."
Bobby closed his eyes and nodded. Maryk said, "And her two dogs.
Practically turned them inside out."
"Peri Fields. Public Affairs.
You didn't know her."
"A touch, a sneeze, a passed memo, a borrowed pen. It wouldn't have taken much. If she wasn't already out with the flu at the start of it, we would have had a catastrophe on our hands."
"With the bureau at ground zero. We can't be this lucky much longer.
It's going to get out."
"That's why Stephen is so important. That's why he stays in the lab. I've got to study him."
"They said Peri had a lot of indoor plants, and that it got into them bad."
"As well as the bacteria in the food. And not just the cupboards-somehow it broke through the refrigerator seal. But the plants were particularly bad.
Plainville does something to them, takes longer to kill them. The stalks were growing up through the walls, around pipes, trying to get out. They were even snaking up the birdstand. It was like they were going for her parakeet."
"You aren't saying --"
"It was almost as though the virus couldn't infect it, so it was going to finish off the job by hand. My people have the bird, but it's just like all the rest. Birds don't get Plainville. We still don't know why."
"The parakeet isn't talking?"
Bobby burst into a fit of inappropriate laughter. His head dropped and his shoulders shook as he fought to regain his composure.
Maryk left a bandage on the table for him and stood to change his gloves. Bobby looked up sniffling and scooping tears out of his eyes.
"Sorry ... it's my first quarantine. All the international liaisons and whatnot from Sixteen-I've got plenty of friends here, and at times I'm almost enjoying myself, playing cards to pass the time. But then I remember where I am, and I'm watching these people shuffling the deck and dealing cards in front of me, and all I can think is that, if even just one of them has it. . ." I Maryk opened the door to leave.
"Rules of containment," he said. "Same for everybody, doctor or patient. That was Stephen's mistake. No one is exempt."
"Well," Bobby said. He was sober now and rolling down his sleeve as he looked at Maryk in the open doorway. "Almost no one."
The funk was general throughout each building as Maryk moved through the BDC to Building Sixteen. The flags outside were flying at half-mast. He stopped in at the vacant Public Affairs office. He saw an empty box of sterile tissues on one of the assistant's desks and balled up tissues scattered around a tablet keyed to a news server.
The screen image was that of Stephen delivering his Nobel speech at the Stockholm Concert Hall. The log line listed the article as that day's third draft.
PEARSE STRICKEN - BDC Head Infected in Laboratory Mishap - Deadly Agent Unspecified (ATLANTA) -- Dr. Ste
phen Pearse, director of the U.S. Bureau for Disease Control and last week's recipient of the Nobel Prize award in Medicine for development of the PeaMar23 synthetic blood, was accidentally infected in an Atlanta laboratory while performing experimental vaccination research ...
Maryk left the desk and continued inside through a door marked PERi FIELDS but the office had already been stripped down and cleaned out.
There was nothing left of her there.
The office of the director remained sealed off from the rest of the building. Maryk stood at the nylon that lined the doorway and watched the yellow suits working inside. One was removing diplomas and photographs from the walls and disposing of them in a carton marked B10 HAZARDOUS WASTE. Another was foaming the brass inlay of the ceiling. A third BioCon agent lifted a large gold medallion off the desk. He briefly inspected Stephen's Nobel medal before depositing it with the rest.
Maryk sat across from Ursula Freeley behind the counter of the gloomy admitting room. Orangeburg had burned itself out. Special Path's biocontainment strategy had denied the arsonist virus the flesh and blood and tissue that was its oxygen. The microbreak had diminished to a few smoldering final-stage terminals.
Freeley sat with her puffed arms relaxed on the arms of the swivel chair and her legs straight out and crossed at the ankles. She appeared more comfortable inside a contact suit than most people appeared outside one. Maryk asked her how Stephen had been when he left the hospital. "I didn't see him then," she said. "He wasn't here but an hour. Had to see the patients though. Had to touch the sick.
I spoke to one of the serologists with him, and he said that when Pearse left he seemed agitated. The hall cameras were all foamed over, so there's nothing to view on disk." She shifted unhappily in her padded chair. "I saw the press release. So now the healer of the free world dies a martyr to his cause. I don't think Plainville victims look too valiant lying in state."
"Better than the panic the truth would bring. What's our status here?"
Freeley crossed her baggy arms. "Not with a bang but a whimper.
Survival rate is zero, no surprise there. Again, nothing links the virus to the outside world. No less than two substantive genetic drifts in the virus between the beginning of the outbreak and the end.
The lethality of this thing is our one saving grace. It kills so, expediently, the infected have little time to infect anyone else."
"Nothing on the vectors?"
"Food, soil, sewage, pests, rodents, vents, air: Nothing stands out.
And the catatonics' old blood all tested clean. It was nothing lying latent." She unknotted her arms and stressed her points with a chopping motion on the arm of the chair.
"They weren't infected, then they were infected, and now there's nothing to tell us how. It's not nosocomial. This didn't move doctor-to-patient. So how did it get in here? Bugs don't just appear and burn in a limited capacity and then disappear again. There's commonality, footsteps, links. This just doesn't happen-and yet here it is, happening again. This thing is smart and somehow getting smarter."
Maryk nodded and looked sternly off to the side.
"And now Lancet is gone," she, added. "That means there are only two left."
Lancet's self-destruction mystified Freeley as well, Maryk was thinking. "Do you ever take off your pants by rolling them down from the waist?" he said.
She looked at him flatly through the mask. "That may be the first personal question you have ever asked me."
"There was a pair of black jeans in a pile of clothes on Lancet's bedroom floor. They were pulled all the way through, inside out."
"You're thinking someone undressed him?"
"I don't know. First Pearse gets stuck with Plainville. Then Lancet turns up dead."
"So? Nothing links the two."
"What if I told you that Pearse had been investigating me? That he was onto the blood project, Lancet and the others. That he had the files in his computer."
Her hard-edged face showed suspicion. "How?"
"Stephen Pearse was many things, but he was never stupid." She dismissed it. "Who gains by killing Lancet? No one. I don't see it."
"I want you on his post. Reilly and Boone insist there's no sign of forced entry; I need to be certain. We've preserved a number of items from his apartment. Closing Lancet down means freeing up some money, so we'll double security on the others. We've got two Survivors left. It is imperative that we protect them."
She nodded at the hospital. "And this?"
"We wait. We prepare, and anticipate. Each time we tell ourselves we've stamped Plainville out for good, and each time we're proven wrong. I'll assemble a rapid response team to cut down our reaction time on the next break, to give us a fighting chance."
"We've got to stop chasing this bug's shadow.
We need a viable sample of the pathogen for study. We can't grow it in the lab because it eats through anything we put in front of it, and we can't sustain it safely because of its virulence."
Maryk stood then. "You forget," he said. "We are growing Plainville in a lab now. Stephen Pearse is cultivating Plainville in viva."
Freeley came close to smiling then. Her cunning eyes brightened behind the Plexiglas of her hood.
Melanie
Breakfast, in a whirlwind. Two slices of broccoli and olive pizza pulled cold from her artfully magneted refrigerator, munched in the bathroom as she pulled on clothes from a pile on the floor and simultaneously willed her chopped hair into order. At that speed, it was easy to ignore the blotchy wall stains and flaking white paint, to shirk the general impression that the tiny bathroom was, like so many other things in Melanie Weir's life, collapsing in on her. She had willfully overslept. Responsibility was no longer a viable deterrent to sleep. Each morning she could find fewer and fewer reasons to get out of bed.
She had once worked with a girl who had a scandalous habit of waking up in her bedroom with total strangers. Melanie did much the same thing, except that for her, the lingering scent of a regrettable evening was not cologne and other smells of a man, but turpentine and linseed oil, on her hands and her fingers, and rising out of the coffee cans and mayonnaise jars set on her windowsill like cocktails left out overnight.
She had this weird thing about painting: She had no real love for the art, and no training whatsoever, and yet once every few months, always late at night and often when the moon was full, she answered this inexplicable urge to take brush in hand and fill up a blank canvas.
They all started out as masterpieces in her mind, as the painting would reveal all the things about herself she could never understand. But then the next morning she awoke to an unfinished landscape of grotesque images that was incomprehensible even to her.
Each was a variation on a theme. All involved blood, such as lakes or waterfalls of blood, set in lurid but desolate landscapes, populated by tiny people wandering around naked or in torn clothes, and bizarre, wolflike beasts with carrion in their grinning teeth, moving through sunless shadows cast by inscrutably deformed trees. These were not Holiday Inn-quality paintings, she knew. One image common to each work was that of a white-haired man whose face was always obscured.
Dead center in her latest garish composition, the man was kneeling without reflection over a boiling reservoir of blood.
Dressed in a crushed velvet jersey and loose jeans, she came back into the bedroom and faced the painting. As a glimpse into her subconscious, this bizarre expression of angst was at the very least unsettling. She took the canvas down off her cheap metal easel and set it on the floor, facing the wall, then went to search for her keys.
Melanie lived in a tiny two-room apartment that was a well of voices.
The broad windows of her apartment faced the broad windows of the next building of apartments, linked to her building on either side, three planes of windows and bleached bricks rising. Through her open, breezeless windows droned the jumbled voices, television clamor, and slamming doors of various other lives. She could make out only a sliver
of sky as she looked up from her windows, though she had a terrific view of the accumulated trash tossed from the windows to the asphalt pen below. The Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston was a cat box for university students. Many a night she was awakened by the delicate sound of a person or persons relieving themselves off the roof.
It didn't have to be this way. Melanie had been taking one of her fearsome canvases out to the trash one morning when a middle-aged man who struck her as a college professor stopped her at the curb. He saw the painting and expressed an interest in purchasing it, but Melanie gave it to him for free. The man insisted on taking her name and address, claiming that if the painting appealed to his "employer," perhaps some future arrangement could be made. She said sure and gave him a fake address and went on her way. A few days later, a money order drawn on an Atlanta bank in the amount of five hundred dollars was slipped underneath her door, with a note requesting more paintings as they became available. Since that time, whenever she was low on funds and had another canvas lying around, she would contact this gentleman to arrange a sale. Neither he nor his employer ever identified themselves, but if some eccentric wanted to pay for her repulsive paintings-her imagination had conjured a dotty old geezer, like a backwoods Citizen Kane, squirreling her canvases away next to his fishing line collection and carton upon carton of artificial limbs-who was she to turn him down? Twice her secret patron had, in writing, offered to relocate her to Atlanta and install her in an artist's loft there. But Melanie was not born yesterday. Besides, she had no real control over when she painted, or what her mind told her to draw.
The heat rising through the well obliterated most rain and snow, and the depth of the pit defeated direct sunlight, so that the weather, when she went outside, was always a surprise. She found her keys and ran down four flights of stairs, pizza crust in hand, to the glass front door webbed to obscurity with cracks left from a year-old shooting. It was a cold, early December morning.
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