"So anyone who copied the drive," he said, "could walk away with an exact replica stored in their own tablet."
"And someone did," She whispered a command into her microphone and slid her hand over the Braille pad and Maryk heard a soft male voice whisper into Suzy Lumen's ear. Numbers appeared on screen. "Full backup creates a register recording the time, date, and chip address of the receiving system."
"So you've got the internal code of the second tablet."
"That's it right there. But I already checked. Hailing has been disabled. This tablet is not on the air."
"Then what about this: Can whoever owns the clone of Pearse's tablet still access the BDC?"
"Not coded files. There's a safeguard built in to the director's tablet to prevent the skeleton key from being duped. But the Genetech still can be dialed into. In fact, it has."
She muttered commands and massaged the pad and smiled at the wall as the machine murmured into her ear. Maryk knew from his mother that the smile of the blind indicated achievement at least as often as pleasure.
Words appeared on screen. "Your personnel file," she said.
Maryk glared. "Accessed and downloaded six days ago," she said.
"Could it have anything to do with this?" She switched back to Stephen's tablet and opened a file." 'Investigation-dot-Maryk,' " she hand-read. "Emptied, and irretrievable. All the files were typed over before they were dumped."
"Personnel files aren't coded?"
"Not at the BDC. No need. Viruses don't use computers."
Stephen was right. Someone had archived his tablet while he was in Amagansett. And later that same someone had dialed into the BDC computers looking specifically for information on Maryk. Whoever it was then knew about his immunological strength. "Can you bring up Pearse's bank account?" Maryk said.
She did. The last debit transaction was dated the day before Maryk brought Stephen back to the BDC. "Fuel," she said curiously.
Maryk read the register. A tankful had been purchased at a Texaco in Trenton, New Jersey, the day before Maryk froze Stephen's bank accounts. "But how could someone other than Stephen Pearse sign for a thousand dollars' worth of merchandise on this tablet?"
Suzy Lumen smiled and scrolled to another file and Stephen's arched signature appeared on screen. Maryk watched her plump fingertips trace it on her read pad. "Signature imprint," she said. "For generating prescriptions, signing documents. They had Director Pearse's tablet sign for them."
Maryk nodded. "What are my options, then?" he said. "I could cancel the director's tablet for you right now. That way, if anyone tried to use the duped code to access the Genetech, they would be refused."
Maryk deliberated. "What if I wanted to preserve my link to this person?"
"Then I can put a sentinel on the Genetech. That would split the signal and trick the user out to me if he tries to come on-line."
Maryk nodded and stood. "Keep a trace on that tablet," he told her.
"I want to know the minute it taps back in."
The Human Component
It had been four meals since she'd seen Maryk.
Night and day passed uneventfully with her sulking in front of the TV in her room, waiting for him to come, like a vampire, for her blood.
Pasco, her shadow from Boston, appeared three times a day to escort her to the Emory college cafeterias for meals. Being held on a college campus seemed to her like poetic justice. Finals had ended and the campus population was dwindling, though she sensed movement around her wherever she went. She was convinced that Maryk had people everywhere, watching her. Inside the cafeteria, the same red-haired custodian mopped a different section of floor at every meal.
Her boundless appetite had returned. She sat that afternoon before a cheeseburger and a plate of chickenfried steak, starting instead with a thick wedge of apple cobbler. Pasco sat at the next table over, eating and diligently working on something on his tablet.
He was intent on what he was reading, gnawing on a sesame breadstick as though it were a pencil.
It bothered her that she hadn't seen Maryk. She knew he needed her blood, and had expected him to have taken it by now. Later that second day she asked Pasco to take her to see Dr. Pearse, and to her surprise, he did.
A nurse led her through most of the preliminary rooms, then left her, shutting the steel door on the dark shower room before the lab.
The walls creaked until the air flow reached a kind of equilibrium and seemed to rush away from her at all points, yet allowed her to breathe.
Warnings glowed fluorescently on the door. She wore a mask, goggles, and gloves, but they had not required her to wear one of the body-condom suits. She nodded to herself and struck the switch and the door popped open, sucking forward the swirling air.
Dr. Pearse was right there. He was standing now and leaning on a metal hospital cane. He was walking. Melanie was stunned. His movement was much improved, though he looked no better. In fact he looked worse. "Hello again," he said, taking a few mindful steps toward her with his cane. His red eyes bothered her even more now, as they moved more naturally within his head, making him appear all the more unnatural. She caught herself looking for further signs of corrosion, and stopped. She willed herself not to stare, but to relax, relax.
Two men worked behind him in the submarine-type room, both sealed inside blue air suits. Melanie remembered at once what it was to be so feared, to be the object of such passive disgust. It was as though Dr. Pearse were a glowing rock that could only be handled with tongs.
He was so genuinely pleased to see her, she was scared. Seeing Dr. Pearse that way, a dying man up and walking around in front of her, made her think about the wonder blood coursing through her own skinny veins.
She stammeringly asked him how he was, which was brilliant.
Next she'd ask a drowning man if the water temperature was okay. But he was enthusiastic, and suddenly she was the one who felt like dying.
"Getting around better," he said, his voice stronger than before. "How are you?"
Now he was concerned for her. She broke the knot of her arms and moved to the counter for something to lean on.
It was all too much suddenly, him being sick and super-pleasant, the sealed room, the swirling oxygen, and the slow-moving blue suits behind. "I'm all alone," she said. She meant that she had no one else to talk to. "As am I," he said. "Except, of course, for our mutual friend."
He wore only the vestiges of a smile. Melanie nodded uncomfortably.
"He scares you," Dr. Pearse said.
She placed her gloved hand on the counter, then pulled it back, then gripped her fingers as though burned. Maryk had succeeded in making a paranoid wreck out of her.
Dr. Pearse went on, "It is extraordinarily rare that a person excels at the very thing they were uniquely created for. Beyond aptitude or ability or talent-I mean a legitimate predisposition, a person born into ... certain faculties who succeeds in exploiting them to their fullest capacity. And when this does happen, it usually creates a monster."
His words shocked her. "Then why are you helping him?"
"Because Peter is our monster. And in helping him, I am helping others, and in that, perhaps helping myself. He has sent me back some new samples from Louisiana."
He spoke of the blood samples as though they were sweets purchased at a bake sale. "What's in Louisiana?" Melanie said.
He looked at her a moment. "They haven't told you?" he said. He moved to a screen and gently prodded the keys. "The Plainville secret is out now. It's all over the news."
He turned the screen toward her, and Melanie forced herself to swallow the bile that had risen in her throat. A news server headline appeared, reading like a shriek over the image of a dark building seen through a chain-link fence and rolls of razor wire: HUNDREDS FEARED DEAD IN LA OUTBREAK PENITENTIARY ISOLATED, RIOTS QUELLED HUNDREDS INFECTED; DEADLY PLAINVILLE MA VIRAL RECURRENCE SEEN.
A sign posted on the fence bore the international biohazard symbol.
"The guards' families," said Dr. Pearse. "They were scared, so they went to the press. It means that the fight has progressed to a different level now."
She was dizzy. "He's there?"
"I'm told Peter's team took off for Louisiana at first call."
Melanie laid her hand over her stomach. For the past day and a half she had sat spitefully in her dormitory room like a little girl.
She felt petulant and spoiled and deeply ashamed. She tried to imagine the prison in Louisiana, and instead saw the dead of Plainville, her parents and friends and neighbors, wasted and cadaverous and all watching her with rotting eyes, waiting to see if she would ever make something of the second chance she had been given. "The virus keeps changing and changing," Dr. Pearse said. "Look here."
He changed the image on the computer screen, and after a moment she was able to focus.
Distorted, as though by the magnification of a powerful microscope, a small, spindly creature squirmed and twitched. "This is the bug that's eating me," he said, nearly in wonder. "Look at how it moves. Simple enough to kill a virus with bleach and study it destroyed. This is our first look at live Plainville. Well-magnified one hundred and twenty thousand times."
He moved closer to the screen and touched it, the distorted green light of the image shading his hand. "I have made a discovery," he went on.
Melanie tried to pay attention. "Some of the RNA sites on the virus contain strands of human characteristic DNA codes-a human component of the virus. Just as I said it would."
He pulled his thin hand from the viewing screen and looked at it, front and back. "Just as I said it would." He seemed to forget that she was there, lost in the world of his hands. For a moment, the triumph was gone. "Of course, I could move faster with a chemical gene splicer, but I'm making do. You are well represented here, too. Your cell cultures, anyway. Plainville burns through everything until it hits them. Miraculous, really." He looked at the equipment surrounding him. "It is good to be back home inside a laboratory again. I was away from it for too long."
He pondered that a moment. She saw then that his grins were not grins but rather the result of the fading architecture of his face. He turned to the long window, evidently viewing something other than the dim room beyond. "Illness does have the effect of clarifying things, doesn't it?" he said. "Life, or death. Sickness, or health. The ruthlessness of existence. I believe this must be how Peter views the world every day-" She interrupted. "I'm going to give him my blood."
Dr. Pearse's red eyes returned to study her face. His grin, perhaps the only expression left available to him, flickered. "Good," he said, nodding slightly. "Yours to give. But not to him: to the people who need it."
The immensity of her situation rose up around her again, overwhelming her. She sank against the console. "Why me?" she said.
"Out of all those people, why did it have to be me? Look at me." She looked at herself "Why did I survive?"
"You are proof that the virus is not irremediable. You survived, so there is hope that others might survive." His knuckled hand went lightly to his chest. "That I might survive."
"But why me?"
"All that is required of you now is to live, to remain healthy."
She nodded, agreeing with him at first. Then she stopped nodding.
"No," she said. "You're wrong. Living's not enough. I've been living for more than four years now, and it's gotten me nowhere. I'm different, he tells me. He's right. How can I use that?"
Dr. Pearse was distracted by the monitor image of the wriggling virus.
She moved in front of it to regain his attention. "You said something about helping the ill," she said.
He regripped his cane and prodded at the smooth cement floor.
"That was just a suggestion. This situation rarely presents itself. The immune can go into these breaks. Survivors sometimes make the best investigators. "But I don't know a thing about viruses."
"You could see to the sick. For them just to engage in conversation with someone not sealed inside a suityou can understand the power of that."
"But I wouldn't know what to say."
"You would. You're doing it right now."
She retreated along the counter away from his grin, then stopped.
"I want to go there," she said.
"It is a federal penitentiary. Perhaps you should wait for some other --"
"No more waiting. It's been four years of waiting. If I agree to give Maryk my blood, then he has to let me go. He has to. You could contact him for me."
"Ransoming your blood," said Dr. Pearse. "Peter won't take kindly to that."
"I have to help. You're not sitting here doing nothing." She had a valid point, and he knew it. "Then will you do something for me?" he asked. His stiff grin had faded. He leaned both hands upon the curve of his cane now, his blood-filled gaze commanding her attention. "Keep a close eye on him. Peter's vocation has taken the place of his conscience. You don't know what he is capable of."
The Penitentiary
She had learned to cheat glances at the helicopter pilot's control stick, anticipating turns and dips and bracing herself accordingly, gripping the soft sides of her seat as they swung around the prison perimeter. They buzzed the guard towers, each one abandoned. Highpowered stationary spotlights crisscrossed the prison grounds and made the bales of razor wire stacked against the high chain fences glitter like rolled carpets of diamonds. The central building of Lewes Federal Penitentiary was stage-lit like an alien ship set down in a bayou. There was a black lake to the north, and swamplands all around, with long, spindly roads like black seams leading away, and small police lights clustered in the distance.
They set down on top of the roof of the main building. Two people stood at the roof door, one of whom Melanie recognized immediately as Maryk. The pilot gave her a thumbs-up signal and she unbuckled her seat belt, taking the white medical suitcase from between her legs and pushing open the door.
She ducked out away from the whipping rotors as she'd seen done so many times on TV. She had to stop and balance herself as the helicopter tipped up and blasted her with wind, wasting no time in taking off again. Her hospital shirt rippled and climbed halfway up her back, and for a moment she thought she might blow off the rooftop like a scrap of paper. Then it was gone, running lights rising into the sky over the bayous of southern Louisiana. She straightened and turned.
Maryk, glowing from a spotlight set behind him, reeked of bleach.
He probably used it as after-shave, she thought. He said nothing, and she set the medical kit containing packets of her blood down at his feet, rather than hand it to him. "Weir, Melanie," he said.
"On-site."
The man holding a plastic-sheathed tablet next to him replied, "Weir, Melanie, on-site, twenty-forty-eight."
She had to strain to hear them. Both ears were filled with noise in the seashell-like absence of helicopter roar.
They descended three flights of echoing metal-edged concrete stairs to a long, gray hall. Every door was open and several inches thick. But except for that and the cameras watching from every corner, the inside of Lewes looked more like a junior college than her idea of a federal penitentiary.
A third suited man ushered her into a side room and began to dress her as Maryk watched. She was issued a plastic surgical gown to wear over her hospital scrubs, a procedure mask with a wraparound splash visor, a cotton cap, a white cowl covering her head except her eyes and nose, and rubber-soled, elasticized booties that fit over her sneakers.
She felt as though she were eight years old again and being bundled up for an afternoon of sledding.
Maryk said from the doorway, "What do you think you can do here?"
She had bartered her blood for Maryk's acquiescence, but now that she was there and being suited up, she was regretting her decision.
The man worked over her with great deference, like a tailor for NASA.
She played confidence to Maryk. "I'd like to help," she said. "Lewes Peniten
tiary is an administrative maximum level six. Do you know what that means?"
"No."
"The Bureau of Prisons uses a one-to-five scale to rank penitentiaries by security level. The men inside here are the worst of the worst."
"If you're trying to scare me," she said, "you should know I've had this aversion to prisons all my life."
"What I'm trying to do is to dispel any Florence Nightingale fantasies Stephen Pearse may have instilled in you."
The tailor stuck a yellow and red BDC patch to her chest and pointed her to the latex glove dispensers, where she took a petite size five.
Maryk went to her and seized her gloved hands, taping them hard around her wrists and checking the seal. She realized then that they were dressed exactly alike.
They left the room and started down the long, gray hall, people in yellow suits brushing busily past them. She had to hustle to keep pace. Her outfit was bulky and everything was moving fast. "At this point, these men no longer pose any threat to you, or to society," he said, "except through their infection. Plainville is the warden in this place now." They passed a high, circular guard station dead center in the hall. "Riots ensued once the disease cycle began. Many of the guards fled when they realized they were cooking in here the same as the inmates, and the prisoners went at each other like animals.
Plainville was already well entrenched. A closed environment, with substandard living conditions, poor hygiene: an optimal ecology for an airborne bug like Plainville. But there is nothing more conducive to microbial transmission than a riot, and the disease quickly wore them down. The fight's gone out of most of them now, and we're losing nine to ten an hour. This is B unit, all advanced cases." He stopped at a closed steel door sealed into the wall at the end of the hallway.
"Inside, guards lie side by side with inmates."
She heard noises through the door that were groans. Maryk faced her.
"You will be safe inside so long as you remain with me at all times. Touch no one and nothing, and keep yourself covered. You know that blood contact from a needle stick will overwhelm your resources and infect, antibodies or no antibodies. Same as for me. So if you are considering another self-destructive stunt like the one you pulled in B4, know that I will stop you, and you will be removed. Stay away from needles, and stay away from blood."
Chuck Hogan Page 19