“They’ve got to get through me first,” she said. “I think I’m one of your biggest fans. Though your teammates sure think highly of you. They can’t believe you’d regain consciousness in a hospital bed and two minutes later you’re back at work.”
“I think pretty highly of them,” DeLuca said. “Besides, work takes my mind off my other sorrows.”
“If you have sorrows bigger than the ones I’m already aware of, I think I’d rather not know about them,” Warner said. When they heard a disturbance in the hallway, she lowered her voice. “It’s a bit past visiting hours, I’m afraid. I was really just going to leave you a cheery note because I thought you’d be asleep.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s after eleven,” she said.
“That’s past curfew,” he said. “How are you going to get back to your hotel?”
“Thought I’d find a place here somewhere,” she said. “I think I’ve slept in more folding chairs in the last few months than I care to remember.”
“You could have the Preacher’s bunk if you want it,” DeLuca said. “Just pull the covers over your head if anybody comes in. And pray nobody gets hurt tonight and they need the bed.”
“I pray that all the time anyway,” she said. “It’s truly tempting. I can’t remember the last time I slept anywhere where the air-conditioning actually worked.”
Just then they were interrupted by the night nurse, a woman with the moniker WHEELER on her nametag. She did indeed have, as Preacher Johnson had put it, “cannons that could have turned the tide at Gettysburg.” When she leaned over DeLuca to adjust his IV drip, his face was buried in the shadow of her colossal bosom. She asked him how he was doing, took his vitals, then shot Evelyn Warner a look before exiting and said, “It’s after visiting hours.”
“There goes my sleepover,” Warner said, once she was gone.
“Stay,” he bade her. “Stay anyway.”
“Well, it’s not like we haven’t slept together before, is it?” she said. “It’s always an adventure with you, isn’t it? Considering you’re temporarily quadriplegic, I’m certain you’ll be a perfect gentleman. Not that that’s what I want. You get a bit weary of perfect gentlemen after a while. A nice imperfect gentleman, that would be nice.”
“Well I don’t want to brag,” DeLuca said, “but I’m about as imperfect as anybody you’d ever care to meet.”
She pushed the second bed closer to his. He felt in an unusually mixed and confusing mood. His conversation with Bonnie had left him with only one conclusion, that his marriage was over, and there was nothing he could do about it. The sight of Evelyn Warner had made him purely happy, her bright wit, her good cheer, and her beautiful face just the thing he needed, right then.
She secured the Velcro holding the door shut, turned out the lights, and lay down on the bed next to his, covering herself with the blanket. He heard her shoes fall to the floor. The CASH was not a private place, even with the doors shut, with walls of nylon and air, and sounds filtering through the walls of people talking and electronic equipment beeping. Other times, when the air-conditioning kicked in, the sound of air rushing through the nylon ducts nearly drowned out conversation, bathing the whole place in a wash of white noise.
“David?” she asked him.
“Yeah?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I just think you’re a really good man and I wondered if you knew that. If anybody had told you lately.”
“Not lately,” he said. He wanted to tell her about his marriage, but he didn’t want to be one of those guys who whined, saying, “My wife just doesn’t understand me . . .” Then he realized that wasn’t it. He didn’t want to bring Bonnie up because she didn’t belong in his life anymore. She’d asked, quite clearly, to be let go of, and he would honor her request, and not think of her again, at least not tonight. “Thank you for saying that. Even if I know it’s not true.”
“It is true,” she said. “And don’t give me that imperfect crap again. You are a good man, and I know ’em when I see ’em. You remind me of my father.”
“Is that good?” DeLuca asked.
“It’s always good when a woman tells a man he reminds her of her father, but it’s never good for a man to tell a woman she reminds him of his mother. Which I don’t, I hope.”
“You don’t,” he said.
“Am I right? Let me guess. Big Italian family, warm and loving, blue-collar father, mother saying ‘Mangia, mangia’ all the time and whacking you with a twisted-up dishtowel whenever you snuck a cookie before dinner.”
“Not even close,” DeLuca said. “Small and bitter. And white-collar. One sister, Elaine. My father worked way too hard for Nationwide Insurance, and my mother couldn’t cook for shit. Everything was frozen and then boiled. And nobody talked. Code of silence. Omerta. You probably heard of it.”
“And nobody in the Mafia?” she asked.
“Nobody,” DeLuca said. “Though I’ve got a cousin in Brooklyn who’s been trying to get in since high school. How about you? What did your father do?”
“Guess.”
“Well,” DeLuca said. “Let me try. Owned a publishing company, member of Parliament, Lord of Banbury. Your older brother Nyles runs the publishing company now and your younger brother Harry plays in a rock and roll band. Your mother is Lady Banbury. She was a commoner when your father met her and she doesn’t feel like she fits in with the peerage, but she’s a terrific horsewoman and an accomplished poet. And she’s very proud of you.”
“I don’t know if I should feel flattered or invaded,” she said. “You looked me up.”
“I’m counterintelligence,” DeLuca said. “That’s what we do. But that doesn’t mean I know you.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “But you could, if you wanted to.”
They’d been lowering their voices ever since they’d started talking with the lights out, her lips close to his ear. He couldn’t turn his head, but he liked knowing she was there, that close to him. She put her arm across his chest, propping her head up on her other arm so that she could look at him, half on her bed and half on his now.
“You’re quite good-looking, too, you know,” she said. “So many of these soldier boys become harsh-looking. Or sad. Or full of themselves. But I have a feeling you look like you always do. I don’t know why I think that. I could be wrong. I was so sorry when I read about your sister, David. That must have crushed you.”
“Did I tell you about Elaine?”
“No you didn’t,” she said, “but you’re not the only person who knows how to look someone up. I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like, when it happened. Nine-eleven. It must have felt like the world was ending.”
“I guess it did,” DeLuca said. “One kind of world, anyway. I wish I could turn my head so I could look at you.”
“I’m right here,” she said, sitting up and leaning over him, her face eight inches from his. She regarded him a moment, smiling, and then she kissed him, as gently and as sweetly as he’d ever been kissed, her lips gently caressing his, her tongue softly probing his mouth, brushing against his teeth . . .
And then she lay back on her bed.
“I’m going to have to stop now, while I still can,” she whispered, out of breath. “I think one second more and I would become utterly abandoned, which is something I want to experience with you, David DeLuca, but perhaps some other time when you’re not in traction. And lest you think I have some sort of fatal attraction to men with bullet wounds, this is something I’ve thought since the first time I met you.”
“But . . .”
“Shh,” she said, pressing a finger gently to his lips. “More to come. Plenty of time. Sleep sleep. I’m right here if you need anything.”
He woke the next morning to the sound of Evelyn Warner talking sotto voce on her sat phone. The television was on, the volume down low, barely audible. On the screen, a picture of a building in Baghdad, the front of the building collapsed, the rest of it smoking
. A crawl at the bottom of the screen said, “Car bomb explodes at U.S. Counterintelligence Headquarters in Baghdad.” Evelyn looked horrified when she realized DeLuca had seen the screen.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I have to go. This happened just this morning.”
On the television, a picture of one fictitious Sergeant Alvin King, 1974-2004.
“My cameraman is waiting for me. I can come back. Are you okay? I’m so sorry. I know these were the people you worked with. This is very confusing to me. I have one source saying how terrible it is and another saying he didn’t know anything about any counterintelligence headquarters . . .”
DeLuca hated what he had to do next.
“Nobody did,” he said. “That was the point. I knew Al King.” A second picture showed a Lieutenant Ray Shuman. “I knew him too. What are they saying? How many?”
“Eight dead, twelve wounded,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out where they’re taking them. I have to go. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said. He hated this, hated it, but the press had to be convinced that the attack was real. It was his best, and perhaps his last, chance at getting close to Mohammed Al-Tariq. He didn’t have a choice in the matter.
“I’ll come back,” she said. “Your man Vasquez was by this morning and he left you this,” she said, opening the laptop computer that rested on DeLuca’s bedstand. “It’s all hooked up. I wish I could stay. I have to go. My cameraman is waiting.”
“I understand,” DeLuca said, wondering if she’d ever speak to him again, once she uncovered the ruse, as he was certain she would. “Go. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Chapter Seventeen
GILLIAN O’DOHERTY WAS WORKING LATE (HER fifth late night in a row), listening to baseball on the radio. She liked the background noise, the murmur of the crowd, the distant vendors shouting out “Peanuts! Popcorn!” She rarely paid attention to who was winning, or even playing. Tonight the Sox were playing in Oakland, and it looked like extra innings.
She’d spent the afternoon processing Walter Ford’s request to give him a DNA analysis of a suspect he identified as M.J. Probably not Michael Jackson, she presumed, filling out the paperwork the FBI lab in D.C. was going to need to do the workup. He’d sent her a hairbrush.
She’d come back after a late supper to search her database, in response to the e-mail from David DeLuca that directed her to look into anything mysterious or unusual that might have occurred involving dockworkers or the shipping industry. She’d come up with four recent deaths that might have warranted further study. The first was a young man named Murphy, an airport water-taxi captain who’d been stabbed in a bar in Charlestown, but reading the case more closely, he was just a poor kid who insulted another man’s motorcycle and ended up with severed right subclavian and common carotid arteries, bleeding out in the parking lot. The second was a Ukrainian sailor named Alexiev with a blood alcohol level that had been three times the legal limit, who’d fallen off his ship and died when he struck his head on a forklift below, crushing the right parietal bone all the way to the sagittal suture. The third case was a union official who’d been shot in his car, a single bullet from a .22-caliber automatic, the bullet entering the occipital bone at the mid-left-lambdoidal suture and exiting the skull just below the left lacrimal. The officers working the case were looking at it as a mob hit. A test of the hair stuck to the bullet suggested the union official had a cocaine problem, which might have had something to do with why he’d been shot, but it hardly added up to an international conspiracy.
The fourth case was a dockworker named Anthony Fusaro, a burn victim who’d died in a fire in his North End triple-decker. According to the report, he’d been drinking in bed (a bottle of alcohol was found nearby), probably fell asleep smoking a cigarette (a lighter was found next to the bed), and perished in the ensuing conflagration. She had a tissue sample in the freezer to test for the presence of drugs or disease, but it hadn’t seemed terribly important, and no next of kin had been clamoring for answers, so she’d let it slide while she pursued more pressing matters.
She took the sample from the freezer and set it in a petri dish to thaw. It had the familiar yet odd smell of charred human flesh, like roast mutton but slightly more chemical. The sample had been taken from the vastus lateralis, according to the tag. The rest of the body had been bagged and cremated when no one claimed it, but she was sure she had enough tissue to work with.
“Pleased to meet you, Anthony,” she said, holding the sample up to the light. From the sounds coming from the radio, somebody had hit a home run. “Let’s see how you’re doing tonight.”
She washed her hands with betadine, donned latex gloves and a surgical mask, following universal precautions, turned on all the laminar flow units in the lab, and then set about preparing a 1:800 dilution of the subject’s serum. Using a pipette, she transferred the diluted serum to a rack of test tubes containing antigen/antibody complexes. It would take about an hour to create titers. Beyond the usual infectious agents, she tested from a kit that had been supplied to her office by the Centers for Disease Control, containing the more exotic agents likely to be involved in biological attacks, including anthrax, botulinum, aflatoxin, ricin, mycotoxins, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, rotavirus, and smallpox. Any infectious bug would have to follow Koch’s postulates to be proven—she had to be able to isolate it, propagate it outside the host, and cause the same disease by returning it to a similar host.
While she waited, she examined the tissue itself for cutaneous affects, first with the naked eye, then with a 10X magnifying glass, and finally with a stereo microscope. She perceived, in the burned flesh, what appeared to be an array of abutting rings, approximate circles individually uneven and erosely bordered but evenly distributed. She was surprised at how easily the epidermis separated between the spinosum and basale stratum, with charring on the base membrane and again between the dermis and the subcutaneous musculature, as if the skin had come loose before the fire started. She’d hypothesized that the rings were the result of droplets of fire retardant falling on the smoldering flesh, but a closer look under the microscope suggested a varying density to the carbon residue, as if the skin had been scarred or pocked before burning.
When she returned to the rack of test tubes, she saw that every antigen/antibody complex assayed had come back negative except one.
Her heart jumped in her chest.
Anthony Fusaro had died of smallpox.
Proving Koch’s third postulate was beyond her capabilities, given that the smallpox virus had no reservoir other than human, no intermediate species to jump to between primary hosts, which had, in part, been why it had been possible to eradicate it in the general population. Had there been a secondary host, for example mice or rats, eradication would have been much more difficult.
Quickly, she resealed and sterilized the petri dish containing the tissue sample, double-bagged it, then placed it back in the freezer after affixing a biohazard warning sticker to the outside of the label, upon which she’d written “variola major.” She considered calling the Centers for Disease Control immediately, but it was approaching three o’clock in the morning, so she held off. As a precaution, she cracked open an NBC (nuclear/biological/ chemical) quick-response kit developed by the CDC for distribution through the Strategic National Stockpile Program, found a dose of smallpox vaccine, and inoculated herself. It probably wasn’t necessary, and even if it were, she could have waited until the Public Health Office opened in the morning to get a smallpox vaccination, but why bother other people when she could take care of it herself?
The chempack also contained a Centers for Disease Control reference CD, so she popped it the drive of her desktop and opened the smallpox file. She skimmed the historical information, the story of colonial Lord Jeffrey Amherst killing the local Native American tribes by giving them virus-saturated blankets, and she scanned the story of D. A. Henderson’s work to eradicate the disease, clicking
her way to the electron microscopy itself, where she called up a picture of the virus variola major. Then, using her own electron microscope, she compared what she had in her lab with what she found on the CD, expecting final confirmation.
Instead, she observed that the virus under her microscope was different from the organism pictured on the CD. For one thing, the virus in her lab was much smaller, about seven microns across. For another, it had a different shape, a bend where variola major was straight. She copied and saved to disk the digital images she was observing. She saw where the new virus had formed endosomes on the surface proteins of the host cells, and where the viral proteins had formed fusion loops and then trimmers to catapult the virus into the cell’s nucleus, where it would redirect the host cell’s DNA to make copies of the virus rather than of itself.
Then, she saw something she’d never seen before, or rather, she’d seen it, but she’d only seen it in time-lapse microscopy. This was happening in real time, viral particles penetrating host cell membranes and commandeering the host cells’ DNA at speeds she didn’t quite believe were possible. She could actually watch it as it occurred.
Poor Anthony Fusaro had never stood a chance.
Perhaps to reassure herself, she found the syringe she’d used to vaccinate herself and injected a drop of vaccine onto the slide under her microscope’s lens, hoping to document the process whereby the vaccine killed the virus.
But an odd thing happened.
Rather than witnessing the destruction of the virus, she watched as the virus ripped through the vaccine, using it as a kind of energy source. The result, in the human body, would be to turn the body’s immune system (the lymphocytes, antigens, T-cells, and phagocytes) against itself, something like the way AIDS worked, but at a vastly accelerated rate. She directed the computer to record her images at set intervals to document the rate of viral reproduction, fascinated and unable to take her eyes from the scope.
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