by Earl Merkel
It was a Lexus, a pale gray mount for his final ride. As he fumbled with the keyring, Anji glanced over his shoulder in the direction from which he had come. There was no one to be seen.
He turned the key in the lock, and the trunk popped open. It was, he noted idly, surprisingly spacious.
“Excuse, please,” a voice said from behind.
Anji spun, startled as much by the trace of a Slavic accent as by the interruption itself. For a split second, what might have been a smile of beatific delight flashed across his Asian features.
My Sensei!his mind cried out, knowing at the same instant it could not be.
And it was not.
He did not know the man who stood carefully outside Anji’s attack radius with a genial smile on his cleanshaven face.
Anji’s eyes dropped to an object the stranger held, waist-high. It was oddly shaped—an awkward black metal protuberance, vented on the sides and with what looked like a strip of masking tape affixed across the front of the tube. He had just recognized it as a weapon when the tape abruptly blew apart, leaving its edges frayed and tinged with black.
There was no sound, but Anji felt the shock of impact against his sternum. He staggered, catching himself for an instant; then his knees gave way and he felt himself tumble backward. He crashed onto metal, his head bouncing hard against what felt like thin carpet. There was still no pain, but when he willed his hand to touch his chest, it came away warm and dripping.
The world swam redly for a moment; when his eyes cleared again, he was looking up the pale blue sky framed by the inside of the open trunk lid. A face moved into his vision, peered down at him without apparent interest. Then it disappeared, and he felt his legs being lifted and folded into the trunk where he lay. They seemed very far away, no longer a part of his body.
Then the trunk lid slammed shut, plunging Anji into a semidarkness that, a few seconds later, became final and complete.
Day One:
July 21
Chapter 1
Fort Walton Beach, Florida
July 21
Breakfast today was an apple, a bright red Macintosh, and Dr. Carol Mayer bit into it with the aggrieved attitude of a hungry woman deprived of a decent meal. It made a satisfying crunching sound and tasted delicious and sweet. But it was still an apple, and as such, a woefully insufficient substitute for a real meal.
Her jaw working busily, Carol popped another chart from the ready-rack behind the reception counter and scanned it quickly. She frowned, pursing her lips.
Another upper-rez complaint?the young physician said to herself.Third one I’ve fielded this morning.
It was shaping up into a busy day, and the non-physician side of Carol sighed in disappointment. It was a beautiful day outside, and the waters of Choctawatchee Bay—herbay: the expanse of living waters that she had first seen on the incoming flight when she interviewed for the job here, the bay with which she had fallen into thrall from that instant onward—would be blue and inviting.
The emergency room at the Rossini-Evans Clinic was crowded—not unusual for a Tuesday during the summer season, when it seemed that every other tourist, traveler or random visitor to the Emerald Coast ran afoul of the perils of vacation. It might be sunburn, cherry red on newly arrived flesh unaccustomed to the searing rays of the Redneck Riviera. It might be jellyfish stings, or fishhook impalements. It might be cracked bones or abrasions on visiting skateboarders, whose chronic attitude of terminal teenage boredom was at least temporarily on hold.
But it’s not often summer colds,Carol told herself.At least, not this many.
“Room Three,” LaTonya Ferris said, interrupting the physician’s musings. She was a large black woman in nurse’s garb who ruled the clinic’s immediate care operations with an iron hand. “But when you’re finished there, honey, take a look at the boy in Five. He’s wearing a cast that’s past due the time to come off.” She chuckled. “And the fragrance is something else, I want to tell you.”
Carol Mayer checked to make sure no patients were watching. Then she stuck her tongue out at LaTonya. Both women laughed at the same time, and Carol was still grinning as she strode down the hallway to the examining room. She took a final bite of her apple, dropped it in the side pocket of her lab coat, and knocked once on the closed door.
Carol was all efficiency when she opened the door and stepped in.
Seated on the exam table was a woman who could not have been far out of her teens. She was wearing a multicolored tubetop and white shorts, and on her feet were bright red canvas Keds. Like so many of the girls who found their way to the sugar white beaches here, she had long blond hair and the body of a dancer. A sea-horse tattoo, acquired recently enough to still look raw on the margins of the ink lines, decorated the inside of her left thigh.
A young man in a faded Auburn T-shirt and cutoff Levi’s sat on the table beside her, holding her hand and looking uncertain.
“How are we doing today”—Carol glanced at the name on the insurance form—“Ms. Atkins, is it?”
Ashley Atkins, whose sophomore year at Ole Miss had ended three weeks before she had informed her parents of the plan to summer on the beach, blew her nose in the handkerchief she held. Her eyes were red and puffy.
“Not so good. I truly feel like hell.”
“She’s been throwin’ up all morning, Doctor,” the young man interjected. His voice was worried. “I think she’s running a fever, too.”
“Let’s take a look.” Carol snapped on fresh latex gloves from a box on the countertop. She slipped a plastic sleeve over the sensor of an electronic thermometer and placed the tip in the younger woman’s ear canal.
“Yep. You’re elevated, a bit. I want to look at your throat, please.”
There was inflammation. It was not major, and certainly fit the diagnostic profile Carol was building. Northwest Florida in July was an oven, which meant that air conditioners were working overtime in every motel room, beach house and condo. That kept the inside air dry, which dried out throat and nasal membranes; viruses tended to thrive in that kind of environment. Add to that the closed-circuit recirculated air in movie theaters, restaurants, rave halls and barrooms—well,Carol reasoned,it’s a wonder everybody isn’t nursing the summer sniffles.
She scribbled a note on the form. “About how long have you been feeling ill, Ms. Atkins?” she asked, without looking up.
“Day ’fore yesterday, she started sounding all clogged up,” the young man said. “I don’t think she got much sleep last night, either.”
“It wasn’t bad until this morning, Bobby,” Ashley protested. “Doctor, you got something I can take to feel better?” She blew her nose again. “Penicillin or something? I tried Contac, but it didn’t do any good.”
Carol shook her head sympathetically.
“I’m afraid you’ve picked up a bad cold,” she said. “Antibiotics don’t work on a virus. I’m going to take some swabs and have a nurse draw a blood sample—don’t worry, Ms. Atkins, you’ll hardly feel it. We’ll run some tests. There are a few medications that can help with the symptoms, and we’ll write you up a prescription.” She stood, peeled the latex gloves from her hands and tossed them into a wastebasket. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Carol closed the door behind her. It was a routine case, a summer cold, and Ashley Atkins was an otherwise healthy young woman. Strictly speaking, Carol could prescribe two antivirals, amantadine and rimantadine, though it was probably too late in the cycle to do much good. In addition, the medical journals were all agog about neuraminidase inhibitors like zanamivir and oseltamivir, though the results were still less than predictable. There were also even newer formulations, most of them still in the pre-brand-name stage and tagged only by alphanumeric identifiers; sometimes they worked, usually they did not. Worse, the cost was horrendous; few HMOs or insurance companies would pay for what they termed such “experimental” treatment.
All you could really do was wait it out. A week, ten days at the most, and Ashley Atkins w
ould be back on the beach without a care in the world. Carol fished the apple from her pocket and nibbled at it.
She was approaching the reception counter to order the tests when she heard a loud hacking from the waiting room. It rose above what suddenly seemed to her a cacophony of lesser coughs and a chorus of snuffling noses.
On a hunch, she walked around the counter and looked out at the waiting room. Of perhaps fifteen people there, she estimated a dozen were exhibiting the sniffling, flushed-face presentation she had already seen three times today.
As she watched, one of the waiting patients began to cough again. It was loud and phlegmy and extended, racking the middle-aged man’s beefy body. It was also evidently painful, bending him forward from the waist as he sat. When the man finally regained control, his eyes were watering profusely. He wiped at his mouth with a handful of paper tissues, and Carol saw the bluish cast of his lips.
My God,she realized,he’s cyanotic.
She was just starting forward when the man’s eyes rolled upward and he fell forward. He crashed heavily to the floor and lay motionless. In an instant, Carol was crouched over him, oblivious to the screaming and commotion in the room. Her fingertips were still wet with the juice of the apple now rolling into a far corner, and she pressed them firmly against the man’s carotid. She concentrated hard, only vaguely aware of a figure that was now kneeling beside her. It was one of the nurses, Jerry-something-or-other, who moonlighted at the clinic when not on duty at Eglin Air Force Base hospital.
“There’s no pulse,” she told him, and began chest compressions as Jerry bent to clear the airway. They worked as a team, with Jerry timing his mouth-to-mouth ventilation to Carol’s pace until LaTonya sprinted up with a bag and oxygen mask.
For the next few minutes, the waiting room was chaos. Other physicians and nurses rushed in, some of them herding the waiting-room occupants away from the tableau on the floor. Patients, themselves alarmed by the clamor of the frightened crowd, peered from behind half-opened doors of the treatment rooms; several emerged to see better, adding to the press of humanity in the room.
Carol noticed them only peripherally, all her attention focused on the medical crisis. The portable electroshock kit was up and charging in seconds, but even repeated hits from the paddles caused no change in the unit’s monitors. She heard somebody, a woman, asking loudly for an ambulance; if Carol had not been so fiercely focused she might have laughed.
Ambulance? This is a clinic, lady. He’s already up to his butt in doctors.
She said nothing, except to call for syringes of adrenaline, bicarbonate, TPF—the full arsenal that modern medicine provides to restimulate cardiac activity.
But not even the most sophisticated treatments can reanimate dead tissue. After almost twenty minutes, Carol waved Jerry away from what was now only a bundle of slowly cooling meat. She looked at her wristwatch, trying to ignore the film of tears that blurred the digital numbers.
“Time of death,” she said in a low voice, “nine-fifty-fourA .M.”
Around the room, there was a hushed silence from the medical staff and the patients alike.
But only for a moment.
Then a woman standing wide-eyed amid the other stunned patients began to cough, loudly and painfully. She was bent forward at the waist when Carol looked up, and had it not been for the fresh sea-horse tattoo she would not have known who it was. The paroxysm rocked Ashley Atkins’s body, and she leaned heavily against the young man who held her arm.
There was an instant’s hesitation before one of the clinic staff moved toward her. In that brief moment, the other patients already had begun to shrink back—all but one, whose own sudden racking cough ended in a projectile gush of bright crimson blood.
What the hell?Carol Mayer asked herself.What the hell is going on here?
She felt a shiver pass along her spine, and recognized it as fear.
Chapter 2
Atlanta, Georgia
July 21
It was clearly not politically correct, but whenever Beck Casey landed in Atlanta there was a part of him that missed the Old South. He would look at the plastic kiosks advertising Japanese laptops, cellular phone services, the ever-changing and still-unmet promises of a dot-com technology, and wonder where the hell Scarlett O’Hara had gone.
At those moments, the historian in Beck would try to envision that world through the eyes of a Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis: vast feudal plantations doomed by the flaws and inequities that defined their agri-economic system but alive with the elegance that the system propped up. Beck saw the aristocratic young bloods, equally at home on horse and behind dueling pistol; and the proud Rebel beauties, as refined as they were fiery in their own varieties of passions. It was a romanticized imagery, and Beck knew it. But in recent years the picture had become increasingly difficult to summon, even though the capital of the New South took pains to remind all comers of its heritage. It had taken Beck several trips to understand what was wrong.
The problem, he had come to see, was in the sanitized version that was now being offered for public consumption. Hartsfield Airport was now the nation’s busiest; gone were the Confederate battle flags, the faux-lithograph postcards portraying red-clay fields of cotton, even the mural re-creating the Battle of Stone Mountain that had greeted travelers of an earlier year. All these had been replaced by ubiquitous photo-posters of Southern belles carefully posed in hoop-skirted coquettishness on the immaculate lawns of restored antebellum mansions. Today the Stars and Bars had been recast as a racist symbol; the plantations raised only tourist dollars; the coterie of modern Scarletts featured a more or less equal mix of races, skin hues and, presumably, creeds.
It was, he supposed, social progress of a sort—though Beck often wondered if blatant historical revisionism caused more problems than it cured. Better to embrace the past, or at least acknowledge its mistakes, than to remanufacture a homogenized history from random bits and scraps that survived the censor’s scissors. All this was the Disney version of the Old South; and even as an unreconstructed Yankee, Beck felt the poorer for it.
He was jostled from his thoughts, bumped from the front by a woman in a rumpled business suit; then, almost simultaneously, from behind by a man in wilted shirtsleeves whose coat was draped over an arm. Both muttered their automatic pardons, their minds already otherwise occupied, before pushing past in opposite directions.
As always, the airport was chaotic. If you fly anywhere in the South, you change planes in Atlanta. The terminal was packed with throngs of the harried, the overwrought, the perplexed. Beck moved as quickly as possible through the gate area, pressed forward by his fellow arrivals still filing down the jetway behind him. Together they formed one of the countless tributaries that merged into a constant flow of humanity pouring through the airport terminal. Beck spotted an eddy, an empty space along the wall. He claimed it for his own, planting his bag at his feet.
“Dr. Casey!” The voice came from behind, and as Beck turned he found himself face-to-face with a young woman almost as tall as himself. She was dressed in a light summer suit that was cut severely, almost like a uniform. Dark hair fell just short of her shoulders before curling slightly inward; it framed a face attractive in what Beck considered a serious-scholar sort of way. But her hands were delicate and lovely, not needing the adornment of jewelry and sensibly displaying none, and her eyes were a startling green.
“Dr. Casey?” This time the voice was interrogative. “Dr. Beck Casey?”
“Maybe,” he said. “If I am, do we know each other?”
“Pardon me,” she said, a hint of impatience in her tone. “I’m supposed to meet a Dr. Casey arriving from Chicago on Delta.” She looked over her shoulder at the few Chicago passengers still milling about the gate area.
“Guilty as charged,” Beck said, and grinned. “Let me guess: Larry Krewell sent you here, right?”
She nodded, and held out her hand. “I’m Andrea Wheelwright, Doctor. From CDC. Dr. Krewell ha
d an unexpected schedule conflict, and I volunteered to meet your flight. You, uh . . . fit the description Dr. Krewell provided.”
“And Larry’s description said what, exactly?”
She colored slightly. “Well—tall. Dark hair.” She smiled. “He described your age as—I’m quoting here—‘either a well-preserved forty or a dissipated-looking thirty-five.’And he said you probably wouldn’t be dressed like a doctor.”
Beck looked down at an Iowa State T-shirt that had once been black, tucked into faded denim jeans. On his feet were salt-stained Top-Siders, no socks. On the carpeted floor beside them, an oversized gym bag that had seen better days bulged with Beck’s traveling kit. Only the laptop Power-Book, slung over his shoulder in its spotless black ballistic nylon case, seemed out of place in an appearance that might, with extreme charity, be described as casual.
“Nailed it, didn’t he?” Beck said, laughing.
The crowd jostled them again, and Andrea Wheelwright scooped up the gym bag with an ease that belied its weight. “I have a car outside,” she said, and—using the bag as a ram—led the way. She pushed through the throngs with enthusiasm, and forced a passage for herself and Beck on the crowded tram to the main terminal. There, she surged ahead to a long escalator that led upward to natural sunlight. He followed in the wake she left, deferring to what he recognized as an expert pathfinder.
Outside, an illegally parked Ford Mustang pressed against the curb under a sign that readTOWAWAY ZONE . It drew annoyed glances from the airport traffic police, but little more: a printed card propped inside the windshield saidCDC /CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL—OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT VEHICLEin large letters, above an impressive block of smaller type. The woman beeped the door locks and moved quickly to the driver’s side. Tossing the bag in the seat behind her, she slid in and the engine roared to life. Before Beck could completely close the passenger door, she was pulling into the passing stream of vehicles.