by Tom Clancy
As with any sort of photography, setting up the shot was the difficult part of the process; once you got to the shutter click, you were home free. From the moment he’d scanned Gordian’s case report, Eric’s mind had been whispering virus. After he’d inspected the first-generation X rays sent by Lieberman, that whisper became an urgent shout. But the problem in taking pictures of viruses was that they tended to be camera shy. The tiniest were dwarfed even by common bacteria. Scientists measured their size in nanometers—billionths of a meter. On this infinitesimal scale, a single droplet of blood became a vast, unmapped sea of crests and troughs where they could remain undetected unless present in great numbers. And the greater their numbers, the worse the infection. It was therefore easier when investigating deadly viral illnesses to find colonies in samples from autopsies of the dead or patients in late-stage disease than in samples taken from less advanced cases.
Eric had hoped from the start that Roger Gordian wasn’t going to make life easy for him. When his viewing of an unconcentrated drop of serum failed to reveal any viruses after nearly two hours, he considered it a break. Better he’d needed to take the extra step of placing a sample in a centrifuge to pack as many organisms as possible into a concentrate than have an abounding population instantly jump out at his eyes. Viruses were unsparing, mechanistic parasites that used up the living cells of their hosts as they bred. Given Eric’s fears about the nature of Gordian’s infection, a sample that teemed with virus particles might have suggested a bleak prognosis indeed.
After centrifugation, Eric had used filter paper to drain the circular grid bearing his concentrated sample, then stained it with a solution of 2 percent phosphotungstate that was conductive to electrons. He had known that his processing would damage whatever viruses might be displayed, and that further deterioration could be expected from the ionizing effect of the microscope’s electron beam. But while there were methods of cryogenic preparation that could have substantially reduced, if not altogether eliminated, the loss of a specimen’s structural integrity, these techniques were finicky and took time. And Eric’s goal was to aid in Gordian’s diagnosis and treatment, not his postmortem, which meant he had to be expedient. He had weighed the two options against each other and decided to go ahead with conventional EM, reasoning that an adequate amount of the sample remained for the lab’s regular staff to perform cryo EM later on, should his own examination indicate it was advisable.
Now Eric removed his glasses and sat rubbing his eyes, strained from too many long, sleepless hours fixed on the visual panel of the EM. The only reminder that his stomach wasn’t completely empty was an occasional repeating of the ketchup-sopped burgers he’d picked up for dinner. He knew he ought to go home, pop some antacid tablets, and climb into bed. But the pictures wouldn’t let him budge.
He put the glasses back on and looked at his micrographs. Then at the electronic library shots on his computer screen. His gaze moving between them again and again.
Lilies. On a quiet pond.
As an epidemiologist with the CDC in the midnineties, Eric had been one of the primary investigators who had worked to identify the mystery illness that scourged the Four Corners Navajo tribal reservation in the Southwest and then gradually made its way eastward, killing better than half its victims — many of them young, otherwise healthy individuals — within days of their first symptoms. The infections began with mild flulike respiratory problems and rapidly progressed toward systemic crash, the walls of the capillaries in the lungs breaking down, developing tiny leaks that bled out into the surrounding tissues until they became inundated with fluid and sometimes swelled to double their normal size. In many of the fatal cases there was a similar breakdown of stomach membranes. The external signs of terminal-stage disease were especially horrible as the blood vessels in the body’s mucous membranes and subcutaneous tissues deteriorated, causing petechiae, pinpoint hemorrhages of the eyes, mouth, and skin.
In the early days of the contagion’s spread, the inhabitants of Four Corners came to refer to the epidemic simply — and for Eric chillingly — as sin nombre. Without a name. That designation stuck with it after intensive scientific detective work eventually determined the disease was a new strain of hantavirus, a lethal hemorrhagic fever whose occurrence was never previously recorded in North America.
The tingles Eric had felt on first perusal of Gordian’s case report had stemmed from the combination of his respiratory problems and the abnormal lymphocytes and diving platelet count in his bloodstream. Platelets were essential to the body’s healing factor, minuscule patches that gathered to stop bleeding and release clotting agents. A normal platelet count averaged 150,000 to 350,000 per microliter of blood. Gordian’s count had been 120,000 per microliter when he was admitted to San Jose Mercy — borderline low. It had then fallen to 90,000 Monday morning. On the most recent workup, it declined even more pronouncedly to 50,000 per microliter.
Eric had seen nearly the same profile in sin nombre patients entering the pulmonary edema phase of the disease. And changes in Gordian’s chest X rays had also been discomfortingly familiar. The vague skeins of shadow across his lungs evident on Sunday’s pictures had become linear opacities of the airspaces within twenty-four hours, visible as short perpendicular white streaks at their bases. By Tuesday afternoon, there were longer lines developing from the hilum, the crowded interchange where the blood vessels, nerves, and bronchi emerged into the lungs.
Sin nombre, he thought.
Without a name.
The liliform viruses now on Eric’s computer screen were micrographs that he and his colleagues on the CDC investigative team had taken eight years ago… and the shots he’d gotten out of the EM’s photographic chamber tonight bore an undeniably striking similarity to them.
As in the original series, the organisms were circular in shape. As in the originals, their envelopes were ringed with binding proteins that enabled them to attach to the outer membranes of host cells. But the architecture of their nucleocapsids — the core material within the viral envelopes that held the genomic code for their replication and entry into the cell — showed a subtle variance.
Studying the set of images he’d isolated from Roger Gordian’s bloodstream, Eric could see none of the roundedness typical of the nucleocapsids on the database specimens of sin nombre, or for that matter in any of the related old-world hantavirus strains he’d encountered in his scientific career. Instead, they appeared long and straight, almost filamentous, even when computer-enhanced.
Eric couldn’t go beyond guessing whether this anomaly represented a difference in the genetic makeup of the separate specimens until a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, probe was conducted on Gordian’s samples, and the actual RNA sequences could be compared against the codes of all other known hantaviruses. But his immunogobulin capture assays — fluorescent dye screening tests developed in the late 1980s that produced results within three or four hours — had shown weak positives for several catalogued strains of the disease, with the brightest green glow on his lab slide appearing for sin nombre. While that, too, had been relatively pale, it had made Eric nervous as hell once added to the rest of the evidence before him.
His eyes hurting, his stomach hollow, he sat there tensely in the lab, frozen behind his computer as dawn crept its slow way into the sky outside. He could say very little absolutely except that Roger Gordian was in serious trouble. But he believed in his bones that if Gordian didn’t have sin nombre, he’d contracted something very much like it.
That a close relative to the disease without a name, one nobody had known about, had just shown up on the doorstep.
* * *
The doe strode softly into the thick stand of trees, her tracks like broken hearts in the fallen snow. Food was plentiful here, the low-hanging pine boughs bunched with cones, the needle buds on the saplings still succulent, only beginning to brown in their cold-weather dormancy.
Scanning a moment for predators, she saw nothing disturb the ve
getation, heard nothing except the hushed whisper of the breeze. Then she lowered her head and tore at the young trees with her flat, blunt teeth, lacking incisors to bite into them.
The knife slashed up from beneath the dark shelf of a branch, plunged hilt-deep into the softness of her throat, then slashed crosswise once and again. Arterial and venous blood gushed over the animal’s white down and stained the snow under her front hooves mingled shades of red. She collapsed heavily, the brightness of life frozen in eyes already dead.
Kuhl knelt to pull his knife from the wound, traces of vapor steaming from its wet blade.
For the first time in weeks, he felt released.
* * *
Gordian awoke, gasping for air.
Feverish and disoriented, unable at first to remember where he was, he felt certain a hand was clapped over his nose and mouth. Then he got his bearings. He was in his hospital room. His bed light off in the dimness of early morning. A thin crack of illumination spilling under his door from the outer corridor.
Air.
He needed air.
Gordian struggled to pull down a breath, his body arched off his mattress from the effort. But his lungs didn’t respond. They felt heavy and clogged. A muffled gurgling noise escaped him. Air. He fumbled under his chin for the oxygen mask. Couldn’t find it. He reached down to his chest and still couldn’t locate it. Groped about on his right side, where he sometimes clipped it to the safety rail. Not there.
The oxygen mask. He needed the mask. Where was it?
His mouth opened wide, he swung his arm up over his head, found the feed hose running from the wall, and with a surge of relief slid his fingers down along its length. Feeling for the mask at the end of it—
His newborn relief suddenly plummeted away into confusion.
The mask…
He was already wearing it.
He cupped his hand over its curved plastic surface, pressed it against his face, drew hard. Air hissed through the tube. He could hear it over the strangled shreds of sound coming out of him. Hear it flowing into his mask… but that was where it seemed to stop. His throat, his chest, were blocked.
Desperate, choking, feeling as if his chest were about to explode, he clawed for the emergency button at his side to summon a nurse, hoping to God one was very nearby.
EIGHTEEN
CALIFORNIA NOVEMBER 16, 2001
The condominium subleased by Donald Palardy belonged to a large block of units UpLink International had acquired to house its midlevel employees in one of the newer planned developments in Sunnydale — a suburban community with the conceit of a major city, about fifteen miles south of San Jose.
By the time he got into his car to drive down Wednesday morning, Ricci had started wondering if Megan and Scull could have been right about him making too much of Palardy’s absence. Maybe Palardy had put on a well-rehearsed sick voice when he’d phoned Hernandez to say he wouldn’t be at work the previous Monday. Maybe he’d met a hot number in a bar and spontaneously decided to take her on a cruise to nowhere. Maybe he would be in bed with his phone unplugged, munching on potato chips and watching game shows or reruns of sixties sitcoms on cable television. In hindsight, Ricci’s all-fall-down comment about Palardy and Gordian seemed a bit silly, even to him. And his finger-snapping had made it sound sillier. Of course, everyone had agreed that something wasn’t kosher about Palardy’s continued dereliction after three days, and felt it was at least worth checking out.
His thoughts had gone on in that mode until he finally located Palardy’s condo after several wrong turns leading onto streets named for different native flowers that all sounded alike to him, past rows of two-family stucco buildings that all looked alike.
Then Ricci stopped questioning himself and started noticing things. It was a mental shift to a scrupulous objectivity that grounded every good cop the moment he arrived at the scene of an investigation. And Ricci doubted even the Boston Police Department officials who’d once thrown him into the political winds would have disputed that he’d been among their best.
As he rolled his Jetta into the driveway, his first observation was that Palardy’s van was in his carport. His second was that Palardy hadn’t brought in his newspapers for a few days — there were three lying on his walk in their plastic delivery bags. That could mean he was home and too sick to bother picking them up or that he’d gone off somewhere without his vehicle, although he might own more than a single set of wheels.
He strode to the door, rang the bell, and waited. No one answered. He fingered the buzzer again, keeping it depressed a little longer. Still nobody. Then he knocked without getting a response. After a few minutes, he leaned over to peek through the glass panels on either side of the door, but they were covered with louvered screens. The shade was likewise fully drawn over the front window.
Ricci buzzed again, let another minute pass. He heard a sound from inside, listened, realized it was the racket of a cuckoo clock. Palardy didn’t come to the door.
Ricci tried the doorknob. Locked. He bent to examine it out of old habit. A typical key-in cylinder lock. He could retract the bolt with a credit card in ten seconds flat. In fact, the door had been opened that way before, judging by the scratches on the rim and doorframe. That prompted another observation. The scratches looked as if they might be fresh.
He considered this a moment. The marks might not have the slightest significance. Ricci would have been hard pressed to count how often he had accidentally gotten locked out of his own home and used a charge card to work his way inside. It was easy once you got the knack. Anybody could do it. Every cop he’d known. And Palardy, being a trained countersnoop, it seemed reasonable to assume he wouldn’t need to hire a locksmith if he forgot his house keys somewhere. Not with a Minnie Mouse job like this. On the other hand, Palardy had unexplainedly dropped from sight, and Ricci’s probing mind couldn’t rule out the chance that someone else might have gained entry.
He thought about using the card trick to admit himself right now but then dismissed the notion. That very sort of tactic had once helped his detractors pin the rogue-detective label on him. And he was just getting comfortable at UpLink.
He stood there at the door, attempting to remember the street where he passed the management office. Fuchsia, was it? Or Manzanita? Unable to decide, he returned to his car and drove around a while, looking for the place.
A quarter hour and multiple wrong turns later, he found it on Lupine. The building manager was a man named Perez whose reservations about admitting a stranger to Palardy’s apartment unit began to dissipate the instant Ricci flashed his UpLink Security ID card. And no wonder, since the company owned half the complex.
“We’re pretty concerned,” Ricci said. He kept his card displayed. “Nobody’s heard from him in days.”
Perez seemed fascinated with the Sword insignia.
“I do this, got to stick around while you’re inside,” he said with a heavy Mexican accent.
“Okay by me.”
Perez nodded. “Lemme grab the key ring, I meet you over there.”
Ricci offered to give him a lift instead, dreading another wrong turn. With Perez beside him to furnish directions, it took under five minutes to get back to the condo.
In the walkway Perez fumbled with his keys for a second, found the right one, and pushed open the door.
They found the living room unoccupied. Utterly still except for the ticking of the cuckoo clock.
“Palardy?” Ricci stood in the entry. “You here?”
Silence. Stillness.
Ricci stepped past the building manager to another door, slightly ajar. He glanced over his shoulder. “This the bedroom?”
Perez nodded.
Ricci rapped the wood. Again no answer. He grabbed the doorknob and entered.
In the doorway behind him, Perez inhaled sharply at the sight of the body.
Ricci’s memory of the photo he’d pulled from the security files confirmed it was Palardy. He was lying in be
d on his back, his eyes wide open. A blanket covered him to the chest. His face was gray, with dark purple blemishes on the cheeks and forehead. His mouth was twisted into what appeared to be a grimace of pain. The hand sticking out from under the blanket was hooked into a claw, the visible portion of his bare arm also lesioned.
“You should stay back,” Ricci said to the building manager.
He didn’t need encouragement.
“Sí, ” he said shakily. “I got to call the cops—”
“Have a cellular on you?”
Perez nodded.
“Good.” Ricci inclined his head toward the telephone on the bedside stand. “I don’t think you want that one anywhere near your mouth.”
Perez nodded again and crossed himself, staring inside from the entrance.
Ricci produced a business card and pen from inside his sport jacket, wrote hastily on the back of the card, and handed it to him. “Do me a favor; contact the guy whose name and number I jotted down. That’s Pete Nimec, at UpLink. Let him know what we found here. If you don’t mind, I think it might be better if he’s the one who gets in touch with the police.”
Perez nodded a third time and took the portable phone out of his pocket.
Ricci turned back into the room, reached into his own pocket for the scrub mask and latex gloves he’d brought with him, and put them on. Then he went over to the bed for a closer look at the dead man.
The skin at the back of his neck pebbled.
Palardy’s stomach had tossed up whatever was inside it. His gaping, cyanotic lips were crusted with vomit. His face, too. It had overflowed onto his pillows, sheet, and blanket, leaving them splashed with yellowish stains.
Ricci examined the nightstand. Besides the phone, it held a small reading lamp and a half-filled glass of something that might have been apple juice or a soft drink. The glass was on a coaster between the bed and phone. Ricci frowned, thinking. Or rather, letting a thought that had already occurred deep in his mind rise to a conscious level. Had he felt an attack or seizure coming on, Palardy surely would have attempted to call for help. Very likely overturned the glass when he was groping for the phone. Dropped the receiver, if he’d managed to get his hand around it. But they were neatly in place. And the way Palardy’s blanket was pulled up to his chest, he almost could have been tucked in. Passed away without stirring from his sleep.