On Ashley’s recommendation, the door sign beside room 5C would read: Hardy, Frank.
By Monday morning, Gordian’s fever had lowered to 101° and he was feeling stronger, though his breathing continued to be strained and he showed little desire for food. His standardized physician’s treatment sheet — known by the memory key ABC/DAVID to every fourth-year medical student, physician’s aid, and registered nurse — listed his condition as stable on its third line, between the Admit to: and Diet information. The next line (A for Activity) had a check mark in front of the words Bed Rest. Blood and sputum samples were ordered in the space that read Studies and Lab on this particular hospital’s form (synonymous with Intake and Output in the next-to-last line of the trainee’s mnemonic). The final line, listed as Medications (i.e., D for Drugs), called for a moderate dosage of acetaminophen every four hours pending the lab results, which were not expected to return positive for anything more severe than the flu.
At 8:30 A.M. sharp, Ashley and Julia arrived to visit, Julia leaving at 10 o’clock to attend a meeting at the fashion design firm where she’d recently been hired as a public relations consultant, Ashley staying on until Gordian shooed her home at noon with reassurances that he was doing fine — though she made a point of reassuring him that, fine or not, he could count on seeing her again by dinnertime.
Around three in the afternoon, Gordian’s attending nurse came to take his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure readings, give him his prescribed Tylenol capsules, and scribble something on his chart. A few minutes afterward, he became groggy and let himself doze off for a while.
At four P.M., as Gordian slept on the fifth floor, a nurse on station duty two floors below briefly left her desk for the ladies’ room. The moment she did, a man in the crisp white uniform of an orderly entered the station from where he had been drifting near a supply closet, treading quietly in crepe-soled shoes.
Keeping an eye out for the nurse, he pointed-and-clicked through several menus on her computer and retrieved the bed assignment information on all patients admitted in the past twenty-four hours. He could have chosen to use any of the networked unit computers at any station in any ward in the building. This was simply a convenient opening; amid the constant movement of a busy hospital, he would have had no trouble finding others.
Seconds later, the data on the patient in room 5C appeared on the computer, minus his falsified name.
Returning to the opening screen, the man left the nurse’s station and strode along the hall until he found a small, unoccupied patients’ lounge and entered it. There he slipped a wireless phone from his pocket and placed a call on a digitally encoded line.
“He’s here,” he said into the mouthpiece.
The bottleneck elevator rose from the upper sublevel and opened to release him with a pneumatic sigh. Emerging into the corridor, he turned to the right and walked past high-security doors marked with signs for the laboratories in the connecting hallways behind them. Some displayed the universal biohazard symbol at eye level, their red-and-black trefoil pattern conspicuous against the surrounding grayness.
He carried himself lightly for a man of his muscular proportions, and this partially went to explain the dead silence of his progress down the hall. But as the fluorescent panels overhead neutralized shading and shadow with their suffused radiance, so did the thick concrete walls seem to dampen sound, flatten color, deduct from between them all except the essential and functional.
While the drab work environment required varying degrees of acclimatization from most of the personnel who spent their days and nights physically isolated even from the outlying northern wilderness, Siegfried Kuhl found it to his decided liking. There was a sense of impregnable weight and austerity that suited him. But he felt something beyond that, an unseen force. On occasion, he would put his two hands against a wall and feel the strong vibrational pulse of machinery behind it, the pumping of compressed-air streams to microencapsulation chambers and “space suits” in the Level 4 laminar flow enclosures underground. At such times Kuhl imagined himself to be touching a hard womb of stone, the life forms within seething and twisting in furious gestation.
Kuhl advanced through the hall, men and women in surgical scrubs moving singly and in groups toward the laboratory entrances on either side of him. Comparable in his mind to Los Alamos at its inception, this was the only facility of its type on earth, at the frontier of the development and mass production of biological weapons — of which the Sleeper virus was the current acme. Its operations covered every stage of the pathogen’s creation from genomic analysis and DNA splicing to its cultivation, stabilization, and chemical encoating. The microbe’s trigger mechanism additionally required the concurrent and coordinated applications of protein and molecular engineering processes. And experimentation to refine the virus continued with the goals of accelerating its lethal progression within the target host or hosts, increasing its resistance to potential cures and inoculations, and addressing the need for variant strains that would provide buyers with widened options, allowing them to select from among diverse packages of symptoms.
There was still work, much work, to be done before perfection was achieved.
Now Kuhl reached a reinforced steel door that divided the corridor beyond from the rest of the building. No signs marked the entry. He put his hand against its intelligent push plate and paused for his subcutaneous vascular patterns to be IR scanned and matched against a binary file image in an allied database.
A millisecond later, a green indicator light flashed on. Then the vaultlike door swung inward without a sound as the flow of current to the armature of its electromagnetic lock was briefly interrupted.
Kuhl entered a short passage. He was alone here. The walls to his left and right were featureless, the door to the single office at the passage’s opposite end made of dark, heavy wood. Its knob was of gleaming brass.
He went to the door and waited. There was no need to announce himself. The biometric scanner that had allowed him into the hallway would have identified him to the office’s occupant, and his approach would have been monitored with hidden cameras.
A moment later, the door opened, Harlan DeVane standing on the other side, his hand on the polished brass handle, wearing a white shirt, white tie, and custom-tailored black suit of perfect outline that might have been stenciled onto his bony frame.
“Siegfried, come in,” he said, and motioned him inside with a flick of his pale, thin hand. “You’ll be pleased to hear the news I’ve received about Roger Gordian.”