“What is it?” she asked.
There were lines under his collar, around his neck. White lines, like freeways.
“Damp palms,” he said. “Vergil had damp palms.” They had already been inside him for days. “So obvious.”
“Edward, please, what is it?”
“I have to make a call,” he said. Gail followed him into the bedroom and stood as he sat on the bed and punched the Genetron number. “Dr. Michael Bernard, please,” he said. The receptionist told him, much too quickly, there was no such person at Genetron. “This is too important to fuck around with,” he said coldly. “Tell Dr. Bernard this is Edward Milligan and it’s urgent.”
The receptionist put him on hold. Perhaps Bernard was still at Vergil’s apartment, trying to sort out the pieces of the puzzle; perhaps they would simply send someone out to arrest him. It really didn’t matter either way.
“Bernard here.” The doctor’s voice was flat and serpentine—much, Edward imagined, like he himself sounded.
“It’s too late, Doctor. We shook Vergil’s hand. Sweaty palms. Remember? And ask yourself whom we’ve touched since. We’re the vectors now.”
“I was at the apartment today, Milligan,” Bernard said. “Did you kill Ulam?”
“Yes. He was going to release his… microbes. Noocytes. Whatever they are, now.”
“Did you find his girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do with her?”
“Do with her? Nothing. She was in the shower. But listen—”
“She was gone when we arrived, nothing but her clothes. Did you kill her, too?”
“Listen to me, Doctor. I have Vergil’s microbes inside me. So do you.”
There was silence on the other end, then a deep sigh. “Yes?”
“Have you worked out any way to control them, I mean, inside our bodies?”
“Yes.” Then, more softly, “No. Not yet. Antimetabolites, controlled radiation therapy, actinomycin. We haven’t tried everything, but… no.”
“Then that’s it, Dr. Bernard.”
Another longer pause. “Hm.”
“I’m going back to my wife now, to spend what little time we have.”
“Yes,” Bernard said. “Thank you for calling.”
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“Of course. Good-bye.”
Edward hung up and put his arms around Gail.
“It’s a disease, isn’t it?” she said.
Edward nodded. “That’s what Vergil made. A disease that thinks. I’m not sure there’s any way to fight an intelligent plague.”
16
Harrison leafed through the procedure manual, making notes methodically. Yng sat in a stressless leather chair in the corner, fingers of both hands forming a pyramid before his face, his long, lank black hair falling over his eyes and glasses. Bernard stood before the black formica-topped desk, impressed by the quality of the silence. Harrison leaned back from the desk and held up his notepad.
“First, we’re not responsible. That’s how I read it. Ulam did his research without our authorization—”
“But we didn’t fire him when we learned of it,” Yng countered. “That’s going to be a bad point in court.”
“We’ll worry about all that later,” Harrison said sharply.
“What we are responsible for is reporting to the CDC. This isn’t a vat spill or breach of lab containment, but—”
“None of us, not one of us, thought Ulam’s cells could be viable outside the body,” Yng said, twisting his hand into a jumble of fingers.
“It’s very possible they weren’t, at first,” Bernard said, drawn into the discussion despite himself. “It’s obvious there’s been a lot of development since the original lymphocytes. Self-directed development.”
“I still refuse to believe Ulam created intelligent cells,” Harrison said. “Our own research in the cube has shown how difficult that would be. How did he determine their intelligence? How did he train them? No—something—”
Yng laughed. “Ulam’s body was being transformed, redesigned… how can we doubt there was an intelligence behind the transformation?”
“Gentlemen,” Bernard said softly. “That’s all academic. Are we, or are we not going to alert Atlanta and Bethesda?”
“What in hell do we tell them?”
“That we are all in the early stages of a very dangerous infection,” Bernard said, “generated in our laboratories by a researcher, now dead—”
“Murdered,” Yng said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“And spreading at an alarming rate.”
“Yes,” Yng said, “but what can the CDC do about it? The contamination has spread, perhaps across the continent by now.”
“No,” Harrison said, “not quite that far. Vergil hasn’t made contact with that many people. It could still be confined to Southern California.”
“He made contact with us,” Yng said ruefully. “It is your opinion we are contaminated?”
“Yes,” Bernard said.
“Is there anything we can do, personally?”
He pretended to consider, then shook his head. “If you’ll excuse me, there’s work to do before we announce.” He left the conference room and walked down the outside corridor to the stairs. Near the front of the west wing was a pay phone. Removing his credit card from his wallet, he inserted it into the slot and punched in the number of his Los Angeles office.
“This is Bernard,” he said. “I’m going to take my limo to the San Diego airport shortly. Is George available?” The receptionist made several calls and placed George Oilman, his mechanic and sometimes-pilot, on the other end of the line. “George, sorry for such short notice, but it’s something of an emergency. The jet should be ready in an hour and a half, fully fueled.”
“Where this time?” Oilman asked, used to long flights on short notice.
“Europe. I’ll let you know precisely in about half an hour, so you can file a flight plan.”
“Not your usual, Doctor.”
“Hour and a half, George.”
“We’ll be ready.”
“I’m flying alone.”
“Doctor, I’d rather—”
“Alone, George.”
George sighed reluctantly. “All right.”
He held down the receiver switch and then punched in a twenty-seven-digit number, beginning with his satellite code and ending with a secret scramble string. A woman answered in German.
“Doktor Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs, bitte.”
She asked no questions. Whoever could get through on this line, the doctor would speak to. Paulsen-Fuchs answered several minutes later. Bernard glanced around uneasily, realizing he was taking some risk being observed in the open.
“Paul, this is Michael Bernard. I have a rather extreme favor to ask of you.”
“Herr Doktor Bernard, always welcome, always welcome! What can I do for you?”
“Do you have a total isolation lab at the Wiesbaden facility you can clear within the day?”
“For what purpose? Excuse me, Michael, is it not a good time to ask?”
“No, not really.”
“If there is a grave emergency, well, yes, I suppose.”
“Good. I’ll need that lab, and I’ll need to use B.K. Pharmek’s private strip. When I leave my plane, I must be placed in an isolation suit and a sealed biologicals transport truck immediately. Then my aircraft will be destroyed on the runway and the entire area sprayed with disinfectant foam. I will be your guest… if you can call it that… indefinitely. The lab should be equipped so that I can live there and do my work. I will require a computer terminal with full services.”
“You are seldom a drunkard, Michael. And you have never been unstable, not in our time together. This sounds quite serious. Are we talking about a fire, Michael? A vat spill, perhaps?”
Bernard wondered how Paulsen-Fuchs had found out he was working with gene engineering. Or did he know? Was he just guessing? “A very extreme emergency, Herr Doktor. Can you oblige me?”
“Will all be explained?”
“Yes. And it will be to your advantage—and your nation’s advantage—to know ahead of time.”