“I’m going to ask a couple of questions that might sound strange,” Talia said.
“Okay.”
“Do you work closely with animals?”
“No,” Celia replied. Then a thought seemed to strike her. “I have a cat.”
“Have you eaten anything out of the ordinary?” Talia asked. “Taken any prescription or non-prescription drugs? Tell the truth—this is important. You won’t get in trouble.”
“I can’t think of anything,” the woman said, shaking her head. “I was just in France, but I’m not very adventurous, food-wise.”
“France? How recent was that?”
“I just got back to San Francisco a few days ago.”
“Did you go anyplace else? Anywhere in Africa or Southeast Asia?”
“No, no place like that.”
“Okay,” Talia said. “We’re going to draw some blood and send it to the lab. Meantime, we’ll give you some chicken soup in the arm and something to bring that fever down. How does that sound?”
The woman smiled weakly and nodded.
“Let me look at your eyes for a sec,” Talia said, moving in close. She took out a small penlight and shone it on one, then the other, holding the lids open with her free right hand.
“Okay,” she said. We’re going to be moving you to another room. Have you got anyone in the waiting room?”
Celia shook her head. Talia nodded, picked up her coffee cup, and exited the room.
Outside, she took Randal aside.
“Some subconjunctival bleeding,” she murmured. “Could be some kind of hemorrhagic fever.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Randal said. “Like what? Yellow Fever? Ebola?”
“Whoa, Tex,” she said. “I said it could be, but it’s still not likely. She might just have a bad case of the flu and a nose bleed. But let’s be on the safe side. Put her in a clean room. Strict isolation, okay? Just in case. And let’s turf it to someone who really knows about this stuff—Collins, maybe, or Park. Okay? And don’t spread any Ebola rumors around. I was just thinking out loud.”
“Okay,” he said.
She had almost finished her coffee when Ravenna stuck her head around the corner.
“Incoming SCUD,” she said. “Motor-vehicle accident.”
“My lucky night,” Talia sighed, and she went to scrub up.
By the time she had the guy stabilized enough for real surgery, her shift was almost up. Which was good, because she was dead on her feet. She was pulling herself together to go when she ran into Randal.
“Get her settled in?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “And you know what? We got another one.”
“Another what?”
“Another blood-sneezer. Old African-American lady. I sent her straight to isolation.”
“Huh,” Talia said, and she frowned. “I don’t know. This is starting to sound like a thing. Have you called around?”
“I’ve kind of had my hands full,” he said.
“I’ll check it out tomorrow,” she said.
She wore her scrubs home, showered, and pulled out a pair of pajamas.
“It’s just us, baby,” she told the pj’s. “We can be together all night.”
She fixed herself a Moscow Mule and just sat for a moment, savoring the slight sting of the ginger beer and lime over the kick of the vodka. She checked the messages on her landline. Some of her friends thought she was a bit out of it for having one, but landlines worked in power outages, and they worked when towers or satellites were down. And here in earthquake-land, that seemed like a good thing.
Also, landlines—hers anyway—didn’t have texting, so she could safely give the number to people from whom she didn’t want to get texts all of the time. Like the people who had left the four messages on her phone. Her father, a guy named Dean she had met last week at a bar called the Choirboy, another guy named Serge who got her number from, of course, her father. And another one from her father.
Tonight, he counted as two people.
Deleting the messages, she sat back and took a sip. Halfway through her drink she remembered to turn on her cell phone. It had been off all day.
She had a text from St. John, a guy with whom she had done her residency. She hadn’t heard from him in a while—he worked at another hospital in the Bay Area, also in the ER. Curious, she checked the message.
Hey Tal—funny disease today. Hemorrhaging, high fever. Couldn’t diagnose, turfed to ICU. Two cases. U have any? Let’s get a drink sometime.
“Wow,” she said to her pj’s. “It must be a thing.”
2
As the helicopter descended, Malakai began to think he had made a mistake—perhaps a fatal one. He had been ambushed before, in Rwanda and in South Kivu. In Uganda he’d been led into a trap he’d barely escaped. But this was California, and it was possible that his instincts had grown sleepy.
They were kicking in now, though, big time. What he saw below him didn’t make sense.
It didn’t fit with the public story, either, which meant something was happening that powerful people did not want to be common knowledge. That could very well mean he was entering into a situation he might not as easily walk out of.
He had expected to meet with a few park rangers, some police or National Guard or whoever dealt with these sorts of matters. Instead what he saw was a cluster of prefabricated buildings bearing the symbol of Anvil, a military contractor that he personally knew had been involved in some pretty nasty business around the globe. He knew that because he’d worked for them himself, during the Second Congo War.
Of the four people with him in the helicopter, two of them had sidearms. He might be able to grab the gun of the nearest, shoot the other, take control of the situation…
Maybe twenty years ago. Maybe even ten.
But not now.
Oh well, he thought. We’ll see, I suppose.
The chopper landed, and he wasn’t murdered immediately upon touchdown, so he figured this wasn’t payback of some sort. They wanted something from him, and most likely it was only after they got it—or if he couldn’t provide it—that imminent danger kicked in. Nevertheless, he was on the edge of a forest with which he wasn’t familiar, surrounded by people he did not know.
Everything about it screamed “covert.” Whatever was happening here, only very few people knew about it.
He was escorted into one of the buildings, which had been set up as a spare sort of office. The desk was fairly large, but the only thing on it was a plain manila envelope. Behind it stood a man of middle years. His suit was expensive and tailored. The man escorting Malakai seemed to shrink a little in his presence.
“Mr. Youmans,” the man behind the desk said. “My name is Trumann Phillips.”
He reached out to shake Malakai’s hand. His own hands were soft and smooth, suggesting a man of soft living. But Malakai had dealt with men like this before. The set of his shoulders and the hard glint in his eye suggested some sort of predator. This man was used to getting what he wanted, and probably not squeamish about how he got it. Or from whom.
“Tell me, Mr Youmans,” Phillips began, taking a seat and clasping his hands together. “What have you heard of the situation?”
“What the television tells me,” Malakai said carefully. “It’s all a bit confused—doesn’t really make sense. Some apes escaped from a laboratory and freed others from a zoo. They had some sort of a fight with policemen on the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of them were killed there, but a few escaped into the Muir Woods.” He spread his hands. “To here, I take it.”
Phillips nodded.
“That’s the bare bones of it,” he said. He unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair. “You know something about apes, don’t you, Mr. Youmans?” he continued.
“A thing or two, I suppose,” Malakai replied. “But you must know that already, or I wouldn’t be here. I consult for those who study apes in the wild—help track and find them so they can be studied. I work with various rescue groups, as well, and am employed by several zoos.”
“Yes,” Phillips said. “But back in the day you wore other hats. Safari guide, for instance. Mercenary. And you poached mountain gorillas and chimpanzees.”
Malakai shrugged. “If I’d done anything like that, it would have been illegal. So I don’t suppose I did it.”
Phillips eyebrows dipped a little, and Malakai felt the danger lurking there.
“I’m not concerned with the legality of anything you’ve done,” Phillips said. “I’m concerned with your qualifications. And the results you achieve.”
“Mr. Phillips,” Malakai said, softly, “You contacted me, sir—not the other way around, so I wonder why this talk of qualifications. Yes, I know how to hunt apes. And yes, I know how to capture them. And I daresay—if it is necessary—that I know how to kill them. If those are the qualifications that concern you, I’m your man.
“If not…” He shrugged again, trying to seem confident while wondering what his “if not” might lead to. A flight back to San Francisco? An unmarked grave in the Muir Woods?
Phillips sat silently for a moment, tapping his finger on the table.
“You signed a confidentiality form before coming in here,” he said.
“I did,” Malakai agreed.
“You understand the penalties involved in breaking that contract?”
“It does not matter,” Malakai said. “Asking for my word would have been sufficient to secure my discretion.”
Phillips gave him a long, hard look in the eye.
Malakai gave it back unflinchingly. A moment of truth was coming, a wind blowing through.
Phillips finally nodded.
“Fine,” he said. “Here’s the job. Lead a team into the woods. Find the apes. Capture them.”
“How many are there? Which species?”
“Chimps, mostly, including some bonobos. A few orangutans and gorillas.”
“They’ll be all over the place, then,” Malakai said. “The different groups won’t stick together. Depending on how many there are, it could take a while.”
“We believe not,” Phillips said. “We believe they keep together as a group.”
Malakai blinked, but didn’t say anything. That didn’t make any sense at all, but then again, neither did anything he knew about the incident on the bridge. He’d half believed the whole thing had been some sort of weird American publicity stunt, staged for a reality show of some sort.
“How many did you say, sir?” Malakai asked. “How many apes all together?”
“It may be as many as several hundred,” Phillips answered.
“That is… a lot,” Malakai said. “You want me to capture a few hundred apes?”
“As many as possible,” Phillips said. “At least one from each species would be nice.” His lips thinned into a smile.
“That’s the job,” he said. “Now, shall we discuss compensation?”