The technician in the van switched off the GPS device. It had worked — the combined tracker and vital-signs register had sounded the alarm, and the team knew at once that number five was in distress and where he was located. He had been easy to find off the public road, and luckily no one had seen him fall or stopped to help him. The crash had taken him clear of the road and down a small embankment where he wasn’t visible to passersby. The doctor in charge had been grateful for that.
Now the subject was displaying a highly unusual assortment of signs, but nothing they hadn’t seen before. The GPS showed what speed he had been going — much too fast for that phase of the training cycle. It looked as if they were losing him, but the doctor knew a fresh batch of subjects were conveniently scheduled to arrive that very day. On the other hand, it was a shame; this one showed some promise, as he had been an athlete before getting in trouble with the law.
Within twenty minutes they had reached their destination. The van backed into a loading dock where another medical team was waiting, and they transferred the cyclist into a windowless room full of emergency medical equipment. As he lay unconscious on a gurney, one orderly cut away the man’s cycling gear while another wheeled over what resembled a dialysis machine. By the time it was hooked up, the EEG monitor showed that there was no brain function, but that was of secondary importance — they had to make sure that the heart kept working so that they could recycle the blood and figure out exactly what had gone wrong, even though they had a pretty good idea.
A half hour later, the cyclist was technically dead, but his breathing and heart and vital functions were being maintained mechanically. His body would most likely be worked up and kept with the others in this state for as long as it was useful. The man’s blood was running through a system that centrifuged it in 100 cc samples, separating out the usual components and the additives before reintroducing the cells and the plasma back into his artificially maintained circulation.
A surgical team entered the room, gloved and gowned as if for a regular operative procedure. The only difference was that none of the team was terribly concerned with sterility, and the scrub had been perfunctory at best. Without ceremony, a splenectomy was performed on the dead man and a lung sample was taken. Both the spleen and the lung sample were immediately sectioned and examined in the same room by one of the senior scientists on the staff. Under the high-powered microscope, he could see what he knew would be there, a profusion of microscopic, sapphire-blue spheres blocking the capillaries. The scientist checked his watch. He knew the boss was out of the country, but he’d need to hear about this right away.
CHAPTER 1
The woman is desperate and defenseless. A large man is sitting on her chest, restraining her, his head turned while watching the other end of a long room. The man’s blocking her view, but she knows that whatever’s going on is bad. She senses that someone she knows and cares for is going to die. As she struggles with the weight on top of her, she looks at up at her tormentor’s face. He’s a man she knew at one of the foster homes and institutions in which she was raised, a man who got too close. She looks away and then back at him. Now he’s another man, her uncle, the worst of the men who have affected her life, and he’s holding the video camera she came to hate.
The uncle she so despises says something in Albanian to a colleague who is somewhere in the room. It’s a language she recognizes but no longer understands. The look on his face, with its cruel smile, is that of a predator, with her being the prey. Enjoying his victim’s terror, he speaks again, but now in English. “Do it!” he snarls to his compatriot. “Shoot him!” The woman lifts and twists her head unnaturally to get a view. A hooded man is tied to a chair with duct tape. He jerks back and forth as he tries to free an arm or a leg, like a desperate insect caught in a spiderweb. The other man has a gun. He’s walking around the chair, shouting in Albanian, lunging forward with the gun outstretched, poking the bound man, teasing him as a cat teases a captured mouse. With his free hand the armed man reaches over and tears off the hood and then looks back toward his partner. The woman recognizes the bound victim. It is a former medical school classmate named Will. And now she can see the gunman and recognizes him as well. It’s her father. He sees her and turns back toward Will, and as she fills the world with a screamed “No!” he shoots the prisoner in the head.
—
Just as suddenly as it appeared, the weight left her chest. The heavy, molecular immunology textbook that she had been reading thudded to the floor. The woman sat up from the sofa, momentarily disoriented, sweating, shivering in the coolness of her apartment’s living room. She became aware of an unfamiliar sound, not screams or gunfire, but a penetrating ring. It was her doorbell, which had been pressed possibly twice in the eighteen months she’d been living there.
Still confused, the woman unsteadily got to her feet and walked to the narrow entryway of her apartment. Who on earth could be ringing her doorbell? Looking through the peephole, she recognized her visitor. She turned and leaned her back against the door, stunned anew. The doorbell’s raucous sound echoed around her mostly empty apartment, seeming louder than it actually was, but as she recovered from the anxiety and tension of the nightmare, it was easier to bear. She fortified herself with a deep breath as her visitor gave up on the doorbell and loudly knocked three times in quick succession. He always was very persistent. With a sigh, she turned and opened both locks on her door and pulled it open.
“Pia!” said George Wilson. “You’re home. Terrific! How are you?” His lips were pulled back in an uncertain smile as he vainly tried to look her in the eye and gauge her reaction to his unexpected appearance on her doorstep. Then his line of sight went south, taking in her nearly naked body, and his smile broadened. At least the sight of her was welcoming. To him she was as alluring as she’d always been. He held a sad-looking bunch of roses.
“George, what the hell are you doing here?” demanded Pia Grazdani, pronouncing each word separately, uninterested in hiding her intense irritation. Her hands were jammed down on her hips with her jaw jutting forward, lips pressed together. Only when she followed George’s gaze did she remember she was dressed in only a sports bra and panties, exposed to the apartment-complex’s hallway, where some of the neighbors’ children were playing. At her feet and extending over to the couch where she had fallen asleep was a trail of running gear: shoes, ankle-high socks, a white sweatshirt, running shirt and shorts, and a small backpack. On the coffee table was an iPod with earphones.
“You better come in,” she said with uncamouflaged resignation, backing into the sparsely but tastefully furnished room. “What are the flowers for?” Her tone reflected her exasperation.
“What do you think? It’s April twenty-first. It’s your birthday. Happy birthday, Pia.” George smiled, then shrugged defensively and busied himself by shutting the door behind him. He stood his roller bag up on its end and telescoped the handle.
“Oh,” Pia said simply. “It’s my birthday?” Pia was aware of the date, but had done nothing to acknowledge it. She retreated back into the interior of the apartment, picking up her running gear as she went.