I pulled down the headset and signed off, and Peri took back her tablet. “South Carolina?” she said.
“We’re heading back. You’ll need to clear my calendar for the next few days.”
“But the London speech...” She broke off, and did not persist. She must have sensed my determination. “I’ll extend all apologies,” she said.
Her smile brought back some of the night, and in her face I saw again that thing I had glimpsed under the chandelier, that had endeared her to me: Behind the learned cynicism of her profession lingered, like a smattering of character freckles just visible beneath camouflaging cream, the bright liveliness of a small-town girl.
Our shared silence was, rather than uncomfortable, thoughtful. Even encouraging.
“I panicked this morning,” she said. “It was stupid. I’m sorry I ran out.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Good morning,” I said.
I blushed. She didn’t.
“Good morning.”
Later we returned to the States together, conversing over meals in first class like any other couple, and the time passed pleasantly, but too quickly. After a small kiss inside the main terminal at Dulles International Airport, we departed for separate airplanes, hers back to Atlanta and mine on to South Carolina, that dread feeling in the pit of my stomach returning.
But for now she reached up to swipe a wayward lock of hair off my forehead, then nodded back at the door. “By the way,” she said. “Did you actually mean any of that in there?”
The medal weighed heavily in my hand like a gilded ashtray. “All of it, I think.”
The chief resident of the Orangeburg Federal Hospital waited anxiously to be introduced. “An honor, Dr. Pearse,” he said, and we shook gloved hands, under the ambulance entrance overhang. I was being sealed into a biohazard contact suit, its design much improved in the years since Africa, a lighter, saffron-colored, tear-resistant polymer jumper that was cooler inside and allowed greater mobility of the head and shoulders.
“We’ve isolated the green zone,” he said, “and evacuated all nonexposed patients, support staff, personnel.”
“Leaving how many infected?”
The chief resident took a dramatically deep breath. “Sixty-four. Eleven dead already and as many as twenty in the late stages. We would have picked it up sooner, but with the TB patients, it was difficult to tell.”
The hood came down over my head. There were many people moving around me.
“The catatonics, Dr. Pearse.”
They were pulling tape around my ankles, knees, and elbows, sashing the slack suit material. I nodded my hood at the doctor, prompting him to continue.
“Clinical catatonia, nonresponsive to medication. None of them has spoken or moved in at least the past ten years. They were in the room next to the TB ward, undergoing neurological tests. Dr. Pearse — they’re speaking. The infected catatonics. They’re waking up, asking questions.”
The suit hood smelled of plastic inside, with a lingering coolness like that of a Halloween mask. A Velcro tag labeled S. PEARSE was affixed to my breast, beneath the black BDC logo. I thumbs-upped the Biohazard Containment Unit without enthusiasm and looked again to the doctor.
“The virus we suspect here has been known to have a pronounced effect on the brain,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
I walked alone to the nylon-tunneled entrance way, known as “the umbilical,” its pale blue wails rippling in the Carolina breeze. The advance BioCon team had removed the automatic doors to the hospital and installed air locks and negative pressure doorways. I stopped at a steel door papered with safety stickers, checklists, and red warnings, placing my triple-sealed hand upon it. It had been a long time since I’d been inside a suit. I took three deep, filtered breaths, loud inside the hood, then entered.
The second door opened on a hospital corridor and whooshing gusts of air accompanied me inside. The building was sealed under negative pressure so that no microbes could escape to the outside environment; whenever the control doors were opened, air was made to rush inward. The gloomy admitting room and hospital lobby were empty, the talking head on a high monitor still automatically welcoming visitors and issuing paperwork instructions. Hospitals were no longer places where the sick went to be cured. All surgeries, diagnostic tests, and physical examinations were performed at neighborhood-based “parish” clinics under the auspices of the national health care system, at a flat rate surcharge. Federal hospitals had become “managed care facilities,” or sanitariums for long-term care of the chronically and terminally ill.
The walls and ceilings were all coated with a white, meringuelike viricidal foam. Eight colored bands ran along the center of the clean corridor floor. I followed apple green where it veered off from the rest.
Around the first corner, other BDC personnel moved about in yellow suits like astronauts burdened by gravity, backs emblazoned with the cardinal red, three-petaled biohazard symbol. One stepped out and approached me, calling to the others in a muffled voice, “Dr. Pearse is on-site.” A second suit holding a glassine-shielded tablet, the administrator of the situation log, called out the time in response: “Mr. Director on-site, thirteen-oh-two.”
The approaching scientist strode out to meet me, her arms and legs moving naturally inside the baglike suit, the cap lining her forehead and the frame of the Plexiglas shield giving her face a pronounced V shape of dark eyes and slanting cheeks, a sharply tapered chin. The woman’s face was striking, but like a sculpture made of glass, her beauty was cold and fixed. Two thin auburn eyebrows arched smartly into an uncreased forehead. Her name tag read U. FREELEY.
Freeley was Peter Maryk’s number two in Special Pathogens. She joined me and strode confidently at my side, following the green stripe ninety degrees around another corner. “PCR typing confirms the pathogen,” she said. Her voice lowered commensurate with the privileged nature of the information. “It’s a confirmed Plainville drift.”
“We’re absolutely certain?”
“Oligonucleotide mapping will take a day or two, but it’s here, and it’s hot.”
An antigenic “drift” described a slight change in the makeup of a virus. A virus that has “drifted” has undergone a subtle genetic mutation, and can elude previously produced antibodies to successfully reinfect an immunized host. An antigenic “shift” is a wholesale recasting of the virus. Plainville’s frequent shifts were as alarming as they were unexplained.
She said, “It originated with the catatonics.”
That was meant to surprise me, which it did. “Not the TB ward?”
“Catatonics first. Then immediately jumped to the lungers down the hall.”
“No amplification outside the hospital?”
“None yet. Again, a nice, tight environment for containment. We have the hospital logs for all visitors and contact tracing is under way. Quarantine Services should have everyone rounded up within the hour.”
“Good. The hospital is locked down?”
“FEMA Biohazard is settled in. Epidemiology is represented by General Investigation, Identification, Host Factors, Pathogenesis—”
“Fine.” I cut short the roll call. We had arrived at another air lock bolted to the wall and sealed with drying epoxy, the removed door leaning next to it. The tiles beneath our feet were entirely green.
“Trauma,” Freeley said. “We grouped the catatonics here to facilitate treatment.”
I nodded and reached for the door handle. I wanted to pick up the old feeling before proceeding with the investigation.
“Just patients inside,” she said. “Serology can handle the blood sampling.”
“I want to take a look around for myself.”