Bobby closed his eyes and nodded.
Maryk said, “And her two dogs. Practically turned them inside out.”
“Peri Fields. Public Affairs. You didn’t know her.”
“A touch, a sneeze, a passed memo, a borrowed pen. It wouldn’t have taken much. If she wasn’t already out with the flu at the start of it, we would have had a catastrophe on our hands.”
“With the bureau at ground zero. We can’t be this lucky much longer. It’s going to get out.”
“That’s why Stephen is so important. That’s why he stays in the lab. I’ve got to study him.”
“They said Peri had a lot of indoor plants, and that it got into them bad.”
“As well as the bacteria in the food. And not just the cupboards — somehow it broke through the refrigerator seal. But the plants were particularly bad. Plainville does something to them, takes longer to kill them. The stalks were growing up through the walls, around pipes, trying to get out. They were even snaking up the birdstand. It was like they were going for her parakeet.”
“You aren’t saying—”
“It was almost as though the virus couldn’t infect it, so it was going to finish off the job by hand. My people have the bird, but it’s just like all the rest. Birds don’t get Plainville. We still don’t know why.”
“The parakeet isn’t talking?”
Bobby burst into a fit of inappropriate laughter. His head dropped and his shoulders shook as he fought to regain his composure. Maryk left a bandage on the table for him and stood to change his gloves. Bobby looked up sniffling and scooping tears out of his eyes.
“Sorry... it’s my first quarantine. All the international liaisons and whatnot from Sixteen — I’ve got plenty of friends here, and at times I’m almost enjoying myself, playing cards to pass the time. But then I remember where I am, and I’m watching these people shuffling the deck and dealing cards in front of me, and all I can think is that, if even just one of them has it...”
Maryk opened the door to leave. “Rules of containment,” he said. “Same for everybody, doctor or patient. That was Stephen’s mistake. No one is exempt.”
“Well,” Bobby said. He was sober now and rolling down his sleeve as he looked at Maryk in the open doorway. “Almost no one.”
The funk was general throughout each building as Maryk moved through the BDC to Building Sixteen. The flags outside were flying at half-mast. He stopped in at the vacant Public Affairs office. He saw an empty box of sterile tissues on one of the assistant’s desks and balled up tissues scattered around a tablet keyed to a news server.
The screen image was that of Stephen delivering his Nobel speech at the Stockholm Concert Hall. The log line listed the article as that day’s third draft.
(ATLANTA) — Dr. Stephen Pearse, director of the U.S. Bureau for Disease Control and last week’s recipient of the Nobel Prize award in Medicine for development of the PeaMar23 synthetic blood, was accidentally infected in an Atlanta laboratory while performing experimental vaccination research...
Maryk left the desk and continued inside through a door marked PERI FIELDS but the office had already been stripped down and cleaned out. There was nothing left of her there.
The office of the director remained sealed off from the rest of the building. Maryk stood at the nylon that lined the doorway and watched the yellow suits working inside. One was removing diplomas and photographs from the walls and disposing of them in a carton marked BIOHAZARDOUS WASTE. Another was foaming the brass inlay of the ceiling. A third BioCon agent lifted a large gold medallion off the desk. He briefly inspected Stephen’s Nobel medal before depositing it with the rest.
Maryk sat across from Ursula Freeley behind the counter of the gloomy admitting room. Orangeburg had burned itself out. Special Path’s biocontainment strategy had denied the arsonist virus the flesh and blood and tissue that was its oxygen. The microbreak had diminished to a few smoldering final-stage terminals.
Freeley sat with her puffed arms relaxed on the arms of the swivel chair and her legs straight out and crossed at the ankles. She appeared more comfortable inside a contact suit than most people appeared outside one. Maryk asked her how Stephen had been when he left the hospital.
“I didn’t see him then,” she said. “He wasn’t here but an hour. Had to see the patients though. Had to touch the sick. I spoke to one of the serologists with him, and he said that when Pearse left he seemed agitated. The hall cameras were all foamed over, so there’s nothing to view on disk.” She shifted unhappily in her padded chair. “I saw the press release. So now the healer of the free world dies a martyr to his cause. I don’t think Plainville victims look too valiant lying in state.”
“Better than the panic the truth would bring. What’s our status here?”
Freeley crossed her baggy arms. “Not with a bang but a whimper. Survival rate is zero, no surprise there. Again, nothing links the virus to the outside world. No less than two substantive genetic drifts in the virus between the beginning of the outbreak and the end. The lethality of this thing is our one saving grace. It kills so, expediently, the infected have little time to infect anyone else.”
“Nothing on the vectors?”
“Food, soil, sewage, pests, rodents, vents, air: Nothing stands out. And the catatonics’ old blood all tested clean. It was nothing lying latent.” She unknotted her arms and stressed her points with a chopping motion on the arm of the chair. “They weren’t infected, then they were infected, and now there’s nothing to tell us how. It’s not nosocomial. This didn’t move doctor-to-patient. So how did it get in here? Bugs don’t just appear and burn in a limited capacity and then disappear again. There’s commonality, footsteps, links. This just doesn’t happen — and yet here it is, happening again. This thing is smart and somehow getting smarter.”
Maryk nodded and looked sternly off to the side.
“And now Lancet is gone,” she, added. “That means there are only two left.”
Lancet’s self-destruction mystified Freeley as well, Maryk was thinking. “Do you ever take off your pants by rolling them down from the waist?” he said.
She looked at him flatly through the mask. “That may be the first personal question you have ever asked me.”
“There was a pair of black jeans in a pile of clothes on Lancet’s bedroom floor. They were pulled all the way through, inside out.”
“You’re thinking someone undressed him?”
“I don’t know. First Pearse gets stuck with Plainville. Then Lancet turns up dead.”
“So? Nothing links the two.”
“What if I told you that Pearse had been investigating me? That he was onto the blood project, Lancet and the others. That he had the files in his computer.”
Her hard-edged face showed suspicion. “How?”
“Stephen Pearse was many things, but he was never stupid.”
She dismissed it. “Who gains by killing Lancet? No one. I don’t see it.”
“I want you on his post. Reilly and Boone insist there’s no sign of forced entry; I need to be certain. We’ve preserved a number of items from his apartment. Closing Lancet down means freeing up some money, so we’ll double security on the others. We’ve got two Survivors left. It is imperative that we protect them.”
She nodded at the hospital. “And this?”
“We wait. We prepare, and anticipate. Each time we tell ourselves we’ve stamped Plainville out for good, and each time we’re proven wrong. I’ll assemble a rapid response team to cut down our reaction time on the next break, to give us a fighting chance.”