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"What the fuck was that all about?" Barney said, his voice a whisper of shock and dismay.

Nobody answered.

Stacy Richardson had a theory. Only Charles Lack knew exactly what had just happened.

"We got an event over here," Dr. Lack said to Dexter DeMille over the telephone from inside the restaurant. "I think… I think…"

"You think what?" Dr. DeMille snapped impatiently. He was in his lab in Building Six at Vanishing Lake Prison.

"We've got a problem. A guy at the restaurant just went nuts and killed his wife." Dr. Lack lowered his voice. "He behaved exactly like the test case yesterday."

"That's impossible," Dexter DeMille shouted. "How could that be?"

"Obviously, some of your damn mosquitoes got loose," Dr.

Lack hissed. "I told you that it was a mistake. We should never have used an aerobiological vector."

"Let's not go into that now," Dexter said. "Stay there, I'm on my way," and he hung up.

The bio-hazard team from the prison roared into town fifteen minutes later. Dr. DeMille was the first one out of the windowless van. He moved into the restaurant with his medical bag, followed by three M. P. S. Barney unlocked and cautiously opened the door to the food locker. Stacy Richardson moved to where she could see into the room over their shoulders.

Dr. Sidney Saunders was now kneeling on the floor leaning against the sidewall. His hands were still tied behind him. The rage was no longer in his eyes. Instead, there was a look of desperate confusion. He tried to stand as they entered, but staggered, and like Troy Lee, fell over, going down on his right side. He had lost his equilibrium; drool was streaming down his chin.

"Look for a labrum injection mark," Dr. DeMille said to Dr. Lack, referring to a mosquito bite, knowing the scientific language would elude the civilian restaurant patrons. "See if you can isolate it. We can do a tracking scan later," DeMille finished.

They were working feverishly, pulling Sid Saunders's shirt off, checking around his hairline.

"Here," Dr. Lack said, and pointed to a mosquito bite on the back of the dying man's neck.

"Get him in the van," DeMille said. "Forget bio-containment. We've gotta move fast."

"What's going on here?" Barney said again. "Does this have something to do with yer experiments over at the prison?" But Drs. Lack and DeMille were already following the uniformed M. P. S, who had picked up the dying sixty-year-old dentist and were carrying him out of the restaurant. They put him in the back of the truck. The M. P. S pushed Barney away from the van and slammed the back door before scrambling in and roaring away.

Mary Saunders still lay dead in the booth at table two. Only after the van left did Barney make calls to the County Coroner and Sheriff, which were fifty miles away in Bracketville, a town with only a two-man substation. The Sheriff said they would get up there as soon as possible, and suggested that Barney take Mary over to the big walk-in fish cooler on the dock and put her there until the County people showed up.

Stacy Richardson slipped out of the restaurant in the confusion and moved up the hill to a little two-room wood cottage in the back that Barney sometimes rented to employees. She noticed absent-mindedly that the two hobos had finished their cleanup, but had left without waiting to get paid or fed. She assumed that, like homeless people everywhere, they were sensitive to their vulnerability and had fled during all the frenzied activity.

Stacy took out a key, opened the door, and moved into her cluttered cottage. She went directly to her small desk and pulled a binder down off the shelf, which read:

PRIONS

She opened it to a section she had labeled:

SYMPTOMS AND DISEASE

Then she turned the binder to a fresh page and wrote:

"Dr. Sidney Saunders, DDS."

"Near death at 10:30-07/16/99. Condition appears to be neuro-related."

Below that she wrote: "The death resembles no condition before observed. Probable iatrogenic infection, homicidal rage, followed by status epilepticus. Mosquito vector." Then she wrote a detailed medical account of Sid Saunders's bizarre homicidal pre-death behavior.

Also pasted in the binder were several long-lens photos of Charles Lack and Dexter DeMille, along with both men's scientific histories. Under Dr. DeMille's bio, Stacy wrote the new information Dr. Lack had provided: "DeMille is unstable, dissociative, and suicidal." Yet it was stable, fun-loving, nonsuicidal Max who had supposedly stuck a twelve-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 10

DAMAGE CONTROL

They were seated in the old parole board hearing room in the big, rectangular pale brick administration building. Out the windows across the yard they could see the high tower that contained the gas chamber in center block.

Admiral James G. Zoll was seated with his back to the windows that streamed sunlight past him and lit the unhappy faces of Dexter DeMille, Charles Lack, and Colonel Laurence Chittick. Seated at the end of the room, with his back to a large map of Vanishing Lake, was Captain Nicholas Zingo. He and his "Torn Victor" Delta Force Rangers were assigned to Admiral Zoll for program security and had arrived with the Admiral and Colonel Chittick half an hour ago from Fort Detrick, in three unmarked Blackhawk helicopters.

Captain Zingo was a muscular thirty-year-old, who Dexter DeMille feared would be ordered one day to kill him. Torn Victor was a unit combat designation and included ten event-trained Delta Force Rangers, who immediately upon arriving had commandeered the available jeeps and two half-tracks at the prison, then quickly deployed them around Vanishing Lake. Captain Zingo had an earpiece attached to a belt radio and was monitoring his deploying Rangers through his headset, while at the same time listening to what was going on in the briefing room.

"I assume it's your cocktail that caused this?" Admiral Zoll asked Dr. DeMille, his sandpapery voice filling the room and raising the hair on the back of Dexter's neck.

"Before we know that for sure," Dexter said, "we'll need to do a brain slice and examine the tissue under an electron microscope at forty-seven thousand power to see if unusual amounts of amyloid plaque are present in the cells and if-"

"Cut the shit, Doctor," Admiral Zoll interrupted. "I don't need a buncha nano-chat. Is it our stuff that caused this or not?"

Dexter couldn't bring himself to answer. He looked around the room and his eyes accidentally caught Dr. Lack's.

"It's us, Admiral," Charles Lack said, as if invited in by Dexter's helpless look.

Admiral Zoll got to his feet and walked around the table slowly. He moved over to the map. "How did the goddamn mosquitoes get out?" he asked, and when Dexter hesitated again, Charles Lack answered.

"We did a colored smoke test an hour ago. There's a leak in one of the vents. It appears that there were bad exhaust seals in the old gas vents that were never properly addressed."

"Why didn't we do a smoke test before we put those two grunts in there?" Admiral Zoll asked softly.

"Good question, sir," Charles Lack said. Then he looked to Dexter as if he should suddenly have the answer.

Dexter had no answer. It was a mistake, and the Crazy Ace was not a man you confided your mistakes to.

Dexter was beginning to slide into one of his deep depressions. The room seemed to be getting smaller. It was almost as if the walls were closing in. Even his breath was coming faster; his heart was slamming so uncontrollably in his chest that he was alarmed he might actually have a coronary.