Slater wasn’t proud of what he was doing — sitting in his car, in the dark, parked outside his ex-wife’s house — but he hadn’t really intended to find himself here.
At most, he’d intended to cruise slowly past the house and take a look on his way home from the AFIP, but then a wave of exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he’d had to pull over under the umbrella of a big elm tree. In preparation for the exhumation work in Alaska, he’d put himself on an antiviral regimen that he knew could have some debilitating effects, and the coffee he’d picked up at Starbucks apparently wasn’t doing much to counteract it.
Once he’d parked, he’d turned off his lights, reclined his seat, and looked out his window at the stately Tudor house, with its white walls and its neat brown trim, its gabled roof and trim hedges. Even the driveway didn’t have a leaf on it. It was like a picture from a magazine. The first floor was dark, except for the porch light, but the windows upstairs were lighted, and once in a while he could see someone moving behind the mullioned glass. Martha and her husband had two kids, a boy and a girl.
The whole thing, he thought, couldn’t be more perfect. And it could have been his … if he’d wanted it.
He’d met Martha when they were both in medical school at Johns Hopkins. She was paying her own way, while his was being bankrolled by the Army. When he went off to Georgetown to pursue his studies in epidemiology, she had followed him there, working on her specialty in dermatology. After they got married, he knew what she was hoping for — she wanted him to hold down a nice safe Army post on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center while she built up her private practice in the Washington suburbs. And for a time, he tried. He did the whole office and administrative thing, shuffling paper, attending meetings, giving lectures, but over time he felt more and more restless. It got especially bad when he received reports from the field, detailed accounts of what was being done on the front lines to save lives and eradicate disease. That was what he had trained for, that was what he wanted to be doing — not sitting in an air-conditioned office, evaluating programs and rubber-stamping reports. He had put in for overseas duty, and Martha had reluctantly agreed to let him try it.
But if she hoped he would get it out of his system, she was wrong. The more he did it, the more he wanted to do. After a year or two, he no longer felt out of place in some godforsaken jungle; he felt out of place at a cocktail party in Chevy Chase. And much as he and Martha loved each other, they both recognized that they were going in separate directions. The night she dropped him off at the base for his morning flight to an Army camp in the Dominican Republic, where there’d been an outbreak of dengue fever, she said good-bye and take good care of yourself, but they’d both known it was more than that. When he came back nine weeks later, he opened the door to their condo with a sense of foreboding in his heart; the letter he found waiting for him on the kitchen counter said everything he’d expected, but he’d still had to read it several times just to absorb every word. To this day, if he’d had to, he could recite it line for line.
Slater took a sip of his coffee, cold now, and watched as an upstairs window was cranked open a few inches and a curtain drawn. He thought he caught a snatch of conversation on the wind, a boy’s voice saying something about homework, and a woman’s laugh. Martha’s laugh. A few seconds later, the light went out.
Slater put his seat back even farther and closed his eyes. God, he was tired. It was cold out, but he still had his coat on, and it wasn’t bad inside the car. And it had been such a long day. Long, but productive. At least the mission was chugging along, and his dream team was coming together nicely. Dr. Eva Lantos had jumped at the chance to get out of her lab in Boston—“I will be so glad to give the mole-rat genome a rest!”—and Vassily Kozak had been tracked down to an industrial waste dump on the outskirts of Irkutsk, where he was completing a study of the chemical pollutants in the soil.
“I have recommended,” he said in his heavily accented English, “they should shut the city of Irkutsk, but they do not like this idea.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Not me either.”
Slater had told him, in strictest confidence, what he wanted him for in Alaska. Vassily had listened carefully as Slater continued to outline the task ahead, finally interrupting only to ask, “This Spanish flu — it killed many Russians?”
“Ten or twelve million, by the best estimates,” Slater replied.
“Do you think that it is still infectious?”
Slater knew that Vassily was asking him an honest question, and all he could do was give him the straightest answer he could. “No, I don’t believe it is,” he said, “but I can’t guarantee anything.”
Russians, even now, knew something about death — the twentieth-century toll, from warfare and disease, had been extraordinary by any measure. Other nationalities sometimes forgot their own past disasters, but for Russians a dreadful knowledge was bred in their bones, and Slater respected the caution it inspired to this day. “If you come, I’ll want you to start on an antiviral regimen right now, the same one everyone else on the team will be on — myself included.”
“And you will send me the names of these drugs?”
“I’ll do better. I’ll have them hand-delivered to you in Irkutsk.”
Vassily grunted, still thinking things over, as Slater explained some of the clearances that Vassily would have to get both from the Academy of Sciences on the Russian end, and the National Security Council, the AFIP, and maybe even the FBI on the other. And when he was done, he said, “I rest my case,” and waited for the verdict.
“I think maybe,” the professor said, “I have done enough in Irkutsk.”
Slater smiled and clenched his fist in triumph.
“And it would be a good thing, yes, to work with you again. Maybe we can make some history.”
Although history was the one thing Slater hoped they would not be making — his most fervent wish was that the mission would prove in the end to have been utterly unnecessary — he would take his victories any way he got them.
Now, only one big piece of the team was still lacking, and that afternoon Slater had driven over to the base at Fort McNair. The adjutant told him where to find Sergeant Groves, and he’d entered the gym as inconspicuously as possible. He hung out by the back, watching the bout, and even though Groves and his opponent were wearing padded gloves and helmets, every blow echoed with a thud.
The other soldiers had abruptly curtailed their workouts, dropping their jump ropes, giving the punching bags a rest, holding the dumbbells down by their sides. This was simply too good a match to ignore.
For somebody built like a bulldog, Groves was surprisingly nimble on his feet, bobbing and weaving his way around the ring. The other fighter was a white guy with a longer reach, though, and a couple of inches on him. A few times he let loose with a long, looping punch that caught the sergeant on his shoulder or the side of his head. Once, Groves was even rocked back on his heels by a powerful shot to the ribs.
But each time he was hit, he put his head down lower and came in again, like Mike Tyson minus the Maori tattoos.
A bell went off, and the two fighters immediately let their arms fall and retired to their respective stools. Groves had his head down, and was sipping water through a straw.
“The sergeant can really kick ass,” a soldier in a West Point T-shirt observed.
“You better believe it,” Slater replied.
“I hear he’s done three tours over there.”
“Four.”
The soldier glanced at Slater, who was unfamiliar and looked out of place in his civilian clothes — jeans and a white shirt, under an overcoat — and no doubt wondered how he knew. There was the staccato rattle of a punching bag being put back to use.