Middleton found a key on the ring that opened the door across the room. This led to a small pathology lab with a single steel autopsy table, shining clean. All the tools lay neatly in their trays or in cabinets along the far wall. Some tools had been left in an autoclave, but otherwise the lab was beautifully organized and maintained.
“When was the last autopsy conducted here?” Dicken asked.
“I don’t think there have ever been any,” Middleton said. “I haven’t heard of any, at least. Wouldn’t we have to get permission from the county?”
“Not if they refuse responsibility. Maybe Mark will know.” But he was beginning to doubt that Augustine knew anything. It was beginning to look as if his old CDC boss, the putative director of Emergency Action, had finally been hamstrung—perhaps castrated was the better word—by the political wolves in Washington.
Down a short hall and to the right, they came upon the unexpected mother lode: a fully equipped molecular biology and genetics lab, six hundred square feet of space under a high ceiling, crammed with equipment. Tissue centrifuge sorters provided specimen flow to racked analyzers—matrix and variable-probe sequencers specializing in polynucleotides, RNAs and DNAs; proteomizers capable of discerning complete complements of proteins; glycome and lipidome units for isolating and labeling sugars and fats and related compounds. More racks stood at the ends of broad steel lab benches.
The sorter and analyzers were connected by steel and white plastic automated specimen tracks, running like a little railroad through diffraction molecular imagers, inoculator/incubators, and a variety of video microscopes—including two up-to-the-minute carbon force counters. All magnificently automated. A one- or at most two-person lab.
Everything on and around the benches was hooked up to a small, square, bright red Cenomics Ideator, a dedicated computer capable of three-D imaging and real-time gene and protein description and identification.
There was more than a wealth of equipment here: What Dicken saw as he walked around the room amounted to obscene overkill for a typical school medical facility. He had visited labs in rich biotech firms that wouldn’t have been able to compete.
“Wow,” Dicken said in awe. “This is the whole damned Delta Queen.”
Middleton raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing.” He walked between the benches, then paused to reach out with his gloved hand and stroke the Ideator. He had his riverboat. He had everything he needed to track the virus back up the river of disease to the far, frozen north—to its sleeping, glacial form.
If no one else was willing to do it, he was sure he could do it all by himself, right here, and screw the unreasoning outside world. With the help of a few manuals. Some of this equipment he had seen only in catalogs.
Dicken leaned over to look at steel tags, identifiers, shipping labels. “Who paid for all this?”
Middleton shook her head. She was as stunned as he, but probably did not fully appreciate the magnitude of their discovery.
He found what he was searching for on the back of one of the carbon force counters. A steel tag read, “property of americol, inc., u.s.a. federally registered corporate loan equipment.”
“Marge Cross,” he said. “Large Marge.”
“What?”
Dicken murmured a quick explanation. Marge Cross was the CEO and majority shareholder of both Americol and Eurocol, two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturers. He did not add that for a time Marge Cross had employed Kaye Lang.
Dicken said, “Let’s find some way to open those refrigerators. And that.” He pointed to the unmarked stainless steel door—more of a hatch, actually—at the back of the lab.
Middleton shuddered. “I’m not sure I want to,” she said.
Dicken scowled. “We’re tired, aren’t we?”
Chastened, she handed him the ring of keys. “I’ll look for the codes,” she said.
40
THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA
Mitch shifted into four-wheel drive, then pushed the Jeep through a previously broken and mangled section of guardrail—just as George had described it. The Jeep rumbled down the embankment.
Kaye cradled Stella once more in the backseat. Stella did not react to the bumps and lurches. Kaye stared straight ahead, through the windshield, seeing nothing, really, and thinking furiously. She could not shut down her mind, filled with scenes and plans that did not connect in any useful way. She was at the end of her rope, about to be jerked up hard; she knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it.
She was more than half convinced they were going to lose Stella. Making plans for a time after Stella certainly seemed appropriate, but she could not bring herself to do so. Her thoughts became jagged and incomplete, painful.
She could feel her throat starting to constrict, as it had in the nightmare.
“There,” Mitch said. He pointed.
“What?” Kaye wheezed.
“A road.”
As George had told them, they now straddled an almost overgrown path, just barely deserving to be called a road. He swung the Jeep left. The path wound through scrub forest for a quarter of a mile, then connected to a state highway. This way would avoid quarantine roadblocks on the county line.
Mitch’s intuition had been finely honed over the last ten years. He had sharp criminal instincts. He could almost picture Department of Health or FEMA roadblocks, INS agents, or the Philadelphia National Guard checking each vehicle on the main highway, CDC deputy inspectors waiting in the back of an Emergency Action van…
He had seen it all before, while traveling, looking for a new home, seven years ago. During the panic after the discovery of Mrs. Rhine.
Kaye crooned to Stella as she had when Stella was a baby. Stella’s lips were cracked and her forehead hot. Her head lolled until Kaye cradled it in her elbow. She brushed back the luxurious, short-cut hair with her fingers, watched her daughter’s cheeks, alternately flushing and blanching, like a signal light trying to decide whether to stay on. Stella smelled rank in a particularly disturbing way, a sick offspring smell that made Kaye deeply uneasy.
Kaye had not entirely lost the enhanced sense of smell she had developed as the mother of a SHEVA infant, even though she could no longer produce her own communicative pheromones. The pores behind her ears had closed up after two years. Mitch’s had closed even earlier, and their cheek patches, the variegated melanophores, had faded back to normal as well, though in Kaye’s case they had left small, trapped pools of freckles.
Stella’s lips moved. She started speaking, babbling really, in two streams at once. Kaye stroked her daughter’s chin and lips until they stopped their restless action, and Stella reduced the volume to a whisper:
“I want to see the woods/
“There’s so little time/ Leave me in the woods/
“Please./ Please. Please.”
“We’re in the woods, honey,” Kaye told Stella. “We’re in the forest.”
Stella opened her eyes, then, blinded by the light in her face, swung her arm up, nearly knocking Kaye’s nose bloody. Kaye pushed the arm down and covered Stella’s eyes with her hand.
“How much longer?” she asked Mitch.
“Not sure. Maybe an hour.”
“We might lose her before then.”
“She’s not going to die,” Mitch said. “She’s doing better.”
“She won’t drink.”