Kaye bit her lip. “I’d like to make one thing clear, Mr. Wothering. My husband was sick. He was mentally ill. What Saul did or did not do is no reflection on me — nor on him. He was trying to keep his balance and get on with his life and work.”
“I understand, Ms. Lang.”
“Saul was very helpful to me, in his own way, but I resent any implication that I am not my own woman.”
“No such implication intended.”
“Good,” Kaye said, feeling her way through a subtle minefield of irritation, threatening to flare into anger. “What I need to know now is, does Marge Cross still find me useful?”
Wothering smiled and gave a tilt of his head in a way that expertly expressed acknowledgment of her irritation and the need to continue his task. “Marge never gives more than she takes, as I’m sure you will learn soon. Can you explain this vaccine to me, Kaye?”
“It’s a combination antigen coat carrying a tailored ri-bozyme. Ribonucleic acid with enzymelike properties. It attaches to part of the SHEVA code and splits it. Breaks its back. The virus can’t replicate.”
Wothering shook his head in amazement. “Technically wonderful,” he said. “For most of us, incomprehensible. Tell me, how do you think Marge will get women all over the world to consider using it?”
“Advertising and promotion, I suppose. She said she’d practically give it away.”
“Who will the patients trust , Kaye? You are a brilliant woman whose husband deceived her, kept her in the dark. Women can feel this unfairness in their very wombs. Believe me, Marge will go to great lengths to keep you on her team. Your story just gets better and better.”
41
Seattle
Mitch pushed up in bed, in a sweat and shouting. The words leaped out in a guttural tumble even as he realized he was awake. He sat on one side of the bed, leg still tangled in the covers, and shivered. “Nuts,” he said. “I am nuts. Nuts to this”
He had dreamed of the Neandertals again. This time, he had flowed in and out of the male’s point of view, a fluid sort of freedom that had at once immersed him in a very clear and unpleasant set of emotions, and then lofted him away to observe a jumbled flow of events. Crowds had formed at the edge of the village — not on a lake this time, but in a clearing surrounded by deep and ancient woods. They had shaken sharpened, fire-hardened sticks at the female, whose name he could almost remember…Na-lee-ah or Ma-lee.
“Jean Auel, here I come,” he murmured as he extricated his foot from the covers. “Mowgli of the Stone Tribe saves his woman. Jesus.”
He walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He was fighting off some virus — a cold, he was sure, and not SHEVA, considering the state of his relationships with women. His mouth tasted dry and foul and his nose was dripping. He had caught the cold somewhere on his trip to Iron Cave the week before. Maybe Merton had given it to him. He had driven the British journalist to the airport for a flight to Maryland.
The water tasted terrible, but it cleaned out his mouth. He looked out over Broadway and the post office, nearly deserted now. A March snowstorm was throwing small crystal flakes down on the streets. The orange sodium vapor streetlights turned the accumulated snow into scattered piles of gold.
“They were kicking us off the lake, out of the village,” he murmured. “We were going to have to fend for ourselves. Some hotheads were getting ready to follow us, maybe try to kill us. We…”
He shuddered. The emotions had been so raw and so real he could not easily shake them. Fear, rage, something else…a helpless kind of love. He felt his face. They had been shedding some sort of skin from their faces, little masks. The mark of their crime.
“Dear Shirley MacLaine,” he said, pressing his forehead against the cold glass of the window. “I’m channeling cavemen who don’t live in caves. Any advice?”
He looked at the clock on the VCR perched precariously on top of the small TV. It was five in the morning. It would be eight o’clock in Atlanta. He would try that number again, and then try to log on with his repaired laptop and send an e-mail message.
In the bathroom, he stared at himself in the mirror. Hair awry, face sweaty and oily, two days’ growth of beard, wearing a ripped T-shirt and BVDs. “A regular Jeremiah,” he said.
Then he started another general cleanup by blowing his nose and brushing his teeth.
42
Atlanta
Christopher Dicken had returned to his small house on the outskirts of Atlanta at three in the morning. He had worked at his CDC office until two, preparing papers for Augustine on the spread of SHEVA in Africa. He had lain awake for an hour, wondering what the world was going to be like in the next six months. When he finally drifted off into sleep, he was awakened it seemed moments later by the buzzing of his cell phone. He sat up in the queen-size bed that had once belonged to his parents, wondered for a moment where he was, decided quickly he was not in the Cape Town Hilton, and switched on the light. Morning was already glowing through the window shutters. He managed to pull the phone out of his coat pocket in the closet by the fourth ring and answered it.
“Is this Dr. Chris Dicken?”
“Christopher. Yeah.” He looked at his watch. It was eight fifteen. He had managed to sleep a mere two hours, and he was sure he felt worse than if he had had no sleep at all.
“My name is Mitch Rafelson.”
This time, Dicken remembered the name and its association. “Really?” he said. “Where are you, Mr. Rafelson?”
“Seattle.”
“Then it’s even earlier where you are. I need to get back to sleep.”
“Wait, please,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry if I woke you up. Did you get my message?”
“I got a message,” Dicken said.
“We need to talk.”
“Listen, if you are Mitch Rafelson, the Mitch Rafelson, I need to talk to you…about as much as…” He tried to come up with a witty comparison, but his mind wouldn’t work. “I don’t need to talk with you.”
“Point made…but please listen anyway. You’ve been tracking SHEVA all over the world, right?”
“Yeah,” Dicken said. He yawned. “I get very little sleep thinking about it.”
“Me, too,” Mitch said. “Your bodies in the Caucasus tested positive for SHEVA. My mummies…in the Alps…the mummies at Innsbruck test positive for SHEVA.”
Dicken pressed the phone closer to his ear. “How do you know that?”
“I have the lab reports from the University of Washington. I need to show what I know to you and to whoever else is open-minded about this.”
“Nobody is open-minded about this,” Dicken said. “Who gave you my number?”
“Dr. Wendell Packer.”
“Do I know Packer?”
“You work with a friend of his. Renee Sondak.”
Dicken scratched at a front tooth with a fingernail. Thought very seriously about hanging up. His cell phone was digitally scrambled, but somebody could decode the conversation if they had a mind to. This made him flash hot with anger. Things were out of control. Everyone had lost perspective and it was not going to get better if he just played along.
“I’m pretty lonely,” Mitch said into the silence. “I need someone to tell me I’m not completely nuts.”
“Yeah,” Dicken said. “I know what that’s like.” Then, screwing up his face and stamping his foot on the floor, knowing this was going to give him far more trouble than any windmill he had ever tilted at before, he said, “Tell me more, Mitch.”