“Bragg?” someone asked.
“The patent asshole,” another answered.
Cross stood up from the bed. “Related to the news about the baby?” she asked Augustine.
“You might think so,” Augustine said. “Somebody at the hospital in Mexico City leaked the news. La Prensa reported the baby was severely malformed. It was on every channel by six A.M.”
Kaye turned to Dicken. “Born dead,” he said.
Augustine pointed to the window. “That might explain the mob. This was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration.”
“Let’s get to it, then,” Cross said, subdued. “We have work to do.”
Dicken looked downcast as they walked to the elevator. He spoke in an undertone to Kaye. “Let’s forget the zoo,” he said.
“The discussion?”
“It was premature,” he said. “Now is no time to stick our necks out.”
Mitch walked along the littered street, boots crunching through shards of glass. Police barricades marked by yellow ribbon closed off the convention center and the front entrances of three hotels. Overturned cars were wrapped in yellow ribbon like presents. Signs and banners littered the asphalt and sidewalks. The air still smelled of tear gas and smoke. Police in skintight dark green pants and khaki shirts and National Guard troops in camouflage stood with folded arms along the street while city officials disembarked from vans and were led off to tour the damage. The police watched the few unofficial bystanders through dark glasses, silently challenging.
Mitch had tried to get back to his hotel room at the Holiday Inn and had been turned away by unhappy clerks working with the police. His luggage — one bag — was still in his room, but he had the satchel with him, and that was all he really cared about. He had left messages for Kaye and Dicken, but there was no fixed place for them to return his calls.
The convention appeared to be finished. Cars were being released from hotel garages by the dozens, and long lines of taxis waited a few blocks south for passengers dragging wheeled suitcases.
Mitch could not pin down how he felt about all this. Anger, jerks of adrenaline, a bitter surge of animal exultation at the damage — typical residues of being so near mob violence. Shame, the single thin coating of social veneer; after hearing about the dead baby, guilt at perhaps being so wrong. In the middle of these flashing emotions, Mitch felt most acutely a wretched sense of displacement. Loneliness.
After this morning and afternoon, what he regretted most was missing his breakfast with Kaye Lang.
She had smelled so good to him in the night air. No perfume, hair freshly washed, richness of skin, breath smelling of wine, but flowery and hardly offensive. Her eyes a little drowsy, her parting warm and tired.
He could picture himself lying next to her on the bed in her hotel room with a clarity more like memory than imagination. Forward memory .
He reached into his jacket pocket for his airline tickets, which he always carried with him.
Dicken and Kaye made up a lifeline, an extended purpose in his life. Somehow, he doubted Dicken would encourage that continued connection. Not that he disliked Dicken; the virus hunter seemed straightforward and very sharp. Mitch would like to work with him and get to know him better. However, Mitch could not picture that at all. Call it instinct, more forward memory.
Rivalry.
He sat on a low concrete wall across from the Serrano, gripping his satchel in two broad hands. He tried to summon the patience he had used to stay sane on long and laborious digs with contentious postdocs.
With a start, he saw a woman in a blue suit coming out of the Serrano lobby. The woman stood for a moment in the shade, speaking with two doormen and a police officer. It was Kaye. Mitch walked slowly across the street, around a Toyota with all its windows smashed. Kaye saw him and waved.
They met on the plaza in front of the hotel. Kaye had circles under her eyes.
“It’s been awful,” she said.
“I was out here, I saw it,” Mitch said.
“We’re going into high gear. I’m doing some TV interviews, then we’re flying back East, to Washington. There has to be an investigation.”
“This was all about the first baby?”
Kaye nodded. “We got some details an hour ago. NIH was tracking a woman who got Herod’s flu last year. She aborted an interim daughter, got pregnant a month later. She gave birth a month premature and the baby is dead. Severe defects. Cyclopia, apparently.”
“God,” Mitch said.
“Augustine and Cross…well, I can’t talk about that. But it looks as if we’re going to have to rework all the plans, maybe even conduct human tests on an accelerated schedule. Congress is screaming bloody murder, pointing fingers everywhere. It’s a mess, Mitch.”
“I see. What can we do?”
“We?” Kaye shook her head. “What we talked about at the zoo just doesn’t make sense now.”
“Why not?” Mitch asked, swallowing.
“Dicken has done a turnabout,” Kaye said.
“What kind of turnabout?”
“He feels miserable. He thinks we’ve been completely wrong.”
Mitch cocked his head to one side, frowning. “I don’t see that.”
“It’s more politics than science, maybe,” Kaye said.
“Then what about the science? Are we going to let one premature birth, one defective baby—”
“Steamroll us?” Kaye finished for him. “Probably. I don’t know.” She looked up and down the drive.
“Are any other full-term babies due?” Mitch asked.
“Not for several months,” Kaye said. “Most of the parents have been choosing abortion.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not been talked about much. The agencies involved aren’t releasing names. There’d be a lot of opposition, you can imagine.”
“How do you feel about it?”
Kaye touched her heart, then her stomach. “Like a punch in the gut. I need time to think things over, do some more work. I asked him, but Dicken never gave me your phone number.”
Mitch smiled knowingly.
“What?” Kaye asked, a little irritated.
“Nothing.”
“Here’s my home number in Baltimore,” she said, handing him a card. “Call me in a couple of days.”
She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently, then turned and walked back into the hotel. Over her shoulder, she shouted, “I mean it! Call.”
45
The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda
Kaye was hustled out of the Baltimore airport in a nondescript brown Pontiac lacking government license plates. She had just spent three hours in TV studios and six hours on the plane and her skin felt as if it had been varnished.
Two Secret Service agents sat in polite silence, one in front and one in back. Kaye sat in the back. Between Kaye and the agent sat Farrah Tighe, her newly assigned aide. Tighe was a few years younger than Kaye, with pulled-back blond hair, a pleasant broad face, brilliant blue eyes, and broad hips that challenged her companions in these tight quarters.
“We have four hours before you meet with Mark Augustine,” Tighe said.
Kaye nodded. Her mind was not in the car.
“You requested a meeting with two of the NIH mothers-in-residence. I’m not sure we can fit that in today.”
“Fit it in,” Kaye said forcefully, and then added, “Please.”
Tighe looked at her solemnly.
“Take me to the clinic before we do anything else.”
“We have two TV interviews—”
“Skip them,” Kaye said. “I want to talk with Mrs. Hamilton.”
Kaye walked through the long corridors from the parking lot to the elevators of Building 10.