"Is her prognosis as bad as—"
"Yeah." A pair of gloved hands rubbed against the scrub pants. Inside the latex rubber, his hands were sweating now. "If we can't determine where it came from… if we can't explain it…" He looked at his younger, taller colleague. "I have to get back. I want to take another look at that structure."
"HELLO," GUS LORENZ said. He checked his clock. What the hell?
"Gus?" the voice asked.
"Yes, who's this?"
"Mark Klein in Chicago."
"Something wrong?" Lorenz asked groggily. The reply opened his eyes all the way.
"I think—no, Gus, I know I have an Ebola case up here."
"How can you be sure?"
"I have the crook. I micrographed it myself. It's the Shepherd's Crook, and no mistake, Gus. I wish it were."
"Where's he been?"
"It's a she, and she hasn't been anywhere special." Klein summarized what he knew in less than a minute. "There is no immediately apparent explanation for this." Lorenz could have objected that this was not possible, but the medical community is an intimate one at its higher levels; he knew Mark Klein was a full professor at one of the world's finest medical schools.
"Just one case?"
"They all start with one, Gus," Klein reminded his friend. A thousand miles away, Lorenz swung his legs off the bed and onto the floor.
"Okay. I need a specimen."
"I have a courier on the way to O'Hare now. He'll catch the first flight down. I can e-mail you the micrographs right now."
"Give me about forty minutes to get in."
"Gus?"
"Yes?"
"Is there anything on the treatment side that I don't know? We have a very sick patient here," Klein said, hoping that for once maybe he wasn't fully up to speed on something in his field.
" 'Fraid not, Mark. Nothing new that I know about."
"Damn. Okay, we'll do what we can here. Call me when you get there. I'm in my office."
Lorenz went into the bathroom and ran some water to splash in his face, proving to himself that this wasn't a dream. No, he thought. Nightmare.
THIS PRESIDENTIAL PERK was one even the press respected. Ryan walked down the steps first, saluted the USAF sergeant at the bottom, and walked the fifty yards to the helicopter. Inside, he promptly buckled his belt and went back to sleep. Fifteen minutes later he was roused from his seat again, walked down another set of stairs, saluted a Marine this time, and headed into the White House. Ten minutes after that, he was in a sleeping place that didn't move.
"Good trip?" Cathy asked, one eye partly open.
"Long one," her husband reported, falling back to sleep.
THE FIRST FLIGHT from Chicago to Atlanta left the gate at 6:15 A.M., Central Time. Before then, Lorenz was in his office, on his computer terminal, dialed into the Internet and on the phone at the same time.
"I'm downloading the image now."
As the older man watched, the micrograph grew from top to bottom, one line at a time, faster than a fax would come out of a machine, and far more detailed.
"Tell me I'm wrong, Gus," Klein said, no hope in his voice at all.
"I think you know better, Mark." He paused as the image finished forming. "That's our friend."
"Where's he been lately?"
"Well, we had a couple of cases in Zaire, and two more reported in Sudan. That's it, as far as I know. Your patient, has she been—"
"No. There aren't any risk factors that I have been able to identify so far. Given the incubation period, she must almost certainly have contracted it here in Chicago. And that's not possible, is it?"
"Sex?" Lorenz asked. He could almost hear the shake of the head over the phone.
"I asked. She says she's not getting any of that. Any reports anyplace else?"
"None, none anywhere. Mark, are you sure of what you've told me?" As insulting as the question was, it had to be asked.
"I wish I weren't. The micrograph I sent is the third one, I wanted good isolation for it. Her blood is full of it, Gus. Wait a minute." He heard a muffled conversation. "She just came around again. Says she had a tooth extracted a week or so ago. We have the name of her dentist. We'll run that one down. That's all we have here."
"All right, let me get set up for your sample. It's only one case. Let's not get too excited."
RAMAN GOT HOME shortly before dawn. It was just as well that the streets were almost entirely devoid of traffic at this time of day. He was in no condition for safe driving. Arriving home, he followed the usual routine. On his answering machine was another wrong number, the voice of Mr. Alahad.
THE PAIN WAS so severe that it woke him up from the sleep of exhaustion. Just walking the twenty feet around the bed and into the bathroom seemed like a marathon's effort, but he managed to stagger that far. The cramping was terrible, which amazed him, because he hadn't eaten all that much in the past couple of days despite his wife's insistence on chicken soup and toast, but with all the urgency he could suffer, he dropped his shorts and sat down just in time. Simultaneously, his upper GI seemed to explode as well, and the former golf pro doubled over, vomiting on the tiles. There was an instant's embarrassment at having done so unmanly a thing. Then he saw what was there at his feet.
"Honey?" he called weakly. "Help…"
48 HEMORRHAGE
SIX HOURS OF SLEEP, maybe a little more, was better than nothing. This morning, Cathy got up first, and the father of the First Family came into the breakfast room unshaven, following the smell of coffee.
"When you feel this rotten, you should at least have a hangover to blame it on," the President announced. His morning papers were in the usual place. A Post-it note was affixed to the front page of the Washington Post, just over an article bylined to Bob Holtzman and John Plumber. Now, there was something to start off his day, Jack told himself.
"That's really sleazy," Sally Ryan said. She'd already heard TV coverage of the controversy. "What finks." She would have said "dicks," a newly favored term among the young ladies at St. Mary's School, but Dad wasn't ready to acknowledge the fact that his Sally was talking like a grown-up.
"Uh-huh," her father replied. The story gave far more detail than was possible in a couple of minutes of air time. And it named Ed Kealty, who had, it seemed—unsurprisingly, but still against the law—a CIA source who had leaked information which, the story explained, had not been entirely truthful and, even worse, had been a deliberate political attack on the President, using the media as an attack dog. Jack snorted. As though that were new. The Post's emphasis was on the gross violation of journalistic integrity. Plumber's recantation of his actions was very sincere, it said. The article said that senior executives at NEC's news division had declined comment, pending their own inquiry. It also said that the Post had custody of the tapes, which were entirely undamaged.
The Washington Times, he saw, was just as irate but not in quite the same way. There would be a colossal internecine battle in the Washington press corps over this, something, the Times editorial observed, that the politicians would clearly watch with amusement.
Well, Ryan told himself, that ought to keep them off my back for a while.
Next, he opened the manila folder with the secret-tape borders on it. This document, he saw, was pretty old.
"Bastards," POTUS whispered.
"They really did it to themselves this time," Cathy said, reading her own paper.
"No," SWORDSMAN replied. "China."
IT WASN'T AN epidemic yet, because nobody knew about it. Doctors were already reacting in surprise to telephone calls. Excited, if not frantic, calls to answering services had already awakened over twenty of them across the country. Bloody vomit and diarrhea were reported in every case, but only one to a customer, and there were various medical problems that could explain that. Bleeding ulcers, for example, and many of the calls came from busi-nesspeople for whom stress came with the tie and white shirt. Most were told to drive to the nearest hospital's emergency room, and in nearly all cases the doctor got dressed to meet his or her patient there, or to have a trusted associate do so. Some were instructed to be at the office first thing, usually between eight and nine in the morning, to be the first patient of the day and thus not interfere with the daily schedule.