He cared a lot about them.
Tension in his face. In the muscles of his forearms and hands. Bad for battle.
He focused on the sound of the radio coming through the car's cheap speakers: a country melody . . . heavy metal . . . some loudmouth ranting about a local politician's drive to . . . classical music—Vivaldi, the driver decided. The Red Priest. And what had that politician been up to? He wanted to raise the cost of parking meters—yeah, that was it. The radio jumped to the next station on the dial. A commercial for "champagne homes on a beer budget . . ."
He felt calmer.
Champagne homes on a beer budget. Who thought up these things? His foot edged down on the accelerator, and he shot through a light just as it turned red.
GPS said eight minutes. He said five.
thirty-eight
"There's one more thing that lends credibility to what
your partner told me," Allen said, poking at the fries on his plate. "No one has been able to find where Ebola resides when it is not in monkeys or humans. It disappears for years at a time, but no reservoir has been found, despite testing thousands of animals and insects." He gave her a sideways glance, as if to say,
Are you following?
"You're suggesting it can't be found in nature because it's not there."
"Pretty and smart," he said with a wink at Stephen. "The reservoir is actually a test tube in some mad scientist's lab. He keeps it there until it's time for another field test. Then back into nature it goes so he can watch what happens."
"Wait a minute," Julia said. "Isn't it possible that a virus can mutate itself in the ways you've described, for no other reason than its own survival?"
"Certainly."
"And scientists still might find a nonhuman reservoir in nature and figure out natural reasons for those other odd things about Ebola, right?"
"It's possible."
"I mean, you are viewing the evidence through the lens of suspicion."
"And in the context of a murderous cover-up," he agreed.
"Why wouldn't somebody have blown the top off this years ago?"
"Julia, I can only guess." Allen snatched a fry off her plate, bit it in two, and flicked the remainder at Stephen. "Maybe these guys are good at hiding. If they have been introducing Ebola into the population every time they needed to test it, they've been smart about it; probably giving it to monkeys first, or even infecting humans through monkeys, to throw investigators off the trail. In Africa they found the perfect red herring: poor countries where shoddy communication, transportation, and medical expertise combine with rough terrain and a staggering number of possible insect and animal vectors to hinder ecological investigations and throw a cloud of mystique over the whole puzzle. It is the Dark Continent."
"You're forgetting the more probable reason," said Stephen. "Look at the situation we're in. We may or may not know something, yet somebody is going all out to silence us. How do we know that other people, people before us, haven't tried to blow the top off, only to be stopped? By all indications, we're messing with powerful people."
They sat quietly for a while, looking at their partially eaten lunches, at each other, but not really at anything. The shadow under their umbrella seemed to have darkened.
"Okay," Julia said, pushing away her plate. "Let's say someone is making Ebola. Unless they're doing something more, I can't see—"
"They are," Allen said. "I think they are. The way your partner put it was—and I'm not trying to embellish or interpret—'bio . . . attack . . . filovirus . . .' I asked when. He said, 'Already happening.'"
Julia said, "'Under way'? That's what he said."
"We've got to do something," Stephen said, leaning in.
"I agree," she said. "But what?"
Allen said, "The sooner this breaks open, the sooner the heat's off us."
"Any ideas?"
"The media. Newspapers, television. It'll make headlines for a year."
"Allen, it's not going to happen," Stephen said with a dismissive wave of his hand. His frustrated tone told Julia the two had already covered this ground. "There's not a news organization in the country that'll touch this story without proof."
"Look!" Allen leaned on his elbows over the table, bringing his face to within a foot of Stephen's.
The wooden pole of the umbrella perfectly separated their firm profiles. The image reminded Julia of a billboard she'd seen outside Atlantic City for what promoters billed "the fight of the century." The Parkers made credible stand-ins for the boxers: handsome Allen would be the media darling—witty, enchanting, nimble of tongue and foot. But hulking Stephen would be the hands-down favorite, a monolith of unyielding muscle. She suspected that their discord ran deeper than the disagreement at hand.
"I know people, media heavyweights, who could help," Allen continued.
"You could be joined at the hip to Katie Couric—it's not gonna matter."
"You have a better idea?"
Stephen turned to Julia. "You're FBI?"
"Sort of. Like a division of it."
"Can we go there?"
Allen jumped in. "I told you, I'm not going to—"
Julia held up her hand to stop him. "Yesterday morning, I would have said there wasn't anyone in my agency or the Bureau I wouldn't trust. Now I don't know. What I do know is someone highjacked a satellite signal that's supposedly impossible to highjack. At least one, maybe two, hit squads are in play; they're not being discreet and they're not afraid of killing federal agents. At least two of them were probably cops, so whoever hired them has connections within the law enforcement community. All of this may have something to do with a man-made virus, which means either terrorism or the military. It's hard for me to imagine that the government isn't involved in this at some level. The muscles that are flexing are way too big to be private."
"The media, then," Allen said, leaning back, vindicated.
"I don't think so," she said. "I agree with Stephen. Unless you have hard evidence to support your claims, no reputable news agency will come near this. Your connections might get you lunch and a pat on the back, but that's all."
She raised her hand again to halt Allen's objection. "I'm not saying this isn't a huge story, but to newspeople, your saying that it is doesn't mean squat."
It was clear to her that Allen was not accustomed to being contradicted. The flesh on his face seemed to harden. His tight lips pushed out a bit, sliding back and forth slowly, as though he were working on a jawbreaker. His eyes bore into hers, unflinching. He'd obviously perfected this countenance of wrath to a degree that caused nurses, med students, and even colleagues to acquiesce rather than endure the gaze.
She leaned into it. "Contacting the media now will do nothing but tell our pursuers how much we know and where we are."
"The killings," he said. "The condition of Donnelley's body, his words . . ."
"Just words," Julia said, firm. "And nobody heard what he said but you, right?"
"You don't believe me?"
She hesitated a beat. "I do, because Goody told me some of the same things. And I'm not the media. You'd have to convince some pretty jaded people whose livelihood depends on checking and double-checking the facts. Even if they were to give you the benefit of the doubt, they'd keep the story under wraps until they investigated, until they were sure. That would give the people after us time to do what they probably do best: silence nosy journalists and their informants."
Allen blinked slowly. He was listening.
"Going to the press would put the spotlight on us, not them. Of course, you could sell the story to one of those grocery-store gossip rags. It'd be right next to a feature about the three-headed pig-boy who ate his neighbor."