‘Have you known Yu Lin for long?’
‘Couple of months,’ she said.
‘And you don’t speak any English.’
‘No.’
‘How long have you been in America?’ Li asked. She cast him a look of concern. ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell them. It doesn’t matter a damn to me if you’re illegal or not.’
‘Eight months,’ she said. ‘I came with my brother. My uncle is with one of the tongs here in Houston. He paid our shetou, and now we work for him. Already my brother is a dai lo, you know, a gang leader.’
Li nodded. ‘And Yu Lin?’
‘I met him at the club where I work. But my brother doesn’t like me seeing him. We are Fujian. He is Taiwanese. My brother says he is not a real Chinese.’
Li flicked his head toward the bedroom. He said, ‘Do you think your brother did this?’
Her bottom lip quivered for a moment, like jelly on a spoon, and then her face crumpled and she burst into tears. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Take it easy.’ And he put both his arms around her and she pressed her face into his chest, and he felt the sobs shake her fragile frame. There was nothing, he knew, that he could do for her. Her lover had been hacked to death. Her brother was shaping up as a suspect. It would not be long before the authorities discovered that she was an illegal alien, and she would be hauled up before the immigration court and threatened with repatriation. Her American Dream was very quickly turning into a nightmare.
He nodded to the female officer who came to offer comfort in his place as he gently disentangled himself. He found Hrycyk outside on the balcony, leaning on the rail smoking a cigarette. Hrycyk turned a pensive gaze on him. ‘Well?’
‘Looks like Yu got himself into conflict with the girl’s brother,’ Li said. ‘Could be that simple.’
‘Or it could be that he’d been rumbled and they decided that he knew too much.’
‘That’s possible, too,’ Li said. ‘In which case you’ve got a leak in the agency.’
Hrycyk straightened up, bridling. ‘What the hell d’you mean?’
‘It’s a bit of a coincidence that they should decide to take him out the very day he’s scheduled to break cover and meet up with you. I mean, how would they know that?’
Hrycyk glared at him, but the implications of what Li was saying were not lost on him. Hrycyk’s cellphone rang again. He threw his cigarette butt down into the street and answered it. He listened in silence, flicked Li a glance, then said, simply, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. He thought for a moment, then looked at Li again. ‘We got fifty minutes to get across town to Hobby and catch the next flight to Washington.’
III
The rain was driving horizontally across the tarmac at Dulles. The temperature had tumbled to just a few degrees above freezing. Their airport security vehicle ploughed through the darkness on the apron, the lights of the main terminal receding behind them, the rain caught in their headlights like stars at warp speed. Li peered through the windshield trying to see where they were going. Hrycyk had been less than illuminating, and Li suspected that was because he had no idea where they were going, or why.
There were lights up ahead now, and the roar of an engine. As they drew close, an army-camouflaged helicopter took shape in the dark, buffeted by the wind, lights blazing, rotors turning. It was waiting for them. Their driver drew up alongside it, and Hrycyk cursed when he realised he was going to have to get out in the wet. He pulled up his collar, hunching himself against the downdraught and the rain, and slipped out into the night. Li ran across the tarmac in his wake. Uniformed arms extended from an open doorway and drew them up into the belly of the chopper. In the faint yellow electric light of the interior, he saw colourless faces looking up at him. Margaret, Fuller, Major Cardiff in his Air Force blue. Someone handed him a helmet with a built-in headset, and strong hands pushed him down into a canvas seat. The door was pulled shut as he slipped on his helmet and heard Hrycyk’s voice. ‘What’s all this about, Sam?’ They lurched to one side as the helicopter lifted off into the night.
Fuller shouted above the roar of the engine, ‘They’re flying us up to a little town in Maryland called Frederick. The army base at Fort Detrick.’
‘What the hell’s there?’ Hrycyk demanded to know.
‘USAMRIID,’ Fuller said, and when Hrycyk looked blank, spelled it out for him. ‘The United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.’
‘Jesus!’ It was the first time Li had seen Hrycyk overawed by anything. ‘That’s the biowarfare defence place.’ He thought about it for a moment, glanced at Li, then turned back to Fuller. ‘Christ, and they’re going to let a foreign national in there? A Chinese?’ Fuller just shrugged. Hrycyk was completely nonplussed. ‘For God’s sake, Sam, what is going on here?’
‘You’ll find out when we get there, Mike,’ Fuller shouted.
Li looked to Margaret for some kind of elucidation. She gave the merest shrug of her shoulders. And he saw that Steve Cardiff, sitting next to her, was pale as a ghost.
By the time their chopper touched down on the landing pad at Fort Detrick, the rain had stopped. Stars twinkling in a very black sky, were periodically obliterated by occasional scurrying clouds. An almost full moon cast its silver light across the landscape, and in the distance you could see the outline of the Catoctin mountains of western Maryland traced against the sky. The group was driven across the base in two army jeeps, and Li saw the flashing orange lights at the security gates, before they turned into the car park outside the USAMRIID building. It was a collection of ugly, windowless concrete blocks, designed to contain the most dangerous organisms on earth. It wouldn’t win any prizes for its architecture.
In the front reception area they had to fill out forms and were in turn handed guest security passes by a silver-headed security man. A young uniformed woman with hair neatly plaited up the back led them along a wood-panelled corridor. Portraits of past USAMRIID commanders followed their progress to the Joel M. Dalrymple conference room, where a large oblong table had been set up with more than twenty seats around it. There were already a dozen other people standing about in groups talking, several of them in uniform. Li took the opportunity of whispering to Margaret, ‘What are we doing here?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said grimly. ‘But I have a real bad feeling about it.’
Steve brought over an older man in a dark suit to meet Margaret. Li drifted away.
‘Margaret, this is Dr. Jack Ward,’ Steve said. ‘Dr. Ward is the Armed Forces medical examiner.’
Dr. Ward shook Margaret’s hand solemnly. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Campbell. I’ve heard a very great deal about you.’
Margaret glanced at Steve then back to Dr. Ward. ‘Have you?’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘You have…’ he chose his words carefully, ‘…something of a reputation.’
‘Really?’ said Margaret. ‘Reputations can be good or bad. I hope it’s not the latter.’
‘I’m far too much of a gentleman to say,’ the doctor said, and allowed himself the most distant of smiles.
Margaret looked to Steve to see if he had shared in this obscure joke. But he was standing with a glazed look in his eyes, staring into the middle distance. He became aware of her looking at him and quickly refocused. ‘What?’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ she said.
‘Oh.’ He seemed flustered. ‘Sorry. Stuff on my mind.’
A commanding voice cut above the hubbub in the conference room. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, would everyone like to take a seat around the table?’ It took a few minutes for the assembled to settle and for the possessor of the voice, in full army uniform, to introduce himself as Colonel Robert Zeiss, Commander of the USAMRIID facility which was hosting this hastily arranged meeting. He, apparently, was going to chair it, and he began by introducing everyone at the table. There were a couple of doctors from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, several senior USAMRIID officers; two representatives of the FBI in addition to Fuller; three representatives of an organisation that Zeiss referred to as FEMA, but without explanation; a middle-aged man in a grey suit from the CIA; and a secretary seconded from the Commander’s office to take notes. Curious eyes fell on Li and Margaret as they were introduced. Hrycyk sat at the far end of the table with his arms folded, watching and listening, and not saying much.