Zenavax’s flu vaccine threw off an avalanche of cash that the company was using to develop new vaccines and broaden its product line. Wall Street had rewarded their efforts — her stock options were worth over $2 million — but it hadn’t been only about the money. She had wanted her career to mean something. She had wanted, one day, to look back on her life and know that she had made an important contribution to her field, that she’d been an agent for change.
Lately, though, she had come to feel more like an agent of death.
The faint alarms had first sounded several months ago while she was analyzing blood samples from a group of human test subjects in Guatemala. Zenavax was testing a prototype malaria vaccine on human volunteers who had earlier received the company’s flu vaccine. Blood from several of the test subjects had revealed a similar immune reaction, one that she recognized from her work on the earliest flu vaccine prototype at University Children’s — one that had destroyed an entire colony of laboratory mice.
Immediately, she had told her boss. He listened attentively, perused her data, and assured her that he would look into it. “Let’s not jump to conclusions” was his self-evident and pontifical counsel to her at the time, before reminding her that even unsupported rumors could decimate the value of Zenavax’s stock.
But at least he had examined her data and talked to a few outside experts, or so he said when he later shared the “good news.” He told her that the test results were more easily explained by other causes — probably an autoimmune reaction to one of the many parasitic diseases endemic to Central America. In any case, he said, it didn’t appear to have anything to do with their vaccines.
He had told her what she wanted to hear, and for a few months after that Kate had all but ignored the lingering questions. It was so easy to do when she could throw the data onto a flash drive and toss it into a desk drawer.
Then, four months ago, when she traveled to the Guatemalan village where they were testing the vaccine, her life had imploded. The fragile shell of her world had broken open and a lifetime of self-seeking choices spilled out like a putrid sludge. What had been data elements suddenly became pairs of sunken brown eyes, test subjects became cadaveric young faces, titer levels became heartbeats pounding against the ribs of bodies ravaged by…whatever this was.
People were dying, and the only connection among the victims was Zenavax.
She had tried to do something, she reminded herself. One family, a nine-year-old girl and her parents, had been willing to leave their village. She had given them enough money to buy their way into Mexico. She’d worked out a plan to meet the family in Tijuana and, somehow, smuggle them across the border and arrange for medical care. But two weeks later, when she met them at a ramshackle hotel in the Mexican border town, the parents had pleaded for her to take their daughter and leave them behind.
Death was already visiting the parents. She had seen it in their graying skin, in their gasping breaths.
Her body shuddered as a wave of guilt swept through her. She had placed the decrepit child in the trunk of her car and crossed into the U.S., a light-skinned woman waved through by an Immigration agent scanning an ocean of vehicles for stowaways. Once across, she removed the girl’s wasted body from the car’s trunk and laid her on the backseat. The drive to Los Angeles was a lost memory, wiped clean by the terror and dread that had gripped her.
But Kate remembered the gurgling sounds. They started just as she was driving through East Los Angeles on the Santa Ana Freeway. That was when the girl’s breaths slowed to agonal gasps. She was close to death, and both of them knew it.
Kate had panicked. She had left the girl near the Emergency Room entrance of a small community hospital along some frontage road, knowing that the child’s death was certain.
In the final minutes of that child’s life, Kate had treated her as if she were of no more consequence than an afterbirth. She had abandoned her promise to the girl’s dying parents. Now, she could no longer push aside the nightmare.
She drove along the front of University Children’s without giving it a passing glance. Her eyes were aimed at Kolter’s Deli, across the street from the hospital. She peered through the plate-glass window that spanned the restaurant’s entire length, but the interior was too dimly lit to spot Luke.
A dry swallow stuck in her throat. Please be there.
Would he help her? Would he put aside his bitterness toward her, would he listen without condemning her? It would be in his eyes. After a few minutes alone with him, she’d know.
Whatever happened, it was too late to turn back now. Earlier that evening, when Luke hadn’t answered her first call to the E.R. and the hospital operator wouldn’t give her his cell number, she had e-mailed the photograph to him. He hadn’t mentioned it when they finally spoke. Obviously, he hadn’t seen it yet. It was better this way — she wanted to talk with him face-to-face.
Soon, it would all be out in the open.
She was risking everything—everything—but what choice did she have? She couldn’t hold onto the secret any longer.
Kate rubbed a palm against her linen slacks. Moisture seeped through to her thigh.
She made a quick left turn onto a side street, then pulled into an alley and drove along the rear of a string of retail shops before passing the back entrance to the deli. A canister light hanging over the service door flickered to the rhythm of the wind gusts. Funnels of soot rose like fingers grabbing at the swaying telephone lines.
It was 10:09 P.M. when she pulled into a small open-air parking lot in the middle of the block, about twenty-five yards beyond Kolter’s.
Her cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
Oh, God. Her mother.
“Yeah, Mom. I know I haven’t called this week…Yes, Mom, I know you worry about me when I don’t call…Yeah, you’re right, I’m sorry…Mom, listen, I can’t talk right now. I’m meeting someone…Who?…Well, Luke McKenna but don’t…No, Mom, we’re not getting back together — that’s ancient history. This has to do with my work…”
Why did I answer the phone?
“Okay, Mom, believe what you want, but I’m telling the truth. It’s about work…Listen, I gotta go. He’s standing right here.”
Not quite true, but close.
“Okay, Mom, I’ll tell him you said hello…What?…Yes, Mom, I’ll tell him you miss seeing him. I’ve gotta go. Yeah, I’ll call you tomorrow…I promise. Love ya.”
Her body twitched nervously when she saw the dark form in her peripheral vision.
A white lab coat. He was walking toward her, hand over his eyes, dust and debris swirling around him. Even in the dim light she recognized the athletic stride.
Luke. He looked like he had gained some weight.
She groped for the unlock switch on her door.
I thought I told him we’d meet inside the deli…
9
At 10:45, Luke was sitting in a crescent-shaped booth along the front of Kolter’s Deli, turning a coffee mug in his hands while staring up at the helipad atop the hospital. Air-5, the Sheriff’s helicopter he used to fly on as a physician volunteer with the department’s Search & Rescue team, sat motionless under the wash of a floodlight. For a long time, that stint had been important — like a bridge straddling two incongruous identities — but when he relinquished it two years ago, it felt as though he’d reached another milestone in his private twelve-step program.