Lauren agreed and hung up. She sat on the edge of her bed, her mind racing, trying to think of all the things she had to do to get ready for an international trip. She dialed Continental Airlines to arrange for the earliest possible morning flight to Atlanta. She got a flight leaving at six a.m.
She called her teaching assistant and after apologizing for calling so late, told her what was going on. The young girl was devastated at the terrible news but agreed to cover Lauren’s classes and to explain to the dean why she was leaving for the next couple of weeks. For a time she merely sat there staring at the floor of her apartment, feeling helpless, until she finally forced herself to get up. She had a lot to do before her plane left for Atlanta at six a.m. She took a suitcase from her closet and began filling it with clothes, letting the activity take her mind off Mexico and the horrors there.
After she snapped the suitcase shut, she went to her briefcase and thumbed through a stack of papers inside until she found copies of a translation of Díaz’s journal that arrived in yesterday’s mail.
Too keyed up to go back to sleep, she propped a couple of pillows against the headboard, put on her reading glasses, and turned to the first page. Perhaps the journal would offer some clues to the fate that had befallen her friends and colleagues at the Tlateloco dig. At the very least, she reasoned, it might help keep her mind off the agony she’d heard in Charles Adams’s voice.
Though her Spanish was tolerable, she was grateful for the translation Charlie had included with the copies of the original document. In spite of her vow to try to put Charlie’s phone call out of her thoughts, she found it hard to concentrate. Her mind filled with images of all the kindnesses and special moments she and Charlie had shared in her years at the university.
Finally, she pushed all maudlin thoughts aside, vowing to grieve for her mentor later. Now it was more important for her to read and try to understand as much as she could about the mysterious illness Díaz had named the Black Plague. As she read, she wondered if this Dr. Williams and his team of experts would be able to solve a mystery that had its beginnings almost five hundred years ago. She hoped so, for she simply had to know what happened to Charlie and all the others.
Two hours later, physically and emotionally spent, she set her alarm, turned off her light, and drifted into a fitful sleep, tormented by dreams of dying men and animals in the jungle. In the morning she would be on her way to Atlanta to join a doctor by the name of Williams and his team on a journey into the face of a death so horrible that it could barely be contemplated.
Chapter 3
Mason Williams unlocked and entered the conference room at CDC headquarters his Wildfire Team used whenever they had a thorny problem to discuss. Stifling a yawn, he threw his “go-bag” packed with the clothes and toiletries he’d need for two weeks in the jungle in the corner and proceeded immediately to the rear table holding the most important equipment in the room, a coffeepot.
Minutes later he was sitting at the head of the long burl wood conference table and drinking the wake-up juice while he went over the notes he’d taken while on the phone with Dr. Matos. From the doctor’s description of the sickness, he felt sure it was some form of hemorrhagic fever, but he was damned if he could think of anything endemic to Mexico that would produce those symptoms.
He finished his coffee and was just getting up to pour another cup when he saw two of his team members entering the door.
Lionel Johnson and Shirley Cole walked in side by side, looking like Mutt and Jeff as they tossed their go-bags into the corner with Mason’s.
Lionel Johnson, MD, PhD, was six feet four inches in height, tipped the scales at 250 pounds, and was an easygoing African American who was the world’s foremost authority on fungi and mycobacteria. Although he’d gone to Duke on a football scholarship and had been a fierce competitor on the field, he was very shy and gentle in everyday life and spoke so softly that he often had to repeat himself in meetings. His features were, like the rest of him, large and coarse. His most prominent attribute were his ears, which stuck out like Clark Gable’s and were often the subject of fond teasing by the other members of the team.
In contrast, Shirley Cole had a PhD in Microbiology, was only five feet two inches tall, and was almost that wide. At forty-four years of age she was the oldest member of the team and was slightly matronly. She had been extensively involved in army biological and chemical warfare secret laboratories prior to coming to work at the CDC. She was the unofficial den mother of the team and spent most of her off time baking cookies and muffins, which she brought to all of their meetings. Usually calm and centered, she could still get quite testy if her conclusions were questioned but then usually felt guilty and baked even more goodies to make up for her temper.
They smiled when they saw Mason standing next to the coffee machine as Shirley approached, handing him a platter of banana nut muffins. “Try these, boss,” she said. “They’ll get that bleary look out of your eyes.”
Lionel nodded, smiling around the crumbs on his lips. “Yep,” he mumbled. “Mighty tasty all right.”
Mason grabbed one and motioned to the coffee machine. “Better drink up, guys. I have a feeling we’re gonna need all the coffee we can get to handle this case.”
Before he could continue, the other three members of the team came hurrying through the door, all jabbering about what could be so important to yank them out of their beds at this ungodly hour.
Mason stepped back so Sam Jakes, Suzanne Elliot, and Joel Schumacher could gather around the coffeepot and get their fair share of caffeine and muffins. As he sipped his coffee and watched them mingle and tease back and forth he thought back to the amazing changes each of them had undergone since joining the Wildfire Team. Once highly independent loners who were all at the pinnacle of their fields, they were now members of a team that required the most intimate cooperation imaginable… not only their very lives depended on it, but the lives of thousands of others, also.
It had been just a few years before when he had been tasked with finding and recruiting the best medical and scientific talent available. He was told to form a rapid response group that could be ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice to travel anywhere in the world to attack and defeat any disease threats to the country and the world.
Mason remembered the first to join his team was Sam Jakes, who had an MD and PhD in virology and had been doing cutting-edge research at Columbia University. When Mason first approached the irascible gnomelike man, he found his personality was perfectly suited to New York City — he was brusque, rude, and totally convinced of the unassailability of his giant intellect.
About five feet five inches tall and weighing over two hundred pounds, Jakes was sensitive about both his short stature and his pudgy profile and was quick to take offense at the mention of either. The fact that he was balding with flyaway frizzy hair and bushy caterpillar eyebrows and an ugly blot of a nose didn’t help his self-esteem issues regarding his appearance.
In spite of that, he was also supremely arrogant about his abilities and rarely respected anyone else’s feelings or intellect and was both condescending and argumentative on almost every subject.
However, since he knew as much about virology as anyone on earth, Mason ignored the fact that he wasn’t a team player and overlooked his faults and convinced him to join the team by promising him the chance to see and treat firsthand diseases most doctors only read about.