“I’m guessing you don’t have a cheeseburger hiding back there somewhere,” he said.
The man stared at him.
“Never mind,” Hawker said. He held out a hand, passing on the food.
The waiter moved off and Hawker began to scan the room.
Filling out the incredible space was an international group of investors and medical professionals. Whatever Paradox was selling, a pretty distinguished group of guests seemed interested in buying.
Wealth from twenty countries walked the floor. Americans like Callahan, Middle Eastern men in traditional garb, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian attendees could be seen and overheard. Aside from the waiters, Hawker was undoubtedly the poorest man in the room. It left him feeling oddly out of place.
And then he spotted Sonia, standing near a podium, in a form-fitting white cocktail dress. Leaning close to a thin, gray-haired man, she seemed to speak in hushed tones. A whisper here, a nod there, a smile and a handshake for someone who stopped by.
She was all grown up now, no doubt about that. The awkward beauty of a twenty-year-old had morphed into a gorgeous thirty-year-old with curves and confidence. From what he saw, she was in her element, shining as the center of attention while everything else swirled around her.
She said a few more words to the man next to her, a partner or executive by the look of things, shook another set of hands, and then exhaled at a break in the pressing crowd.
As she took a breath her eyes came up; her gaze stretched out across the ballroom as if to relax for just a moment, and in the process landed directly on Hawker.
He saw her pause. Her expression changed, signaling a moment of confusion and indecision. He guessed she wasn’t sure what she was seeing or didn’t believe what her mind was telling her. And then she drew in a breath, her lips parted in surprise, and Hawker knew that she’d recognized him.
The gray-haired man tapped her on the shoulder. She turned toward him abruptly, but in a second she was back on form. And Hawker realized that Sonia wasn’t just part of the show — she was the main attraction.
Moments later the lights began to dim. Sonia and the gray-haired man stepped off the platform and Hawker lost them in the crowd. At each end of the room, huge plasma-screen monitors began to descend from the ceiling while some type of spalike music rose up.
The show was about to begin. Whatever Sonia had been up to for the last few years, whatever Paradox was selling, Hawker and the rest of the crowd were about to find out.
CHAPTER 19
Upon their arrival in Beirut, Danielle and Moore had been whisked away to the American embassy. Waiting in a secured communications room, Danielle took the opportunity to talk with Moore about Hawker.
“I’m not sure Hawker is the best person to be on this mission,” she said.
Moore remained stoic. “I was wondering when you’d mention that. What are your thoughts?”
“He has a stake in it,” she said. “He wants his friend to be cleared, wants to believe in him.”
As Moore considered her words, Danielle felt sick inside. She felt as if she were stabbing Hawker in the back somehow. She believed what she was saying and, more important, she believed she was speaking in Hawker’s best interest, whether he knew it or not.
Moore seemed less concerned. “Who wouldn’t want their friend to be proven innocent?” he said. “He seems objective to me.”
Danielle struggled. Perhaps objective versus subjective was the point, or at least it might become the point.
“There’s no one else I know more interested in doing what’s ‘right,’ ” she said. “But if what’s right from his point of view conflicts with what’s right for the rest of the world … we know where Hawker comes down on that. He believes in the tribe around him. That’s what matters. It’s the reason we love him, and the reason he frustrates us so badly. Even in Mexico he threatened to let the world burn if it came down to choosing between those he loved and everything else.”
“And did he?”
“No,” she said, remembering how Hawker had ultimately chosen. “But it’s still a blind spot.”
Moore stopped scribbling the notes on his pad and turned toward her. “We all have blind spots,” he said. “Sometimes they’re what make us who we are.”
“I know, but—”
“Hawker joined up for a reason.”
“Because he wants a clean slate,” she said.
“That’s not why he joined,” Moore insisted.
Danielle sat back, fixing her gaze on Moore in an inquisitive way. She was pretty certain she understood the deal they’d crafted for Hawker and what he was getting out of it.
“We’re his tribe now,” Moore explained. “You in particular. He joined up so he wouldn’t be alone.”
“And the fact that he’s now making contact with a woman from his past, someone he obviously had feelings for?” she asked.
“You tell me,” Moore said. “Would he choose her over what’s right?”
She hesitated. How could she know?
“The feelings between you two are no great secret,” he said. “Can you be objective about it?”
“It’s not his body I’m trying to save,” she said defensively.
Moore made a face as if he were weighing the possibilities. “Then you watch him, you make the call.”
As she considered Moore’s directive, a great irony struck her. She had always been good at seeing the forest for the trees, focusing on the bigger picture. But now her mind was on Hawker. She was the one seeing it on a personal level, trying to spare her friend from the dark road he seemed to be heading down.
She didn’t want Hawker getting pushed into a corner and forced to choose. He’d suffered enough of that already.
A moment later the feed from NRI headquarters in Virginia kicked in and Danielle recognized Walter Yang from the NRI’s medical science department. Dressed in a white lab coat with rimless glasses, Walter looked every bit the PhD in molecular biology and genetics that he was. For reasons she could not fathom, he was also wearing a holster with a pistol secured in it.
Moore cleared his throat. “Why are you armed, Walter?”
“You told me to shoot anyone who tried to break the quarantine,” Yang said.
Moore looked distraught and glanced over at Danielle. “Remind me not to use metaphors when speaking to the sciences department,” he said, and then he turned back to the screen.
“Have you shot anybody yet?”
“No,” Yang said proudly. “No one has tried to escape.”
“Good,” Moore said. “Let’s keep it that way. Turn the gun back in to security, forget what I said about shooting people, and tell me what you’ve discovered on the data Ms. Laidlaw provided.”
Yang looked disappointed for a second, then brightened. “First off,” he said, “the data are incomplete.”
“I was in kind of a hurry,” Danielle said, realizing that Yang would know nothing about where the data came from or how it was collected.
“Sure,” he said. “Well, the good thing is we have enough here to reconstruct the gist of this clinical triaclass="underline" several years of work on a long list of deliberately mutated viruses. Things don’t go straight-line, of course, but in general each new Series seemed to improve on the last.”
“Can you see a connection with the UN virus?” Moore asked.
“I can’t speak to their genetic similarities, because the data contains only trial results, not the actual genetic coding, but based on the range of infected cells claimed in the trials, the UN virus and trial 951 are likely highly related but not the same. Given some modifications, both could probably be used in genetic therapy.”
“Ah,” Danielle said. Onscreen, Yang grinned and nodded.