“That’s what doctors do. Hey,” I said, following the jeep’s progress, grateful it was there. “That’s Eddie and Sachs. They’re waving.”
Sachs had his binocs out, too, and he was pointing so Eddie could change course. The two men had become fast friends. The jeep raised dust behind it. Minutes later it stopped at the foot of the trail and the men scrambled out and headed up the steep trail. Sachs had acquired a tan, and definition in his muscles. Eddie always looked the same. He was built like a horse and, I thought irritably, sometimes about as smart.
Sachs opened his knapsack and, as they closed, pulled out papers. He thrust the sheaf toward me, even before they reached us. That’s how eager he was.
“You were right, Joe,” he said. “More right than anyone thought. My guys didn’t want to make waves but I insisted. You won’t believe how it started, but you’ll sure believe,” he said, flourishing a printout of the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, “where it’s ending. Get this.”
I felt my breath catch as I looked over the information; page after page, building it all up; the years, the names, the connections, the transactions.
A dizzy rage rose up inside me. All I could think of was, You did it for this?
TWENTY-NINE
The uniformed guards were polite and efficient, patting me down in the lobby. Another guard ran a scanner over me when I reached the second bank of elevators to the tower, the one that started on the forty-first floor. A third man handled the wand and hand search outside the executive suite. Normal precaution, he said. He had the look of ex-military; had the politeness, the firmness, the obvious strength.
“We’re checking all visitors. There’s been a threat,” he apologized. I knew he was lying, and he knew I knew. He was looking for recording devices, not explosives. I didn’t mind.
It was early December, three weeks after we finally got out of quarantine. Today’s headline in the New York Times, sitting on the guard’s desk, read:
PRESIDENT AUTHORIZES SPANISH FLU VACCINATION PROGRAM.
THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOSES TO BE PREPARED.
BRITAIN, FRANCE & GERMANY CONSIDER SIMILAR PROGRAMS.
The front page of the business section, partially visible below the A section, read, PACIFIC-NORTH STOCK SURGES! GREATEST ONE-DAY GAIN IN MARKET HISTORY!
Inside, the director’s new office was three times the size of his old rabbit hole in Northwest Washington, glass instead of tired gray marble, eightieth-story view instead of basement, soundproofing, art consultant — picked canvases, Italian leather chairs, all the perks of upper floor life in New York. I remembered reading once that in jungles, some animals spend their entire lives in high tree canopies. They don’t come down. They never experience the dirt of the forest floor. How like the tropical jungle this city was, I thought.
He rose from behind his old walnut Washington desk — an out-of-place and doggedly sentimental attachment — clad in a three-button pinstriped suit in dark blue, with light gray stripes. The shirt was crisp white, the tie Armani, the gold cuff links sparkled from sunlight slanting through floor-to-ceiling windows. The sky was urban blue, a washed-out vestige of what I recalled from the Arctic. Below rose the lesser towers of Gotham, their spires mere supplicants, straining, like the city, for more.
“Nice office, sir,” I said, looking down at Fifty-seventh Street.
“Every time I come back, it takes getting used to, Joe.”
The triple-strength windows blocked out any hint of unwanted sound. New Yorkers moved below as in a twenty-first-century silent movie. Or if you preferred the inside view, there was a big-screen TV, tuned to FOX Business, a built-in wet bar, and several colorful canvases. The photos of his wife and two girls in Bermuda were the same ones he’d exhibited in D.C. The wall of VIP photos showed the director in the old days, more hair, bigger stomach, nerdier glasses, with the President, the National Security Advisor, at a London conference on bioterror.
I said, “I bet you see pilots’ faces when they go by.”
He chuckled. “Oh, it’s just more space I have to figure out how to fill. They hire people to help you do it.”
I accepted a Tito’s vodka on ice. The glass was crystal, the tongs silver. We made small talk, and at length, when it was time, I said, “You know the thing that keeps bothering me? It’s who told the Chinese to send that submarine.”
He shrugged, sipped single malt on ice. He’d told his secretary to hold all his calls. “Del Grazo, I imagine.”
“No, he only knew we were going north. Zhou was dispatched before anyone on the Wilmington knew about the illness, yet the sub carried the antidote. Funny, huh?”
“Hmm. Now that you mention it, I do find it odd.”
I felt his smooth, icy vodka spread through me. I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out a folded paper, and his pleasant expression turned curious.
“Records, sir, on some old Kansas pharmaceutical company. Maybe you heard of it. E.E. Worth & Sons.”
He’d heard of it, all right, that much was evident in the slight straightening of shoulders, and briefest hesitation in the way his glass lifted toward his mouth. It’s funny how loud silence can be. I heard an ice cube crackle in his glass.
“What’s that name again, Joe?”
“Well, sir. E.E. Worth, a little company established 1887. They provided drugs to Fort Riley. Had a contract with the Army — headache powders, gargles, medical needs. Apparently had a research arm, too.”
“Is that so,” the director said in an interested voice.
“Yes, sir! Turn of the twentieth century. World War One, the bioweapons race! Total war! The French came up with tear gas in 1914, then, in ’15, chlorine from the Germans, and phosgene from France. In 1917, mustard gas. A whole biowarfare effort, and E.E. Worth did their part.”
“And how was that?”
“Andy Sachs’s guys found this. Worth had a research farm near Fort Riley, Kansas. Experimenting on sheep. Pigs. Horses. Gasses and diseases, sir! Conditions must have been primitive as hell, poking around. No idea that viruses even existed yet. No containment. Just doctors and amateur chemists stumbling around dirty labs. Then, in 1918, the Spanish flu suddenly breaks out at Fort Riley, in the middle of this race for new weapons!”
The director’s brows rose. “You’re suggesting a connection?”
“So far, just facts. In 1931, Worth merges with Ashcroft Drugs of Chicago. In 1952, with Chicago-Midland; ’64, Boyd & Sons; and they’re absorbed into Pacific-North in ’87. And P-N acquires Jade Pharma for their generics arm, an Asian arm in 2008, brings us up to today.”
“Joe, I don’t understand where you’re going.”
“Don’t you?”
His eyes were in shadow. His shoulders did not move.
I pulled out another folded paper and felt his gaze slide to it, cool, gray, distant.
“What I couldn’t figure out first… well… actually, what none of us could figure out, was why all records relating to that old farm — bills for services, invoices, details of work projects, you name it — nothing was in the archives.”
“Tsk! No one keeps work orders a hundred years old.”
“Oh, archives did for the other forts, sir.”
“An oversight, then, with a war on.”
“Maybe.”
“Lost then, certainly.”
“Oh, definitely. Lost.” I nodded. “But why?”