He had turned then, took one look, and knew again why he had badgered the army into bringing her to Fort Detrick. He had seen her first in the NIH lab where she had castigated a careless researcher, and he had been shocked to meet her again at her sister’s place, but those two encounters had been enough to know he wanted to spend time with her. He had sat there under Randi’s angry gaze admiring Sophia. She had long cornsilk hair pulled back in a ponytail and a slim figure full of curves.
She had not missed his interest. That first day in the USAMRIID lab, she had told him, “I’ll take the empty bench over there. You can stop staring at me, and I’ll get to work. Everyone tells me you’re a hotshot combat doctor. I respect that. But I’m a better researcher than you’ll ever be, and you’d better get used to it.”
“I’ll remember that.”
She had stared him straight in the eye. “And keep your dick in your pants until I say take it out.”
He nodded, smiled, and told her, “I can wait.”
The hospital’s waiting room was an island out of time. In his mind the world was somewhere else. Crazy memories rampaged through his brain. He seemed to be out of control. He would have to call the wedding off. Cancel everything. The caterers, the limousine, the …
My God, what was he doing?
He shook his head violently. Tried to focus his mind. He was in the hospital.
Dawn’s light reflected pink and yellow on the buildings across the street. He would have to put his dress uniform back into mothballs.
Where had she been in recent weeks? He should have been with her. He should never have gotten her the job at USAMRIID.
How many people had they invited to the wedding? He had to write each one. Personally. Tell them she was gone … gone …
He had killed her. Sophia. He had made USAMRIID make an offer so good she had taken the job at Detrick, and he had killed her. He had known he wanted her the moment he saw her at Randi’s. When he had tried to tell Randi how sorry he was her fiance had died, Randi had been too angry to listen. But Sophia had understood. He had seen it in her eyes—those black eyes, so intense, so lively, so alive …
He had to tell her family. But she had no family. Only Randi. He had to tell Randi.
He lurched to his feet to find a pay telephone, and Somalia came back to him in a rush. He had been posted to a hospital ship in the minor invasion to bring order and protect our citizens in a country torn apart by the war raging between two warlords who had divided Mogadishu and the country. They summoned him into the remote bush to treat a major with fever. Exhausted from a twelve-hour shift, he had diagnosed malaria, but then it had turned out to be the far-less-known and far-more-deadly Lassa fever. The major had died before the diagnosis could be corrected and better treatment begun.
The army exonerated him of wrongdoing. It was a mistake many more experienced doctors—unfamiliar with virology—had made before and would make again, and Lassa usually killed even with the best treatment. There was no cure. But he knew he had been arrogant, so full of himself that he had not called for help until too late. He blamed himself. So much so that he had pressured the army to assign him to Fort Detrick to become an expert in virology and microbiology.
There, after he really understood the rarity of Lassa compared to malaria, he finally accepted his error as a risk of field medicine in distant and unfamiliar places. But the major had been Randi Russell’s fiancé, and Randi had never forgiven Smith, never stopped blaming him for his death. Now he had to tell her he had killed another person she loved.
He slumped back onto the couch.
Sophia. Soph. He had killed her. Darling Sophia. They would marry in the spring, but she was dead. He should never have brought her to Detrick. Never!
“Colonel Smith?”
Smith heard the voice as if from under miles of water at the bottom of a murky lagoon. He saw a shape. Then a face. And burst through the surface to blink in the hard light.
“Smith? Are you all right?” Brigadier General Kielburger stood over him.
Then it struck him and left him chilled to the marrow. Sophia was dead.
He sat up. “I have to be there at the autopsy! If—”
“Relax. They haven’t started yet.”
Smith glared. “Why the hell wasn’t I told about this new virus? You knew damn well where I was.”
“Don’t use that tone with me, Colonel! You weren’t contacted at first because the matter didn’t seem urgent—a single soldier in California. By the time the two other cases were reported, you were due home in a little over a day anyway. If you’d returned when your orders instructed, you would have known. And perhaps—”
Smith’s stomach clenched into an enormous fist, and his hands followed suit. Was Kielburger suggesting he might have saved Sophia had he been here? Then he slumped back. He did not need the general to do what he was already doing himself. Over and over as he sat in the dawn waiting room he blamed himself.
He stood up abruptly. “I have to make a call.”
He walked to the telephone near the elevators and dialed Randi Russell’s home. After two rings the machine picked up, and he heard her precise, get-to-the-point voice: “Randi Russell. Can’t talk now. After the beep, leave a message … . Thanks.”
That “thanks” came grudgingly, as if an inner voice had told her to not be all business all the time. That was Randi.
He dialed her office at the Foreign Affairs Inquiries Institute, an international think tank. This message was even crisper: “Russell. Leave a message.” No thanks this time, not even as an afterthought.
Bitterly, he considered leaving the same kind of message: “Smith here. Bad news. Sophia’s dead. Sorry.”
But he simply hung up. There was no way he could leave a death message. He would have to keep trying to reach her, no matter how much it hurt. If he could not get her by tomorrow, he would tell her boss what had happened and ask him or her to have Randi call him. What else could he do?
Randi had always been a sometime thing, frequently away on long business trips. She saw Sophia rarely. After he and Sophia grew close, Randi seldom called and never came around.
Back in the waiting room, he found Kielburger impatiently swinging a knife-creased uniform leg and polished boot.
Smith dropped into a chair beside the general. “Tell me about this virus. Where did it break out? What kind is it? Another hemorrhagic like Machupo?”
“Yes to all of that, and no to all of that,” Kielburger told him. “Major Keith Anderson died Friday evening out in Fort Irwin of acute respiratory distress syndrome, but it was not like any ARDS we’d ever seen. There was massive hemorrhaging from the lungs, and blood in the chest cavity. The Pentagon alerted us, and we got blood and tissue samples early Saturday morning. By then two other deaths had occurred in Atlanta and Boston. You weren’t here, so I put Dr. Russell in charge, and the team worked around the clock. When we did the DNA restriction map, it turned out to be unlike any known virus. It failed to react to any of the antibody samples we had for any virus. I decided to bring in CDC and the other Level Four facilities worldwide, but everything is still negative. It’s new, and it’s deadly.”
In the corridor, Dr. Lutfallah, the hospital pathologist, passed with two orderlies pushing a sheet-draped gurney. He nodded to Smith.
The general continued talking. “What I want you to do is—”
Smith ignored him. What he had to do was more important than anything Kielburger wanted. He jumped up and followed the procession to the autopsy rooms.
Hospital orderly Emiliano Coronado slipped out into the service alley behind the hospital to have a cigarette. Proud of his distant ancestor’s daring and fame, he stood erect, his shoulders squared, and in his imagination he stared off into the vast distances of Colorado four centuries ago, looking for the Cities of Gold.
A sudden pain sliced across his throat. His cigarette dropped from his mouth, and his vision of glory sank into the refuse littering the dark alley. A knife bl
ade had cut a thin trickle of blood from his neck. The blade pressed against the wound.
“Not a sound,” the voice said from behind.
Terrified, Emiliano could only grunt.
“Tell me about Dr. Russell.” Nadal al-Hassan dug the razor-sharp knife deeper as encouragement. “Is she alive?”
Coronado tried to swallow. “She die.”
“What did she say before she died?”
“Nothin’ … she don’ say nothin’ to no one.”
The knife dug in. “You are sure? Not to Colonel Smith, her fiance? That does not sound possible.”
Emiliano was desperate. “She unconscious, you know? How she gonna talk?”
“That is good.”
The knife did its work, and Emiliano Coronado lay unconscious and dying as his blood soaked the refuse of the shadowed alley.
Al-Hassan looked carefully around. He left the alley and circled the block to where the van waited.
“Well?” Bill Griffin asked as al-Hassan climbed in.
“According to the orderly, she said nothing.”
“Then maybe Smith knows nothing. Maybe it’s good Maddux missed him in D.C. Two murders at USAMRIID increases the risk of someone figuring it out.”
“I would prefer Maddux had killed him. Then we would not be having this discussion.”
“But Maddux didn’t kill him, and we can rethink the necessity.”
“We cannot be certain she did not speak in her condominium.”
“We can if she was unconscious the whole time.”
“She was not unconscious when she went into her building,” al-Hassan replied. “Our leader will not like the possibility she told him of Peru.”
Griffin shot back: “I’ve got to say it again, al-Hassan, too many unexplained deaths and killings can draw a lot of attention. Especially if Smith’s told anyone about the attacks on him. The boss could like that even less.”
Al-Hassan hesitated. He distrusted Griffin, but the ex-FBI man could be right. “Then we must let him decide which course of action he likes least.”
Bill Griffin felt a weight lift from him. Not all the way off, because he knew Smithy. If Jon even suspected that Sophia’s death was not an accident, he would never back off. Still, Bill hoped the hardhead would believe she had made a mistake in the lab, and the attacks on him had no relation to her death. When there were no more attacks, he would give it up. Then Smithy would be out of danger, and Griffin could stop worrying.
In the tile and stainless-steel autopsy room in the basement of the Frederick hospital, Smith looked up as pathologist Lutfallah stepped from the dissecting table. The air was cold and singed with the stink of formaldehyde. Both men were dressed completely in green scrubs.
Lutfallah sighed. “Well, that’s it, Jon. No doubt at all. She died of a massive viral infection that destroyed her lungs.”
“What virus?” Smith’s masked voice demanded, although he was pretty sure he knew the answer.
Lutfallah shook his head. “I’ll leave that part to you Einsteins at Detrick. The lungs and almost nothing else … but it’s not pneumonia, tuberculosis, or anything else I’ve ever seen. Swift and devastating.”
Smith nodded. With a giant effort of will, he blanked his mind against who was lying cut open on the stainless-steel table with its channels and slopes to catch blood. He and Lutfallah began the grim business of collecting tissue and blood samples.
Only later after the autopsy was finished and Smith had taken off his green cap and mask and gloves and scrubs and sat outside the autopsy room alone on a long bench did he let himself grieve for Sophia again.
He had waited too long. He had let his excited chase of science and medicine around the globe keep him away too much. He had been lying to himself that with Sophia he was no longer a cowboy. It was not true. Even after he had asked her to marry him, he had still left her for his pursuits. And now he could not get that lost time back.
The pain of missing her was sharper than anything physical he had ever felt. With a rush of aching comprehension, he tried to come to terms with the fact that they would never be together again. He leaned forward, and his face fell into his hands. He yearned for her. Thick tears poured through his fingers. Regret. Guilt. Mourning. He shook with silent sobs. She was gone, and all he could think about was that his arms ached to hold her one more time.
Chapter Nine
9:18 A.M.
Bethesda, Maryland
Most people think of the behemoth National Institutes of Health as a single entity, which is far from the truth. Set on more than three hundred lush acres in Bethesda, just ten miles from the Capitol’s dome, the NIH consists of twenty-four separate institutes, centers, and divisions that employ sixteen thousand people. Of those, an astounding six thousand are Ph.D.s. It is a collection of more advanced degrees in one location than most colleges and some entire states are able to boast.
Lily Lowenstein, RRL, was thinking about all that as she stared out her office suite’s windows on the top floor of one of the seventy-five campus buildings. Her gaze swept over the flower beds, the rolling lawns, the tree-rimmed parking lots, and the office structures where so many highly educated and intelligent people labored.
She was looking for an answer where there was none.
As director of the Federal Resource Medical Clearing house (FRMC), Lily was herself highly educated, well-trained, and at the top of her profession. Alone in her office, she stared out at the prestigious NIH, but she did not see the people or buildings or anything else. What she was actually seeing and thinking about was her problem. A problem that had grown almost imperceptibly over many years until it weighed her down like the proverbial thousand-pound gorilla.
Lily was a compulsive gambler. It made no difference what kind; she was addicted to them all. At first she spent her vacations in Las Vegas. Later, after she took her first job in Washington, she went to Atlantic City because she could get to the tables faster. She could play Atlantic City on weekends, or on a single day off, or even a one-night stand in recent years as the compulsion grew with the size of her debts.
If it had stopped there—casino gambling and an occasional trip to the track at Pimlico and Arlington—perhaps it would have remained a minor monkey. It would have been annoying, draining away her good salary, causing rifts in her family when she canceled visits and failed to send Christmas or birthday presents to her nieces and nephews. It would have left her with few friends, but it would never have grown into the terrifying beast she now faced.
She placed bets by telephone with bookmakers, placed bets in bars with other bookmakers, and, finally, borrowed money from those who lent money to faceless, frantic souls like herself. Now she owed more than fifty thousand dollars, and a man who would not give his name had called to tell her he had bought up all her debts and would like to discuss payment. It shot chills up her spine. Her hand shook as if from palsy. He was polite, but there was an implied threat in his words. At exactly nine-thirty she was to meet him at a downtown Bethesda sports bar she knew only too well.
Terrified, she had tried to figure out what to do. She had no illusions. She could, of course, go to the police, but then everything would come out. She would lose her job and probably go to prison because, inevitably, she had cut a few corners in buying office supplies, and she had pocketed the difference. She had even dipped into petty cash. That was what compulsive gamblers did.
There were no more friends or family who would lend her money, even if she were willing to let them know she had a problem. One of her two cars, the Beemer, had been repossessed, and her house was mortgaged to the maximum. She had no husband, not anymore. Her share of her son’s private school tuition was in arrears. She had no bonds, no stocks, no real estate. No one was going to help her, not even a loan shark. Not anymore.
She could not even run away. Her only means of support was her job. Without her job she had nothing. She was nothing.
From a rear booth in the sports bar, Bill Griffin watc
hed the woman enter. She was about what he had expected. Middle-aged, middle-class, almost prim, nondescript. A few inches taller, maybe five-foot-nine. A few pounds heavier. Brown hair, brown eyes, heart-shaped face, small chin. There was a certain telltale carelessness about her clothes: Her suit bordered on shabby and did not fit as well as it should on the director of a big government facility. Her hair was ragged, and her gray roots were showing. The gambler.
But she was also a shade haughty as she stood inside the door looking for someone to come forward and claim her, the sign of the middlerank bureaucrat.
Griffin let her stew.
Finally he stepped out of the booth, caught her eye, and nodded. She walked stiffly past tables and booths toward him.
“Ms. Lowenstein,” he said.
Lily nodded to control her apprehension. “And you are?”
“That doesn’t matter. Sit down.”
She sat, nervous and uneasy, so she went on the attack. “How did you find out about my debts?”
Bill Griffin smiled thinly. “You don’t really care about all that, Ms. Lowenstein, do you? Who I am, where I got the debts, why I bought them up. None of it matters a damn, right?” He gazed at her trembling cheeks and lips. She caught his look and stiffened her face. Inwardly he nodded. She was terrified, which made her vulnerable to alternatives. “I have your markers.” He watched her brown eyes as they shifted uneasily. “I’m here to offer you a way to get out from under.”
She snorted derisively. “Out from under?”
No gambler cared much about simply erasing debt. Gambling was a compulsion, an illness. Debt was an embarrassment and danger, but it had little impact until it meant the tracks, the bookmakers, anyone who ran a game would refuse to let you play without cash on the table. Griffin knew Lily was in a daily scramble to come up with enough to place more than a five-dollar track bet.