It was time to either give up and lay in several dozen cases of Coors, settle for a slow and boring decline, or to hammer together a platform he could stand on, plank by carefully researched scientific plank.

“You asshole,” he said as he stood by the window, scrap of packing newspaper in one hand, front page headlines in the other. “You goddamned…immature…assholel”

27

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta

Low lazy clouds, thin sunlight neutral through the windows of the office of the director. Mark Augustine stood back from the scrawl of crisscrossing lines and names on the whiteboard and clasped his elbow in his hand, rubbed his nose. At the bottom of the complex outline, below Shawbeck, the director of the NIH, and the as-yet unannounced replacement for Augustine at the CDC, lay the Taskforce for Human Provirus Research: THUPR, pronounced like “super” with a lisp. Augustine hated this name and referred to it always as the Task-force; just the Taskforce.

He swept his hand down the management staircases. “There it is, Frank. I leave here next week and hop on over to Bethesda, at the very bottom of the whiteboard jumble. Thirty-three steps down. This is what it’s come to. Bureaucracy at its finest.”

Frank Shawbeck leaned back in his chair. “It could have been worse. We spent most of the month trimming it down.”

“It could be less of a nightmare. It’s still a nightmare.”

“At least you know who your boss is. I’m answerable to both HHS and the president,” Shawbeck said. The news had arrived two days earlier. Shawbeck would remain atNIH, but was moving up to be director. “Right in the middle of the old cyclone. Frankly, I’m glad Maxine has decided not to step down. She’s a much better lightning rod than I am.”

“Don’t fool yourself,” Augustine said. “She’s a better politician than either of us. We’ll take the bolt when it comes.”

“If it comes,” Shawbeck said, but his face was sober.

“When, Frank,” Augustine repeated. He gave Shawbeck his characteristic grin-grimace. “WHO wants us to coordinate on all outside investigations — and they want to come into the U.S. and run their own tests. Commonwealth of Independent States is dead in the water…Russia lorded it over the republics for too long. No coordination possible there, and Dicken still hasn’t been able to get a peep out of Georgia and Azerbaijan. We won’t be allowed to investigate there until the political situation stabilizes, whatever that means.”

“How bad is it there?” Shawbeck asked.

“Bad, that’s all we know. They aren’t asking for help. They’ve had Herod’s for ten or twenty years, maybe longer…and they’ve been dealing with it in their own way, on a local level.”

“With massacres.”

Augustine nodded. “They don’t want that to come out, and they certainly don’t want us saying SHEVA originated with them. The pride of fresh nationalism. We’re going to keep it quiet as long as we can, just to have some leverage there.”

“Jesus. What about Turkey?”

“They’ve accepted our help, let our inspectors in, but they won’t let us look along the borders with either Iraq or Georgia.”

“Where’s Dicken now?”

“In Geneva.”

“He’s keeping WHO in the loop?”

“Every step of the way,” Augustine said. “Carbon-copy reports to WHO and UNICEF. The Senate’s screaming again. They’re threatening to delay UN payments until we get a clear picture of who’s paying for what on the world scene. They don’t want us holding the tab on whatever treatment we come up with — and they can’t believe it won’t be us who comes up with a treatment.”

Shawbeck lifted his hand. “It probably will be us. I’ve got meetings scheduled with four CEOs tomorrow — Merck, Schering Plough, Lilly, Bristol-Myers,” he said. “Americol and Euricol next week. They want to talk sharing and subsidies. As if that isn’t enough, Dr. Gallo’s coming in this afternoon — he wants to have access to all of our research.”

“This has nothing to do with Hiy’ Augustine said.

“He claims there might be similar receptor activity. It’s a long shot, but he’s famous and he has a lot of clout on the Hill. And apparently he can help us with the French, now that they’re cooperating again.”

“How are we going to treat this, Frank? Hell, my people have found SHEVA in every ape from green monkeys to highland gorillas.”

“It’s too early for pessimism,” Shawbeck said. “It’s only been three months.”

“We have forty thousand confirmed cases of Herod’s on the Eastern Seaboard alone, Frank! There is nothing on the horizon!” Augustine pounded the whiteboard with his fist.

Shawbeck shook his head and held up both hands, making little shushing noises.

Augustine dropped his voice and let his shoulders slump. Then he picked up a cloth and meticulously wiped the edge of his hand where it had smeared across the ink on the board. “On the bright side, the message is getting out,” he said. “We’ve had two million hits on our Herod’s web site. But did you hear Audrey Korda on Larry King Live last night?”

“No,” Shawbeck said.

“She practically calls men devils incarnate. Says women could get along without us, that we should be put in quarantine… Pffi!”He shot out his hand. “No more sex, no more SHEVA.”

Shawbeck’s eyes glittered like little wet stones. “Maybe she’s right, Mark. Have you seen the surgeon general’s list of extreme measures?”

Augustine ran his hand back through his sandy hair. “I hope to hell it never leaks.”

28

Long Island, New York

Toothpaste dribbles lay like little blue tadpoles in the bottom of the sink. Kaye finished washing out her mouth, spat water in an arc to swirl the tadpoles down the drain, and wiped her face on a towel. She stood in the bathroom doorway and glanced down the long upstairs hall at the closed master bedroom door.

This was her last night in the house; she had slept in the guest bedroom. Another moving van — a small one — was arriving at eleven this morning to remove what few belongings she wanted to take with her. Caddy was adopting Crickson andTemin.

The house was up for sale. In a booming market, she would get top dollar. That at least was protected from their creditors. Saul had put the house in her name.

She chose her clothes for the day — plain white panties and bra, a blouse and cream sweater combination, pale blue slacks — and rolled the few items of wardrobe that hadn’t already been packed into a suitcase. She was weary of dealing with stuff, apportioning this and that to Saul’s sister, marking bags for Goodwill, other bags for trash.

It had taken Kaye almost a week to remove those marks of their life together that she did not want to take with her and that the real estate agent thought might “color” the place for potential buyers. She had gently explained about the detrimental effect of “All these science books, the journals…Too abstract. Too cold. Too much the wrong color.”

Kaye pictured snooty upper-class lookie-loos invading the house in critically mindless pairs, well-dressed in tweeds and penny loafers or draped silk and knee-length microfiber, shunning signs of true individuality or intellect, but finding hints of style from Sunday supplement magazines all too charming. Well, by itself, the house had plenty of that sort of charm. She and Saul had bought furniture and curtains and carpeting that did not overtly offend that sort of charm. Their own life, however, had to be expunged before the house could go on the market.

Their own life. Saul had ended his share of any more life. She was erasing the evidence of their time together; AKS was disbanding and scattering their professional life.

Mercifully, the agent had not mentioned Saul’s bloody incident.