“From Georgia?”

Packer did not connect this immediately. “Atlanta?”

“No, Republic of.”

“Ah…yes, as a matter of fact,” Packer said. “But he’s also been looking for evidence of Herod’s flu in historical records. Decades, even centuries.” Packer tapped Mitch’s hand pointedly. “Maybe he’d like to know what you know?”

33

Magnuson Clinical Center, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Four women sat in the brightly lighted room. The room was equipped with two couches, two chairs, a television and video player, books, and magazines. Kaye wondered how hospital designers always managed to create an atmosphere of sterility: ash-colored wood, cool off-white walls, sanitary pastel art of beaches and forests and flowers. A bleached and calming world.

She watched the women briefly through the window of the side door as she waited for Dicken and the director of the clinical center project to catch up with her.

Two black women. One, in her late thirties and stout, sitting upright in a chair, inattentively watched something on the television, a copy ofElle draped across her lap. The other, in her early twenties, if that, very thin, with small pointy breasts and short cornrowed hair, sat with her cheek propped on her hand and her elbow on a couch arm, staring at nothing in particular. Two white women, both in their thirties, one bottle-blond and haggard and dazed-looking, the other neatly dressed, face expressionless, read battered copies of People and Time.

Dicken approached along the gray-carpeted hallway with Dr. Denise Lipton. Lipton was in her early forties, small, pretty in a sharp sort of way, with eyes that looked as if they could shoot sparks when she was angry. Dicken introduced them.

“Ready to see our volunteers, Ms. Lang?” Lipton asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Kaye said.

Lipton smiled bloodlessly. “They’re not very happy. They’ve undergone enough tests in the last few days to…Well, to make them not very happy.”

The women within the room looked up at the sound of voices. Lipton smoothed her lab coat and pushed the door open.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” she greeted them.

The meeting went well enough. Dr. Lipton escorted three of the women to their private rooms and left Dicken and Kaye to talk more extensively to the fourth, the older black woman, Mrs. Luella Hamilton, of Richmond, Virginia.

Mrs. Hamilton wondered if she could get some coffee. “I’ve been drained so many times. If it isn’t blood samples, it’s my kidneys acting cross.” Dicken said he would get them each a cup and left the room.

Mrs. Hamilton focused on Kaye and narrowed her eyes. “They told us you found this bug.”

“No,” Kaye said. “I wrote some papers, but I didn’t actually find it.”

“It’s just a little fever,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “I’ve had four children, and now they tell me this one won’t really be a baby. But they won’t take it out of me. They say, let the disease take its course. I’m just a big lab rat, aren’t I?”

“Seems like it. Are they treating you well?”

“I’m eating,” she said with a shrug. “The food’s good. I don’t like the books or the movies. The nurses are nice, but that Dr. Lipton — she’s a hard case. She acts nice, but I think she doesn’t like anybody very much.”

“I’m sure she’s doing a good job.”

“Yeah, well, lady, Miz Lang, you sit in my seat for a while and tell me you don’t want to bitch a little.”

Kaye smiled.

“It pisses me off, there’s this black nurse, a man, he keeps treating me like some sort of example. He wants me to be strong like his mammy.” She regarded Kaye with steady wide eyes and shook her head. “I don’t want to be strong. I want to cry when they do their tests, when I think about this baby, Miz Lang. You understand?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“It feels like all my others did around this time. I say maybe it is a baby and they’re wrong. Does that make me a fool?”

“If they’ve done the tests, they know,” Kaye said.

“They won’t let me visit my husband. That’s part of the contract. He gave me the flu and he gave me this baby, but I miss him. It wasn’t his fault. I talk to him on the phone. He sounds all right, but I know he misses me. Makes me nervous, being away, you know?”

“Who’s taking care of your children?” Kaye said.

“My husband. They let the children come and see me. That’s okay. My husband brings them by and they come in and see me and he stays out in the car. Four months it will be, four months!” Mrs. Hamilton twisted the thin gold wedding band on her finger. “He says he gets so lonely, and the kids, they ain’t easy to be with sometimes.”

Kaye grasped Mrs. Hamilton’s hand. “I know how brave you are, Mrs. Hamilton.”

“Call me Luella,” she said. “I say it again, I ain’t brave. What’s your first name?”

“Kaye.”

“I am scared, Kaye. You find out what’s really going on, come and tell me first, all right?”

Kaye left Mrs. Hamilton. She felt dried out and cold. Dicken walked with her to the ground floor and outside the clinical center. He kept looking at her when he thought she would not notice.

She asked to stop for a minute. She crossed her arms and stared at a stand of trees across a short stretch of manicured lawn. The lawn was surrounded by trenches. Most of the NIH campus was a maze of detours and construction sites, holes filled with raw earth and concrete and jutting forests of rebar.

“Everything all right?” Dicken asked.

“No,” she said. “I feel scattered.”

“We have to get used to it. It’s happening all over,” Dicken said.

“All of the women volunteered?” Kaye said.

“Of course. We pay for all their medical expenses and a per diem. We can’t compel this sort of thing, even in a national emergency.”

“Why can’t they see their husbands?”

“Actually, that may be my fault,” Dicken said. “I presented some evidence at our last meeting that Herod’s will lead to a second pregnancy, without sexual activity. They’re going to hand the bulletin out this evening to all researchers.”

“What evidence? My God, are we talking immaculate conception here?” Kaye put her hands on her hips and swung around to face him. “You’ve been tracking this thing since we ran into each other in Georgia, haven’t you?”

“Since before Georgia. Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia. Herod’s started hitting those countries ten, twenty years ago, maybe even earlier.”

“Then you read my papers, and it all fell into place? You’re a kind of scientific stalker?”

Dicken made a face, shook his head. “Hardly.”

“Am I the catalyst?” Kaye asked in disbelief.

“It’s not simple, Kaye.”

“I wish they’d keep me in the loop, Chris!”

“Christopher, please.” He looked uncomfortable, apologetic.

“I wish you ‘d keep me in the loop. You act like a shadow around here, always following, so why do I think you may be one of the most important people in the Taskforce?”

“Thank you, it’s a common misperception,” he said with a wry smile. “I try to keep out of trouble, but I’m not sure I’m succeeding. They listen sometimes, when the evidence is strong — as it actually is in this case, reports from Armenian hospitals, even a couple of hospitals in Los Angeles and New York.”

“Christopher, we’ve got two hours before the next meeting,” Kaye said. “I’ve been stuck in SHEVA conferences for two weeks now. They think they’ve found my niche. A safe little cubbyhole, looking for other HERV Marge has put together a nice lab for me in Baltimore, but…I don’t think the Taskforce has much use for me.”

“Going with Americol really irritated Augustine,” Dicken said. “I could have warned you.”

“I’ll have to focus on doing work with Americol, then.”

“Not a bad idea. They have the resources. Marge seems to like you.”