With a start, he saw a woman in a blue suit coming out of the Serrano lobby. The woman stood for a moment in the shade, speaking with two doormen and a police officer. It was Kaye. Mitch walked slowly across the street, around a Toyota with all its windows smashed. Kaye saw him and waved.

They met on the plaza in front of the hotel. Kaye had circles under her eyes.

“It’s been awful,” she said.

“I was out here, I saw it,” Mitch said.

“We’re going into high gear. I’m doing some TV interviews, then we’re flying back East, to Washington. There has to be an investigation.”

“This was all about the first baby?”

Kaye nodded. “We got some details an hour ago. NIH was tracking a woman who got Herod’s flu last year. She aborted an interim daughter, got pregnant a month later. She gave birth a month premature and the baby is dead. Severe defects. Cyclopia, apparently.”

“God,” Mitch said.

“Augustine and Cross…well, I can’t talk about that. But it looks as if we’re going to have to rework all the plans, maybe even conduct human tests on an accelerated schedule. Congress is screaming bloody murder, pointing fingers everywhere. It’s a mess, Mitch.”

“I see. What can we do?”

“We?” Kaye shook her head. “What we talked about at the zoo just doesn’t make sense now.”

“Why not?” Mitch asked, swallowing.

“Dicken has done a turnabout,” Kaye said.

“What kind of turnabout?”

“He feels miserable. He thinks we’ve been completely wrong.”

Mitch cocked his head to one side, frowning. “I don’t see that.”

“It’s more politics than science, maybe,” Kaye said.

“Then what about the science? Are we going to let one premature birth, one defective baby—”

“Steamroll us?” Kaye finished for him. “Probably. I don’t know.” She looked up and down the drive.

“Are any other full-term babies due?” Mitch asked.

“Not for several months,” Kaye said. “Most of the parents have been choosing abortion.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not been talked about much. The agencies involved aren’t releasing names. There’d be a lot of opposition, you can imagine.”

“How do you feel about it?”

Kaye touched her heart, then her stomach. “Like a punch in the gut. I need time to think things over, do some more work. I asked him, but Dicken never gave me your phone number.”

Mitch smiled knowingly.

“What?” Kaye asked, a little irritated.

“Nothing.”

“Here’s my home number in Baltimore,” she said, handing him a card. “Call me in a couple of days.”

She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently, then turned and walked back into the hotel. Over her shoulder, she shouted, “I mean it! Call.”

45

The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Kaye was hustled out of the Baltimore airport in a nondescript brown Pontiac lacking government license plates. She had just spent three hours in TV studios and six hours on the plane and her skin felt as if it had been varnished.

Two Secret Service agents sat in polite silence, one in front and one in back. Kaye sat in the back. Between Kaye and the agent sat Farrah Tighe, her newly assigned aide. Tighe was a few years younger than Kaye, with pulled-back blond hair, a pleasant broad face, brilliant blue eyes, and broad hips that challenged her companions in these tight quarters.

“We have four hours before you meet with Mark Augustine,” Tighe said.

Kaye nodded. Her mind was not in the car.

“You requested a meeting with two of the NIH mothers-in-residence. I’m not sure we can fit that in today.”

“Fit it in,” Kaye said forcefully, and then added, “Please.”

Tighe looked at her solemnly.

“Take me to the clinic before we do anything else.”

“We have two TV interviews—”

“Skip them,” Kaye said. “I want to talk with Mrs. Hamilton.”

Kaye walked through the long corridors from the parking lot to the elevators of Building 10.

On the drive from the airport to the NIH campus, Tighe had briefed her on the events of the past day. Richard Bragg had been shot seven times in the torso and head while leaving his house in Berkeley and had been declared dead at the scene. Two suspects had been arrested, both male, both husbands of women carrying first-stage Herod’s babies. The men had been captured a few blocks away, drunk, their car packed with empty cans of beer.

The Secret Service, on orders from the president, had been assigned to protect key members of the Taskforce.

The mother of the first full-term, second-stage infant born in North America, known as Mrs. C., was still in a hospital in Mexico City. She had emigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in 1996; she had worked for a relief agency in Azerbaijan between 1990 and 1993. She was currently being treated for shock and what the first medical reports described as an acute case of seborrhea on her face.

The dead infant was being shipped from Mexico City to Atlanta and would arrive tomorrow morning.

Luella Hamilton had just finished a light lunch and was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out over a small garden and the windowless corner of another building. She shared a room with another mother who was down the hall in an examination room. There were now eight mothers in the Task-force study.

“I lost my baby,” Mrs. Hamilton told Kaye as she walked in. Kaye stepped around the bed and hugged her. She returned Kaye’s embrace with strong hands and arms and a little moan.

Tighe stood with arms folded near the door. “She just slipped out one night.” Mrs. Hamilton held her eyes steady on Kaye’s. “I hardly felt her. My legs were wet. Just a little blood. They had a monitor on my stomach and the little alarm started to beep. I woke up and the nurses were there and they put up a tent. They didn’t show her to me. A minister came in, Reverend Ackerley, from my church, she was right there for me, wasn’t that nice?” “I’m so sorry,” Kaye said.

“The reverend told me about that other woman, in Mexico, with her second baby…”

Kaye shook her head in sympathy. “I am so scared, Kaye.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I was in San Diego and I didn’t know you had rejected.”

“Well, it’s not like you’re my doctor, is it?” “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And the others.” Kaye smiled. “But mostly you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a strong black woman, and we make an impression.” Mrs. Hamilton did not smile as she said this. Her expression was drawn, her skin verging on olive. “I talked to my husband on the telephone. He’s coming by today and we’ll see each other, but we’ll be separated by glass. They told me they’d let me go after the baby was born. But now they say they want to keep me here. They tell me I’m going to be pregnant again. They know it’s coming. My own little baby Jesus. How can the world get along with millions of little baby Jesuses?” She started to cry. “I haven’t been with my husband or anyone else! I swear!”

Kaye held her hand tightly. “This is so difficult,” she said. “I want to help, but my family, they’re having a hard time.

My husband is half crazy, Kaye. They could run this damned railroad so much better.” She stared out the window, held on to Kaye’s hand tightly, then waved it gently back and forth, as if listening to some inner music. “You’ve had some time to think. Tell me what’s happening?”

Kaye fixed her eyes on Mrs. Hamilton and tried to think of something to say. “We’re still trying to figure that out,” she finally managed. “It’s a challenge.”

“From God?” Mrs. Hamilton asked.

“From inside,” Kaye said.

“If it’s from God, all the little Jesuses are going to die except one, then,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “That’s not good odds for me.”

“I hate myself,” Kaye said as Tighe escorted her to Dr. Lipton’s office.