“Why?” Tighe said.

“I wasn’t here.”

“You can’t be everywhere.”

Lipton was in a meeting, but interrupted it long enough to talk with Kaye. They went to a side office filled with filing cabinets and a computer.

“We did scans last night and checked out her hormone levels. She was almost hysterical. The miscarriage didn’t hurt much if at all. I think she wanted it to hurt more. She had a classic Herod’s fetus.”

Lipton held up a series of photographs. “If this is a disease, it’s a damned organized disease,” she said. “The pseudo-placenta is not very different from a normal placenta, except that it’s much reduced. The amnion is something else, however.” Lipton pointed to a process curled on one side of the shrunken shriveled amnion, which had been expelled with the placenta. “I don’t know what you’d call it, unless it’s a little fallopian tube.”

“And the other women in the study?”

“Two should reject within a few days, the rest over the next two weeks. I’ve brought in ministers, a rabbi, psychiatrists, even their friends — as long as they’re female. The mothers are deeply unhappy. No surprises there. But they’ve agreed to stay with the program.”

“No male contact?”

“Not from any male past puberty,” Lipton said. “By order of Mark Augustine, co-signed by Frank Shawbeck. Some of the families are sick of this treatment. I don’t blame them.”

“Any rich women staying here?” Kaye asked, deadpan.

“No,” Lipton said. She chuckled humorlessly. “Need you even ask?”

“Are you married, Dr. Lipton?” Kaye said.

“Divorced six months ago. And you?”

“A widow,” Kaye said.

“We’re the lucky ones, then,” Lipton said.

Tighe tapped her watch. Lipton glanced between them. “Sorry to be keeping you,” the doctor said sharply. “My people are waiting, too.”

Kaye held up the photographs of the pseudo-placenta and amniotic sac. “What do you mean when you say this is a terribly organized disease?”

Lipton leaned on the top of a filing cabinet. “I’ve dealt with rumors and lesions and buboes and warts and all the other little horrors diseases can build in our bodies. There’s organization, to be sure. Rearranging the blood flow, subverting cells. Sucking greed. But this amniotic sac is a highly specialized organ, different from any I’ve ever studied.”

“It’s not a product of disease, in your opinion?”

“I didn’t say that. The results are distortion, pain, suffering, and miscarriage. The infant in Mexico…” Lipton shook her head. “I won’t waste my time by characterizing this as anything else. It’s a new disease, a hideously inventive one, that’s all.”

46

Atlanta

Dicken climbed the gentle slope from the parking garage on Clifton Way, glancing up with a squint at clear skies with low fat-bellied puffs of cloud. He hoped the fresh cool air would clear his head.

Dicken had returned to Atlanta the night before and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and holed up in his house, drinking until four in the morning. Walking from the living room to the bathroom, he had stumbled over a pile of textbooks, slammed his shoulder against a wall, and fallen to the floor. His shoulder and leg were bruised and sore, and his back felt as if he had been kicked, but he could walk and he was pretty sure he did not have to go to the hospital.

Still, his arm hung half-bent, and his face was ashen. His head hurt from the whiskey. His stomach hurt from not eating breakfast. And in his soul he felt like shit, confused and angry at just about everything, but mainly angry at himself.

The memory of the intellectual jam session at the San Diego Zoo felt like a burning brand. The presence of Mitch Rafelson, a loose cannon, saying little substantive but still seeming to guide the conversation, at once challenging their sophomoric theories and spurring them on; Kaye Lang, lovelier than he had ever seen her before, almost radiant, with her patented look of puzzled concentration and no goddamned interest in Dicken beyond the professional.

Rafelson clearly outclassed him. Once again, after having spent his entire adult life braving the worst that Earth could throw at a human male, he was coming up short in the eyes of a woman he thought he might care for.

And what the hell did it matter? What did his masculine ego, his sex life, matter in the face of Herod’s?

Dicken came around the corner onto Clifton Road and stopped, confused for a moment. The attendant at the garage booth had mentioned something about picketing, but had given no hint of the scale.

Demonstrators filled the street from the small plaza and tree planter fronting the redbrick entrance of Building 1 to the American Cancer Society headquarters and the Emory Hotel across Clifton Road. Some were standing in the beds of purple azaleas; they had left a path open to the main entrance but blocked the visitor center and the cafeteria. Dozens sat around the pillar that held the bust of Hygeia, their eyes closed, swaying gently from side to side as if in silent prayer.

Dicken estimated there were two thousand men, women, and children, in vigil, waiting for something; salvation or word at least that the world was not about to end. Many of the women and more than a few of the men still wore masks, colored orange or purple, guaranteed by half a dozen fly-by-night manufacturers to kill all viruses, including SHEVA.

The organizers of the vigil — it was not called a protest — walked among their people with water coolers and paper cups, leaflets, advice, and instructions, but those holding the vigil never spoke.

Dicken walked to the entrance of Building 1, through the crowd, attracted to them despite his sense of the danger in the situation. He wanted to see what the troops were thinking and feeling — the people on the front line.

Cameramen moved around and through the crowds slowly, or more deliberately along the pathways, cameras held at waist level to capture the immediacy, then being lifted to shoulders for the panorama, the scale.

“Jesus, what happened?” Jane Salter asked as Dicken passed her in the long hall to his office. She carried a briefcase and an armload of files in green folders.

“Just an accident,” Dicken said. “I fell. Did you see what’s going on outside?”

“I saw,” Salter said. “Creeps me out.” She followed him and stood in the open door. Dicken glanced over his shoulder at her, then pulled out the old rolling chair and sat down, his face like a disappointed little boy’s.

“Down about Mrs. C.?” Salter asked. She pushed back a wisp of brown hair with the corner of a folder. The wisp fell back and she ignored it.

“I suppose,” Dicken said.

Salter bent to set down the briefcase, then stepped forward and laid the files on his desk. “Tom Scarry has the baby,” she said. “It was autopsied in Mexico City. I guess they did a thorough job. He’ll do it all over again, just to be sure.”

“Have you seen it?” Dicken asked.

“Just a video feed when they took it from the ice chest in Building 15.”

“Monster?”

“Major,” Salter said. “A real mess.”

“For whom the bell tolls,” Dicken said.

“I’ve never figured out your position on this, Christopher,” Salter said, leaning against the door jamb. “You seem surprised that this is a really nasty disease. We knew that going in, didn’t we?”

Dicken shook his head. “I’ve chased diseases so long…this one seemed different.”

“What, more sympathetic?”

“Jane, I got drunk last night. I fell in my house and cracked my shoulder. I feel like hell.”

“A bender? That sounds more appropriate to a bad love life, not a misdiagnosis.”

Dicken made a sour face. “Where are you going with all that?” he asked, and shoved his left forefinger at the files.