“Morgan wants to go to the bus station,” Mitch said. “He’s had enough.”

“Mother Nature isn’t being very kind or gentle, is she?”

“Mother Nature has always been something of a bitch,” he said.

“So much for Rocinante and touring America,” Kaye said sadly.

“You want to make some phone calls, get involved again, don’t you?”

Kaye lifted her hands. “I don’t know\” she moaned. “Just taking off and living our lives seems wildly irresponsible. I want to learn more. But how much will anybody tell us — Christopher, anybody on the Taskforce? I’m an outsider now.”

“There’s a way we can stay in the game, with different rules,” Mitch said.

“The rich guy in New York?”

“Daney. And Oliver Merton.”

“We’re not going to Seattle?”

“We are,” Mitch said. “But I’m going to call Merton and say I’m interested.”

“I still want to have our baby,” Kaye said, eyes wide, voice fragile as a dried flower.

The shower stopped. They heard Morgan toweling off, alternately humming to himself and swearing.

“It’s funny,” Mitch said, almost too softly to hear. “I’ve been very uncomfortable about the whole idea. But now…it seems plain as anything, the dreams, meeting you. I want our baby, too. We just can’t be innocent.” He took a deep breath, raised his eyes to meet Kaye’s, added, “Let’s go into that forest with some better maps.”

Morgan stepped out onto the walkway and stared at them owlishly. “I’m ready. I want to go home.”

Kaye looked at Morgan and almost flinched at his intensity. The boy’s eyes seemed a thousand years old.

“I’ll drive you to the bus station,” Mitch said.

70

The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Dicken met the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Dr. Tania Bao, outside the Natcher Building, and walked with her from there. Small, precisely dressed, with a composed and ageless face, its features arranged on a slightly undulating plain, nose tiny, lips on the edge of a smile, and slightly stooped shoulders, Bao might have been in her late thirties but was in fact sixty-three. She wore a pale blue pantsuit and tasseled loafers. She walked with small quick steps, intent on the rough ground. The never-ending construction on the NIH campus had been brought to a halt for security purposes, but had already torn up most of the walkways between the Natcher Building and the Magnuson Clinical Center.

“NIH used to be an open campus,” Bao said. “Now we live with the National Guard watching our every move. I can’t even buy my granddaughter toys from the vendors. I used to love to see them on the sidewalks or in the hallways. Now they’ve been cleared out, along with the construction workers.”

Dicken raised his shoulders, showing that these things were outside his control. His area of influence did not even include himself anymore. “I’ve come to listen,” he said. “I can take your opinions to Dr. Augustine, but I can’t guarantee he’ll agree.”

“What happened, Christopher?” Bao asked plaintively. “Why do they not respond to what is so obvious? Why is Augustine so stubborn?”

“You’re a far more experienced administrator than I am,” Dicken said. “I know only what I see and what I hear in the news. What I see is unbearable pressure from all sides. The vaccine teams haven’t been able to do anything. Mark will do everything he can, regardless, to protect public health. He wants to focus our resources on fighting what he believes is a virulent disease. Right now, the only available option is abortion.”

“What he believes …” Bao said incredulously. “What do you believe, Dr. Dicken?”

The weather was coming into a warm and humid summer mood that Dicken found familiar, even comforting; it made a deep and sad part of him think he might be in Africa, and he would have much preferred that to the current round of his existence. They crossed a temporary asphalt ramp to the next level of finished sidewalk, stepped over yellow construction tape, and walked into the main entrance of Building 10.

Two months ago, life had begun to come apart for Christopher Dicken. The realization that hidden parts of his personality could affect his scientific judgment — that a combination of frustrated infatuation and job pressure could jolt him into an attitude he knew to be false — had preyed on him like a swarm of little biting flies. Somehow, he had managed an outward appearance of calm, of going with the game, the team, the Taskforce. He knew that could not go on forever.

“I believe in work,” Dicken said, embarrassed that his thoughts had delayed a response for so long.

Simply cutting himself off from Kaye Lang, and failing to support her in the face of Jackson’s ambush, had been an incomprehensible and unforgivable mistake. He regretted it more with each day, but it was too late to retie old and broken threads. He could still build a conceptual wall and work diligently on those projects assigned to him.

They took the elevator to the seventh floor, turned left, and found the small staff meeting room in the middle of a long beige and pink corridor.

Bao seated herself. “Christopher, you know Anita, Preston.”

They greeted Dicken with little cheer.

“No good news, I’m afraid,” Dicken reported, seating himself opposite Preston Meeker. Meeker, like his colleagues within the small, close room, represented the quintessence of a child health specialty — in his case, neonatal growth and development.

“Augustine still at it?” Meeker asked, pugnacious from the start. “Still pushing RU-486?”

“In his defense,” Dicken said, and paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, to present this old false face more convincingly, “he has no alternatives. The retrovirus folks at CDC agree that the expression and completion theory makes sense.”

“Children as carriers of unknown plagues?” Meeker pushed out his lips and made a pishing noise.

“It’s a highly defensible position. Added to the likelihood that most of the new babies will be born deformed—”

“We don’t know that,” House said. House was the acting deputy director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the former deputy director had resigned two weeks ago. A great many NIH people associated with the SHEVA Taskforce were resigning.

With hardly a pang, Dicken thought that once again Kaye Lang had proved herself a pioneer by being the very first to leave.

“It’s indisputable,” Dicken said, and had no trouble telling her this, because it was true: no normal infants had been born yet to a SHEVA-infected mother. “Out of two hundred, most have been reported severely deformed. All have been born dead.” But not always deformed, he reminded himself.

“If the president agrees to start a national campaign using RU-486,” Bao said, “I doubt the CDC will be allowed to remain open in Atlanta. As for Bethesda, it is an intelligent community, but we are still in the Bible Belt. I have already had my house picketed, Christopher. I live surrounded by guards.”

“I understand,” Dicken said.

“Perhaps, but does Mark understand? He does not return my calls or my e-mail.”

“Unacceptable isolation,” Meeker said.

“How many acts of civil disobedience will it take?” House added, clasping her hands on the table and rubbing them together, her eyes darting around the group.

Bao stood and took up a whiteboard marker. She quickly and almost savagely chopped out the words in bright red, saying, “Two million first-stage Herod’s miscarriages, as of last month. Hospitals are flooded.”

“I go to those hospitals,” Dicken said. “It’s part of my job to be on the front.”

“We also have visited patients here and around the country,” Bao said, mouth tight with irritation. “We have three hundred SHEVA mothers in this very building. I see some of them every day. We are not isolated, Christopher.”