Pandemic Page 88

A knock at the door.

“Margaret?”

Klimas. Coming with another test.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak.

The door opened. Klimas stepped inside, a smiling a.s.sa.s.sin with a black eye.

No preliminaries; he just offered the box. And why not? The drill was old hat. Klimas knew she wasn’t infected. She’d tested negative so many times already.

But how could that be?

Her hand reached out on its own, took the box. She didn’t want to die, not like this, not with a bullet to the head …

She ripped open the foil, used the cool, wet cotton to clean her finger. She pressed the tester against her fingertip, felt the tiny sting of the needle punching home.

Yellow … blinking yellow … slowing … slowing … slowing …

Green.

Klimas nodded. “Good to go. Thanks.”

He took the blinking test and the empty box from her, then walked out. He shut the door behind him.

Margaret’s body shuddered with both relief and terror — she was alive, but she was infected. Had to be. But why hadn’t it turned red …

Did you think it wasn’t smart enough to make changes, Margo? Did you really think it wasn’t capable of beating your silly little test?

She shook her head.

“No,” she whispered. “Oh G.o.d, no.”

Cantrell … he’d tested negative over and over again, but when he’d escaped his cell he’d come after her, tried to kill her. Cantrell … the one with the genius IQ, just like her. He’d been infected the whole time, right under their nose.

The Orbital had created a new organism — an organism that the test didn’t detect.

And she had it.

She had to tell someone, warn everyone. She had to tell Klimas … but if she did, he’d kill her on the spot. If she didn’t, she’d convert, become one of them. But maybe she wouldn’t … this new organism, it was untested, un-proven. Maybe she wouldn’t convert.

And, maybe she was just being crazy … the test turned green, not red, GREEN.

She was okay. She wasn’t infected.

She wasn’t.

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING

Murray sat on a couch in the Oval Office. In front of him was a table loaded with neat folders. Beyond that, a chair that held President Blackmon. They were alone.

They had spent the last hour in the Situation Room — along with Admiral Porter, the secretary of defense and a few other big hitters — debriefing about the second naval disaster to occur on Lake Michigan in the last six days. At the end of that meeting, Blackmon had asked Murray to join her.

For the first thirty minutes of that second meeting, her personal staff had been present, helping plan and explain the logistics of the immunization effort. It was the largest public health effort in the nation’s history, so there were a lot of logistics.

Then, Blackmon had asked everyone to leave. Everyone except Murray.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been alone with a president. Going on four decades, now, Murray had been summoned to this office to discuss things that could have no record of being discussed.

Blackmon had her left leg crossed over her right, the hem of her stiff dress suit perfectly positioned over her left knee. In her lap, she had an open folder. Blackmon preferred paper over electronics whenever it was convenient — one of the few things about her that Murray found admirable.

She shut the folder and looked up at him. “The first delivery of inoculant will be here tomorrow afternoon. Deliveries to military facilities will start arriving tomorrow night, and it will take a week before we reach them all. The first civilian deliveries are scheduled to arrive in major cities two days from now. I’m burning every last sc.r.a.p of political capital I have on this, Director Longworth, so I have to put you on the spot — I want to know what Cheng saw when he tested it on his crawlers.”

Now Murray understood the reason for the one-on-one meeting. In the wake of the Los Angeles’s attack, Murray had given Captain Yasaka a clear order — send Tim Feely down to the lab to process the bodies and have him package tissue samples to be sent to Black Manitou. Feely had been in such a rush that he’d only prepared samples from Petrovsky; an unfortunate choice, considering Margaret’s insistence that Walker’s hydras might be humanity’s final solution.

The end result: crawlers had escaped the task force, because Murray had orchestrated it.

The transport had been risky, of course, but had gone off without a hitch. Cheng’s team had a brain-dead woman on Black Manitou Island, which they were using to cultivate the crawlers for research and testing. Crawlers and test subjects alike were locked down in conditions that made BSL-4 precautions look about as difficult to pa.s.s through as airport security. Cheng and his team were just as sequestered on their island as Margaret, Clarence and Feely were on the Coronado.

Murray could count the people who knew about the Black Manitou crawlers on two hands — and leave three fingers to spare. And that number included the president and himself. Murray hadn’t even told Margaret. Apparently, neither had Feely: something the man seemed to think was a favor to Murray. Feely had called in that imaginary marker during the argument with Cheng over who got to name the yeast. Murray could give a wet s.h.i.t about the name of the d.a.m.n stuff, so Feely got what he wanted. Besides, that had p.i.s.sed off Cheng, and Murray hated Cheng.

“Doctor Cheng tested the inoculant directly on the crawlers harvested from Charles Petrovsky’s corpse,” Murray said. “The substance dissolved the crawlers with one hundred percent efficiency. However, his team euthanized the subject and performed an autopsy — the inoculant had no effect on removing the infection from her brain. As Montoya and Feely predicted, once the infection reaches the brain, it’s too late.”