Infected Read online

  Everyone thought Bill was crazy. Why would a five-foot-eight, 150-pound English major volunteer to room with a six-foot-five, 240-pound linebacker who benched 480 and had already beaten the holy hell out of three roommates, all of whom were Division I football players? But to everyone’s surprise, it worked out perfectly. Bill seemed to have a talent for laughter, laughter that soothed the savage beast. Bill saved not only Perry’s athletic career but his collegiate one as well. Perry had never forgotten that.

  Ten years he’d known Bill, and in all that time he’d never heard the man give a straight answer about anything that wasn’t related to work.

  Music drifted over from Bill’s cube. Ancient Sonny & Cher ditty, to which Bill cleverly sang “I got scabies, babe” instead of the original lyrics. The IM alert chimed again:

  StickyFingazWhitey: You think Green Bay is going to give the Niners a good game tonight?

  Perry didn’t type in an answer, didn’t really even see the question. His face scrunched into a mask of intense concentration that one might mistake for pain. He fought against the urge to scratch yet again, except this time it was far worse than before, and in a far worse place.

  He kept his hands frozen on the keyboard, using all his athletic discipline not to scratch furiously at his left testicle.

  7.

  THE BIG SNAFU

  Dew Phillips slumped into the plastic chair next to the pay phone. After this ordeal even a young man would have felt like a week-old dog turd, and at fifty-six, Dew’s youth was far behind him. His wrinkled suit stank of sweat and smoke. Thick smoke, black smoke, the kind that only comes from a house fire. The odor seemed alien in the clean, dirt-free confines of the hospital. Somewhere in his head, he knew he should feel grateful that he was in the waiting room at the Toledo Hospital and not in the airtight quarantine chamber at the CDC in Cincinnati, but he just couldn’t find the energy to count his blessings.

  Greasy soot streaked the left side of his weathered, heavily lined face. His bald head also showed streaks, as if flames had danced precariously near his mottled scalp. The small patch of red hair, which ran from ear to ear around the back of his head, had escaped the smoke stain. He looked weak and exhausted, as if he might teeter off the chair at any second.

  Dew always carried two cell phones. One was thin and normal. He used that for most communication. The other was bulky and metallic, painted in a flat black finish. It was loaded with the latest encrypting equipment, none of which Dew understood or gave a rat’s ass about. He pulled out the big cell phone and called Murray’s number.

  “Good afternoon,” said a cheery but businesslike woman.

  “Get Murray.”

  The phone clicked once; he was on hold. The Rolling Stones played “Satisfaction” through the tinny connection. Jesus, Dew thought, even super-secret, secure lines have fucking Muzak. Murray Longworth’s authoritative voice came on the line, cutting off Mick in mid-breath.

  “What’s the situation, Dew?”

  “It’s a big SNAFU, sir,” Dew said. The military-parlance acronym stood for Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. He leaned his forehead on the pastel blue wall. Looking down, he noticed for the first time that the soles of his shoes had melted, then cooled all misshapen and embedded with bits of gravel and broken glass. “Johnson’s hurt.”

  “How bad?”

  “The docs say it’s touch and go.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yes,” Dew said quietly. “It doesn’t look good.”

  Murray waited, perhaps only long enough to give the illusion that Malcolm’s life was more important than the mission, then continued.

  “Did you catch him?”

  “No,” Dew said. “There was a fire.”

  “Remains?”

  “Here at the hospital, waiting for your girl.”

  “Condition?”

  “Somewhere between medium and well-done. I think she’s got something to work with, if that’s what you mean.”

  Murray paused a moment. His silence seemed weighted and heavy. “You want to stay with him, or should I have some boys watch over him?”

  “You couldn’t drag me away with a team full of mules tied to my balls, sir.”

  “I figured as much,” Murray said. “I assume the area was checked and sterilized?”

  “As in three-alarm sterilized.”

  “Good. Margaret is on the way. Give her whatever help she needs. I’ll get there when I can. You can give me a full report then.”

  “Yes sir.” Dew hung up and flopped back into the chair.

  Malcolm Johnson, his partner of seven years, was in critical condition. Third-degree burns covered much of Mal’s body. The hatchet wound in his gut wasn’t helping things. Dew had ample experience with horribly wounded men; he wouldn’t take two-to-one odds for Malcolm’s survival.

  Dew had seen some crazy shit in his day, more than most, first in ’Nam and then with almost three decades of service to the Agency, but he’d never seen anything like Martin Brewbaker. Those eyes, eyes that swam with madness, drowned in it. Martin Brewbaker, legless, covered in fire like some Hollywood stuntman, swinging that hatchet at Malcolm.

  Dew let his head fall into his hands. If only he’d reacted faster, if only he’d been just one second faster and stopped Mal from trying to put out the fire on Brewbaker. Dew should have known what was coming: Blaine Tanarive, Charlotte Wilson, Gary Leeland—all those cases had ended in violence, in murder. Why had he thought Brewbaker would be any different? But who would have expected the crazy fuck to set his whole house on fire?

  Dew had one more call to make—Malcolm’s wife. He wondered if Malcolm would still be alive by the time Shamika flew in from D.C.

  He doubted it. He doubted it very much.

  8.

  WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT?

  At lunchtime Perry sat in the bathroom stall, pants around his ankles, 49ers sweatshirt in a pile on the tile floor. On top of his left forearm, atop his left thigh, and on his right shin were small red rashes about the size of a No. 2 pencil eraser. Three other spots itched just as maddeningly; his fingers told him that similar rashes perched on his right collarbone, on his spine just below his shoulder blades and on his right ass cheek. He also had one on his left testicle—that one he tried not to think about.

  Their itching came and went, sometimes fading in and out like a slowly turned volume knob, other times arriving with full-bore force like hitting the “power” button of a maxed-out stereo. Definitely spider bites, he figured. Maybe a centipede; he’d heard they had nasty venom. What amazed him was how he’d slept through such an attack. Whatever it was that had bitten him, it must have hit just before he awoke. That would explain why he saw no marks when he prepared for work—the poison had just entered his system, and his body was slow to react.

  They itched and were a touch disconcerting, but all in all it was no big deal. Just a few bug bites. He’d simply have to discipline himself not to scratch, and sooner or later they’d go away. If he left them alone, they’d probably disappear. Trouble was, he had an awful time of leaving skin blemishes alone, whether they be scabs, zits, blisters or anything else, but his bad habit of picking at such blemishes wouldn’t help matters. He’d simply have to focus, have to “play through the pain,” as his high-school football coach used to say.

  Perry stood, buttoned his pants and put his sweatshirt back on. He took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. It’s just a test of will, Perry thought. A test of discipline, that’s all. You’ve got to have discipline.

  He left the bathroom and headed back to his desk, ready to work hard and earn his pay.

  9.

  PAYIN’ THE COST TO BE THE BOSS

  Murray Longworth looked over the list of personnel who had enough security clearance to join Project Tangram. It was a short list. Malcolm Johnson was down for the count. That made Dew a solo operative, which is what Murray had wanted in the first place. But Dew had insisted on bringing in Johnson. Murray shook his head—that d
ecision would fuck with Dew, probably for the rest of his life.

  Casualties, unfortunately, were the cost of doing business. You sent flowers to the funeral, you moved on. Murray understood that. Dew, he never did. Dew Phillips made shit personal. That was why Murray was the number-two man in the CIA and Dew Phillips was still a shit-stomping grunt. A grunt in a nice suit, sure, but a grunt nonetheless.

  That was also why five presidents had called on Murray to get things done. Secret things. Unsavory things. Things that would never make the history books, but had to get done anyway. And this time the President of the United States of America had asked Murray to find out what the hell was turning normal Americans into crazed murderers. Murray, from the CIA, mind you, and not the FBI, who should have handled a domestic issue. It was, in fact, illegal for the CIA to run this op on U.S. soil, but the president wanted Murray to handle it—if it was terrorism, it might require some creative tactics. Tactics that just might be just a smidgen outside the law.

  Five victims to date in a plague that would throw the country into an unparalleled panic, and he had precious little information. So far he’d done a masterful job of keeping the lid on things—he had more than a hundred people at his immediate disposal, yet fewer than ten knew what was actually going on. Not even the Joint Chiefs had the whole story.

  When Margaret Montoya had contacted the CIA with that first strange report, the call eventually landed with Murray. She wasn’t just some crank caller or some science-type doom-and-gloomer preaching about yet another pending global-warming catastrophe. She was from the CDC, and she suspected she might have stumbled onto a terrorist bioweapon. Her credentials and her urgency convinced enough people to push her through the phone maze, each level passing the call upward, until it reached Murray.

  Margaret said she hadn’t gone through the proper channels in the CDC because she feared leaks. Murray knew that was only partially true—the rest of the story was that Margaret wanted to be the one tracking this bizarre killer. If she went through normal channels, she feared some supervisor would take the case away from her and grab all the recognition while Margaret was pushed to the wayside of anonymity.

  He’d met with her, and it took only one look at her case files—and those pictures of Charlotte Wilson and Gary Leeland—to convince him that she was right; there was a new threat in town.

  The best part of it all was her relative obscurity. She wasn’t some world authority on disease or some Nobel Prize–winner or anyone of note. She was a very competent epidemiologist who worked out of the Cincinnati CDC office; she wasn’t even high-ranking enough to be at the main CDC center in Atlanta. Murray knew he could monopolize her time—draft her, if you will—and only a handful of people would notice her absence.

  He’d put people to work searching for references to “triangles” or anything else that might reveal additional cases. That search turned up Blaine Tanarive, who a week earlier had contacted Toledo TV station WNWO, claiming a “triangle conspiracy.” WNWO notes described Mr. Tanarive as “paranoid” and “irrational.”

  Two days later, neighbors discovered the bodies of Tanarive and his family in their house. Tanarive was reported as being in a “highly advanced state of decomposition.” His wife and two daughters were also found dead, although their level of decomposition was not as advanced. Forensics showed that each of the women had been stabbed at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. WNWO then did a follow-up story on Mr. Tanarive’s phone call and the message of the “triangle conspiracy.”

  A murder/suicide. Tanarive had no record of violence. Neither he nor his family had any history of mental illness. All the physical evidence pointed to Tanarive. Investigators wrote off the case as a sudden, tragic, inexplicable onset of mental illness. The case had been closed until Murray’s search for information related to “triangles.”

  Margaret’s information, combined with the Tanarive case file, was all Murray needed to see. He’d taken the info to the director of the CIA, then called an emergency meeting with the president. Not a meeting with the president’s chief of staff, not with the secretary of defense, but a quiet little sit-down with the head honcho himself. Murray brought Montoya along for good measure.

  Her report proved quite convincing. The pictures really captured the president’s attention: pictures of Gary Leeland’s blue triangle growths; pictures of similar, rotting growths on Charlotte Wilson’s corpse; pictures of Blaine Tanarive’s oozing, pitted, skeletal body, covered with that eerie green fuzz.

  The president gave Murray carte blanche, anything he wanted.

  Murray had the power to draft whomever he needed, but he didn’t want a big team, not yet. He had to keep things quiet, controllable. When the news of this hit the streets the panic would be legendary. More than likely the country would basically shut down; people wouldn’t leave their homes for fear of catching the disease, and those who did leave would flood the hospitals with everything from diaper rashes to flea bites. And Murray knew that sooner or later the news would get out. He had to gather as much information as he could before the panic hit, because when it did, things were going to get very complicated.

  Five cases to date—two more discovered after the presidential meeting. First, Judy Washington, age sixty-two, found one day after Gary Leeland had died, but obviously infected earlier. Dew and his partner found her pitted skeleton in a field outside the retirement community where both she and Leeland lived. Her infection had already run its course. And now the disaster that was Martin Brewbaker. Five cases in sixteen days, and he knew there were more the CIA had yet to uncover.

  He suspected things were only going to get worse.

  10.

  HALF AN AUTOPSY IS BETTER THAN NONE

  She hated herself for feeling this way, but she was thrilled at the chance to examine a fresh body. She was a doctor first, a healer; that had been her training, if not her true calling, and she held the sanctity of life in the highest regard. She knew she should feel upset over the new death, but excitement had washed over her the second that Murray ordered her to Toledo.

  Margaret wasn’t exactly happy at another death, of course not, but she had yet to see a body that wasn’t ravaged by days of highly accelerated decomposition. Here she was, seemingly the sole defender against this bizarre affliction, and she’d had almost nothing to study, nothing to work with. To Margaret this wasn’t just another body—the fifth so far—it was a chance to gain headway against a disease with the potential to make Ebola and AIDS look as insignificant as the common cold.

  So much could change in such a short time. Sixteen days earlier she’d been an examiner for the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases’ Cincinnati office. The CCID was a division of the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC. She was good at her job, she knew, but things hadn’t been stellar career-wise. She wanted to move up the ladder, to gain prestige, but at the end of the day she had to admit to herself she just didn’t like conflict brought on by office politics—she simply didn’t have the balls.

  Then she got the call to examine a body in Royal Oak, Michigan, a body suspected of containing an unknown infectious agent. When she saw the body, or what was left of it, she knew it was a chance to make a name for herself. Only seven days after examining that body, she had sat down at a meeting with CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence Murray Longworth, and—believe it or not, children—the president himself. She, Margaret Montoya, sitting down with the president to help decide policy.

  And now, less than twenty-four hours after a second secretive meeting in the Oval Office, a CIA agent escorted her as if she were some head of state. She absently chewed on a Paper Mate pen, gazing out the passenger-side window as the black Lexus pulled in to the entrance of the Toledo Hospital.

  Four remote television vans dotted the parking lot, all close to the front and emergency entrances.

  “Dammit,” Margaret said. She felt her stomach do flip-flops. She didn’t want to deal with the press.

  The driver sto
pped the car, then turned to look at her. “You want me to take you in the back way?” He was a stunningly handsome African-American youngster named Clarence Otto, assigned to her on a semipermanent basis. Murray Longworth had ordered Clarence to accompany her everywhere. Mostly to “grease the wheels,” as Murray put it. Clarence took care of all the little things so Margaret could concentrate on her work.

  It struck her as funny that Clarence Otto was a full-blown, gun-toting CIA agent, and yet he really didn’t know what this was all about, while she, a midlevel epidemiologist for the CDC, was knee-deep in what might be the greatest threat ever to face the United States of America.

  His looks distracted her, so she usually spoke to him while gazing in another direction. “Yes, please…avoid the press and get me to the staging area as soon as possible. Every second counts.”

  That was an understatement. In her twenty-year career, she’d examined more bodies for more diseases than she cared to remember. Once a body died the corpse conveniently waited for examination. Put it on ice and it will keep until you’re ready to take a peek. But not with this crap—oh no not at all. Of the three bodies they’d actually recovered, two were already so decomposed as to be of little or no use. The other, which was the first body discovered, had literally dissolved before her eyes.

  That was the first hint that something truly disturbing was afoot. Paramedics in Royal Oak, Michigan, had brought in the corpse of Charlotte Wilson, age seventy. Wilson had just murdered her fifty-one-year-old son with a butcher knife. She then attacked two cops on sight with said knife, screaming how she wouldn’t let “a bunch of Matlocks” take her alive. The police really had no choice, and killed her with a single shot. The paramedics reported strange growths on the woman’s body, the likes of which they’d never observed or heard of. They had pronounced her dead on the scene, then called for the morgue to come pick up the body.