Contagious (33 page)

easy
.”
Gutierrez stared at Murray for a second, then raised the glass in a salute. “Thank you, Murray. Now go take care of this.”
“Yes, Mister President,” Murray said, and walked out.
BOXERCISE
Margaret paced in the computer room, which was tough to do considering she could only walk about five steps before she had to turn a 180. The PVC fabric on her legs
zip-zipped
as she walked. She was still wearing the suit, sans helmet, in order to save time when she had to go back in for surgery. Dew was already out of his. She’d never seen him in scrubs before.
Clarence walked into the control room.
“Did you reach Murray?” she asked. “Is it
okay
with him if we go ahead and save this woman’s life now?”
Clarence looked at Dew, then back at her.
“What’s the problem?” she asked. “Come on, guys, chop-chop. Time’s a-wastin’.”
Dew looked at the floor. Clarence’s face was a blank.
“You can’t operate,” Clarence said.
“What are you talking about? We’ve got everything we can get from her.”
“Not everything,” Clarence said. “Not yet.”
She stared at him for a moment. Understanding flared up, but part of her fought it down. She didn’t want to believe what she was hearing.
“You . . . Clarence, you can’t be serious. You don’t think we’re going to let those things
hatch
out of that woman, do you?”
“We have orders,” he said.
Clarence had known what Murray’s answer would be. That’s why he’d insisted they wait, delay the surgery. If he hadn’t fed her that bullshit about keeping people in the loop, she’d already have Bernadette Smith on the operating table.
Margaret had heard the phrase
seeing red
. She’d understood it in theory, but she had never actually
seen
red. Until now. A rage exploded inside her like nothing she’d ever felt.
“We are
not
going to let that woman die!”
She took two steps forward and started jabbing her finger into Clarence’s broad chest. She could have also screamed at Dew, sure, but she’d almost expected this from a cold-blooded killer like him. But from
Clarence
? A man she’d made love to? “That woman has a ten-year-old son who just lost his father and two sisters. I can
save
Bernadette, I know it. We are going to operate on her, and
right now,
you rotten bastards. Do you hear me?
Right now.”
Clarence shook his head. “We can’t, Margaret.”
“That’s
Doctor Montoya
to you, asshole.
Doctor
. As in sworn to protect life.”
“We have orders,” Clarence said.
“Orders from who? From that slimy bastard Murray Longworth? From Ogden? From
him
?” Margaret pointed at Dew, who kept staring at the floor. “Who the fuck thinks they can
order me
to let this woman die?”
“The president,” Clarence said quietly. “It’s from the top. Executive order.”
“Is that right? Well maybe he can order you to gas some Jews while you’re at it! How about that for following orders? Or maybe he can order Dew here to tie up some nigger and give him a whippin’ just to set an example!”
Clarence’s face wrinkled in anger, but she didn’t care. In fact, she liked it. She wanted to get a reaction out of this asshole, this
goose-stepping
asshole. How could she have ever thought she loved a coldhearted machine like this?
“What do you think, Dew?” Margaret screamed. “If you were
ordered
to do it, that would make it
okay
, wouldn’t it?”
“Margaret,” Clarence said, “please calm down.”
“Didn’t I tell you it’s
Doctor
Montoya? Didn’t I,
Agent
Otto?”
“You don’t understand, we ha—”
Margaret threw a straight right jab. He was still talking when she did. Her fist hit the bottom of his left front tooth. His head snapped back, from pain, not from the force of her punch, and his hands shot to his mouth. She had seen anger on his face before, but his new expression went way beyond that. This was
fury.
His eyes cut through her rage a bit, made her realize that no matter how mad she got, she was still a small woman and someone his size could hurt her. Hurt her
bad,
anytime he wanted to . . . or anytime he lost control.
His nostrils flared. He stood up to his full six-foot-three-inch height.
“You broke my tooth,” he said. His voice remained quiet, but it was no longer calm. Agent Clarence Otto, her lover—correction,
former
lover—was about one ounce shy of knocking her right the fuck out.
“Leave, Otto,” Dew said.
Clarence’s head snapped to the left and he glared at Dew. For a second, Margaret thought his rage might manifest itself on Dew Phillips.
“That’s an
order,
” Dew said quietly.
Clarence glared at him for another few seconds, then looked at Margaret, hate in his eyes. He turned and walked out of the trailer.
“You need to get a grip, Doctor Montoya,” Dew said. “We’re in a very bad situation here, and you’re smart enough to understand the big picture. Do you have that first-aid kit in here?”
“Why the
fuck
do you need a first-aid kit?”
Dew pointed down to her right fist. “Because you’re bleeding all over the place.”
Margaret felt the hot wetness a second before she lifted her hand. Only when she saw it did she feel the pain. Her right ring finger was split wide open at the base knuckle, cut by a piece of broken tooth wedged between the torn skin and the bone.
With her left hand, she opened a cabinet and pulled out the plastic first-aid kit. One-handed, she lifted its lid and rummaged for a suture needle and some gauze.
Dew held out his left hand, palm up.
“I don’t need your help, Phillips.”
“Yes you do.” His hand was still waiting for hers.
“My left hand is fine,” Margaret said. “I’ll be happy to split that one open on
your
tooth if you push me.”
“Clarence Otto is a gentleman,” Dew said. “I’m not. I’m a firm believer in equal rights. You hit me and you’ll be spitting up blood. Then, if I know Otto, he’s going to come after me because I hit his girl. He’s bigger than me, so I’ll have to knee him in the balls and then probably break his right arm to make him stay down.”
Margaret just stared at him. Dew talked in a slow, steady voice. A smooth voice. Even while he was talking about nothing but violence, his voice calmed her. Every degree her temper dropped, the pain in her hand went up correspondingly.
“Do you want to know
how
I’ll break his right arm, Doctor Montoya?”
Images of Perry Dawsey flashed through her mind, images of the huge man curled up on a hotel-room floor, bleeding from Dew’s handiwork. Her brain superimposed Clarence Otto over Perry Dawsey.
Dew’s left hand was still out, palm up.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to know.” She lifted her bloody right hand and put it in his palm.
He picked the tooth out of her knuckle and put it on the computer counter. “Otto might want that back,” he said. “Aren’t you scientist types supposed to be above the fray and all that?”
“I’m not going to let that woman die,” Margaret said. “What just happened doesn’t change anything. I’m
going
to operate.”
“No you’re not.” Dew pulled gauze on the wound, pressed hard and held it. Margaret hissed at the pain. “What you’re
going
to do, Doctor Montoya, is what you’re told.”
She started to protest, but he squeezed her hand a little bit harder. The pain made her gasp, cutting off her words.
“The president ordered that we allow that woman’s triangles to hatch,” Dew said. “We can’t locate the next gate; therefore we can’t afford to kill something that might have that information.”
“We can’t sacrifice our own citizens, goddamit.”
“Wake
up,
Doctor Montoya. America sacrifices her own all the time. Always has, always will. We sacrificed enough of my friends in Vietnam.”
“We have a volunteer army now, Dew,” Margaret said. “It’s not the same thing. We don’t have the draft anymore.”
“Which will last exactly as long as there are enough troops to fight the engagements we have.” Dew removed the bloody gauze and tossed it into a wastebasket. He pressed another batch in place, held it with his left thumb, then pulled out a suture kit with his right hand. He tore it open with his teeth and set it next to the keyboard.
“The very
second
we face a big enough threat, you know damn well that draft will be back,” he said. “The few die so the many can live. That woman in there, she needs to die for that same reason.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Margaret said. “I’m not military. I am a doctor, and I do
not
sacrifice people. I’m going over your head.”
Dew removed the second batch of gauze, which was less bloody than the first. He pinched her torn skin together, picked up the pre-threaded needle and slid it through the flesh.
His hands were rough but warm. Gentle. She watched his technique: smooth, experienced.
“You’ve done this before?”
Dew nodded. “Sugar, I’ve done this while people were trying to kill me. I’ve done it to
myself
while people were trying to kill me. This here is just a little ol’ barroom brawl cut. Where did you learn to punch like that?”
“Boxercise,” Margaret said. “I’ve never actually hit anyone in my life.”
Dew nodded again. “You go over my head and you’re out,” he said as he made the second stitch. “It’s not a threat to say you’ll be put in solitary confinement until this thing is all over. I say it’s not a threat because I know you don’t care about punishment or pissing anyone off.”
“I don’t.”
Dew made a third stitch. “Still, that’s what will happen. You’ll be off the case and someone else will take over. Maybe that Doctor Chapman fella, maybe your old buddy Doctor Cheng.”
Dew made the fourth stitch, then looked her in the eyes. His face was only a few inches from hers. She felt his hands moving—he was tying off the stitch by feel alone.
“Whoever it is, they won’t know as much as you, Margaret. They’re going to have to spend time catching up, time we don’t have. And they will probably miss something that could make all the difference.”
She looked away. He was right.
“We don’t know what’s coming through those gates,” Dew said. “But whatever it is, it would
already
have come through if it wasn’t for you. Thanks to your weather theory, we may even find the source of infection. If it’s a satellite, we might be able to shoot it down. That’s because of
you.
Margaret—we can’t do this without you.”
“But Dew, that woman . . . it’s going to he horrible.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, it will. But we
need
to know. You’re playing in the big leagues now, and part of the game at this level is knowing when you have to make a sacrifice.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Margaret said. “This is what you’re good at, right?”
Dew smiled. It was a smile full of bitterness.
“Among the best, I’m told. Kind of a dubious honor. Look, Doc, no matter what you say, what you do, or who you talk to, Bernadette Smith is going to die. All you can do is put up a useless protest and be pulled off the project. You get to keep your integrity, but at what cost to the country? To
humanity
? Tell me you understand that part at least.”
She did understand. Any protest would just be ignored, accomplish nothing—the Murray Longworth machine would roll over her. Things would continue, only less effectively. And as much as it made her hate herself, she wasn’t going to let a wasted gesture take her off this project.
“I get it,” she said.
“If you think Gutierrez is making this call on a whim, if you think it’s easy for Otto and me to execute it, then you’re a fool. I hope you never have to make a call like this, Margaret. But if you do, you just remember—is one life worth the lives of hundreds? Of thousands?”
“We don’t
know
that sacrificing Bernadette Smith is going to save hundreds of lives. Or even
one
life.”
Dew nodded. “Exactly. We
don’t
know, and that’s why a decision like this is such a mindfuck.”
He stood up and started repacking the first-aid kit. Her hand was already bandaged. She hadn’t even felt it. Had a few different cards been dealt, Dew Phillips could have been a world-class surgeon.
He started to walk out, then turned to face her. “So shall I get Doctor Chapman to run things, or will you do your job?”
She hated him. She hated him more than she thought it possible to hate a human being, and almost as much as she hated Clarence Otto.
“I’ll do it,” she said.
That bitter smile again.
Dew Phillips walked out of the control room, leaving Margaret alone to think about the coming nightmare.
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Colonel Charlie Ogden stood in the command tent, looking over the maps and satellite photos spread across a central table. Corporal Cope sat on a stool. He had the forward-leaning posture of a bird of prey, waiting to pounce on Ogden’s next order.
Ogden wondered if he’d get even his customary four hours of sleep that night. Probably wasn’t time for it. And if he couldn’t sleep, neither could Corporal Cope. Poor guy. But Cope was a young man; he didn’t really need sleep. Sleep was for pussies.
Ogden checked his watch: 2130.
“Corporal.”
“Yes sir?”
“Any word from Doc Harper about private Climer?”
“Nothing yet, sir,” Cope said.
“How long ago was Harper in here?”
“About twelve hours, Colonel.”
“How long does it take to wake up from being shot in the fucking shoulder?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir,” Cope said. “I can look it up online if you like.”
“It was a rhetorical question, Corporal.”
“Yes sir.”
Maybe the kid did need some sleep after all.
“Corporal, any hits from the satellite search?”
“No sir,” Cope said. “I’m all over them, as you requested. I’m on a first-name basis with the squints now, sir, although the name they have for me when they take my calls every fifteen minutes isn’t Jeff, if you know what I mean.”
The squints were annoyed with thoroughness? Well, fuck ’em. They weren’t on the front lines.
Ogden sipped lukewarm coffee, staring, thinking. He’d expanded the search area, applied every available resource, and still no sign of a gate. All the previous outbreaks had resulted in a construct somewhere within about a hundred miles. Granted, a hundred-mile radius made for a huge area, but they had dozens of air assets and dedicated satellite coverage. If something was there, they should have found it.