Infected (6 page)

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.

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 stopped 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.

Ten hours later, during the autopsy, the strange growths prompted county health officials to call the CDC’s Cincinnati office, which sent Margaret and a team. By the time she arrived six hours after that—sixteen hours after the woman had been shot and killed—the body was already in bad shape. In the course of the next twenty hours, the body disintegrated into a pile of pitted bones, thick mats of an unidentified gossamer green mold, and a puddle of black slime. Refrigerating didn’t slow the decomposition. Neither did flat-out freezing. The factor that attacked the body was unknown and new, an efficient chemical reaction that seemed unstoppable. Margaret still didn’t know how it worked.

Shortly after Wilson’s disintegration, Margaret hit the computer databases scanning for the words
triangular growth.
She found the record of Gary Leeland, a fifty-seven-year-old man who went to the hospital complaining of triangular growths. Less than half a day after being admitted, Leeland killed himself by setting his hospital bed on fire. The pictures of Wilson, combined with the initial pictures doctors had taken of Leeland, were the reasons that Margaret was here.

Otto skirted the news vans and the bored-looking camera crews. The unmarked Lexus drew casual glances and nothing more. It pulled up near a back door, but a rogue reporter and a cameraman were waiting there as well.

“What has the press been told?” Margaret asked.

“SARS,” Otto said. “It’s the same story as with Judy Washington.”

Dew Phillips and Malcolm Johnson had found Judy Washington’s decomposed body four days earlier in an abandoned lot near the Detroit retirement home where she lived. Her corpse had been the worst yet—nothing more than a pockmarked skeleton and an oily black stain on the ground. There wasn’t a single shred of flesh left.

“Second case in eight days,” Margaret said. “The press will think it’s a full-blown SARS epidemic.”

SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, had been tagged by the media several times over as the next “nightmare plague.” While the disease was potentially fatal, and had racked up a significant body count in China, it wasn’t a major threat to a country with an efficient medical system like the United States. SARS was, however, a contagious, airborne disease, which explained the Racal suits and the quarantine. The bottom line on SARS? Enough of a danger to make people pay attention, but it really threatened only the elderly and Third World countries—and in America, that was never enough to create a panic.

She got out of the car. As a unit, the reporter and the cameraman pounced like a trapdoor spider, a spotlight flicking on and hitting her in the eyes as the microphone reached for her face. She flinched away, trying to figure out what to say, already almost ready to vomit. But as fast as they were, Clarence Otto was faster, covering the camera lens with one hand, grabbing the microphone with the other and using his body to shield Margaret long enough for her to reach the door. He moved with the fluid grace of a dancer and the speed of a striking snake.

“I’m sorry,” Otto said with his charming smile. “No questions at this time.”

Margaret let the door slip shut behind her, cutting off the reporter’s vehement protests. Clarence Otto could handle the media. He could probably handle a lot of things, some of which she didn’t want to know about, and some of which she thought about each night she spent alone in a hotel bed. She suspected she could easily seduce him; even at forty-two, she knew her long, glossy-black hair and dark eyes were part of a look that attracted many men. She thought herself an attractive Hispanic woman—men who wanted her told her she was “exotic.” Which was funny to her, because she was born in Cleveland. Sure, she had some extra baggage around the hips (and who the hell didn’t at forty-two?), and the wrinkles were becoming a bit more prominent, but she knew damn well she could have just about any man she wanted. And she wanted Clarence.

She quickly shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. When she got stressed, she got horny, as if her body knew the one surefire way to relieve mental tension. She was going to examine a corpse, for God’s sake, and she needed to keep her hormones in check. Margaret breathed deeply, trying to control her stress level, which seemed to soar higher with each case.

Almost as soon as she entered the hospital, another CIA agent, this one a middle-aged man she’d never seen before, fell in at her side and escorted her through the empty halls. She figured this guy, like Clarence, knew little of the whole story. Murray wanted it that way—the fewer people who knew, the fewer places from which information could leak.

She entered the morgue, which housed the recently erected portable decontamination chambers. Amos Braun, her only help in this hunt for answers to a biological nightmare, was waiting for her.

“Good morning, Margaret.”

She always thought his voice made him sound like a frog. Or maybe a toad. A drunk toad, slow and growly and maybe with only half his lips working correctly. The beyond-skinny Amos was somewhat effeminate and always the snappy dresser, though about ten years out of style. Most people initially assumed he was gay. His wife and two children, however, provided some evidence to the contrary. He always looked to be an hour or two behind on his sleep, even though his energy never faded.

Amos had been with her in Royal Oak when they’d examined Charlotte Wilson, and every step of the way since. He was one of the best in the business, granted, but he was all she had. She’d asked Murray for more staff, told him she
needed
more staff, but he’d refused—he wanted to control the flow of information, limit the number of those in the know.