Hybrid (4 page)

“We finished the sequencing of the R2 serotype last night and found eleven base-pair changes.”

“That’s good news. So we don’t expect R2 to ever become a significant player.” Martin had always expected that the Hanta virus would develop less virulent subtypes, and it was Adam’s job to prove it.

“Nope. Whatcha got there?” Adam seemed to vibrate.

“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested in a case of encephalitis in Colorado.” Nathan dangled the word “Colorado” before the bouncing Adam. Hanta was especially active in neighboring New Mexico.

“In March?” Adam’s bouncing increased in frequency.

“No, February. Dick Fernung took a look at the case.” Martin enjoyed winding Adam a little tighter; only, Adam stopped his incessant leg bouncing. “What’s wrong?”

“Dr. Martin, Dick Fernung is in Africa. He’s been there since January. Uganda, I think.”

“Damn, how did I forget that?” Martin said. He needed a break, or an assistant, probably both. He returned to his computer, but the report was unsigned. “Martha, can you get me file . . .” He donned bifocals to read the case number from the computer. “434-w90?”

“No,” she shouted back.

Both men were surprised by her response. “And why the hell not?” asked Martin.

“Because I got you that very file yesterday, and you haven’t returned it. Did you look on your desk, O organized one?” She didn’t even bother to get out of her chair.

Nathan began rustling around his desk, and just before he was going to shout that it wasn’t there, Adam found it on a chair next to him.

“Found it,” he said, handing over the thin manila folder. “Dr. Fernung has a post-doc working for him. It’s, ah . . . Larry Strickland,” he said sheepishly. His left leg began to bounce.

Martin sneered as he thumbed through the file, looking for the signature page.

“Great! Guess who signed it out?” he said sarcastically. Larry Strickland was a post-doc who would never rise above research assistant if Martin had anything to say about it. He was as much of a mistake as Adam had been a find. “He’s lazy, sloppy, and stupid.” The words slipped out, and immediately both were embarrassed, especially Adam, who was just two years older than Strickland. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Said what?” Adam popped to his feet. “Well, I’ve got some time on my hands. I’ll be happy to review it.”

“I don’t know. How are you with arbovirus? They can be tricky,” Martin said with mock concern, handing him the file.

“Well, I do know that they’re not nearly as sexy as the Sin Nombre virus. If I need to know anything else about them, I can always look it up in a book.” Adam was back in full motion as he thumbed through the file. “This shouldn’t . . .” Adam stopped moving again.

“You were saying?” Nathan had turned back to his desk and waited for the younger man to finish his thought.

“Dr. Martin, I don’t think this is an arbovirus,” Adam said softly, staring at an electron micrograph. “This doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. Definitely not an arbovirus. It’s too big and much too complex.” Sabritas awkwardly bent over Martin’s desk sharing the photograph.

“What? Just give me the file. I can’t see it from way over there.” Nathan was more annoyed than concerned. A six-sided wheel with what looked like arms at each corner stared back at him. It took about five seconds for his brain to process what he was seeing, but it took his stomach less than one. A wave of nausea hit him, and he dropped the file. It hit his knee and fell to the floor.

“Have you seen anything like . . . Are you okay?”

Martin was light-headed, and his mind was racing. “This has got to be a mistake,” he mumbled as he felt the wheel of karma turn. He reached for the file, but Adam had already scooped it up.

“I take it you know what this is,” Adam said seriously.

“Let me see it again.” Martin’s heart was palpitating, but his mind was clearing.

Adam fumbled with the pages for a moment and handed his boss the electron micrograph. The picture hadn’t changed. There were four more pictures of the virus, and each showed the six-sided wheel with short arms. Martin checked the file numbers and found that they all matched. It was too much to hope that a clerical error had been made.

“Hold this for me,” said Martin, passing the file back to Adam. Martin retrieved the old EDH
1
file, and after several minutes of rifling through its pages, he threw it back onto the desk. “No goddamn pictures,” he said, turning to his computer and pounding away at the keys.

Adam cautiously walked around the desk and watched with growing concern as his boss punished the keyboard.

Finally, Martin stopped; he had found another hexagon with six arms. A fist tightened in his chest, but the angina wasn’t what concerned him.

“They’re close, but not the same,” Adam said. Martin jumped a little, having for the moment forgotten his protégé. “Look, this Colorado virus has much smaller appendages.” Adam shoved the file in Martin’s face. “I’d guess that it has less nuclear material as well, but they’re definitely related. This one has to be a mutation of the one on the screen.” Adam made the obvious connection, but Martin had stopped listening. “We have a problem, don’t we?”

Martin didn’t answer. Instead, he picked up the phone. “Martha,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically controlled and business-like, “I need you to get me William Branch. He’s assistant director of the FBI in Washington. You should have his number. Tell him it’s an emergency.” Martin hung up the phone.

Adam was afraid to move or speak. He thought he had seen Nathan Martin in every conceivable mood, but never before had he seen him like this.

“She knew.” Martin said to himself.

Amanda slid off the high-back aluminum chair and into her parka. Out of habit, she had signed off, but it probably wasn’t necessary. She walked up to the counter of the Internet café and gave the night clerk a ten-dollar bill. She had worn gloves since she had come in, and the bill was clean. She had every expectation that within a very short period of time, it would be confiscated as evidence, and she didn’t want things to be too easy for the FBI. She had signed in using her real name. No sense in disguising that. Everything else, however, was artifice.

Kurt Campion, the night clerk for Missy’s All-Nite Internet, could only stare. Not many coeds used the café this late, and he’d never seen one that looked like Amanda Flynn.

Amanda smiled at Kurt, and she had the attention of every atom in his body.

“You a student here?” he asked awkwardly while slowly making change.

“Yes, I am. I transferred here from Texas this semester.” She used her sweetest voice and projected the image of an innocent, carefree small-town girl who had no idea just how attractive she was.

Kurt could hardly breathe. Nearly twenty-one, he was, and would always be, the quintessential geek, and beautiful women didn’t give geeks the time of day. At least, none had ever given Kurt the time of day. “Um, I’m in . . . computer engineering,” Kurt said. “I got this job because I can fix just about anything in here. Besides, it’s quiet enough that I can write my code.”

Amanda glanced over his shoulder; his laptop was paused on a fantasy role-playing game. Kurt followed her gaze. “Oh, that’s the latest version of
The End of Time
—”

Before Kurt could explain all the secrets and intricacies of the game, and conveniently slip in the fact that he was the first person ever to become The Grand Executioner, Amanda cut him off. “I think games like that have led to the dissolution of American society.”

Crestfallen, Kurt’s eyes dropped. “Seven-fifty is your change.”

Amanda took the money from the sad college student. She didn’t like embarrassing him, but it was important that he remember the image of a twenty-year-old sociology major, five foot two, with short brown hair and stunning green eyes. In twenty, maybe thirty minutes, Kurt was going to get a visit from the FBI, and they would have a seven-year-old photograph of a five-foot-seven blonde with blue eyes who would now be thirty-seven. They would try to convince Kurt that the stuck-up bitch was actually Amanda. In the end, they would conclude that Kurt was an unreliable witness or that Amanda had used a stand-in—either way, the confusion would work to her advantage.

“’Bye,” she said politely and walked out the door, swinging a book bag over one shoulder. Outside, Boulder, Colorado, was cold, quiet, and asleep. Constitution Avenue, the university’s main drag, was completely deserted, and Amanda’s clogs echoed off the storefronts. She continued up the street as far as the main campus. Comfortable that her deception was now complete, she turned onto Peak Street. Her five-year-old Jeep Grand Cherokee was parked in front of a Starbucks, and she quickly got in.

“Damn him,” she said after strapping in. Her breath frosted the windshield. It had been a mistake to contact Martin, a mistake to believe that an ass like him could ever change. Now more than ever, she would have to cover her tracks, which meant leaving her apartment, her job, and ultimately her car behind.

She started the car, and as it heated up, so did she. For more than three months, she had cooperated with them. She had submitted to dozens of their intrusive follow-up exams and had answered thousands of pointless questions, but it never seemed to be enough. They wanted something she couldn’t give them. “That’s not entirely true,” she whispered. She could have given them something; she could have given them the whole truth. It wouldn’t have answered any of their questions, but it would have told them that they were asking all the wrong questions.

It was Martin who first suspected that she wasn’t completely forthcoming. “Bastard,” she said, without fogging the windshield. “He’s responsible for all this.” That wasn’t entirely true, either. He simply wouldn’t let it go; he wouldn’t let her go. He refused to accept the fact that he would never have his answers. It was more than just professional responsibility. Somehow it had become personal challenge. He would know her secret or he would destroy her life. As it turned out, it wasn’t her life that had been destroyed. She had no regrets about what she had done; she was well past feeling regret by that point. They had put her in a no-win situation, and they were the ones who had lost. For six years, they had hunted her, and up until this morning, the trail had grown decidedly cold. She put the car in gear and pulled out into the empty street, passing a deli on the left. Above the door was a large sign with the words
Martin’s Deli
painted across it.

“Can’t shake you, can I,” she said while turning south. There was no point in returning to her apartment; she had planned for this eventuality and had everything she needed in the backseat. Her life in Boulder was over, and so were six years of relative normality.

She drove in silence; radios only annoyed her. When the car was warm, she shimmied out of her parka and tossed it onto the crowded back seat. She had one stop to make, and then she would be on her way back to Colorado Springs, a place she had hoped never to see again. She wondered halfseriously if it was the karmic center of the whole universe, or just hers. She had grown up in Aspen—not the famous resort, but a small farming community east of both Boulder and Denver—but it was Colorado Springs where she had lived and been happy. She had gone to school there, met and married her husband there, had a son there, and finally buried them both there.

The car bounced over a frozen mound of snow, and the wheel jerked in Amanda’s hand. Even her car was reluctant. “Easy girl,” she said. “We still have to see Auntie Em before we go.”

Regency Care Center was the only medical facility in Thompson County, and the only place Emily Elizabeth Larson would consider living. At 72, she was Amanda’s oldest living relative; in fact, she was Amanda’s only living relative. She had retired from her professorship, sold her home in Enid, Oklahoma, moved back to Aspen Springs, Colorado, broken her hip, and had surgery all in the span of one very stressful month.

Amanda made the sixty-mile drive from Boulder back to her hometown several times in the last few weeks despite the obvious risk. Normally, it took less than an hour over the new highway, but this morning she took the old route. It was a shorter distance, but took a half hour longer because most of it was over one-lane roads that wound down Kenner Pass. She had avoided these roads for eight years; bad memories lay ahead, but she had to face them before she faced the future.

The road finally began to level off and Amanda could hear the swollen Kenner River as it flowed parallel to the gravel road. A few more bends in the road and then there it was, looming above her: the bridge. It was an old steel structure with dark rust stains at each rivet site. It hadn’t received a lot of attention in the eight years since she was last at this spot, but it still appeared solid. The river had become popular with kayakers as it plunged more than a hundred feet in the last quarter mile before passing under the span; Amanda could see several cars parked in the makeshift gravel lot just to the left of the bridge. It bothered her that people were here now, and that this place, which had become a nexus for her family, had now become a recreation destination for others.