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LUKE A.F.B., PHOENIX

It was 1:07 P.M. when the ambulance carrying the remains of the Secretary of State sped across the gray tarmac toward Air Force One. Montoya leaned over the rails of the observation deck to watch it pass, oblivious to the drone of two large helicopters which circled slowly about the perimeter of the base.

“And what do you suggest, Dr. Kirby?” she said without looking up. “Do I take their word for it?”

Kirby hesitated. He wished he had a better answer for her.

“I’m not sure there’s anything else you can do,” he said at last. “Ultimately it’s something I think we’re going to have to take on faith.”

Montoya seemed to mull this over as she stared out across the desert airstrip with uncharacteristic silence. She watched as the white ambulance pulled up below Air Force One. Two figures dressed in white climbed out of the back and prepared to transfer Williams’ corpse to the aircraft. It was wrapped in a bright green body bag. A second bag containing the remains of Agent Lew Gallagher would be loaded as well.

Cassie had also been watching from the observation deck. She turned away and put a hand on her husband’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s give Camilla a few minutes to herself.”

News of the morning’s events had spread rapidly. The Phoenix incident now threatened to eclipse the significance of the loss of the Eisenhower and the Paul Hamilton in the day’s upcoming news segments. It would compete with footage of the President giving an emergency TV broadcast outside the gates of Luke Air Force Base shortly after being whisked away from the Marriott Hotel — now the site of the “attempt on the President’s life.”

Once again the media had been duped into reporting an entirely skewed version of the events, despite having witnessed them with their own eyes: Coleman was being billed as a hero, Anders had come off as a militant extremist who died in a hail of bullets after turning a gun on the Secret Service, while Montoya, his real target, was hardly mentioned. Her sur­vival of Solano’s botched assassination attempt paled next to Coleman’s well-being and the news of Williams’ death. From the emergency ward of Phoenix Memorial Hospital — where he was receiving treatment for a broken leg — Stark had been able to look into the camera lens of a local TV station and, with tears in his eyes, declare that, “The nation lost a good man today, a great man… He was my friend… Is this live?”

But there had been triumph, as well as tragedy to report. From a make­shift podium outside Luke Air Force Base, Coleman announced that So­lano’s regime had collapsed, and that Montoya had been returned to power. This, he said, had allowed him to conduct rapid negotiations with the new president, and cleared the way for a swift response to the sinking of the two U.S. warships in the Philippine Sea. The frigates Jarrett and Aubrey Fitch were approaching the area now to join Gary and the destroyer Fletcher in rescue operations.

Navy pilots, he reported, were already preparing to be flown from San Diego to the Mexican airfields of Monterrey. The Mexican government had rescinded all hostilities with the United States and was pledging com­plete cooperation, beginning with the immediate release of the Campeche Bay oil workers and the formerly disputed F-22N Raptors which had been awaiting shipment to the U.S. The first batch of aircraft would be made available later that day. More U.S. pilots from naval air stations in the Chesapeake Bay area would reach Mexico shortly thereafter. The piloted aircraft would be flown to Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas — and from there, quickly dispatched to the western Pacific.

Yet, Montoya’s pledge to withdraw her country’s troops from the Gulf of Mexico represented a change of policy with respect to not only Solano’s ill-conceived strategies for dealing with the U.S., but also her own. What she gave Coleman, she had done so because she had no choice in the matter. With anti-American forces gathering in the western Pacific, to refuse him was to run the risk of appearing sympathetic to the very people who had succeeded briefly in unseating her from power. It would have been a dangerous game for her to play. With its back to the wall, there was precious little the U.S. would not do to protect itself from its enemies. She knew the irritable giant was drawing itself up, and she was determined to extricate her country from its sights before it lashed out. So she had struck her deal.

In exchange for Montoya’s cooperation, Coleman had secretly agreed to dismantle the ‘biological research program’ that he had, at first, desper­ately tried to convince her did not exist.

But she had refused to let him off so easily.

On first catching up with him at the air base, she’d demanded to know the nature of the mission she’d overheard him aborting during their flight from the hotel — just before the second missile had picked up the car and tossed it through the air like so much balsa wood. “I want to know where that plane was going,” she told him.

When Coleman had thought it over, he replied. “To the Gulf. It was a reconnaissance mission.”

At this point any pretense toward diplomacy abruptly came to an end. She had given him a deadly look. “And this is what you felt an urgent need to put a stop to while some lunatic was firing missiles up your ass?! I don’t think so, Mr. President!”

Montoya could not hold back. She angrily accused Coleman of attempt­ing to use biological means to intervene in the affairs of her government. In response, the President had tried to look stunned, but came off as more embarrassed than anything else.

Clearly at a disadvantage in Stark’s absence, Coleman tried to stall. However, his hastily adopted version of reality took another blow when news arrived that a ‘gigantic black bat’ had apparently swooped out of the skies over Mexico and overflown the National Palace before vanishing again.

“To the Gulf,” she said in a mocking tone that caused Coleman to break eye contact. “A reconnaissance mission.”

Though flummoxed, Coleman doggedly maintained that Montoya’s suspicions regarding the purpose of the suspended mission were entirely based on ‘fantasy.’ The word itself had infuriated her. It was as if he was telling her that what she claimed to have seen firsthand in the southern deserts of Arizona was purely a product of her own over-fertile imagina­tion. Then, when he’d seen the reaction on her face, he had mistakenly tried using humor to ease his way out.

“Believe me,” he told her with a foolish grin. “If we had intended to use force, you’d be flying back to a pile of rubble about now…”

The stupid man. Once again he had taken her for a simple-minded woman. And that, she was about to remind him, was far from the case indeed. When she had stepped up to him to deliver her coup de grâce, the look on Coleman’s face was still that of a man who believed he might yet talk his way out of trouble. She had taken pleasure in watching it dissolve.

“Unfortunately, Mr. President,” she warned him, “you have overlooked one thing. World opinion will prove a lot less forgiving of you than I could ever be… What do you think its reaction will be when it discovers the very same company the White House has supported financially all these years, just so happens to be the one to have been conducting a secret program of biological warfare against my people?” She gave him a holier-than-thou arch of her eyebrows. “What will you say then, Mr. President? That you had no idea?”

No, he had told her, he hadn’t. The notion of a biological strike against her country, in any form, was beyond contemplation. Not now, not ever.

Montoya had been forced to listen to his lies as they struggled to arrive at a workable, if not entirely satisfactory, compromise. She would give him what the U.S. so desperately needed, but not before he had agreed to eradicate the hidden capability which had been built up against her people — a threat which hung over them like Damocles’ sword.

“Believe me,” Coleman had insisted in the end. “If there should be the slightest truth to what you’re saying — I swear — I will personally see to it myself that the situation is resolved to your complete satisfaction. Camilla, you have my word.”

But that was all she had. And as she waited for her plane to be flown in from a municipal airfield to the city’s east, she had to wonder if his word would prove to be enough.

“I understand… Thank you. Goodbye.”

Cassie returned the phone to its cradle. “They’re doing fine. The nurse thinks Irene will be back on her feet by the morning. Apparently she’s been telling everyone the only reason she hasn’t walked out of the place is that she thinks Kevin needs the company. Isn’t that sweet?”

Kirby nodded. “That’s good,” he mumbled.

“What’s the matter?”

Kirby nodded in the direction of Air Force One, which could be seen through a large floor-to-ceiling window. “Montoya’s right,” he said. “Who’s to say he’ll keep his promise?”

Cassie tried to be optimistic. “Maybe he really didn’t know what was going on. If so, don’t you think he’d try to fix the problem once he found out about it?”

Kirby frowned. “What problem? Two days from now there won’t be a single shred of evidence linking Coleman or anyone else in his administra­tion to what was going on at Imtech. If anything was going on, that is.”

Cassie didn’t follow him.

“Where’s the proof?” he said.

The proof? Surely they had seen plenty of that, hadn’t they?

“I mean, you can bet that Dan was smart enough to cover his tracks. Hell, ninety percent of his own people never knew what he was doing. And the ones who did aren’t likely to volunteer the information.”

“What about the lab in the basement where the work took place? We know that exists. Irene saw it. And that… that horrible place in the desert. What about that?” Cassie got a chill just thinking about it.

Kirby shook his head doubtfully. “That’s a restricted area. The govern­ment’s not going to let anyone back in there to check it out. Anyway, like I said…Two days from now the army will probably have that place looking like a goddamn canteen.”

“And Dan’s lab?”

“Circumstantial at best. There’s plenty of American companies operat­ing secret divisions. It’s just another way of doing business. If that wasn’t true, Dan would never have felt that he could get away with taking Irene down there.”

He said they would face a similar problem if they pointed to the empty graves that Parker had uncovered on the glacier in Alaska. There was no evidence whatsoever that anyone at Imtech had a hand in the removal of the bodies — despite the fact that Arnold Frey was known to have visited the site at least once.

It was all circumstantial, Kirby repeated. Even if they were able to prove that Imtech had excavated those bodies, who was to say that what they were doing was dangerous? After all, if you had to name the virus with the least prospect of survival since the end of the First World War, influenza’s flimsy RNA genome made it a strong candidate for the title.

As Cassie listened, she became disheartened. But then she remembered the disk Frey had left behind. The one containing the protein sequences. On the drive to Phoenix Kirby had mentioned that these were probably the sequences making up the virus itself. That was a form of proof, wasn’t it? And besides, hadn’t Richard isolated a sample of the real thing when he’d processed those drops of her blood?

“Both gone,” he told her. “Eugene got the disk and I ended up destroy­ing the sample trying to figure out what it was.”

“There’s nothing left?”

“Nothing usable.”

What they still did have were the protein sequences that Keller had extracted in his lab. They even had the base sequences for the underlying genes of the virus. It was all there in Keller’s lab, stored away in computer memory. But again, there was nothing to link those results directly to Imtech. At least with the disk, Frey had been clever enough to include a copy of his protein-folding program. Because Rosen had chosen not to patent the source code for BLINDFOLD, but keep access to it tightly controlled, that made it highly proprietary to Imtech. Therefore its presence on the disk was effectively as good as a company signature. As for the sequences derived from Cassie’s blood — well, the virus could have come from anywhere. They didn’t even know for sure how she had been infected. Moreover, given their potential for misuse, there was no way Kirby was about to hand over those sequences to just anyone.

“The more I think about it,” he said, “the more I realize we can’t use that information at all.”

“And if you can’t prove Imtech was acting illegally, you don’t think Coleman will see the need to keep his promise?”

“Why should he? He’d just be making trouble for himself, upsetting people I’m sure he’d rather not. Besides — seems to me it would be a lot easier to make a sticky government program just disappear, rather than to try and dismantle it from the top down… No. I honestly can’t see a single compelling reason for him to raise a damn finger.”

It occurred to Cassie that he was probably right. “There must be some­thing we can do,” she said angrily.

As they thought it over, the ambulance that had carried Williams’ body to the base of Air Force One moved away from the plane. It headed back across the tarmac to the gate from which it had come. One runway over from the Boeing 747, Montoya’s C-17 Globemaster touched down with a squeal from its big tires.

“Maybe we don’t have to prove anything,” Cassie said. “Maybe if Irene simply goes public with the story it’ll be enough. After all, people aren’t going to condone this once they understand what’s going on. It’s biologi­cal terrorism, Richard. It’s not something people can just ignore.”

“Isn’t it?”

Kirby motioned to the frenetic activity going on around them. “The trouble is, it’s going to be hard to get anyone’s attention with this stuff going on. This thing with China has got everyone spooked.”

Cassie looked around. For the first time since they’d arrived, the strained looks on the faces around her became apparent. “You’re right,” she whispered. “How bad do you think it is?”

“Bad enough.” Kirby narrowed his eyes as he stared down the corridor. “And if my gut instinct is correct, here comes some more bad news.”

Coming toward them through the crowded hallway was an officer in a neatly pressed blue uniform. He kept his eye fixed on Kirby as he approached — his movement through the corridor facilitated by the actions of air force personnel who dutifully flattened themselves against the wall to let him pass.

The officer raised a hand to attract their attention.

“What does he want?” Cassie wondered.

Kirby was still thinking about his wife’s depiction of BDM750A as the product of a government-sanctioned program of biological terrorism. Even when used in a time of war, that’s all it really was. No one took aim at the enemy — 750A worked by striking haphazardly at the guilty and innocent alike.

There must be something we can do.

Kirby wanted to believe that his wife was right — that despite their apparent powerlessness in the matter, there actually was a way to make Coleman keep his word to Montoya and make sure the product of Anders’ biochemical meddling went back on ice forever. What really annoyed him was a feeling that, somewhere at the back of his mind, he knew the answer to all this. He sensed glimpsing pieces of the solution. But like a stubborn jigsaw that defies completion, he was unable to bring them together in any meaningful way.

One of those pieces seemed to be Debreu’s restriction gene for Delta interferon — the one thing that had made Anders’ demented scheme possi­ble to begin with. And yet, he had a feeling that this wasn’t quite it…

From out of nowhere Kirby heard a woman’s voice. Somebody’s already done this? The words were so clear that initially he thought they had been spoken out loud. He recognized the voice as Debreu’s.

“Richard Kirby?” It was a male voice that broke Kirby’s concentration.

He looked up, saw the face of the officer approaching him, and turned away, hastily trying to recall what the conversation with Debreu had been about.

Suddenly Cassie grabbed him by the elbow. “Richard,” she said pulling on his arm. “You’re in the man’s way.”

Kirby twisted around and saw that he was blocking the path of a private trying to get past him with a mail cart. The cart was piled high with incom­ing mail, and base paperwork sealed in full-sized yellow envelopes. A stack of colorful magazines was also visible.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Kirby apologized and stepped aside to let the private pass. As he did so, the officer came to a halt in front of him.

“Dr. Richard Kirby?”

Kirby glanced at him. “Yes?”

“Colonel Eron.” The officer took Kirby’s hand and shook it. “Sir, I’ve been asked to relay a message from the President.”

“Really? Which one?”

Kirby found his eye attracted to the pile of magazines as they were pushed by him.

The colonel looked unamused by Kirby’s remark. “President Coleman has requested a meeting with you, Dr. Kirby. I’ve been sent to arrange it.”

Kirby wasn’t paying attention. He held up a finger. “Just a minute, would you, Colonel?” Before Eron could protest, Kirby stepped around him and went up to the private delivering mail.

“Is that…? Do you mind if I take a quick look at this?”

He picked up a copy of the new Time magazine. The cover was virtu­ally identical to the one planned for the British issue of The Journal of Gene Therapy and showed Kirby’s triple helix therapy at work. Even the main story caption was similar. IN THE GROOVE: AT LAST, A CURE FOR AIDS? ALSO, THE EIGHTH DAY OF CREATION — DAWN OF THE GENETIC REVOLUTION. Rosen must have leaked the graphic and the story earlier in the week, without telling him.

“Here,” the private said. “Take the copy for the officer’s lounge.” He exchanged it with the one in Kirby’s hands, winking at the colonel as he pushed the mail cart off down the hall. “I’m sure they won’t mind.”

Kirby was staring at the cover when the word CHINESE leaped out at him.

“Dr. Kirby?” the colonel said anxiously. “The President?”

HEPATITIS B: THE FAILURE OF A MYSTERIOUS CHINESE VACCINE.

Somebody’s already done this? Again, they were Debreu’s words.

His mind had been jogged into recalling the conversation he’d had with her after returning from Geneva. It came back to him now as he stared at the magazine. He blushed as he remembered how he’d postulated the possible existence of a Chinese restriction gene to explain the odd results obtained with the new hepatitis vaccine trials on Pingtan. He had won­dered if such a gene had interfered at the molecular level with the immune system’s normal antigenic response to viral infection. After all, similar vaccines based on the hepatitis B surface antigen had worked well in places like Africa — even in some parts of China itself. But Kirby realized now that it wasn’t the gene’s existence or non-existence that was impor­tant. It was what he had overlooked.

It was the vaccine.

“I’ll be damned…”

“Doctor, if we could make a move?”

Kirby looked up from the magazine. He glanced at Cassie. Then back at Eron. “Sure,” he said, rolling the magazine in his hand. “I’d be happy to meet with the President.”

The colonel turned to go. “Right,” he said. “If you’ll just follow me — ”

Cassie held back. “Right now? Camilla’s flying out in fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be seeing her off.”

“President Montoya? I’m afraid her departure has been moved up.”

Colonel Eron consulted his watch. “She’s due out in five minutes.” He looked at Kirby. “You won’t have time.”

Kirby frowned. “Are you sure?”

Eron told him that Coleman was already on his way to Air Force One, where Kirby would meet with him. Ten minutes after Montoya left, the President would also be in the air.

Kirby stared out through the window at the rugged C-17 airlifter on the tarmac. So he would not get to say goodbye to Montoya. He shrugged his shoulders. “All right,” he said. “But I’m going to have to make a phone call first… It’s important.”

The colonel tapped his foot impatiently.

“One call,” Kirby repeated.

Eron gave a resigned nod. “But do it quickly, would you?” He gave a second nod in the direction of a phone visible on the wall at the end of the hall.

“Just give me two minutes, Colonel…”

Kirby led his wife along the hall, away from Eron.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“Nobody.”

“Then what are you — ”

“I’ve got an idea,” he told her. Kirby glanced back over his shoulder. Eron was watching him like a hawk. “Listen carefully,” he said. “Here’s what I need you to do…”

Despite her dirty and disheveled appearance, Cassie Kirby had caught the eye of the colonel. Eron found himself watching her as she accompanied her husband to the phone. Unkempt or otherwise, there was no disguising the fact that she was an attractive woman.

Eron shook his head. How on earth, he wondered, did an egghead like Kirby end up with a woman like that? That sort of thing just didn’t stand to reason.

C’mon Einstein. Get a move on.

When Kirby picked up the phone and dialed, Eron lifted his watch to time him. When he looked back again he could no longer see the doctor’s wife. He scanned the faces coming and going in the corridor.

“Where the…?” His eyes shot back to her husband.

Kirby was watching the colonel as he continued his conversation on the phone. Fortunately he didn’t appear to be going anywhere. That made Eron feel better. He held up his watch and made a gesture to Kirby to speed it up. In response, Kirby touched the rolled up magazine to his head and saluted him.

Jerk, Eron thought.

Thirty seconds went by. Long enough, in Eron’s opinion. Who did this guy think he was, to keep the President waiting? Eron was just about to physically retrieve Kirby when he noticed the doctor’s wife reappear at his side. She was holding a large white envelope which drew the colonel’s attention.

Kirby put down the phone and came around in front of his wife, placing his back to Eron. Eron thought that odd. It was almost as if Kirby was trying to keep the envelope hidden from him.

“That’s it,” the colonel mumbled to himself. “Your time’s up.” He set off down the corridor. But before he could reach the doctor, Kirby abruptly turned around to face him.

“Ready when you are, Colonel.”

“Good.”

Eron glanced at Kirby’s wife — she seemed slightly out of breath — and then at the envelope. It had Montoya’s name scrawled across it in black ink. “What’s that?”

“Something Montoya’s been waiting for,” Kirby said. He reached inside his shirt pocket and pulled out a computer diskette which he slipped into the envelope. “Make sure she gets this,” he told his wife. “It’s impor­tant.”

“Don’t worry — I’ll see she gets it.”

“Can we go?”

Kirby kissed his wife. It made Eron wince.

Cassie waved as she headed off to find Montoya.

Eron checked his watch for the last time. Quickly, he stepped across to a glass door which opened out onto the airfield. “All right,” he said beck­oning Kirby. “This way.”

The noise of the engines was deafening.

When the jeep slowed to a stop in the shadow of the plane, Eron jumped out. Kirby followed him. Above them the nose of Air Force One blotted the sun as it peeked through the clouds. The sight of the massive conical structure hanging above him in the air only reinforced Kirby’s basic conviction that there was nothing natural about flying. Skimming across the desert in a helicopter had been bad enough. But to entrust your life to what looked like a horizontal rocket with wings was something he was never going to get used to — he felt dizzy just looking up at it.

Eron led Kirby across to the foot of a mobile staircase where one of Coleman’s men was standing guard. Scattered around the base of the plane were half a dozen uniformed air force security police, each armed with an M-16 rifle. As he stepped back into the light, Kirby brought a hand up to shield his eyes and looked for Cassie near Montoya’s plane. Presumably Montoya was already aboard. If Cassie was going to get to her she needed to hurry. And unless she did —

Kirby felt a sharp tap on the side of his arm. He was surprised to see the Secret Service agent beaming a smile at him, his hand outstretched in search of a handshake. Not sure why he was doing it, Kirby took the agent’s hand and shook it.

The man said something to him, but Kirby found it difficult to hear over the noise from the engines and pointed to his ear.

“I said, Good work back there.”

Kirby nodded, still unsure what the agent was talking about. A moment later he recognized him as one of the men he had encountered on the roof across from the Marriott. He was one of the pair who had shot at Anders.

“This is Deke Johnson,” Eron shouted.

Kirby wondered if Johnson would have shaken his hand if he’d known what his latest intentions were. Johnson quickly ran a hand-held wand over Kirby’s body and then waved the two men up the stairs.

Half way up Kirby stopped and looked back. Still no sign of Cassie. Even more worrisome, the door in the fuselage of the C-17 had been pulled shut, and now the ground crew were preparing to haul away the mobile staircase. It looked as though his wife had missed her opportunity to see Montoya before she left.

Come on Cass. Where are you?

“Dr. Kirby?”

“Coming,” Kirby said under his breath. He turned forward and headed up the steps.

Once he got inside the plane, the sound from the engines subsided. Kirby had the sensation that he was stepping into another world — one stately and foreign. Directly ahead was a curved staircase leading up to the flight deck. Someone had been coming down the stairs when Eron and Kirby stepped aboard the plane. However, the person had immediately turned around and gone back up when he’d laid eyes on the colonel.

Instinctively, Kirby faced the front of the plane. He had read some­where that the President’s accommodations on Air Force One were found in the nose of the aircraft, and now he peered curiously through an open doorway.

Someone was lying on a beige leather couch. Kirby recognized him from the cast on his leg. It was Coleman’s chief of staff, Leon Stark. There were two other people in the President’s cabin — a male nurse who fluffed the pillow behind Stark’s back, and a grim-faced middle-aged man with a black bag in one hand and a drink in the other, whom Kirby took to be the White House physician.

Stark looked up when he realized that they had company. But he seemed unprepared for it.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re here. Very good… Well, I expect he’ll be down any moment now. In the meantime, why don’t you, ah…”

“How about a tour of the plane, Dr. Kirby?” Eron said jumping in.

Kirby followed Eron back into the wing area, where his host pointed to a seat and simply said, “I’ll come get you.” He promptly disappeared back to the front of the plane, leaving Kirby to make himself comfortable in the big soft leather seats.

But Kirby didn’t feel comfortable. What he felt was exhaustion setting in. On top of that his skin felt grimy, and his beard was beginning to itch. What he really looked forward to was getting home. Besides seeing his kids again, his first priorities would be a shower and a shave, closely fol­lowed by twenty-four hours of uninterrupted sleep…

As he was thinking this, a jeep sped away from one of the buildings and headed out across the adjacent runway. Kirby put his head to the window. Following a sudden spur of activity on the tarmac, the boarding ramp was moved back into place under Montoya’s plane.

Somebody waved from the jeep — an indistinct figure riding on the passenger side. But Kirby didn’t have to see her to know who it was.

Montoya stood in the doorway, waiting for the pair to make their way up the ramp. She was disappointed to see that Cassie was accompanied not by her husband, but a noncommissioned officer of the U.S. Air Force.

Montoya reached out and helped Cassie pull herself up into the plane. “You made it,” she said. “Where’s Richard?”

Cassie looked out through the doorway, past the driver of the jeep who was waiting rigidly on the stairs. She gestured to Air Force One in the distance. “Apparently our illustrious leader has sought him out,” she informed Montoya cynically.

“Perhaps he wishes to thank him.”

“You really think so?”

I know I should have, Montoya thought. She realized now that she had lost her opportunity to do so, and conveyed her regret to Cassie.

“Don’t worry. I’ll tell him there were tears in your eyes,” Cassie said affectionately.

At that, Montoya’s eyes did become watery, surprising the both of them. It was not something that she was used to, and it somewhat embar­rassed her. But there was no denying how fond she had grown of the young woman who stood before her. She would be missed.

“Don’t tell him any such thing,” Montoya said gruffly, wiping at her eyes. “I have an image to protect, don’t you know.”

Cassie nodded. “I’ll tell him you were a pillar of steel.”

“Really?” Montoya said weakly.

A moment later they burst out laughing. Cassie put her arms around Montoya and hugged her.

“Don’t forget to come visit the next time you’re in town.”

“You too,” Montoya said. “I’ll have them sweep the Palace and — ”

“ — polish the jewels,” Cassie said with a smile. “Of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Cassie held out an envelope that she had brought with her. Montoya took it and looked at her.

“It’s from Richard. He said he’s sure you’ll find a use for it.”

Montoya simply nodded and tucked it under her arm. With their good­byes said, Cassie turned and stepped out through the door. She waved once, and then hurried to catch up with her escort who was already bounding down the steps.

Kirby flicked through the pages of the Time magazine on his lap. Under the medicine column on page sixty-five he found what he was looking for. The headline read, “Chinese Puzzle Failed Vaccine,” and the accompany­ing article ran for two full columns, including a schematic diagram of a recombinant adenovirus engineered to express the hepatitis B surface antigen. Kirby studied the article carefully, searching for any new infor­mation which would contradict his suspicions about just what had hap­pened on the Chinese island of Pingtan.

According to the article, World Health officials had been stunned to learn that a novel Hepatitis B live-virus vaccine had been administered in secrecy three years earlier to a population of 20,000 volunteers on Pingtan. The revelation had raised a number of questions, the most immediate of which was this: Why had such a massive inoculation program been carried out in secrecy? What was it about the study that had caused the Chinese to keep it under wraps for so long?

Perhaps, the writer of the article suggested, the introduction of a “relatively benign but necessarily contagious pathogen” as the vaccine vector had initially kept anxious officials in Beijing awake at night. But then, all that they had been dealing with was an ordinary “cold” virus, the writer noted, even if it did represent a modified variety.

More perplexing to scientists, were the results that had been announced. Despite an unprecedented one hundred percent inoculation of the target population, the new vaccine had failed miserably to offer any protection against hepatitis B. It was pointed out that Li Chang, the leader of the Chinese team who had seen the project through, had not been able to offer a coherent explanation for what had gone wrong. This had left the scientific community speculating on not only the cause of the failure, but also the motivation behind the team leader’s muddled disclosure. Unfortu­nately the article ended there, without any further attempt to unravel the mystery.

But Kirby had been present when Chang delivered his talk in Geneva. Because of it, he knew that the writer had overlooked a seemingly insig­nificant piece of information. It was something that, at the time, everyone in the hall that day had naturally dismissed as a slip of the tongue — an error on the speaker’s part that had been accepted for what it was, and then, simply forgotten.

It was perfectly understandable. Because Chang’s only mistake was to refer to the ‘genomic RNA’ of his hepatitis vaccine when Rosen and every other member of the audience knew perfectly well that adenovirus — from which the vaccine was constructed — carried its genes in DNA. Not RNA.

It was a straightforward enough error to make when giving a talk. No more strange, in fact, than for the audience to assume that an error had been made, and subsequently dismiss it. But what if there had been no error? What if Chang had actually been trying to tell his audience some­thing that he could not have dared to tell them directly? Suppose that the virus used to inoculate the Pingtan population had in fact been an RNA virus after all. If it was not adenovirus, then what was it?

Kirby thought he knew the answer.

Eron was on his way back down the aisle. “All right, doc,” he said. “They’re calling for you up front.”

“I think we should ask him,” Stark said.

“Forget it. He doesn’t need to know.”

“He already knows.”

“He thinks he knows,” Coleman said. “There’s a difference.”

“Maybe. I still say it’s better to be safe than — ”

“Leon, the only one who’s going to be sorry around here is you if you don’t put a lid on it right now. We’re in the clear on this. OK?”

Stark made a small whimpering sound and stared at the floor. Maybe they were in the clear, and maybe they weren’t. He had just come off the phone with Tulloch, who despite sounding incredibly put out by the F-117 pilot’s theatrics over Mexico City, had been able to come up with good reasons why an epidemic in the population below the fallout zone had “practically zero chance of being initiated.”

“In the most basic terms,” Tulloch had explained, “the stuff is just never going to make it to the ground. Period.”

The “problem,” Tulloch told him, related directly to the height at which the Aurelia’s viral canister had been pulverized. At an altitude of fifty-eight hundred meters, or nearly six kilometers above sea level, the crystal­lized virus had been released into the atmosphere more than three thousand meters above the sprawling neighborhoods of Mexico City. By Tulloch’s account, that was too high by at least two thousand meters.

“You mean because of wind factors,” Stark queried.

Not exactly, Tulloch said. More important, he thought, were the effects of hydration. Or in this case, the lack of it. Influenza, he explained in a barely audible review of what he considered to be basic biology, was a waterborne virus. Its natural environment was the intestinal tracts and shared waterways of wild ducks. It lived in water. That it was occasionally able to mount a pathway of reproduction through human hosts was an anomaly which depended critically on its ability to spread through the air on minute droplets of water. That was not a problem in the air immediately above Mexico City itself, where humidity followed from the usage of water pumped up to the city through a series of graduated stations. But at fifty-eight hundred meters, the altitude at which the virus had been exposed to the air, the water vapor content was only ten percent of the amount found at sea level.

“The air’s just too dry,” Tulloch insisted. “Which means you can forget about the one hour estimate for survival time that you’ll find in the earlier report. My guess is that, at that height, you’ve got about fifteen minutes before irreversible dehydration sets in, and then… Poof! No more virus.”

Fifteen minutes. It was a tantalizingly short amount of time. Especially given a barrier of three thousand meters airspace which the virus would need to somehow cross to have any effect on the population below.

Coleman was more than satisfied with Tulloch’s detailed assessment of the probable outcome. But while Stark wanted to believe everything that he had been told, he couldn’t help feeling that Tulloch had told them precisely what they wanted to hear. And the only other person whose opinion he could immediately seek was Kirby.

But Coleman had made his position clear. In the event that General Tulloch’s prediction proved to be incorrect, there would only be one course of action available to them. And that was ‘plausible deniability.’

“We simply deny everything,” he’d concluded. “And that means you’re not going to discuss this with anyone.”

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