Infected

Five cases to date — two more discovered after the presidential meeting. First, Judy Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 sanct.i.ty 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 b.a.l.l.s.

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

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

pa.s.senger-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 AfricanAmerican youngster named Clarence Otto, a.s.signed 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 c.r.a.p — 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-yearold 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 p.r.o.nounced 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.