Snakehead (26 page)

V

Margaret sat in someone’s office staring at the shadows on the walls. A lamp on the desk burned a pool of light into a white blotter. Beyond it, only the shapes and shadows of the monsters that stalked her imagination moved in the darkness. Her body felt as if someone had been pounding at it with clenched fists. Her head ached and her eyes stung.

Tracking down Steve’s ex-wife had not been as simple as she had expected. Martha and her new husband were out to dinner somewhere, leaving Danni in the care of a teenage babysitter who gave Margaret a cellphone number. But the cellphone was turned off, and Margaret had been forced to call the babysitter back for the name of the restaurant. The girl said she would have to call home and find out, and that she would call back. In spite of Margaret stressing the urgency of the situation, it was twenty minutes before the babysitter returned the call, saying that her home line had been engaged.

When, eventually, Margaret got through to the restaurant, it was the husband who came to the phone. The banker. He took some convincing that this was not one of Steve’s practical jokes. Apparently there had been several. Margaret inwardly cursed Steve and his juvenile sense of humour but still was unable to resist a tiny, sad smile. She assured the banker that this was no practical joke.

Then Martha had come to the phone, truculent and ready to be difficult. How serious could it be? Did Margaret know how long it would take her to get there from West Virginia? And it was far too late to be dragging a young child out of her bed.

Margaret, patience strained to the limit, had said simply, ‘Martha, it might be the last time Danni gets to see her father. There’s a very strong chance he could be dead by the time you get here.’

And the silence at the other end of the line had stretched out for an eternity. Finally, in a very small voice, Martha had said, ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

There was a knock at the door and a wedge of yellow light fell in from the corridor as it opened. Margaret looked up expectantly and saw the silhouette of Felipe Mendez standing in the open doorway. He looked almost like a caricature of himself, tousled hair, creased and rumpled overcoat, a battered briefcase hanging from the end of his arm. She heard, rather than saw, his smile. ‘People who sit in the dark, my dear, are generally trying to hide from something,’ he said.

‘Life,’ Margaret said. ‘Or maybe it’s death.’

‘What’s the news?’

‘Temperature’s still creeping up. Lot of fluid in the lungs now. He’s very fevered. They’re pinning everything on this rimantadine.’

‘Ah, yes, the antiviral stuff. Unproven.’

Margaret nodded. He stepped in and closed the door behind him, placing his case on her desk and drawing up a chair. As he sat down, his face fell into the circle of reflected light from the desk and she saw him clearly for the first time. He looked tired, older somehow. She could smell the cigar smoke clinging to his clothes. He said, ‘I didn’t get word until I was back in Conroe. This is the earliest I could make it.’ He sighed. ‘At the very least, we might learn more about what it is that has triggered the virus.’

Margaret glanced at him. It was such a cold and unfeeling thing to say. And yet, what else did she expect? Steve meant nothing to Mendez. His concern was to try to find out what had made the virus active, in order that they could prevent it happening to thousands of others. Live or die, Steve gave him a case study.

‘The trouble is,’ Mendez said, ‘although we know exactly what he has eaten and drunk during his time in isolation, there were nearly forty-eight hours prior to that in which he could have consumed any number of things.’

‘Didn’t you ask him?’

‘Of course. The night he was admitted.’ He stroked his goatee thoughtfully. ‘He was very helpful. Went through everything he could remember.’ He exhaled deeply. ‘Unfortunately, the memory is a very unreliable thing. Often faulty. And as you know, my dear, science is only too exact. However, the more data we have to work with the more we can narrow our search.’ He laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘From a speck of dust in the Milky Way, perhaps to something the size of a pebble.’ He smiled grimly. ‘You look weary, my dear.’

‘I could sleep for a week — if my nightmares would only give me peace.’

‘Ah, yes, the waking kind. They’re the worst. You can’t just open your eyes and leave them behind.’

‘Can’t close your eyes and lose them either.’

A uniformed nurse knocked and opened the door. ‘That’s Major Cardiff’s wife and daughter at front reception,’ she said.

Margaret stood up immediately. ‘I’ll be right there.’ She looked sadly at Mendez. ‘He wanted to see his little girl, in case it would be for the last time.’

Margaret had been unaware of creating expectations in her mind, but Martha still took her by surprise. She was not what she had been expecting at all. A strikingly good-looking woman, tall and elegant, she had a thick mane of shiny, black hair. Her face was madeup for her night out, elaborate eye colour and a slash of red lipstick, although Margaret could see that she was pale now beneath the powder. She still wore her long red evening dress beneath a man’s overcoat that had been placed over her shoulders for warmth.

Danni, wrapped and swaddled in quilted anorak and scarf, stood clinging sleepily to her mother’s legs, tired and bewildered. The banker stood behind them, at a discreet distance, in dinner jacket and silk scarf. He was shorter than Steve, heavier, and losing his hair. And there was no magic in his eyes. Margaret fleetingly wondered what it was about him that had made Martha choose him over Steve. Could it really have been as simple and as mercenary as his bank balance? Perhaps it was the smell of money he brought home on his clothes, instead of the smell of death.

‘How is he?’ Martha asked.

‘Not good,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m not sure that you’ll be able to see him now, even through the glass.’

Martha frowned. ‘What do you mean, through the glass?’

‘He’s in isolation. Only properly protected medical staff are allowed any contact with him.’

Martha shook her head, as if this was something preposterous. ‘Well, what on earth’s wrong with him?’

‘He cut himself during autopsy and contracted a viral infection.’

Danni’s sleepy little voice interrupted the interrogation. ‘Mommy, where’s Daddy?’

‘In a minute, honey.’ There was irritation in Martha’s voice. She said to Margaret, ‘But you’re treating him, right? I mean, if it’s just a virus…’

‘AIDS is caused by a virus, Mrs. Muller.’

‘Yeah, and so’s the common cold. I’m not an idiot, Dr. Campbell. What kind of virus are we talking about here?’

An alarm sounded in the corridor, a repetitive monotone wail that sent shivers of chilling apprehension coursing through Margaret’s veins. She turned toward the uniformed nurse who had been standing by. ‘That’s the emergency alarm in two hundred,’ the nurse said in a hushed voice.

‘Oh, God,’ Margaret whispered. ‘Let us through. Fast.’

Martha snatched Danni into her arms. ‘I’ll wait here,’ the banker called after them, but no one was listening to him.

They followed the nurse through the maze of corridors, stopping only to let electronic doors swing open as the nurse waved her ID at the readers on the wall. The reception area was in a state of pandemonium. The alarm was louder here, almost deafening.

The doctor Margaret had spoken to earlier and another two nurses ran past them carrying blue suits into the changing room, making hurried preparations to enter the isolation ward.

Margaret ran to the window and peered through the glass. There were three space-suited nurses around Steve, who was thrashing around on the bed like a man possessed, crashing into the protective rails on either side, wires and drip-feed ripped free and trailing on the floor. His eyes seemed to have sunk into the back recesses of his head, his lips cracked and bleeding. Blood-filled vomit coursed from his mouth. And when it stopped he began screaming and yelling before yet more vomit choked off his screams. And all the time the siren bore into their brains like some maniac with a drill.

And then suddenly, and without warning, Steve stopped fighting it, falling back limp on the bed, three or four shuddering convulsions racking his body, before he lay quite still, head turned toward the door, eyes wide and staring. Margaret knew his heart had simply stopped. His lungs had filled with fluid and blood, starving his brain of oxygen. The billions of replicated viral particles in his blood had finally infested and destroyed his essential organs. His nightmare was over. Theirs had just begun.

A scream exploded in Margaret’s right ear, and she turned to see the terror on little Danni’s face. Hoisted in her mother’s arms she had seen it all through the glass. An unspeakable horror, and Margaret knew that it would live with her all her days. The tiny face which had smiled out from the pewter frame, from her father’s computer screen, from the snapshots pinned to his filing cabinet, was distorted out of all recognition as she drew another deep, quivering breath and screamed again for her lost daddy.

VI

The lights of the Capitol reflected deeply in the dark, silently shifting mass of the Tidal Basin. Margaret stood on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, beneath its towering marble, and looked directly north, beyond the Ellipse, and the South Lawn of the White House to the floodlit Truman Balcony with its distinctive arc of columns. She was not quite sure why she had come here. On a trip to Washington as a schoolgirl, she had been overawed by the scale and magnificence of the Jefferson Memorial. Even more than the commanding figure of Lincoln, gazing from his vast seat across the Reflecting Pool to the needle of the Washington Monument, Jefferson had seemed strong and eternal. Perhaps, she thought, she had returned all these years later in an attempt to rediscover her faith. Not in God, but in Man.

Officially, the memorial was closed. But she had simply abandoned her car in the park and walked across the lawns in the dark, climbing the fence and dropping into the well of the monument, circling it through the trees until she found herself standing on the front steps gazing across the water toward the home of the most powerful man on earth. Away to the right, light reflected off the white stone of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where they printed the paper money that made the world go round. And then there was the Agricultural Department on Fourteenth Street and other buildings that housed some of the primary Cabinet departments. Beyond them, although she could not see it from here, lay Capitol Hill. She was surrounded by all the great seats of government, of power and influence. All as defenceless as man himself against an organism so small it could not be seen with the naked eye. All their task forces and budgets and people, powerless to prevent a simple virus from destroying the life of one man and leaving a little girl fatherless. Bleakly, Margaret wondered how many more lives would be lost before this thing was over. How many more children would be left fatherless, motherless. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions. For the first time since the USAMRIID briefing she knew just what devastation they really faced. She had seen it first hand. And even greater than her grief was her fear.

She turned and walked slowly up the steps, through the pillars, into the vast circular hall at its heart. In the centre of it stood the massive bronze figure of Thomas Jefferson, a great shadow in the dark, reflected light from beyond casting his shadow in several directions at once across the polished marble floor. Pale light from streetlamps in the park slanted in between the pillars, lighting his words carved in the wall.
We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
. Margaret could almost hear them spoken. She wondered what had happened to poor Steve’s inalienable rights. Life, liberty, happiness — all stolen away by a virus engineered by madmen. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the fight against fear. Somehow these people had to be stopped.

Chapter Ten

I

There was a light on in the downstairs sitting room when she climbed the steps and walked the short path to the front door. A bell sounded somewhere deep inside the house when she pressed the bell-push. After a moment, the light snapped on in the hall, and she saw Li in jeans and tee-shirt shamble barefoot to the door. He had a bottle of beer in one hand. He frowned when he saw through the glass that it was Margaret. Something in the set of his face made her doubt her welcome. She could have stayed over in any number of hotels, and no doubt FEMA would have picked up the tab. But right now she needed human company and comfort. He opened the door and they stood staring at each other for a moment, and she knew immediately from his eyes that the beer in his hand was not his first.

She said simply, ‘Steve’s dead.’

Straight away his expression softened, and without a word he took her in his arms, almost squeezing the breath from her, and they stood in the open doorway for what must have been minutes. She clung to him and let the tears finally fall, silently, staining the front of his tee-shirt before she stepped back, wiping her face dry. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

He stood aside to let her into the hall and closed the door behind her, and then she followed him through to the kitchen where he prepared a vodka tonic in a tall glass filled with ice. She sat at the table, picking at a shred of skin which had peeled away from a cuticle. He drained his beer, opened another bottle and handed her the vodka. Still they had not spoken. Finally, when she had taken her first drink, he said, ‘Was it bad?’

She nodded. ‘Worse than you can imagine.’

He sat down opposite her. ‘Then that is what waits for Xiao Ling.’

‘Not if she sticks to the diet,’ Margaret said, and for a moment was overwhelmed by the enormity of her ignorance. How could she know that for certain? How could she guarantee it for life? She looked around suddenly. ‘Where is she?’