Peter May - Snakehead

But he recognised the look in her eyes. ‘Good God, my dear, I don’t want your pity. I’d rather have your company. A little of that acerbic wordplay we used to indulge in when you so disapproved of Michael being a disciple.’

‘I didn’t disapprove of you ,’ Margaret countered quickly. ‘I just thought Michael was too easily led. He needed to develop a mind of his own.’

‘Are you telling me it was his idea and not yours to go to the Roosevelt?’

‘It was a joint decision.’

‘Ah. And that was Michael developing a mind of his own, was it?’

Margaret took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, Felipe. That was all way in the past. And I’d rather it stayed there.’

Mendez appeared to relax, and his smile became beatific once again. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to drag up old, painful memories. Believe me, they are just as painful for me.’ He took both of her hands, now, in his. ‘But I would like to hear, someday, when you feel up to it, what happened to Michael. I understand you have a place up at Huntsville.’

She felt uncomfortable, her hands trapped in his. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘And I have a place just thirty miles down the road at Conroe. An old ranch house on the lake. I can get pretty lonely rattling about in that old place all on my own sometimes.’ He squeezed her hands. ‘I’d appreciate a visit. I really would.’

She said, ‘I’ll stop by sometime.’ But knew that she wouldn’t.

Li shivered in the cold wind that blew, almost uninterrupted, across the wide-open spaces of the two-hundred-acre Fort Detrick. In the moonlight, you could see the rows of new, young trees that lined the sprawling parking lots and hear the wind in their leaves. Lights still twinkled in low, huddled, buildings, and white water towers on stilts stalked the perimeter. The first cigarette had felt rough in his throat, and not as pleasurable as he had anticipated. The second, with which Hrycyk had parted very grudgingly, was altogether more satisfying.

The two men haunted the front of the building, walking in slow silence together along the tree-lined main drag of Porter Street and back again. They had decided on a second cigarette after there appeared to be no activity inside. Eventually Hrycyk said, ‘So you people still wear those blue Mao suit things over there?’

‘Not for a long time,’ Li said.

Hrycyk looked at him as if he suspected him of lying. ‘I’ve seen pictures on TV.’

‘Probably stock footage from the days of the Cultural Revolution. And some of the old folk still wear them. They were cheap and hard-wearing.’

‘But you still go around on bikes, right?’

‘Most people own a bicycle,’ Li conceded. ‘But a lot of people now own a car as well. In fact, there are so many cars in Beijing that the traffic just grinds to a halt at rush hour. It’s one of the most polluted cities in the world.’

‘No kidding!’ Apparently Hrycyk approved. As if pollution somehow meant civilisation.

Li said, ‘The average young Beijinger today works for a private company, might even be self-employed. He smokes the same brand of cigarettes as you, carries the same make of cellphone and drives the same kind of car.’

Hrycyk looked sceptical. ‘A Santana? Gimme a break.’

‘Actually, we build them in China,’ Li said. ‘Millions of them, in a factory near Shanghai.’ He smiled, ‘Who knows, Agent Hrycyk, you might even be driving a Chinese-built car, contributing in your own small way to the growth of the Chinese economy.’

‘My worst fucking nightmare,’ Hrycyk said, and flicked his cigarette butt into the night. ‘Next time I’ll make sure I buy something totally American, like…’ He thought about it for a moment. ‘Like a Chrysler Jeep.’

‘Oh, we build those in China, too,’ Li said. ‘In a factory on the outskirts of Beijing. We call them Beijing Jeeps.’

Hrycyk scowled at him, for once at a loss for words. He thrust his hands in his pockets, and they walked in silence back toward the main entrance. Finally he muttered, ‘Can’t believe we’re here in the middle of the night talking about a fucking flu epidemic. I mean, the flu! Jesus! It can’t be that serious, can it?’

The lights of a car raked the line of trees and swung past them on the road. It pulled up outside the USAMRIID building, and a small man hunched in a big coat hurried inside.

Li said, ‘Looks like the man who’s about to tell us just got here.’

Anatoly Markin was a short man. No more than five-five. Margaret put him at about fifty. His skin was pasty white, flesh hanging loosely on a round face, dirty fair hair oiled and scraped back over a flaking scalp. Around his eyes and nose and mouth, his skin was crusting and red, and it had shed itself down the front of his crumpled suit. Margaret noticed, too, what looked like psoriasis around the knuckles on his fingers. His eyes, beneath strangely blond eyebrows, were an odd, pale blue and had a disconcerting quality when turned in your direction. He looked like a reptile that had been out of water for too long.

Markin sat at the head of the table and blinked at all the faces assembled around it. Dr. Ward was sitting further along from Margaret. But he had returned without Steve. She felt sick, fearing the worst, but had not had the chance to ask. Incongruously, Li and Hrycyk were sitting together near the far end.

Colonel Zeiss made the introductions and sat back, effectively handing the meeting over to Markin, who sat in silence for a long time, just looking at them, breathing in short, shallow bursts that crackled in his chest. At length, in a cartoon Russian accent, he said, ‘My hair, ladies and gentlemen, used to be jet black.’ He ran a scaly finger along one of his thick, blond eyebrows. ‘My eyebrows, too.’ He had their full attention now, and his breath wheezed and gurgled in the silence of the conference room. ‘I have not gone prematurely grey. My hair never regained its colour after it was bleached blond by the hydrogen peroxide disinfectant we sprayed into the air in zone one of Building 107 at Omutninsk. That is where we first developed tularemia for the purposes of biological warfare. We put it into little bomblets, and managed to kill a lot of monkeys with it on Rebirth Island. That was in the early eighties. Ten years after we signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.’ He smiled. ‘We lied a lot.’

He placed his hands on the table in front of him, as if to draw their attention to the dry, cracked skin and red, flaking knuckles. ‘Over the years,’ he said, ‘I have been vaccinated against almost everything you can imagine, from anthrax to plague. Many, many times over.’ He paused for effect. ‘You see the result before you. A man whose immune system has been shot to hell.’ A bitter laugh turned into a cough, and phlegm rattled in his throat. ‘I have more allergies than you people can count. I have lost my sense of smell, my sense of taste. My skin falls off me in drifts. If I did not spend an hour rubbing moisturisers and oils into my hands and face and scalp each morning, I would be red raw.’

His eyes grew suddenly very intense and he leaned forward on his elbows. ‘And you people thought that smallpox was dead! That there were only two remaining repositories in the world — one here in America, and the other at the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow.’ A momentary silence, then, ‘Hah!’ he shouted and slapped his palms on the table and sat back. ‘We developed a weapons-grade variety of it at a secret laboratory at Zagorsk and were producing a hundred tons a year of the stuff at Koltsovo.’ He shrugged, as if in apology. ‘Okay, so mortality rate is low — only 50 percent. But morbidity is excellent. Up to 90 percent of unvaccinated people exposed to the virus will contract it.’ He seemed to be enjoying himself now.