Peter May - Snakehead

Margaret had arrived back in Houston a little after one p.m., depression following her like the stormclouds gathering in the western sky. She had not eaten for nearly twenty-four hours but found that everywhere along Holcombe had already finished serving. Even after a year, she could not get used to the Texan habit of lunching before midday. Eventually she had found an all-day eatery in the Crowne Plaza and ordered a grilled chicken salad. It came piled high on the plate and the waitress said, ‘I asked the chef why they build them salads so big, and he says to me, “People eatin’ this late, they gotta be hungry”.’ It was 1:30 p.m., and Margaret marvelled at Texan sophistication.

She had eaten a little less than half the salad before going back to her office to face the mountain of paperwork piling up on her desk. Mail and telephone messages had accumulated in drifts, like snow, and she wished she could just plough them off to one side and let them melt away in the rain. As with her salad, she had no appetite for it, sitting gazing from the window unable to stop memories of Steve crowding her thoughts. And flickering images of Xinxin’s tears as she had left that morning, mother and daughter still unable to come to terms with their unhappy reunion. That, in turn, had forced her back to the paperwork only to find a letter from the lawyer representing her landlord in Huntsville. It was official notification of her eviction — as if it hadn’t already happened. She had thrown it on the pile, and opened an envelope with the official FEMA insignia on the bottom left corner. It was a list of all the contact telephone numbers of members of the task force, her own included, which had brought a bitter smile of irony to her face. Her home number was already out of date.

She had folded the list and slipped it into her purse, wondering what progress, if any, the task force had made. One of its number was dead. Li had only narrowly avoided being murdered by the assassins sent to silence his sister, and they were still no nearer, apparently, to identifying the ah kung . They had arrested hundreds of illegal immigrants all over the country and were already running out of holding facilities. There were thousands more out there, and probably thousands more still coming in, despite the clampdown on the border. And she knew that the task that faced Mendez in trying to identify the protein which triggered the virus was almost impossible. It had been only too clearly visible in the fatigue etched on his face the previous night. Margaret felt daunted and frustrated by her inability to make any significant contribution.

Finally, she had slipped into a light, waterproof coat, and taken a fold-up umbrella from the bottom drawer of her desk. As she swept past Lucy in the outer office she had said, ‘I’ll be gone for the rest of the day,’ and made her exit without giving Lucy a chance to respond.

Now, as she emerged from the car park into the rain on M. D. Anderson Boulevard, the thunder which had been threatening all afternoon cracked overhead, making her duck reflexively. The rain battered on the taut plastic of her tiny umbrella like peas on a drumskin. She splashed along the sidewalk under the dripping trees, past nurses and doctors in green and white surgical pyjamas hurrying between hospital buildings. Beyond the Women’s University, at the very heart of the Texas Medical Center, the distinctive red roof of the Baylor College of Medicine was only just visible through the downpour above tall windows like glass columns. The ink ran on notices pinned to a pergola. Cars for sale, accommodation to let. Paper turning to mush in the rain. Margaret scampered across East Cullen Street and turned left toward the right-angled white facades of the Michael Debakey Center, with its tiered rows of windows cut like slashes in the stone.

A lab assistant took Margaret up in the elevator and along endless corridors. She was young and bright, with sparkling eyes and conversation that bubbled out of her like water from a spring. Margaret barely heard her. Shown into a tiny cluttered office that overlooked more parking garages to the rear, Margaret sat miserably on the edge of a hard plastic seat clutching her dripping umbrella. Her sneakers and her jeans from the knees down were soaking. After several minutes the door opened and she looked up as Mendez came in, a stained white lab coat hanging open over his shirt, a rumpled tie trailing loose at the neck. His face lit up. ‘My dear, you’re drenched. Can I get you a coffee? Water?’

‘No, no.’ Margaret stood up, embarrassed. ‘I just called in to see if it would be okay for me to stay at the ranch tonight.’

Mendez’s smile was at its most beatific. ‘My dear, you don’t have to ask.’ He took her hands in his. ‘My home is yours, for as long as you like. You know that.’

She shrugged awkwardly. ‘It’s just…I don’t have a key, Felipe,’ she said.

Mendez laughed. ‘But you don’t need one. Just my entry code. I’ll write it down for you.’ He tore a sheet of paper from a pad, scribbled a four-digit number on it and handed it to her. ‘If you want to hang on for half an hour, I’m almost finished here. I could give you a lift.’

‘I’ve got my car,’ Margaret said. ‘Anyway, I’d like to get back and get showered and changed.’

‘Of course.’ He paused. ‘You can spare a minute, though? I have something to show you.’

She followed him into a laboratory at the end of the hall, and slipped on a lab coat. ‘You know why it was called the Spanish flu?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. It originated here in the United States, didn’t it?’

‘So we believe. But we were still fighting a war then, and news of the pandemic was suppressed in most of the countries involved in World War One. It was first most widely reported in the Spanish press. Hence the Spanish flu.’ He waved her toward a monitor on a bench near the back of the lab, and she watched as he slipped a cassette into the built-in VCR. ‘You’re familiar with viral cytopathic effect?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

The screen came to life in a seething mass of tiny organisms dividing, multiplying and ultimately destroying their host cells. Cell necrosis. She almost recoiled from the monitor. She knew without being told what she was looking at. ‘It’s what killed Steve,’ she said. ‘It’s the Spanish flu.’

‘One stage advanced,’ Mendez said. ‘Another mutation down the line. It used its time in Dr. Cardiff to morph itself. To the virus, the good doctor was no more than a living laboratory, a human rat with which to experiment. I would suspect that, if anything, this new version of itself could be even more virulent.’

Margaret was repulsed. ‘They recovered the virus at autopsy?’

‘From the lungs, I believe.’ Mendez looked at her sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry, Margaret. You…were fond of Dr. Cardiff.’ It was a statement, not a question.

She nodded mutely. In her head she had a clear, brutal and bloody image of Steve on the autopsy table.

‘But you do understand, such steps must be taken in order to fight this thing.’ She nodded again, and he said, ‘Anatoly Markin once told me about a Russian scientist called Ustinov who accidentally injected himself with Marburg while conducting experiments with guinea pigs. It was part of their biowarfare program. The poor man took three weeks to die, quite horribly. And when they recovered the virus from his organs they found that through the live incubator of a human being it had mutated into something altogether more stable and powerful. So they used the new strain as the basis of their further weapons research and called it “variant U”. Markin told me they thought Ustinov would have been amused by it.’ He shrugged, a tiny sad smile stretching his full lips, and nodded toward the monitor. ‘Perhaps we should call this “variant C”.’