Michael Palmer - Fatal

"Of course, but what does that accomplish?"

"It's a start."

"He was so damn sure of himself, Rudy. He just sat there smirking, knowing there wasn't a single thing I could do except listen. He said that if I went to the police, they would be able to do nothing, and he would find out."

Ellen felt herself beginning to unravel. She bit on her lip and brushed some tears away with the back of her hand.

"He's probably right on both accounts," Rudy said. "I'm really sick that this happened to you." He reached over and awkwardly patted her hand. "Was there anything else you remember?"

"After he finished threatening Lucy, he made a call from his cell phone and a car pulled up. He walked out of the house as calmly as any door-to-door salesman and drove off, just like that. I tried to get the license number of the car, but it was gone too quickly."

"Did he say anything at all that gave a hint as to who had hired him?"

Ellen shook her head. "I don't think so. He said he was employed by someone who wished to get Omnivax into circulation as soon as possible. I asked if he worked for President Marquand or the drug companies, but he brushed that off."

"I wonder," Rudy said. "My money's on someone on the manufacturing end of all this. From what I know about Lynette Marquand, I doubt she's capable of hiring someone like this, but I can't speak for her staff — or her husband's, for that matter."

"Wait, he said 'employers.' Plural. I remember that distinctly."

"Well, here's some paper. I'd like you to write down every single thing you can remember about the man. His appearance, clothes, mannerisms, phrases he said, everything."

"What good'll that do?"

"I don't really know yet, but as my granny used to say, it couldn't hurt. Maybe something you forgot will pop into your mind."

"Maybe. I want to find him, Rudy. I want to find him and… and hurt him. I close my eyes at night and there's his hideous face leering at me. I wake up in the middle of dreams, soaked in sweat. Early this morning I actually got sick. I wanted so much to go to the police, but after what he said, I just couldn't."

"Easy does it, El. I'll help you. If he's out there, we'll find him. But first, get the facts down on paper. You know me. I need data. Let me get you some more tea while you do that."

"Then you'll tell me what's been going on with you?" "Then I'll tell you," Rudy said.

Rudy's study was the small second floor of the cabin, once an attic. The skylights, beamed cathedral ceiling, knotty pine paneling, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves helped make the room as comfortable as the man. Occupying much of the space was a large oak desk bearing a computer and other sophisticated electronics. A reading area with two worn leather easy chairs and a shared ottoman took up the rest. By the lone window, a telescope looked out across the yard toward the pond.

After she had finished writing down what she remembered of the well-dressed, well-spoken killer, Ellen kicked her shoes off and settled into one of the easy chairs. Rudy took the other. As he stretched his legs onto the ottoman, his bare foot brushed against hers. He quickly pulled it away and muttered an apology, his expression a strange mix of embarrassment and… and what? Ellen wondered. Then she noticed the heightened color in his cheeks.

"So?" she asked, as he replaced his foot on the ottoman a respectable distance from hers.

"Well, you know the problem I've been encountering trying to check up on this Omnivax. It isn't that there are any incriminating research data, there aren't. It's that, for a project this massive, there ain't that much data at all. And as a statistician, I like playing around with piles and piles of data almost as much as I like fishin'. The megavaccine has been field-tested, but not in any controlled way, and the components have all been tested individually and in some combinations, though not in any controlled way, either. Every piece of this lummox of a vaccine seems to work just fine, but only as far as it's been evaluated. I have no doubt that Omnivax protects people against every infection they say it does."

"I hear a but coming on."

"But, if this were a new arthritis medicine or birth-control pill, there is no way it would have been approved for general use on numbers this scant."

"To the best of my knowledge there has never been a tightly controlled double blind study of a vaccine."

"To the best of my knowledge, that is correct. Physicians and the pharmaceutical industry and some of my dear old friends at the CDC and FDA would rather take the chance there are no problems with a vaccine than risk depriving the public of protection against even one a them goldurn microbial buggers."

"Go on."

"Well, like I think I told you, I decided to focus what little time and resources we had on examining the weakest links in the Omnivax chain. So I weeded through the blocks of data available on each of the less common disorders — what I call the fringe players. And like I mentioned, this vaccine against Lassa fever heads that list. It's relatively new. So are the outbreaks of infection it was created to protect us against. It was approved for general use by the FDA about ten years ago. From a statistical point of view — my statistical point of view, at least — it was rushed into use too soon."

"They were afraid a major epidemic was brewing here in the States."

"I know, only it didn't happen — at least not then it didn't. Well, there are no major problems with the vaccine that I can tell, but it sure hasn't been tracked very thoroughly."

"I already know about that," Ellen said, hoping her tone didn't reflect her deep disappointment. "That's what you have?"

Rudy took her reaction in, though, and for a few seconds he just sat there. Then shook his head and grinned proudly.

"Nope," he said. "As a matter of fact it isn't what I have at all. I made some calls. One of them was to an old pal from the CDC I used to do projects with. His name's Arnold Whitman and he's an epidemiologist and a microbiologist. Arnie's been looking at these outbreaks of Lassa fever for us on the QT. If he gets caught mucking around in someone else's territory it could be his job. Anyhow, what he found may be nothing, but Arnie doesn't think so, and Arnie is very high on my list of very smart people who aren't wrong about science a hell of a lot."

"You should be on that list," Ellen said.

"Oh, I am. Seriously, listen to this. The incubation period for Lassa fever from exposure to symptoms is seven to fourteen days, twenty-one days tops. Eighteen of the cases in the U.S. appear to have brought the infection in with them from Africa. The rest of the cases are believed to have caught the virus from those eighteen. Given the known incubation period, it seems as if every one of the eighteen cases became infected on or about the very day they left Africa for the U.S."

"Weird."

"More than weird, my friend. This is the stuff my statistics were born to make sense of. And guess what?"

"They can't?"

"Precisely! They can't make sense of those eighteen cases all becoming infected as they are about to leave for the U.S., because something's wrong."

"But what?"

"That is the conundrum. I can't say, at least not yet. But wait, there's more. In the countries where it occurs frequently, Lassa fever has a clear-cut seasonal predominance for the months of January and February. In fact, here's a little graph I put together with cases that occurred three years ago, which I got from a Sierra Leone health ministry report via my pal Arnie."

"Impressive," Ellen said.

"Not overwhelming, but the January/February pattern the textbooks write about is certainly there. Now look at our eighteen cases."

Ellen held the second graph next to the first. There was only one case in January, none in February. Most of the rest were in the summer.