Робин Кук - Pandemic

“Okay, Dr. Stapleton,” David said. “My car is right here behind me. It’s a black Lexus. I’d like you to get out of the Range Rover and get right in my car. The least amount of time you are exposed, the better it will be. I don’t think anyone is watching us, but one never knows. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Jack said. He then inched his way to the lip of the opened trunk, got to his feet, and then hurried to climb into the black coupe only a few feet from the Range Rover. In the short time he was outside, he could tell that they were parked off in the far end of the Dover Valley Hospital parking area. The brightly illuminated hospital looked like a jewel in the darkness.

A second later, David jumped into the driver’s seat, pulled his door shut, and started the car. Outside, Jack noticed Kang-Dae had already begun driving away. Jack’s escape had been pulled off with commendable efficiency.

“I assume you want to go back to the city,” David said, putting his car in gear and heading after Kang-Dae.

“No, I’d rather go back to the slaughterhouse,” Jack said, already recovered enough to indulge in a bit of sarcasm. “I was just getting comfortable.”

David chuckled. “You are a trip, Dr. Stapleton. I have to say that much about you. Will we be going to your home or the OCME?”

“Home,” Jack said, wondering how he was going to be received.

THURSDAY, 9:15 P.M.

Jack turned to catch one more glimpse of GeneRx and then the Dover Valley Hospital before David pulled out onto the county road and gunned the Lexus. Ahead they could see Kang-Dae and the Range Rover. Both vehicles were heading north.

“Okay,” Jack said, facing toward his liberator and beginning to calm down. “This has been one strange day. I suppose I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but I can’t help it. I need to start by asking exactly who you are, David.”

“That is entirely reasonable,” David said. “My name is actually Zhao Daquan.”

“Zhao, like Wei Zhao?” Jack asked.

“Exactly,” David said. “Wei Zhao is my father.”

“Interesting,” Jack said. The catchword had never felt more appropriate. This whole affair, starting with the call from Bart Arnold about the first subway death, had been full of continual surprises. The idea that Jack had been rescued from a potentially calamitous situation by the son of his major antagonist seemed a kind of poetic justice.

“I suppose you want to know what is going on here,” David said.

“Oh, no!” Jack responded. “I love being totally in the dark. It makes life so much more unpredictable.”

David laughed again, this time with true hilarity. “I have to say, I like your humor, Dr. Stapleton. The background check my father had done on you characterized you as someone who liked to pun and use sarcasm. It certainly was on the mark.”

“So you had access to my infamous dossier,” Jack said. “That gives you an unfair advantage.”

“I am happy to tell you whatever you would like to know about me,” David said.

Ahead, Jack noticed that they were rapidly approaching the entrance to Interstate 80 East that would take them back to New York City, if that was their destination. Jack could see that the Range Rover had continued straight, going under the highway, presumably en route to Wei’s home. For a few seconds Jack held his breath, but then at the appropriate moment David steered onto the entrance ramp. Jack secretly breathed a sigh of relief.

“Well?” David questioned. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Were you born here in the USA?”

“No, I was born in Shanghai,” David said.

“You speak flawless American English,” Jack said.

“Thank you for the compliment,” David said. “I came here nine years ago to go to MIT to study biotechnology and microbiology. Now I am finishing my Ph.D. in genetics and bioinformatics at Columbia University’s Systems Biology Center.”

“So your plan is to follow in your father’s footsteps?” Jack asked.

“In general, yes,” David said. “In specific, no. My goal is to run my father’s biotech and pharmaceutical companies in China, not here in the USA.”

“From my conversation with your father, I get the feeling he’s interested in pulling out of China and concentrating his efforts here.”

“Unfortunately, that is the case,” David said. “I am afraid my own father and his closest team members have become somewhat counterrevolutionaries. My father has always been a unique man, starting with his worshipping Arnold Schwarzenegger and becoming a bodybuilder and martial-arts devotee while studying biotechnology.”

“I can attest to the martial-arts aspect,” Jack said. “We were having a reasonably pleasant conversation when he unleashed one of those wild martial-arts kicks at my head. Of course, I started it by trying to shove him out of the way.”

“You got into a physical fight with my father?” David questioned with obvious incredulity. “I can’t believe you, Dr. Stapleton. And what surprises me, you came out of it without a scratch.”

“I was saved by your father’s security team,” Jack said. “Who knows what would have happened if they hadn’t shown up. And you can call me Jack. Rescuing me from the slaughterhouse entitles you to be on a first-name basis at an absolute minimum.”

“Jack it is,” David said. “I am currently heavier than my father and have also studied martial arts and done bodybuilding under my father’s direction, but I would never challenge him to a fight, even though he is nearly seventy. You are very brave, Jack.”

“Sometimes foolish but not brave,” Jack said. “But let’s get back to your story. You were calling your father and his peers counterrevolutionaries.”

“That’s correct,” David said. “Especially of late. My generation feels much differently about China today than our parents did. China is ascendant. China is on its way to take its rightful place on the world stage.”

“Are you suggesting there’s a kind of new cultural revolution?” Jack questioned.

“In a fashion,” David said. “China needed Mao to force a break from the stranglehold of the past to create a new mind-set for industrialization and pull China into the twentieth century. Now China needs a new incentive to break from the inferiority complex the country has suffered since the Colonial Period, as well as from the capitalist selfishness like my father exhibits. My father is a philanthropist, but he thinks of his billions of renminbi as completely his.”

“There is an irony here,” Jack said. “Your father admitted to me that he got his start as a Red Guard in the Mao Cultural Revolution. Now you are in a sense doing the same thing.”

“I suppose that is true,” David said. “But I want to be part of my Chinese heritage. I am proud of it, and I want to be part of the Chinese ascendency.”

“You aren’t afraid you have become too Americanized, having been living here for nine years?” Jack asked. “Will you find it hard to adapt to living back in China?”

“I don’t think I will have any trouble at all,” David said. “We Chinese university-age generation are all on the same page, whether we are in school in Wuhan, or Canberra, or Paris, or Boston. We are of the same mind-set to truly make China great again, pardon the hackneyed phrase. Whereas here in the USA there is depressing divisiveness and a kind of anti-immigrant neotribalism that is getting progressively worse, in China we millennials are coming together.”

“I can’t argue with you there,” Jack said. “Let me ask you something more specific. How did you know that I was being held in the slaughterhouse animal pen?”