Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Saul might have a very big success here. A double success, perhaps. What he needed to feel important and useful.

She turned and through the open doorway saw Tengiz, the stooped old lab caretaker, talking to a short, plump young man in gray slacks and a sweatshirt. They stood in the corridor between the lab and the library. The young man looked at her and smiled. Tengiz smiled as well, nodded vigorously, and pointed to Kaye. The man sauntered into the lab as if he owned it.

“Are you Kaye Lang?” he asked in American English with a distinct Southern drawl. He was shorter than her by several inches, about her age or a little older, with a thin black beard and curly black hair. His eyes, also black, were small and intelligent.

“Yes,” she said.

“Pleasure to meet you. My name is Christopher Dicken. I’m from the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta — another Georgia, a long way from here.”

Kaye smiled and shook his hand. “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” she said. “What’s the NCID, the CDC—”

“You went out to a site near Gordi, two days ago,” Dicken interrupted her.

“They chased us away,” Kaye said.

“I know. I spoke with Colonel Beck yesterday.”

“Why would you be interested?”

“Could be for no good reason.” He thinned his lips and lifted his eyebrows, then smiled again, shrugging this off. “Beck says the UN and all Russian peacekeepers have pulled out of the area and returned to Tbilisi, at the vigorous request of the parliament and President Shevardnadze. Odd, don’t you think?”

“Embarrassing for business,” Kaye murmured. Tengiz listened from the hall. She frowned at him, more in puzzlement than in warning. He wandered away.

“Yeah,” Dicken said. “Old troubles. How old, would you say?”

“What — the grave?”

Dicken nodded.

“Five years. Maybe less.”

“The women were pregnant.”

“Yesss…” She dragged her answer out, trying to riddle why this would interest a man from the Centers for Disease Control. “The two I saw.”

“No chance of a misidentification? Full-term infants impacted in the grave?”

“None,” she said. “They were about six or seven months along.”

“Thanks.” Dicken held out his hand again and shook hers politely. He turned to leave. Tengiz was crossing the hall outside the door and hustled aside as Dicken passed through. The EIS investigator glanced back at Kaye and tossed a quick salute.

Tengiz leaned his head to one side and grinned toothlessly. He looked guilty as hell.

Kaye sprinted for the door and caught up with Dicken in the courtyard. He was climbing into a small rental Nissan.

“Excuse me!” she called out.

“Sorry. Gotta go.” Dicken slammed the door and turned on the engine.

“Christ, you sure know how to arouse suspicions!” Kaye said loudly enough for him to hear through the closed window.

Dicken rolled the window down and grimaced amiably. “Suspicions about what?”

“What in hell are you doing here?”

“Rumors,” he said, looking over his shoulder to see if the way was clear. “That’s all I can say.”

He spun the car around in the gravel and drove off, maneuvering between the main building and the second lab. Kaye folded her arms and frowned after him.

Lado called from the main building, poking out of a window. “Kaye! We are done. You are ready?”

“Yes!” Kaye answered, walking toward the window. “Did you see him?”

“Who?” Lado asked, face blank.

“A man from the Centers for Disease Control. He said his name was Dicken.”

“I saw no one. They have an office on Abasheli Street. You could call.”

She shook her head. There wasn’t time, and it was none of her business anyway. “Never mind,” she said.

Lado was unusually somber as he drove her to the airport.

“Is it good news, or bad?” she asked.

“I am not allowed to say,” he replied. “We should, as you say, keep our options open? We are like babes in the woods.”

Kaye nodded and stared straight ahead as they entered the parking area. Lado helped her take her bags to the new international terminal, past lines of taxis with sharp-eyed drivers waiting impatiently. The check-in desk at British Mediterranean Airlines had a short line. Already Kaye felt she was in the middle zone between worlds, closer to New York than to Lado’s Georgia or the Gergeti church or Mount Kazbeg.

As she reached the front of the line and pulled out her passport and tickets, Lado stood with arms folded, squinting at the watery sunlight through the terminal windows.

The clerk, a young blond woman with ghostly pale skin, slowly worked through the tickets and papers. She finally looked up to say, “No off going. No taking.”

“Beg pardon?”

The woman lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if this would give her strength or cleverness and tried again. “No Baku. No Heathrow. No JFK. No Vienna.”

“What, they’re gone?” Kaye asked in exasperation. She looked helplessly at Lado, who stepped over the vinyl-covered ropes and addressed the woman in stern and reproving tones, then pointed to Kaye and lifted his bushy brows, as if to say, Very Important Person!

The pale young woman’s cheeks acquired some color. With infinite patience, she looked at Kaye and began speaking, in rapid Georgian, something about the weather, hail moving in, unusual storm. Lado translated in spaced single words: hail, unusual, soon.

“When can I get out?” she asked the woman.

Lado listened to the clerk’s explanation with a stern expression, then lifted his shoulders and turned his face toward Kaye. “Next week, next flight. Or flight to Vienna, Tuesday. Day after tomorrow.”

Kaye decided to rebook through Vienna. There were now four people in line behind Kaye, and they were showing signs of both amusement and impatience. By their dress and language, they were probably not going to New York or London.

Lado walked with her up the stairs and sat across from her in the echoing waiting area. She needed to think, to sort out her plans. A few old women sold Western cigarettes and perfume and Japanese watches from small booths around the perimeter. Nearby, two young men slept on opposite benches, snoring in tandem. The walls were covered with posters in Russian, the lovely curling Georgian script, and in German and French. Castles, tea plantations, bottles of wine, the suddenly small and distant mountains whose pure colors survived even the fluorescent lights.

“I know, you need to call your husband, he will miss you,” Lado said. “We can return to the institute — you are welcome, always!”

“No, thank you,” Kaye said, suddenly feeling a little sick. Premonition had nothing to do with it: she could read Lado like a book. What had they done wrong? Had a larger firm made an even sweeter offer?

What would Saul do when he found out? All their planning had been based on his optimism about being able to convert friendship and charity into a solid business relationship…

They were so close.

“There is the Metechi Palace,” Lado said. “Best hotel in Tbilisi…best in Georgia. I take you to the Metechi! You can be a real tourist, like in the guide books! Maybe you have time to take a hot spring bath…relax before you go home.”

Kaye nodded and smiled but it was obvious her heart was not in it. Suddenly, impetuously, Lado leaned forward and clutched her hand in his dry, cracked fingers, roughened by so many washings and immersions. He pounded his hand and hers lightly on her knee. “It is no end! It is a beginning! We must all be strong and resourceful!”

This brought tears to Kaye’s eyes. She looked at the posters again — Elbrus and Kazbeg draped with clouds, the Gergeti church, vineyards and high tilled fields.