James Rollins - Amazonia

"They will be. We raised them, didn't we?" He smiled at her, the pain fading in his eyes.

"We sure did:" She slipped her arms around her husband and hugged him.

After a moment, Marshall kissed her on the forehead. "I'll take Jessie to day care:"

She didn't object. After giving her grandchild a long hug by the front door, she allowed herself to be guided to her BMW. The forty-minute drive to the Instar Institute was a blur. When she arrived, she was glad to grab her briefcase and head through the cipher-locked doors into the main building. After such a disturbing night, it was good to be busy again, to have something to distract her from her worries.

She crossed to her offices, greeting familiar faces in the hall. The complete immunology report was due today, and she was anxious to test Kelly's theory about an alteration to Gerald Clark's immune status. Preliminary results, coming piecemeal, were not terribly helpful. With the degree of cancerous processes ravaging the body, assessment was difficult.

Reaching her office, Lauren found a stranger standing by her door.

"Good morning, Dr. O'Brien," the man said, holding out a hand. He was no older than twenty-five, slender, with a shaved head, and dressed in blue scrubs.

Lauren, as head of the MEDEA project, knew everyone involved on the research, but not this man. "Yes?"

"I'm Hank Alvisio:"

The name rang a bell. Lauren shook his hand while racking her brain.

"Epidemiology," he said, clearly reading her momentary confusion.

Lauren nodded. "Of course, I'm sorry, Dr. Alvisio:" The young man was an epidemiologist out of Stanford. She had never met him in person. His field of expertise was the study of disease transmission. "How can I help you?"

He lifted a manila folder. "Something I'd like you to see:'

She checked her watch. "I have a meeting with Immunology in about ten minutes:"

"All the more reason you should see this:"

She unlocked her office door with a magnetic ID card and ushered him inside. Switching on the lights, she crossed to her desk and offered Dr. Alvisio a seat on the other side. "What have you got?"

"Something I've been working on:" He fiddled through his folder. "I've turned up some disturbing data that I wanted to run past you:"

"What data?"

He glanced up. "I've been reviewing Brazilian medical records, looking for any other cases similar to Gerald Clark's:"

"Other people with strange regenerations?"

He grinned shyly. "Of course not. But I was trying to put together an epidemiological assessment of cancers among those living in the Brazilian rain forests, with particular concentration in the area where Gerald Clark died. I thought maybe, by tracking cancer rates, we could indirectly track where the man had travelled:"

Lauren sat up. This was an intriguing angle, even ingenious. No won-der Dr. Alvisio had been hired. If he could discover a cluster of similar cancers, then it might narrow the search parameters, which in turn could shorten the time Kelly and Frank would need to trek the jungle on foot. "And what did you find?"

"Not what I expected," he said with a worried look in his eyes. "I contacted every city hospital, medical facility, and jungle field clinic in the area. They've been sending me data covering the past decade. It's taken me this long to crunch the information through my computer models:"

"And did you discover any trends in cancer rates in the area?" Lauren asked hopefully.

He shook his head. "Nothing like the cancers seen in Gerald Clark. He seems to be a very unique case:"

Lauren hid her disappointment but could not keep a touch of irritation from entering her voice. "Then what did you discover?"

He pulled out a sheet of paper and passed it to Lauren. She slipped on her reading glasses.

It was a map of northwestern Brazil. Rivers snaked across the region, all draining toward one destination-the Amazon River. Cities and towns dotted the course, most sticking close to channels and waterways. The black-and-white map was dotted with small red X's.

The young doctor tapped a few of the marks with the tip of a pen.

"Here are all the medical facilities that supplied data. While working with them, I was contacted by a staff doctor at a hospital in the city of Barcellos:" His pen pointed to a township along the Amazon, about two hundred miles upriver from Manaus. "They were having a problem with a viral out-break among the city's children and elderly. Something that sounded like some form of hemorrhagic fever. Spiking temperatures, jaundice, vomiting, oral ulcerations. They had already lost over a dozen children to the disease. The doctor in Barcellos said he had never seen anything like it and asked for my assistance. I agreed to help:"

Lauren frowned, slightly irked. The epidemiologist had been hired and flown here to work specifically and solely on this project. But she kept silent and let him continue.

"Since I already had a network of contacts established in the region, I utilized them, sending out an emergency request for any other reports of this outbreak:" Dr. Alvisio pulled out a second sheet of paper. It appeared to be the same map: rivers and red X's. But on this map, several of the X's were circled in blue, with dates written next to them. "These are the sites that reported similar cases:"

Lauren's eyes widened. There were so many. At least a dozen medical facilities were seeing cases.

"Do you see the trend here?" Dr. Alvisio said.

Lauren stared, then slowly shook her head.

The epidemiologist pointed to one X with a blue circle. "I've dated each reported case. This is the earliest:" He glanced up from the paper and tapped the spot. "This is the mission of Wauwai:"

"Where Gerald Clark was found?"

The doctor nodded.

She now recalled reading the field report from the expedition's first day. The Wauwai mission had been razed by superstitious Indians. They'd been frightened after several village children had become inexplicably sick.

"I checked with local authorities," Dr. Alvisio continued. He began to tap down the line of blue-circled X's. "The small steamboat that trans-ported Clark's body stopped at each of these ports:" The epidemiologist continued to tap the riverside towns. "Every site where the body passed, the disease appeared:"

"My God;" Lauren mumbled. "You're thinking the body was carrying some pathogen:"

"At first. I thought it was one of several possibilities. The disease could have spread out from Wauwai through a variety of carriers. Almost all transportation through the region is by river, so any contagious disease would've followed a similar pattern. The pattern alone wasn't conclusive evidence that the body was the source of the contagion:"

Lauren sighed, relieved. "It couldn't be the body. Before being shipped from Brazil, my daughter oversaw the disposition of the remains. It was tested for a wide variety of pathogens: cholera, yellow fever, dengue, malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis. We were thorough. We checked for every known pathogen. The body was clean:"

"But I'm afraid it wasn't," Dr. Alvisio said softly.

"Why do you say that?"

"This was faxed this morning:" He slid a final paper out of his folder. It was a CDC report out of Miami. "Clark's body was inspected in customs at Miami International. Now three cases of the disease have been reported in local children. All of them from families o€ airport employees:"

Lauren sank into her chair as the horror of the man's words struck her. "Then whatever the disease is, it's here. We brought it here. Is that what you're saying?" She glanced over to Dr. Alvisio.

He nodded.

"How contagious is it? How virulent?"

The man's voice became suddenly mumbled. "It's hard to say with any certainty."

Lauren knew the man, even at such a young age, was a leader in his field or he wouldn't be here. "What is your cursory assessment? You have one, don't you?"