to call in for something like this.
“What you’re describing is impossible,” he insisted. “Sickle-cell is not a communicable disease. It’s strictly genetic. But this… this…” He waved his hands at the map. “This map suggests the spread of a communicable disease.”
Rina Panjay said nothing.
“It’s impossible,” Smithwick said again. “Genetic diseases are not communicable.”
“Could it have mutated?”
“So fast? And to this degree of virulence?” He shook his head. “No… there’s just no way that could happen. Not in ten thousand generations of mutation.”
“Then
The air between them crackled with tension as Smithwick fought against the words that were forming on his tongue. The answer was as simple as it was preposterous. As simple as it was grotesque.
Smithwick said, “It’s theoretically possible to
“Evil?” she suggested.
He was a long time answering, then nodded. “If this is something someone has done… then it could only have been created for one purpose. To do harm. To intentionally do harm.”
Dr. Panjay looked at the map and then her eyes moved across the hundreds of color photographs pinned to the wall. Many of the pictures were of people she knew. Over fifty were from this village. Everyone in the village she had tested had come up positive for this new strain of sickle-cell. Every single person.
“We have to inform WHO,” Panjay said. “We have to warn them-”
“No,” Smithwick interrupted. “We have to warn everyone.”
He stared at the pins.
“Everyone,” he repeated softly, but in his heart he was terrified that they were already too late. Far too late.
Chapter Eight
Baltimore, Maryland
Saturday, August 28, 8:25 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 35 minutes
Things are seldom what they seem. After leaving the cemetery I drove eight blocks, doing double backs and sudden turns and all of the other stunts that cops learn from crooks about losing a tail. Nothing. Nobody was tailing me. I was sure of that.
“Ah, shit,” I said aloud, and immediately pulled off the street into a parking lot of a big strip mall. Couple of things to remember about the NSA: they weren’t stupid, not on their worst days… and they weren’t clumsy.
I got out of the car, locked it, and ran like a son of a bitch.
They weren’t tailing me because they didn’t need to. I hadn’t seen one or heard one, but I’d bet my complete collection of Muddy Waters on vinyl that one of Slab-face’s boys had put a tracer on my car. Either they were tracking me in the hopes that I’d lead them somewhere sensitive to the DMS or they were herding me toward an ambush point. I didn’t wait around to find out. I ran.
They were already closing in on me. Two blocks from where I dumped the Explorer I rounded a corner and there was a black car cruising the street, heading in the direction I’d just come from. As it passed I flicked a glance at it and looked right into the surprised face of Agent John Andrews. Slab-face.
Shit.
I only saw him for a second, but it was long enough for his scowl of frustration to blossom into a big smile like a happy bloodhound. He was yelling at the driver as I jagged left and raced down an alley. I heard shouts behind me and Andrews and his buddy were pelting after me with alarming speed.
I poured it on, leaping over garbage, ducking through a rent in a chain-link fence, vaulting a green Dumpster, and spider-climbing up a fire escape. I’m moderately big, but I can run like a cheetah on speed when I’m motivated.
Andrews, for all his size, was even faster than me.
He was less than ten yards behind me as I tore down a garbage-strewn alleyway toward a dead end. If he hadn’t wasted breath yelling at me he might have grabbed me before I could make it to the end of the alley. Mistake. I leaped as high as I could and grabbed the chain-link fence three-quarters of the way up and scrambled up and over like a nervous squirrel. I swung over the top pole and did an ugly somersault, spilling the change and car keys out of my pocket, and landed in a crouch, fell sideways, and used the momentum to get back to my feet. It wasn’t pretty, but I was up and running.
I didn’t look back. I heard Andrews slam into the fence, but his dress shoes weren’t made for climbing and he fell. I heard him land, and his curses followed me all the way down the alley.
Andrews yelled at me to stop, but he still hadn’t pulled his piece. Curiouser and curiouser. I didn’t want to know how he’d vent his frustrations if he ever got me cuffed to a D ring in a quiet interrogation room, so I ran and ran and ran.
The rest of the alley was clear and I poured on the juice, but just as I was about to make a break for daylight a second Crown Vic screeched to a stop in front of me, tires smoking, its bulk entirely blocking the alley. Two agents started opening their doors, but I didn’t stop. I threw myself into the air, hit the hood of the car, and slid on one ass cheek across the hood. As I landed, the agent on the passenger side made a grab for me, but I spun into him, head-butted him, and then threw him onto the hood as the other agent tried to slide across like I’d done. The two agents hit hard and slid off the front of the car into the street.
I hated messing these guys up, but Mr. Church’s words were banging around inside my head.
Call it an incentive program.
A third agent came out of nowhere, jumped over his pals, and pounded after me. Slab-face and the other agent were too far back now, so I let the driver catch up to me two blocks away. I cut diagonally across a basketball court, scattering black teenagers out of my way as I went. They yelled at us the way kids will and then I gave them something to yell about. As I reached the foul line of the far court I angled for the thin metal pole that supported the rusted hoop from which only tattered threads of a net remained. I leaped at the upright, grabbed it with both hands just as the driver caught up, and I flagpoled around it like a vertical version of a spin on a high bar. My sneakers slammed into the driver’s chest and knocked him flying into a row of overflowing trash cans. It wasn’t a dangerous fall for a fit adult, but it was loud and messy. As I ran, I heard the kids behind me cheering. At least someone appreciated me.
I knew that I’d been lucky, and that was okay. I’d go light a candle in church next chance I had. Right now I had to run the luck as far as it would go.
I wished I had the time to cut one of these goons out of the pack, drag him into an abandoned room, and see if I could convince him that confession was good for the soul. But I doubted any of the agents would know more than Church could find out, and besides, the possible reward wasn’t worth the risk.
So I cut left into a low-rise apartment building, ran down hallways and out the back door, vaulted a couple of backyard fences, nearly got my ass bitten off by a startled bull terrier, made my way to another set of alleys, and zigzagged my way through West Baltimore. I was a white guy running through a rough black neighborhood, but I looked crazy and I looked like a cop, and those were two things nobody of any color wants to mess with.
After another two blocks I slowed to a walk and paid a teenager fifty bucks for his Orioles cap. Sweat ran down my body and pooled in my shoes; my shirt clung to me, outlining the shape of the pistol clipped to the back of my belt. I could feel the eyes of everyone on the street on me, but I knew that no one was going to drop a dime on someone running from the cops-even if he looked like a cop himself. I went into a convenience store and bought an
