hundred pounds, easy.”
“We did that already. No record. They’re going to call in the baggage crew and question them one by one.”
Eph turned back to the black cabinet. He ignored the grotesque carvings, bending to examine the sides, locating three hinges along either top edge. The lid was a door, split down the middle the long way, two half doors that opened out. Eph touched the carved lid with his gloved hand, then he reached under the lid, trying to open the heavy doors. “Anybody want to give me a hand?”
One officer stepped forward, wrapping his gloved fingers underneath the lip of the lid opposite Eph. Eph counted to three, and they opened both heavy doors at once.
The doors stood open on sturdy, broad-winged hinges. The odor that wafted out of the box was corpselike, as though the cabinet had been sealed for a hundred years. It looked empty, until one of the officers switched on a flashlight and played the beam inside.
Eph reached in, his fingers sinking into a rich, black loam. The soil was as welcoming and soft as cake mix and filled up the bottom two-thirds of the box.
Nora took a step back from the open cabinet. “It looks like a coffin,” said Nora.
Eph withdrew his fingers, shaking off the excess, and turned to her, waiting for a smile that never came. “A little big for that, isn’t it?”
“Why would someone ship a box of dirt?” she asked.
“They wouldn’t,” Eph said. “There had to be something inside.”
“But how?” said Nora. “This plane is under total quarantine.”
Eph shrugged. “How do we explain anything here? All I know for sure is, we have an unlocked, unstrapped container here without a bill of lading.” He turned to the others. “We need to sample the soil. Dirt retains trace evidence well. Radiation, for example.”
One of the officers said, “You think whatever agent was used to overcome the passengers…?”
“Was shipped over in here? That’s the best theory I’ve heard all day.”
Jim’s voice called from below them, outside the plane. “Eph? Nora?”
Eph called back, “What is it, Jim?”
“I just got a call from the isolation ward at Jamaica Hospital. You’re going to want to get over there right away.”
Jamaica Hospital Medical Center
THE HOSPITAL FACILITY was just ten minutes north of JFK, along the Van Wyck Expressway. Jamaica was one of the four designated Centers for Bioterrorism Preparedness Planning in New York City. It was a full participant in the Syndromic Surveillance System, and Eph had run a Canary workshop there just a few months before. So he knew his way to the airborne infection isolation ward on the fifth floor.
The metal double doors featured a prominent blaze-orange, tripetaled biohazard symbol, indicating a real or potential threat to cellular materials or living organisms. Printed warnings read:
Eph displayed his CDC credentials at the desk, and the administrator recognized him from previous biocontainment drills. She walked him inside. “What is it?” he asked.
“I really don’t mean to be melodramatic,” she said, waving her hospital ID over the reader, opening the doors to the ward, “but you need to see it for yourself.”
The interior walkway was narrow, this being the outer ring of the isolation ward, occupied mainly by the nurses’ station. Eph followed the administrator behind blue curtains into a wide vestibule containing trays of contact supplies—gowns, goggles, gloves, booties, and respirators—and a large, rolling garbage barrel lined with a red biohazard trash bag. The respirator was an N95 half mask, efficiency rated to filter out 95 percent of particles 0.3 microns in size or larger. That meant it offered protection from most airborne viral and bacteriological pathogens, but not against chemical or gas contaminants.
After his full contact suiting at the airport, Eph felt positively exposed in a hospital mask, surgical cap, barrier goggles, gown, and shoe covers. The similarly attired administrator then pressed a plunger button, opening an interior set of doors, and Eph felt the vacuumlike pull upon entering, the result of the negative-pressure system, air flowing into the isolation area so that no particles could blow out.
Inside, a hallway ran left to right off the central supply station. The station consisted of a crash cart packed with drugs and ER supplies, a plastic-sheathed laptop and intercom system for communicating with the outside, and extra barrier supplies.
The patient area was a suite of eight small rooms. Eight total isolation rooms for a borough with a population of more than two and a quarter million. “Surge capacity” is the disaster preparedness term for a health care system’s ability to rapidly expand beyond normal operating services, to satisfy public health demands in the event of a large-scale public health emergency. The number of hospital beds in New York State was about 60,000 and falling. The population of New York
He followed the administrator into the first room. This was not a full biological isolation tank; there were no air locks or steel doors. This was routine hospital care in a segregated setting. The room was tile floored and fluorescently lit. The first thing Eph saw was the discarded Kurt pod against the side wall. A Kurt pod is a disposable, plastic-boxed stretcher, like a transparent box coffin, with a pair of round glove ports on each long side, and fitted with removable exterior oxygen tanks. A jacket, shirt, and pants were piled next to it, cut away from the patient with surgical scissors, the Regis Air winged-crown logo visible on the overturned pilot’s hat.
The hospital bed in the center of the room was tented with transparent plastic curtains, outside which stood monitoring equipment and an electronic IV drip tree laden with bags. The railed bed bore green sheets and large white pillows, and was set in the upright position.
Captain Doyle Redfern sat in the middle of the bed, his hands in his lap. He was bare-legged, clad only in a hospital johnny, and appeared alert. But for the IV pick in his hand and arm, and the drawn expression on his face —he looked as though he had dropped ten pounds since Eph had found him inside the cockpit—he looked for all the world like a patient awaiting a checkup.
He looked up hopefully as Eph approached. “Are you from the airline?” he asked.
Eph shook his head, dumbfounded. Last night, this man had gasped and tumbled to the floor inside the cockpit of Flight 753, eyes rolling back into his skull, seemingly near death.
The thin mattress creaked as the pilot shifted his weight. He winced as though from stiffness, and then asked, “What happened on the plane?”
Eph couldn’t hide his disappointment. “That’s what I came here hoping to ask you.”
Eph stood facing the rock star Gabriel Bolivar, who sat perched on the edge of the bed like a black-haired gargoyle draped in a hospital johnny. Without the fright makeup, he was surprisingly handsome, in a stringy-haired, hard-living way.
“The mother of all hangovers,” Bolivar said.
“Any other discomfort?” asked Eph.
“Plenty.
“Mr. Bolivar, can you tell me, what is the last thing you remember about the landing?”
“What landing? I’m serious. I was hitting the vodka tonics pretty hard most of the flight—I’m sure I slept right through it.” He looked up, squinting into the light. “How about some Demerol, huh? Maybe when the refreshment cart swings by?”
Eph saw the scars crisscrossing Bolivar’s bare arms, and remembered that one of his signature concert
