CHAPTER
16
Tully punched the number into his cell phone again. For security purposes he never saved numbers in his phone's memory. Or at least he wouldn't even if he knew how.
After two rings it went to voice message again. He flipped the phone shut. Both Cunningham and Maggie had their phones turned off. He'd rather believe that than the alternative—the U.S. Army wasn't allowing them to answer.
It wasn't that Tully didn't respect the United States military… okay, that wasn't true. He didn't respect military officers, especially like the guy he had seen earlier, the one directing traffic, able to order and command with only a wave of a hand and a nod of the head. How many soldiers had that same officer sent to their deaths with as little as a wave of a hand or a nod of his head? Anytime Tully had worked with the military on previous operations the officers in charge took over and did so without apology or even much notice. They didn't play nice and usually they preferred to do so in secrecy. And as far as Tully could tell, they were doing the exact thing right here, right now.
Tully had moved his car to the other side of the street, still along the curb, but at an angle, so he could see between the panel truck and the back of the house. It was just a slice but enough to make out an orange field suit moving from the truck to the back door several minutes ago. And now he could see a second orange suit just blurred across the same path.
He glanced away to watch Ganza loping across the street from the construction crew, making his way back to Tully's car. Ganza wasn't much taller than Tully—maybe an inch or two—but he seemed to carry his height like it was a burden on his skeletal frame. His long, thin legs with knobby knees poking at sagging, brown trousers, skinny neck and sloped shoulders reminded Tully of a giraffe. Even his white lab coat—he hadn't bothered to leave it behind during their rush to the scene—looked like the spotted hide of a giraffe with gray-and-brown splotches where Ganza had attempted, unsuccessfully, to get out stains. When Tully first got divorced it had been a game for him to guess which men he met were married and which ones were single. Caroline would have never let him leave the house with a stain on his tie. Now stains would be a permanent part of his wardrobe if he didn't have women in his life—Maggie, Gwen, Emma—constantly wiping at his shirt cuffs,his tie,his jacket lapels.Tully guessed early on that Ganza had never been married. Not only that, he evidently didn't spend much time around women who even wiped at his stains.
Ganza opened the passenger door and slid in, slamming the door shut with more force than necessary. It was the most emotion Tully could remember the man ever displaying.
'Sons of bitches won't let us collect evidence,' Ganza said in his trademark monotone, despite the slammed door.'They have to isolate and contain.'
Tully could have told him that before Ganza bothered to show his ID and badge to the soldiers masquerading in construction-crew clothing.
'They're right, you know.' He didn't glance over to see Ganza scowl at him. He didn't need to. He could feel it. 'They can't risk more people getting exposed, if there is something in that house.'
'I know that. But they'll destroy whatever evidence there is. They don't know what to look for.' Ganza grabbed the half-eaten tuna sandwich from the dashboard. It had been sitting there since he left it, in the sun. He took a bite and another then said with his mouth still full, 'I offered to gear up and collect it.'
'You mean in one of their space suits?'
'Sure, why not?'
'You ever been in one before?' Tully asked.
'Can't be much different than a gas mask.' But Ganza sat back and gave Tully a long sideways look. 'What? You've been in one?'
'Once. A long time ago,' Tully said and left it at that.
He and Ganza weren't friends and Tully wasn't the type to share more than what was necessary, a trait Gwen Patterson constantly reminded him was—what were her words?—'rather annoying.' Of course, she didn't like it. She was a psychologist by trade. She could get people to share their deep dark secrets. And if Tully wanted her to be a part of his personal life he would need to learn to share those deep dark secrets with her.
But Ganza…he didn't owe Ganza anything. Besides, Tully didn't like to be reminded of the four-hour episode that had been early on in his FBI training. It had been part of basic training back then—after all, 1982 was still the Cold War—that they should all spend several hours in a space suit, although the activity was more about breaking agents down than about biocontainment.
Tully saw something. He could see motion through the slice between the truck and the back of the house. He jerked forward, practically diving around the steering wheel to get a better look. He hoped he was mistaken. But if he wasn't, it looked as if they were taking someone out of the house and into the rear of the truck in a clear plastic body bag.
CHAPTER
17
They called it 'the Slammer,' and Maggie knew about it only from rumor. She would have preferred to leave it that way.
The Slammer was actually a Biosafety Level 4 containment hospital, an isolation ward within USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. The Army used it for patients suspected of having an infectious disease or of being exposed to a biological agent. Those patients, until proven otherwise, were also suspected of being highly contagious.
For the most part, Maggie understood that the Slammer was used, or ready, primarily in case any one of USAMRIID
If one of their own pathologists or veterinarians or microbiologists got pricked with a contaminated needle or cut by a broken test tube or bitten by a lab monkey they had to be able to treat them. They wouldn't be able to transport them to an area hospital and risk further exposure or media. So they'd take them here, to their own hospital that they, themselves, had nicknamed the Slammer, because it was exactly that, a biological solitary confinement. Maggie realized that Assistant Director Cunningham probably had no idea that when he agreed to the Army taking control of the situation it meant committing himself and Maggie to the Slammer.
At first glance the rooms appeared to be ordinary hospital suites, if you didn't mind one of the walls being a full-glass viewing window and having double steel doors locked from the outside. Maggie suspected that she and Cunningham would each get their own room, their own solitary confinement. Mary Louise and her mother were also here somewhere. Maggie hoped they were together.
A woman in a blue space suit escorted Maggie to her room through a series of staging areas. Each had thick heavy doors. Each slammed shut behind them, but it wasn't until the last door, when the air locks sucked in, sealing the door shut, that Maggie felt a panic begin. It started slowly, quietly, ticking in the back of her mind like a heartbeat, only a heartbeat that didn't seem to belong to her. The air was different inside this room. Different from the hallway. Different from the inner staging areas they had just passed through.
Maggie told herself it was just a slight bit of claustrophobia. She'd be fine. Maybe if she told them she had been stuffed into a freezer last year by a madman, they would sympathize and let her go?
To be fair, the panic had actually begun earlier back at Mary Louise's house. It started when Maggie watched the two orange spacemen take Mary Louise's mother out the back door of her suburban house sealed inside a sort of bubble stretcher, what almost looked to Maggie like a plastic body bag. That's when Maggie felt her skin go
