Germ

inched forward, kicked away the assailant's pistol, and stretched his hand to the assailant's neck. An eternity later, he gestured that he'd found no pulse. While the other two covered him, the first hefted the body on its side to cuff the hands behind the back. Julia had seen corpses cuffed before, but never with so much gravity. The cop ran a hand along the body's perimeter, pulling a heavy knife from an ankle sheath and the cell phone from the belt. He tossed them aside.

Julia closed her eyes and lowered her face to the pavement, feeling tiny pebbles bite into her cheek. She was grateful for their solidarity, for how real they felt. She stayed like that as EMTs assessed Stinky— he was alive with surprisingly strong vitals—and until a cop came over and pressed his fingers to her throat.

'I'm okay,' she said and cupped her face in her hands.

thirty-two

Gregor woke from a dream in which he was field-stripping a rifle, alone in a vast arctic landscape. The rifle made sense: he'd broken down and cleaned and reassembled a fair share of them. He wasn't so sure where the winter conditions came from. His foster parents had lived in Wyoming, which certainly got cold and snowy, but nothing like in his dream. Maybe it had something to do with his thirty-year stretch in a tropic climate. No snow. Ever.

His room was dark, except for a soft, unfamiliar light. At the very moment that he saw the light was coming from one of the two cell phones on his nightstand, it rang. Its previous ring must have been what pulled him from his imaginary midnight wandering.

'Yes?' It came out as a croak. He repeated the word.

He recognized the voice on the other end, and his mind cleared immediately. The voice recited a code phrase. Gregor thought for a moment, then returned the proper reply. He listened. 'But aren't you there now? . . . Chattanooga, Tennessee . . . Of course, I can resend the files, but—hold on, let me get a pen.'

He threw back his blankets, swung his legs off the bed, and turned on the bedside lamp. Something wasn't right. The great warrior Ts'ao Kung said the essence of battlefield success was 'to mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy.'

The enemy! Gregor thought. Not your allies, not your commanders!

Code phrase or not, the call worried him. But the man was not someone you questioned or angered. He possessed the phone number, the code phrase, the voice. Gregor didn't know what else to do. He stood and stumbled toward his desk for a pen.

He wished he were back field-stripping a rifle in subzero temperatures.

thirty-three

Julia wasn't about to hang around. She'd been trying to avoid cops all day, and now she was surrounded by them. It wouldn't be long before they found their composure and wanted to know more about her involvement. She'd be brought in to police headquarters and questioned until the FBI or CDC showed up to relieve them of the burden that was Julia Matheson. No doubt there were people in several agencies who had questions for her.

At the moment, each member of the local PD was busy describing the action from his or her own perspective. There was the kind of laughter that comes after extreme stress, and cops saying, 'No, no, no, this is the way it went down,' and cops who were in a blue flunk about the casualties, and cops who wanted to fight because they didn't understand how someone could laugh at a time like this. There were few, it seemed to Julia, who had set all that post-traumatic stuff aside and were going about the business of securing the crime scene and interviewing witnesses. Those who were doing their jobs moved slowly, distractedly, and focused primarily on where the assailant's body fell.

She went to inspect her car. She found what had kept him in the car long after he should have bolted: in the accident, his right arm had apparently become wedged between the crumpled hood and dash. He'd only escaped by slipping his arm out of a wicked-looking gauntlet, leaving it behind. A string of blood dripped from it as if it were a severed arm.

She told a patrolman that she needed to pry open her car door and borrowed his crowbar; she had left her own crowbar with the other tools stashed in the alleyway behind the bar. She levered the hood metal back enough to wiggle the gauntlet loose, then dropped it into a deep canvas book bag, along with a few papers scattered about the interior. Then, acting as if she were doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing, she marched around the corner and kept on going until she reached another major street and hailed a cab.

She was in her room and slumping on the bed before the extent of her injuries became apparent: She hurt everywhere. Her side throbbed where the rib had fractured; her hips ached from thrusting against the seat belt; her throat still felt as fragile as blown glass; various spots of pain flared on her face and arms where fragments of erupting asphalt had bitten into her.

She pulled the memory chip from her pants pocket, turned it around in her fingers. So small. In centuries past, when people fought over a small item, it was usually a jewel or a key to a locked treasure, maybe a deed to some estate or a religious relic. Now, as often as not, it was information. And a lot of information could fit on a tiny square chip like the one she held. Didn't look like much. Worth ten bucks in a computer or camera store. But throw some information on it, and it became invaluable. She thought of the cost so far. Goody. Vero. The cop Gilbert. Even the assassins—the two killers who'd died in the bar and the one tonight. Not that their lives were worth anything, but they did contribute to the tally. And those were only the deaths she knew about. What had happened before Vero tried to get this chip into the right hands?

I hope you're worth it, she thought.

She scooted back on the bed, grabbed her laptop, and turned it on. She leaned over and rummaged through the computer case until she found an adapter card, which she pushed into the computer's expansion port. When she pushed the chip into that, the screen immediately flashed a pattern of multicolored static and froze.

Julia winced.

She restarted the computer four times: twice she started it with the chip already slotted, and twice she waited until the operating system had booted. Each time, it crashed the computer.

Groaning, feeling every bruised muscle, she rolled off the bed, grabbed her purse, and left the room. At the pay phone outside the motel office, she used a calling card to dial a long-distance number.

'Wha—?' She heard a male voice say on the other end of the line.

'Bonsai?'

'Who's this?'

'Julia. Don't say my last name.'

'Like I would. What time—?'

'Late. I need your help.'

'Call back in the morning, Julia. No, I'll call you. I'm really beat, you know, with the new kid and all.'

'Goody's dead.' There was so much silence, Julia said, 'Bonsai?'

'Goody?' He was stunned. 'When?' No sleep left in his voice.

'Today. Yesterday, now. There's some weird stuff going down. I need your help, and no one can know. Can you help?'

'Sure, yeah, whatever.'

'Can you get to a secure phone?'

'This one's good. I sweep it every day.'

Of course he does.

'I have a memory chip. It's—' She read a shallow impression in the chip's plastic case.'An SDx30. I'm pretty sure it's at the heart of what got Goody killed. But I'm afraid it got damaged.'

'What's it doing?'

'Whenever it tries to mount, the computer locks up.'

'It's a full-volume encryption. Everything it needs to know it's a computer file—the hibernation files, swap files, the resource fork, all of it—is locked up. It's a pretty recent development in data security. Your computer doesn't know what to do with it, so it just dies.'

She felt a wave of relief. 'Can you do anything with it?'