Germ

Allen's unlit cigarette wagged like an accusatory finger when he spoke. 'As far as we know, no one has ever been infected by an airborne strain. Monkeys, yes; never a human. Big difference. If the vector to transmit the disease was in that dust, it's a strain more dangerous than any we've ever seen. And it's gone unreported.'

'Maybe nobody knows,' Stephen whispered.

'Look at the date,' Allen said, indicating the screen. 'Whoever's controlling it has had over a year to perfect the delivery system. A crop duster when this video was made—what now, a breeze?'

Julia stared at him a long time, lost in thought. At last she punched the button that continued the video.

fifty-seven

The video flicked to a new scene.

The doorway set in a whitewashed wall again—the skinny black man's home. The date and time set the moment at the fifth morning after the crop duster's visit to the man's work site. The man's friend approached the door, knocked. A woman answered, worry as plain on her face as the bright red housedress on her body. She shook her head and closed the door.

Blackness.

The scream pierced through the speaker even before the shadows swam into recognizable objects on the screen. The man—Julia's star—bellowed in agony from a battered cot in a small, dark room. Naked to the waist, he was curled in a fetal position, clutching at his stomach, rubbing his chest. Perspiration sluiced in thick streams from every inch of exposed flesh. With savage effort, the man hooked his head over the cot's edge and vomited into the black hole of a rusty pail.

'Lord, have mercy,' Stephen whispered.

Positioned somewhere above the cot, the camera perfectly framed the convulsing figure. The woman who had answered the door glided into view and began wiping the man's head and neck with a drenched cloth, comforting him with soft cooing.

With a bolt of quick static, the day passed. The man still lay in a knot, wet, miserable, accepting water from a rag pressed to his fever-blistered lips; only the time on the display had changed. Another flash of static and the man was blistered and bleeding, flailing on the bed, splashing ribbons of blood across the walls and curtains. His mouth stretched in a silent scream. His eyes, solid red, searched blindly for help.

Julia's palm covered her mouth.

A man in a blood-drenched smock, a stethoscope slung around his neck, tried to hold down the dying man. A woman in a white-and-blue dress—a nurse, Julia thought—covered her mouth much the way Julia did and backed away from the bed and out of frame. A geyser of blackish blood erupted. The doctor staggered back, arms raised against the horror before him.

The body convulsed, then was still.

Soft chanting now; the mournful throb of a single drum. A corpse, wrapped from head to toe in white linen, lay like a ghost on a chest-high bier. Weeping softly, the woman who'd comforted Julia's star, his wife perhaps, dipped a flambeau into the kindling under the body. Within seconds, flames had completely engulfed the corpse.

'The medical staff didn't report the cause of death,' Allen said, shaking his head. 'Health officials never would have released the body.'

The camera panned over the faces of the mourners, many of them recognizable from the work site scene when the crop duster had vomited its obscene cargo over them. As smoke darkened the sky, the scene faded to black.

The next act opened at the work site, familiar men laboring under a scorching sun.

'Not again,' Julia lamented. The date display had jumped ahead two months.

But the crop duster did not return. In fact, nothing dramatic occurred in the two minutes the camera lingered there, zooming in on individual faces in calm order. Each went about his duties, seeming to have forgotten the death of his friend. The scene played out like an epilogue, as if to say, Life goes on. If Kafka or Tolstoy had directed the video, this was the way he would have ended it.

Another slow fade. All that was missing, Julia thought, was the word Fini in scripted letters.

After several flashes of static, another video sequence started— this one far different in quality. The image, grainy from low light levels, filled the monitor. Gone was the column of numbers that had recorded the time, date, and other bits of cryptic information. Where the first video had all the markings of a professional recording, made for evidence or analysis, this one more closely resembled a home movie. As covert as the preceding footage obviously was, this current stock seemed more so: most of the time something like a flap of cloth blocked a portion of the lens; the angle was from about knee-high, as if the operator had held the camera like a briefcase—or in a briefcase, thought Julia—and nothing was framed quite right. Most disturbing, visually and viscerally, was the image's constant vibration.

'Why is it doing that, that shaking?' Stephen asked.

'Bad tape in the camera, maybe?' offered Allen.

'Fear,' Julia said. 'Over the past decade, the Bureau has taken to wiring informants and undercover agents not only for sound but also for visuals with miniature cameras. We see that shaking a lot. The guy's scared stiff.'

Under a slate sky, the camera panned over a collection of rusty Quonset huts. They rose like the humps of a sea monster from a field cleared of all foliage except for wisps of dry prairie grass. Here and there, the camera caught men with guns standing or strolling, paying no particular attention to the camera operator. In the distance was a tall chain-link fence, double coils of gleaming concertina wire balancing on top. Beyond that a dense jungle grew. Directly in front of the hangars was a long patch of ground, level and clear of foliage.

'That's a landing strip,' Allen said.

'So it's an air base?' Julia asked.

'Except for the armed men, it looks abandoned.'

Stephen stroked his beard in thought. 'Don't drug cartels operate out of abandoned airstrips?'

'Yeah, and look how green and lush that jungle looks,' Allen said. 'More Amazonian or Asian than African.'

Julia said, 'I don't think this is about drugs.'

The scene changed, and the camera was moving through a dim corridor. It approached a door, then went through it into a brightly lit, refurbished corridor. Windows were set in the walls on each side, lighted from within. The camera approached a window. Reflected in it was a ghostly image that quickly sharpened.

Julia froze the frame. Caught in the glass, a man held a briefcase under his arm.

'Look,' Julia said, pointing to a black circle in the side of the briefcase, facing the glass. 'Wanna bet that's an opening for the camera lens?'

The man recording his own reflection appeared Hispanic, with tight curly hair and heavy features.

'He matches the description of Vero from the bartender at the place where he and Goody were killed,' she said. She studied the face a moment, then restarted the playback.

The reflection faded off the glass as the camera focused on what lay beyond—a room lined with beds. On every one lay a man or woman, some tossing in anguish, others still. Machines monitored their vital signs. IVs snaked into most of the arms.

'Some sort of sick ward,' Stephen said.

Turning from the window, the image blurred. When it refocused, a man was walking toward it. At first Julia thought he wore a mask of a skull. His eyes were big black holes, his skin bone-white and gaunt. As he approached, she saw it was no mask. Sunglasses covered his eyes, but the rest of the visible head was disturbing: wispy white hair clung in patches to the scalp, and the face was more than gaunt; it was as though someone had stretched cheesecloth over a skull. A lipless mouth stretched into a wide grin, showing canted and missing teeth.

Julia's heart leaped, and the camera flicked off.

fifty-eight

When the screen had been black for a good fifteen seconds, Allen exhaled loudly and said, 'I didn't see anything that proves Ebola is man-made, or that these guys did it. At best, it showed that there's an airborne strain