Germ

about six inches off the floor. After a minute, he opened his eyes to see that the bag had reversed directions and was resting against what looked like a black body bag. Vero, Allen thought. He remembered hearing that the assassin had taken the corpse.

His abduction and bondage had been a blur of murky images, viewed through ripples of pain and fear and confusion. Atropos's iron stranglehold had discouraged, through immediate piercing agony, all attempts to break free and rendered him a puppet under the assassin's control. He'd heard the hangar door slam . . . gunshots . . . then nothing. Atropos must have knocked him unconscious, for the next thing he knew he was flying through the plane's portal like a piece of luggage . . . Time stuttered . . . then a body fell to the floor beside him: no, it was a punching bag . . . Cuffs sharp against his wrist, feet tied . . .

Can't breathe!

. . . a noose! How long had it taken for him to realize that it was the weight of his own legs strangling him? It had finally dawned on him, even before full consciousness. When his head had cleared, it throbbed—and told him he was in big trouble.

He didn't recall the takeoff, but that the jet was now airborne was indisputable.

He was alone in the cabin. Recessed spotlights in the arched ceiling cast hard white circles on a chair, a countertop, the floor, and diffused an eerie glow throughout the cabin. Though Allen had flown in a number of private jets—Lears, Hawkers, Gulfstreams—he'd seen none quite like this. The cabin resembled a living room with all the accoutrements of a modern, expensive bachelor pad: The laptop and printer he'd seen earlier. The plasma— now off. DVD player, stereo components. Weights. An extremely comfortable-looking leather chair.

All the comforts of home, with a cruising speed of five hundred miles per hour.

But it was not a home, Allen felt, as much as it was a lair. And he was the hapless victim, waiting for a creature to return for its feast of human flesh.

The cockpit door opened behind him, then clicked shut. An inky shadow fell over him, and Atropos stepped into view. His Wind-breaker removed, a dark green T-shirt clung to the ripples and bulges of his torso and biceps. His face was so taut it might have been forged in steel. He glared at Allen with eyes that revealed nothing but hate.

A cold pressure gripped Allen's jaw. Atropos had seized him, so blindingly fast that Allen wondered if he'd blacked out for a moment. The pressure increased until Allen thought his oral cavity would implode. Atropos slowly pulled his hand back. The fake beard peeled away from Allen's cheeks, breaking free of the spirit gum. The adhesive stretched and snapped like skin. Atropos tossed the hair aside.

Allen tasted blood, salty, coppery. His teeth had lacerated the insides of his cheeks. A gentle probe with his tongue hinted that a few molars may have buckled under the pressure as well.

No words passed between them. The other's cool application of pain, his own refusal to acknowledge it, conveyed mutual disrespect. Beyond that, Allen had nothing to say. Would he plead for life? He'd have better luck negotiating with a frenzied shark. Would he threaten the man, something along the lines of 'You won't get away with this!' Frankly, Allen suspected that Atropos would get away with murdering him, just as he had gotten away with it before. And more important, Atropos believed he'd get away with it, so saying otherwise amounted to groveling. And groveling was something Allen would not do.

Atropos turned. He rolled away the punching bag and gripped the body bag in two hands, then dragged it to within three feet of Allen. Crouching, he unzipped the bag and spread it open.

Allen's breath went away. He wanted to scream but found nothing in him to let out. The plane seemed to plunge a thousand feet, spinning, spinning . . . Colors washed away. The pain brought him back. He studied the mess in the bag and raised his eyes to Atropos. He knew then that this went beyond Karl Litt, beyond his virus, beyond anything so . . . widespread.

This was personal.

sixty-six

From where Stephen and Julia watched, the airport security's search resembled a nocturnal sweep of still waters for a drowning victim. Spotlights cut through the black night to pan the tarmac in looping circles. Trucks trolleyed between the parked planes, invisible except for their amber flashers and the cone-shaped projections of searchlights.

Across an untamed field, beyond perimeter fencing and an unlighted street, the van sat unnoticed, positioned so both occupants could observe the airport grounds through the windshield. Inside, Julia used binoculars to track the trucks' activity. The short nail of her right index finger scraped nervously up and down the binoculars' pebbled surface. She panned right, to where two Chattanooga police cruisers formed a crude V in front of the last hangar. Their headlamps illuminated a man dressed in mechanic's overalls. He seemed to be pantomiming the entire gun battle with wildly exaggerated arm movements.

'A witness,' she said coolly.

Though she hadn't realized it at the time, the sound of Allen's scream outside the hangar had propelled her into what Donnelley used to call Full Battle Mode. It was a state of heightened awareness, when every synapse sparked for only one purpose: to survive. Muscles moved, seemingly on their own and aided by healthy doses of adrenaline, to aim a firearm with point-blank accuracy or move her out of harm's way. It was like a drug, and coming down was hard. After having functioned at 200 percent, even briefly, both mind and body plunged into exhaustion. Soldiers knew it. And cops. Donnelley had been both, and he'd taught Julia how to control the descent, to keep the specter of danger alive in her mind even after its white-hot breath had cooled from her skin, until she was truly safe and ready to rest. Such thoughts fooled the body to attentiveness and tricked the adrenal gland into doling out enough super-juice to keep the mind alert. By giving that specter the cold, impassive face of Atropos, she now found keeping it alive disturbingly easy.

Stephen said nothing. His attention was riveted on the trucks and their lights. If, by chance, Allen wasn't on the Cessna, Atropos would have dumped his body somewhere between the hangars and his jet— precisely where the searchers were looking now.

After the jet took off, Stephen and Julia had no time to scout the area. On the other side of the terminal, three trucks had converged from various points and sped toward them. They'd barely made it to the alley ahead of the trucks, and through the hangar to the van in the parking lot ahead of the men who'd clambered from them.

Julia lowered the binoculars and went to a memory: Allen's attempt to speak while Atropos was gripping his neck. What had he tried to say? She moved her mouth silently, visualizing Allen's face. He had been grimacing in pain. Would that have distorted his lip movements enough to prevent her from deciphering his words? His jaw had moved twice, indicating a two-syllable word or two monosyllabic words. She went through the alphabet, comparing the movements of her mouth to his.

She was thinking of words that started with s when she felt a tug at the binoculars. She let Stephen take them. Stress etched furrows into the flesh around his eyes, on his cheeks above the beard, on his forehead.

She touched his arm. 'We'll get him back.'

His eyes remained glued to the search area. One of the cops had broken away from the illuminated witness to wave his flashlight beam over the tarmac behind the cars.

'That's what I'm afraid of.'

'Alive.'

He lowered the binoculars to glare at her. 'You don't know that.' Cold. Angry. He lifted the binoculars again and scanned out the windshield.

'They took him, Stephen. They took him for a reason. They'll ransom him for the chip. They'll keep him alive until they have it in their hands. That buys us time to figure out a way to get him back.'

They watched as the cops climbed into their cruisers and drove single file toward the terminal. The search trucks switched off their lights and followed, leaving the area dark except for a bold strip of light falling from the slightly open hangar doors, through which the dungareed mechanic disappeared. In another minute, that light also winked out.

'Why don't we just turn over the chip?' Stephen asked, surveying the darkness outside.