Germ

'Because that won't save him.' Julia shifted in her chair so she was fully facing him, one leg tucked under herself. 'That chip is evidence of something. I wish I knew what, exactly. But I'll bet it's not something these guys need to complete whatever it is they're doing. They want the chip only because it's evidence they don't want getting in the wrong hands. We've seen it. We've seen them. At least, some of them. We're as much a liability as the chip is. They're out to destroy us and the chip. They think they're going to use Allen to get the three of us and the chip all at once.'

'So we're all dead.' Stephen's deep, unwavering voice made the proclamation sound as though it had already happened.

'No,' she said. She tried to back it up with a powerful fact. All she could say was, 'Just . . . no.'

A wry smile bent the hair around his mouth. 'You have another plan, I suppose?'

'Look, they took the gauntlet too,' she said. 'It's on the plane, has to be. That means we can track it.'

'Then what?'

'We go get Allen.' This time she did sound certain.

Stephen looked out the windshield at the dark airport. He closed his eyes. His lips moved in silent prayer. She thought he'd fallen into a kind of trance and would be like that for some time; then he looked at her again. His face still harbored searing concern, but a measure of peace had returned to his eyes.

'Let's get to it, then,' he said, keying the van to life and slamming it into gear.

sixty-seven

'He's coming here?' Litt pointed the double lenses of his sunglasses at Gregor. His high forehead crinkled as he raised what would have been his eyebrows had they not fallen out years ago.

'Should be in tomorrow,' Gregor confirmed.

'But . . . why?'

'He said these targets injured him.'

'Injured him? How?'

'He didn't say.'

They were standing in one of the base's former hangars; like the others, it had been converted into a climate-controlled warehouse. A completely new building had been constructed within the interior walls of the fabricated steel hangar, leaving a rusty shell over a clean, poured-cement structure. The low hum of air conditioners filled the air and never ceased. An overhead door built into a hangar door rattled open, and an electric forklift glided in, carrying a pallet of boxes. On each were labels bearing a bar code, the name and address of a hospital or clinical laboratory, and several biohazard stickers. Litt watched the driver deposit the pallet and back through the door. A man approached the pallet and began cutting away a membrane of clear plastic that encased the boxes.

Litt spoke without looking away from the worker. 'Why here, Gregor? We don't invite people here.'

'I'm going to tell Atropos no? If you are worried about confidentiality, Karl, don't be. His reputation is everything he has, and it's impeccable. He doesn't divulge targets or clients, let alone anything about his clients. And my job has always been to protect this compound. You know I take that seriously. I would never have agreed to his coming if I thought it would jeopardize us in any way.'

Litt still looked unsure.

Gregor continued, 'People do come here, suppliers, workers. We have to trust some people, hoping none do what Despesorio did. Atropos is more trustworthy than any of these others, I promise.'

He could not tell Karl that it had been he, Gregor, who had first broached the idea of Atropos's bringing Allen Parker to them. Parker was meaningless to Gregor, but an opportunity to meet the renowned Atropos? He fought to keep the smile off his face. He had brilliantly convinced Atropos that making Parker pay horribly for the injury he had inflicted was a matter of personal integrity and restitution.

Gregor wondered what sort of harm Atropos had suffered—he sounded fine; but the fact that he possessed a deep hatred for his targets was clear. Ah, the injury did not matter. The important thing was that Gregor was going to meet the man himself.

He remembered when Karl had once, out of curiosity, examined his bedroom, gazing at his images of assassins like Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski and Joseph Testa and brutal warlords like Genghis Kahn and Stalin; touching his replica of the rifle that had killed JFK; looking over his bookcase of the underground series How to Kill and biographies of spies and military titans. Karl had dubbed him a 'death groupie,' and Gregor had taken offense. It was simply that he appreciated the skills required to take a life and get away with it.

However, he was hoping Atropos would allow a photograph of the two together. Maybe that did make him a groupie.

Litt interrupted his thoughts. 'Atropos has one of the targets?'

'Dr. Parker, apparently.'

'Alive?'

'For now.'

Litt watched the worker pull a box off the top and walk it over to a counter. A woman sitting at a computer monitor scanned the bar code and stared intently at the information that popped onto her screen. Her fingers flittered over a keyboard, and she reassessed the monitor's information. The worker strode back toward the mound.

'What do you think he wants from us?'

'We did explain a little about Despesorio's condition, just so he was prepared,' Gregor ventured. 'He knows the kind of work we do.'

The employee started to pull down another box. Litt raised his hand and snapped his fingers. It was a fleshless sound, like striking bone against bone. The man looked. Litt waved him over.

'You think he wants a demonstration?'

'I'm guessing he wants Parker to get the same treatment. Maybe then he'll take him back and exchange him for the memory chip.'

The worker approached with the box. He set it at Litt's feet and used a box cutter to open it. Litt crouched, opened the flaps, and extracted a clear plastic envelope. Inside was a card stained with three circles of brownish blood. Information on the card identified the blood's donor: a newborn boy named Joseph. His mother's name, address, and social security number. Litt nodded.

'Every year, these Guthrie cards become more uniform,' he said. 'Another few years, not only every state but every country will use the same blood spot forms. Makes our job much easier.' He slipped the card back among the hundreds of others in the box, then nodded at the worker, who hoisted it up and carried it toward the counter and the woman.

Litt stood, stretched his back, and looked at Gregor. 'So one more field test?'

'Looks that way.'

'Since you invited him, you do the honors.'

Gregor sniffed and wiped at his nose. 'I was just getting over the last one.'

Litt ignored him. 'Are you familiar with the Balinese tiger?' he asked.

Gregor shook his head.

'It was a phenomenal creature. Quite similar to Siberians and Bengals. Fewer stripes, darker in color. But the most impressive distinction of the Balinese was the way it dispatched its foes. Not its prey, you understand—its enemies, such as other tigers encroaching on its territory, depleting its food supply, flirting with its ladies, that sort of thing.' He tugged away a wrinkle in his pant leg, then began chafing the backs of his hands. 'After roaring its displeasure, the thing would attack the intruder. An opponent who fell without inflicting serious injury was allowed to die swiftly, usually by having its throat torn out.' He smiled, a lipless upturning of the dark line that was his mouth. 'On the other hand, an opponent that fought well, perhaps even injuring the resident tiger but not besting it, was fated to a slow, excruciating death. Purely punitive.'

He pushed an errant length of hair back off his face. His narrow fingertips found something on his scalp to scratch at while he talked. 'After incapacitating its rival, the victor would back off, sometimes for days. When the loser seemed to gain some strength, the victor swept in, slashed at it, mauled it further—then moved away again. Often, the superior tiger would wait until its foe had recouped most of its strength before moving in to cut it down again. This amusement could last for weeks. The defeated tiger eventually starved or bled to death. Or grew too weak to fight off the scavengers vying for its flesh, and gave itself over to them. An ignominious end to the noblest