Germ

own burning wick.

'He went down and never got up. Ever. My punch fractured his skull and ruptured a middle meningeal artery. They arrested me for manslaughter, then eventually determined I'd acted in self-defense.'

'Sounds right to me,' Julia said.

He shook his head. 'I was never in danger. That lunge was a half-hearted attempt to save face. It didn't come close. I saw it in his eyes. He was scared. He wasn't going to take us on, with or without a knife.'

She patted his hand. 'Law enforcement has what's called the twenty-one-foot rule. It says that a suspect with an edged weapon is a deadly threat within twenty-one feet. It takes one and a half seconds for a person to close that distance, about the same time a quick-thinking cop can draw and fire his weapon. And our society's infatuation with firearms has dulled us to the dangers of knives, which can kill with one puncture, one slash. In the situation you were in, any cop worth his spit would have shot that guy. Including me.'

He studied her face, said nothing.

'He was freaking out, angry, probably had a few drinks. There's no way you have could have been sure he wouldn't have attacked you. He didn't even know, most likely.'

She saw in his face that Stephen had long ago made up his mind: he'd killed an innocent man.

She said, 'So that shocked you into dropping out of college, finding God?'

'The guy—his name was Wayne Reitz. Only twenty-two. His father came to see me. He was a pastor of a big church. He wept for his son; then he told me to get on with my life, not to let what happened crush me.' He found her eyes. 'Not to let it crush me. Well, I did feel crushed that I could do such a thing with my bare hands. A soon-to-be healer, practitioner of the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. There was this pressing weight on my chest.'

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

'CliffsNotes version: I went to Pastor Reitz's church. I wanted to know if he really meant his kind words. How could he not hate me? He explained God's will and forgiveness. It took a long time, but I started to breathe again. I did some work around the church, went to seminary . . . didn't become a physician.'

In his eyes she saw the pain, still there like the ghost sensations amputees experience. There was also compassion and caring. It all added up to a reluctance to do physical harm.

'As a pastor, as a compassionate man,' she said, 'you believe in fighting evil, right?'

He nodded.

She let the thought hang there. She smiled and slouched against the curving wall of the plane, pushed a small blue pillow behind her head, and closed her eyes. After a few moments, she heard Stephen fiddling with the laptop.

She opened one eye. 'Get it?'

'I just want to watch those videos again,' he said, slipping a pair of headphones over his ears. 'We're missing something. I know it.'

She closed her eye. 'Let me know if you need a hand.'

Julia used her fork to nudge the shriveled chicken breast

on Stephen's plastic dinner tray.

'Aren't you going to eat?' she asked around a mouthful of something that looked like string beans.

'Huh?' he said, pulling his eyes from the laptop's monitor. Her fork was still resting on his meal, which shared her fold-down tray since the laptop occupied his own. 'Go ahead. I'm not hungry.'

She craned around to get a look at the monitor. It was replaying the video of the man's violent death in the hospital. She swallowed hard. 'Trouble?'

He leaned back, shaking his head. 'I've watched the videos a dozen times, scrolled through the list of names, studied the map. I've got to believe they're all components of a plan to invade the U.S., but I get the feeling I'm missing something.' He struggled to put his thoughts into words. 'It's like standing too close to a mosaic: I can't see the big picture.'

'The camera dwells on the victim,' Julia said. 'He has to be someone important.'

'That's just it. He's nobody. Just some poor joe who contracts—' His face lost its color.

'Stephen? What is it?'

'It's so obvious,' he said slowly, his eyes chasing erratic thoughts. 'When did the man contract Ebola?'

'We assumed it was when the crop duster flew over, that it was in the powder it dumped on them.'

'Them?'

'The men having lunch, our victim among them.'

'When did the camera start following him?'

'Judging by the times and date on the screen, the filming began on the morning of the same day.'

'That's it. Watch all the scenes, study them. Almost every one of the men eating lunch with the victim— maybe every one, I'll have to check again—attended his funeral. They're there, mourning, dancing, watching.'

'So . . . ?' Julia said, drawing the word out as she shook her head.

'So,' he said. His eyes were wide and frightened. 'How did the camera operator know which man would contract Ebola from the powder dumped on a group of twenty?'

seventy-six

Kendrick Reynolds leaned on his cane in a room few people knew existed and fewer had ever seen. Egg- shaped, like the three more famous rooms above it, this one lay forty feet below the bottom floor of the White House proper. Spartan by Pennsylvania Avenue standards, it resembled a reading room in a men's club, with dark leather wing chairs and ottomans arranged in conversation-conducive clusters. A Biedermeier sofa and a simple coffee table dominated the center of the room. Having escaped the decorating budgets of a succession of First Ladies, its walls were white; the two dozen or so original paintings that hung from them represented little-known experiments of brutal gore or obscene sexuality by such modern masters as Eakins, Rodin, and de Kooning. If she could have laid eyes on the room, Reynolds's wife would have proclaimed it evidence of the male gender's inability to reconcile masculinity and culture.

More important than the room's aesthetics, thought Reynolds, was its security. A grid of fine wires embedded in the walls, ceiling, floor, and single door completely enveloped the room with an electromagnetic field. The air itself, pushed in and pulled out of two large vents in the ceiling, went through filters charged with the same

electromagnetic field. No signal of any kind—from the timbre of the human voice to the most sophisticated electronic data pulses—penetrated this barrier. It was one of perhaps a half dozen rooms in the world absolutely impervious to eavesdropping. There were no phone lines, no permanent computers, no power outlets or electric wiring to transmit signals to the outside world—a method of eavesdropping known as 'carrier current.' The same type of power cells submarines used energized the room's lights and needed replacing only once a year. Though visitors navigated a battery of X-ray machines and ohm detectors, the guards manning these machines looked for recording devices, not bugs, which the electromagnetic field would render useless. Computers brought into the room had to be TEMPEST certified, meaning the transient electromagnetic pulses they emanated were too low to be detected by devices designed to capture them from the atmosphere and recreate the data they represented.

Reynolds turned from a disturbingly violent monochrome by H. R. Giger and hobbled to a rectory table where his laptop waited with more patience than he himself could manage. Reaching to touch the closed lid, he caught a slight tremble in his hand. He clamped it into a fist and watched it as he might a supposedly dead snake.

He heard the door open and looked up to see John Franklin stepping through the threshold, a guard leaning in behind him to pull the door closed again.

'Kendrick, what is it?' the president asked. In his late forties, square-jawed and blue-eyed, he was an aging golden boy whose stature and refinement reflected a life of privilege and spoils. The man's thick hair was artificially