Looking at her, Stanton felt something he’d never expected before tonight. After a decade in the lab, a decade of fighting for funding to improve prion-disease readiness, a decade of warning that an outbreak was always just one accident away, now the unavoidable had come, and all Stanton wanted was to follow Nina back to the dock, get on
“What if we left?” Stanton asked.
Nina lifted her head. “And went where?”
“Who knows? Hawaii?”
“Don’t do this, Gabe.”
“I’m serious,” he said, staring into her eyes. “All I want is to be with you right now. I don’t care about anything else. I love you.”
She smiled, but there was something sad in it. “I love you too.”
Stanton leaned forward to kiss her, but before he could plant his lips on hers, Nina turned away.
“What?” he asked, pulling back.
“You’re under a lot of pressure, Gabe. You’ll get through this.”
“I want to get through it with you. Tell me what you want.”
“Please, Gabe.”
“Tell me.”
She didn’t look away as she spoke. “I want someone who doesn’t care if he shows up late to work because we spent too long in bed. Someone who’d actually get on that boat and leave all this behind. You’re the most driven man I’ve ever known, and I love that about you. But even if you came with me, in two days you’d be swimming back to the lab. You wouldn’t really walk away. Especially now.”
Stanton wanted to prove to her that the man she was describing didn’t exist, that it was a made-up version of him she’d concocted long ago. But at some level he knew she was right. He wasn’t getting on any boat right now.
Nina laid her head on his shoulder again. They sat in silence, and soon Stanton heard the slow breathing he knew so well. He wasn’t surprised; Nina could sleep anywhere, anytime—on park benches, in theaters, on crowded beaches. Stanton closed his eyes too. The tenseness in his jaw lessened. He thought of calling Davies, to ask how the timeline was going. But the notion floated away in a wave of exhaustion and sadness. He wanted to hide in the comfort of unconsciousness.
Still, sleep wouldn’t come. As he watched the minutes tick by, he found himself reiterating all the reasons he couldn’t be sick. He hadn’t consumed dairy in months. He hadn’t had meat in years. Yet he found himself appreciating Cavanagh’s concerns about how easy it might be for people to believe they had VFI.
Stanton picked up Nina and carried her into the bedroom, putting her on her old side of the bed. Dogma wandered in, and although he rarely allowed the dog on the bed, Stanton patted the mattress several times, and Dogma came bounding up and lay next to Nina.
Stanton was heading to his study to check email again when his cell-phone buzzed with a number he didn’t recognize.
“Dr. Stanton? It’s Chel Manu. Sorry to disturb you so late.”
“Dr. Manu. Where did you go? We’ve been calling you.”
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.”
Stanton heard something in her voice. “Are you all right?”
“I need to talk to you.”
TEN
THE STREET VENDORS WHO’D WON A LOTTERY SPOT ON THE SEAWARD side of the boardwalk were gone, their African reeds and bird-houses and octopus bongs packed in crates until morning. It was just after midnight, and the police were sweeping the beaches for partyers and the homeless. Stanton opened his front door to find Chel standing on his stoop.
He motioned her toward two weathered wicker chairs on the porch of his condo. Barefoot men and women poured toward them like newly hatched amphibians crawling onto the land, searching for a place to curl up until the beach reopened at five.
As Stanton and Chel sat, a hulking Asian man wearing a heavy overcoat and camouflage pants stepped onto the boardwalk, carrying a sign: party like it’s 2012. He plopped down in the middle of Ocean Front Walk, directly across from them. “It will be completed the thirteenth
Stanton shook his head and turned to Chel, who stared at the man with a look he couldn’t categorize.
“What can I do for you?” Stanton asked her.
He listened in disbelief as she told him her story, beginning with the codex, through the real reason for her trip to the hospital. Once she finished, he had trouble resisting the urge to shake her. “Why the hell did you lie to us?”
“Because the manuscript was looted, so it’s illegal for me to have it,” she said. “But there’s something else you should know too.”
“What?”
“I think the man who caused the accident on the 101 is the man who gave me the codex in the first place. His name’s Hector Gutierrez. He’s an antiquities dealer.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“I watched him drive away from my church in that same car.”
“Jesus. Was Gutierrez sick when you saw him?”
“He just seemed anxious to me. I’m not sure.”
Stanton processed this. “Did Gutierrez ever travel to Guatemala?”
“I don’t know. He may well have.”
“Wait a second. Were you lying about Volcy being sick before he came here?”
“No, that was what he told me. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that he started having trouble sleeping near the temple he looted the book from. He wasn’t out there meditating. But he really hadn’t been eating meat for a year.”
Stanton was furious. “The Guatemalans have teams on the ground searching every dairy farm in the Peten because of the information you gave us. And they already think we’re wasting their time and money. Now we have to tell them our translator lied, and they should be searching for ruins in the jungle?”
A skateboarder rolled down the boardwalk and called out, “Chill, bro.”
“I’ll tell immigration everything,” Chel whispered after the kid had passed.
“You think I give a shit about immigration? This is about public safety. If you hadn’t lied, we could have asked him more questions, and we could already be searching the jungle for the real source.”
Chel ran a shaky hand through her hair. “I know that now.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He said the temple where he got the book was three days’ walk from his village in the Peten,” she said. “Less than a hundred miles, probably.”
“Where’s his village?”
Hair strands blew across Chel’s face in the ocean wind. “He wouldn’t say.”
“So somewhere in the vicinity of those ruins,” Stanton said, “could be VFI’s original source. Some sick cow putting off milk that’s being shipped all over the world. Hell, for all we know, the runoff could be going into the water supply down there. Did he tell you anything that could point us toward it? Anything at all?”
Chel shook her head. “The only other things he told me were that his spirit animal was a hawk and that he had a wife and daughter.”
“What’s a spirit animal?”
“It’s an animal every Maya gets paired with at birth. He said his was
Stanton was pulled back to the ER, where he’d watched the other victim die. “Gutierrez said,
