'Thank you, Doctor.'
'You may not care to. All the tests are positive, I'm afraid.'
'Cancer?' asked Evan, swallowing.
'No. I could give you the medical term but it wouldn't mean anything to you. You could call it a form of salmonella, a strain of virus that attacks the lungs, clotting the blood until it closes off the oxygen. I can understand why, on the surface, Mr. Weingrass thought it was the cancer. It's not, but that's no gift.'
'The cure?' said Kendrick, gripping the phone.
After a brief silence, the pathologist replied quietly. 'None known. It's irreversible. In the African Kasai districts they slaughter the cattle and burn them, raze whole villages and burn them, too.'
'I don't give a goddamn about cattle and African villages!… I'm sorry, I don't mean to yell at you.'
'It's perfectly all right, it goes with the job. I looked on the map; he must have eaten in an Omani restaurant that served central African food for imported labourers perhaps. Unclean dishes, that sort of thing. It's the way it's transmitted.
‘You don't know Emmanuel Weingrass; those are the last places he'd eat… No, Doctor, it wasn't transmitted, it was planted.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Nothing. How long has he got?'
'The CDC says it can vary. A month to three, perhaps four. No more than six.'
'May I tell him it could stretch to a couple of years.'
'You can tell him anything you like, but he may tell you otherwise. His breathing isn't going to get any easier. Oxygen will have to be readily available.'
'It will be. Thank you, Doctor.'
'I'm sorry, Mr. Kendrick.'
Evan got out of the bed and paced in growing anger about the room. A phantom doctor unknown in Mesa Verde but not unknown to certain officials in the United States government. A pleasant doctor who only wished to take a little blood… and then disappeared. Suddenly Evan shouted, his cry hoarse, the tears rolling down his face. 'Lyons, where are you? I'll find you!'
In frenzy he smashed his fist through the window nearest him, shattering the glass so that the wind and the snow careened through the room.
The Icarus Agenda
Chapter 37
Varak approached the last of the maintenance hangars in the private area of San Diego's International Airport. Police and armed customs personnel in electric carts and on motorbikes drove continuously through the exposed narrow streets of the huge flat complex, voices and static erupting sporadically from the vehicles' radios. The individual rich and the highly profitable corporations who were the area's clients might avoid the irritations of normal air travel, but they could not avoid the scrutiny of federal and municipal agencies patrolling the sector. Each plane prepped for departure underwent not only the usual flight plan and route clearances, but thorough inspections of the aircraft itself. Furthermore, each person boarding was subject to the possibility of being searched, almost as if he or she were a member of the unwashed. Some of the questionable rich did not really have it that good.
The Czech had casually gone into the comfortable preflight lounge where the elite passengers waited in luxury before takeoff. He inquired about the Grinell plane, and the attractive clerk behind the counter was far more co-operative than he had expected.
'Are you on the flight, sir?' she had asked, about to type his name into her computer.
'No, I'm only here to deliver some legal papers.'
'Oh, then I suggest you go down to Hangar Seven. Mr. Grinell rarely calls in here; he goes straight to preclearance and then to
