This was all quite amazing. He'd initiated the research effort in the knowledge that he'd get all or most of this information, but even so, here was in a single day more information than ten people in the field could have gathered—at considerable risk of exposure—in a week. The Americans were so foolish. They practically invited attack. They had no idea of secrecy or security. It was one thing for a leader to appear in public with his family from time to time—everyone did that. It was quite another to let everyone know things that nobody really needed to know.

The document package—it came to over 2,500 pages— would be collated and cross-referenced by his staff. There were no plans to take action on any of it. It was just data. But that could change.

'YOU KNOW. I think I like flying in,' Cathy Ryan observed to Roy Altman.

'Oh?'

'Less wear and tear on the nerves than driving myself. I don't suppose that'll last,' she added, moving into the food line.

'Probably not.' Altman was constantly looking around, but there were two other agents in the room, doing their best to look invisible and failing badly at it. Though Johns Hopkins was an institution with fully 2,400 physicians, it was still a professional village of sorts where nearly everyone knew nearly everyone else, and doctors didn't carry guns. Altman was staying close, the better to learn his principal's routine, and she didn't seem to mind. He'd been in with her for the two morning procedures, and teacher that she was, Cathy had explained every step of the process in minute detail. This afternoon she'd be doing teaching rounds with a half dozen or so students. It was Altman's first educational experience on the job—at least in something that had value in an area other than politics, a field he'd learned to detest. His next observation was that SURGEON ate like the proverbial bird. She got to the end of the line and paid for her lunch and Altman's, over his brief protest.

'This is my turf, Roy.' She looked around, and spotted the man she wanted to lunch with, heading that way with Altman in tow. 'Hey, Dave.' Dean James and his guest stood up. 'Hi, Cathy! Let me introduce a new faculty member, Pierre Alexandre. Alex, this is Cathy Ryan—'

'The same one who—'

'Please, I'm still a doctor, and—'

'You're the one on the Lasker list, right?' Alexandre stopped her cold with that one.

Cathy's smile lit up the room. 'Yes.'

'Congratulations, Doctor.' He held out his hand. Cathy had to set her tray down to take it. Altman watched with eyes that tried to be neutral, but conveyed something else. 'You must be with the Service.'

'Yes, sir. Roy Altman.'

'Excellent. A lady this lovely and this bright deserves proper protection,' Alexandre pronounced. 'I just got out of the Army, Mr. Altman. I've seen you guys at Walter Reed. Back when President Fowler's daughter came back from Brazil with a tropical bug, I managed the case.'

'Alex is working with Ralph Forster,' the dean explained as everyone sat down.

'Infectious diseases,' Cathy told her bodyguard.

Alexandre nodded. 'Just learning the ropes at the moment. But I have a parking pass, so I guess I really belong.'

'I hope you're as good a teacher as Ralph is.'

'A great doc,' Alexandre agreed. Cathy decided she'd like the newbie. She next wondered about the accent and the southern manners. 'Ralph flew down to Atlanta this morning.'

'Anything special happening?'

'A possible Ebola case in Zaire, African male, age eight. The e-mail came through this morning.'

Cathy's eyes narrowed at that. Though she was in a completely different field of medicine, like all physicians she got Morbidity and Mortality Report, and she kept current on everything she could. Medicine is a field in which education never stops. 'Just one?'

'Yep.' Alexandre nodded. 'Seems the kid had a monkey bite on his arm. I've been over there. I deployed out of Detrick for the last mini-outbreak in 1990.'

'With Gus Lorenz?' Dean James asked. Alexandre shook his head.

'No, Gus was doing something else then. The team leader was George Westphal.'

'Oh, yeah, he—'

'Died,' Alex confirmed. 'We, uh, kept it quiet, but he got it. I attended him. It wasn't real great to watch.'

'What did he do wrong? I didn't know him well,' James said, 'but Gus told me he was a rising star. UCLA, as I recall.'

'George was brilliant, best man on structures I ever met, and he was as careful as any of us, but he got it anyway, and we never figured out how that happened. Anyway, that mini-outbreak killed sixteen people. We had two survivors, both females, both in their early twenties, and nothing remarkable about them that we could ever find. Maybe they were just lucky,' Alexandre said, not really believing it. Things like this happened for some reason or other. It was just that he hadn't found it, though it was his job to find it. 'In any case, only eighteen total victims, and that was lucky. We were over there for six or seven weeks. I took a shotgun into the woods and blew up about a hundred monkeys, trying to find a carrier. No dice. That strain is called Ebola Zaire Mayinga. I imagine right now they're comparing it to what this little kid contracted. Ebola's a slippery little bastard.'

'Just one?' Cathy asked.

'That's the word. Method of exposure unknown, as usual.'

'Monkey bite?'

'Yeah, but we'll never find the monkey. We never do.'

'It's that deadly?' Altman asked, unable to hold back from joining the conversation.

'Sir, the official guess is eighty percent mortality. Put it this way. If you pull your pistol out and shoot me in the chest, right here, right now, my odds are better than beating this little bug.' Alexandre buttered his roll and remembered visiting Westphal's widow. It was bad for the appetite. 'Probably a lot better, what with the surgeons we have working over in Halstead. You have much better odds with leukemia, much better odds with lymphoma. Somewhat worse odds with AIDS, but that agent gives you ten years. Ebola gives you maybe ten days. That's about as deadly as it gets.'

11 MONKEYS

RYAN HAD DONE ALL OF his own writing. He'd published two books on naval history—that now seemed like a previous lifetime summoned to memory on a hypnotist's couch—and uncounted papers for CIA. Each of these he had done himself, once on a typewriter and later on a series of personal computers. He had never enjoyed the writing—it was ever difficult work—but he had enjoyed the solitude of it, alone in his own little intellectual world and safe from any sort of interruption as he formed his thoughts and adjusted their method of presentation until they were as close to perfect as he could achieve. In that way, they were always his thoughts, and there was integrity in the process.

No longer.

The chief speech writer was Gallic Weston, short, petite, dirty blond, and a wizard with words who, like many of the enormous White House staff, had come aboard with President Fowler and never managed to leave.

'You didn't like my speech for the church?' She was also irreverent.

'Honestly, I just decided that I had to say something else.' Then Jack realized he was defending himself to someone he scarcely knew.

'I cried.' She paused for effect, staring into his eyes with the unblinking gaze of a poisonous snake for several seconds, manifestly sizing him up. 'You're different.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean—you have to understand, Mr. President. President Fowler kept me around because I made him sound compassionate—he's rather a cold fish in most things, poor guy. President Durling kept me around because he didn't have anybody better. I bump heads all the time with staffers across the street. They like to edit my work. I don't like being edited by drones. We fight. Arnie protects me a lot because I went to school with his favorite

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