“So you start looking at how the person you’re treating might’ve acquired it. Where’s he been lately? Who were his contacts? You maybe hit on another case that can be linked to him, you can pretty much surmise the sickness is communicable. The next step is to figure out its vectors. How it’s spreading. Whether it jumps from rodents to people. Or rodents to insects to people like bubonic plague. Or gets passed directly from person to person. Name your route. The main thing is that once the information’s in your pocket, you’re on the way to finding your germ. And then you can maybe come to terms with it. Figure out how to deal with the thing.” He looked from Megan to Pete. “You see where I’m coming from?”
The other two were nodding, Megan with her eyebrows raised.
They sat in pensive silence again.
Then, from Nimec: “Where do we start?”
Scull turned sideways in his chair and rapped his fist on the wall.
“Right here, Petey. UpLink HQ,” he said. “Where the hell
Palardy was dreaming he was in the hospital. Or at least he thought it was a dream. It was hard to tell sometimes what was real and what wasn’t. Like the day he’d gone into Gordian’s office with the syringe. That had seemed as if it was a dream, too. He remembered how he’d seemed to be floating in space as he walked through the door, his sense of unreality. Of being inside and outside himself at once. And that was how he felt now. So maybe it was all in his mind. Not just the bad things that had happened to him lately, the things he’d done, but everything since Brazil. The gambling, his selling those blueprints to the space station facility to make his vig, his wife leaving him… and then back to the U.S.A. and more bets, more shylocks, more betrayals demanded of him and carried out. All a dream, every minute of it. Every hour, day, week, and month, right up to and including his coming down with the sickness. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life was…
Life…
Was life. Or something like that.
In the dream he’d been slipping into and out of tonight, these latest installments of his dream of life, or life of dream, whatever, he was in a hospital bed, tucked between clean sheets, feeling loads better. The fever was gone. Gone, the glands in his throat swollen to the size of golf balls. And the heaves and coughs and the blood that had started coming out of him with the coughing, red streaks in his phlegm, then clots, streaking the sink when he spat into it, darkening the water of his toilet, staining the bowl even after he’d flush and flush and flush…
Gone, all gone. Pain and trouble down the drain. The doctors had treated him, the nurses were tender and attentive, and he was comfortable, on the way to being cured. And whenever he opened his eyes and found himself back in his apartment, lying alone in his bed, twisted up in his soiled, wet, stinking sheets, his head on a pillow soaked with bloody discharges from his nose and mouth, whenever he’d opened his eyes and seemed to wake alone, so alone, Palardy would force himself back into that other place, that place of comfort, where the physicians were skilled and the nurses were kind, and he was getting better, so much better, in a warm, clean bed. And then the only thoughts to disturb him would be about the message in a bottle, the riddle sent to himself and not to himself, so people would be able to figure out what happened to him in case anything bad did happen.
That message, that payback, that whopping fuck-you to his betrayers… the problem was that it could come right back at him, be a disaster for him if things turned out okay and he recovered, if it was found before he got released from the hospital to intercept it.
Definitely a thought to intrude on his peace of mind, intrude on his dream, jolt him back to the lonely reality of the apartment where he lay wretched and shivering and very possibly dying in his own bodily filth.
In fact, it was pulling him back there right now, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Because in the present snippet of his dream of sweet mercy and healing, a nurse had been about to care for him, quietly entering his room, softly coming around his bedside, and oh, and oh, and oh, although he couldn’t quite see her features, Palardy was sure she was beautiful, like his wife on their honeymoon, when they’d made their first baby, beautiful like his wife, and he didn’t want to leave her, he didn’t want to…
Palardy opened his eyes. Unsure of his bearings, his sense of place confused. He seemed to be back in his apartment, in his moist and jumbled bed. Sometimes it was hard to be positive on awakening. The shades were drawn to keep the sun from lancing into his eyes. The lights were out for the same reason, that terrible pain in his eyes. The room was so dim, it was hard to know. But he thought he was in his apartment. Awake now. And yet he still had the feeling somebody was with him, near his bed.
He blinked rapidly. If this was his own place, if he was no longer in the dream, then nobody belonged inside it except him.
Who could be…?
Suddenly afraid, Palardy struggled to lift himself on his elbows, craning his head from side to side.
Initially, he thought the man standing to his left was disfigured. His face smashed and flattened. Then he thought his eyes still might be blurry with sleep, and blinked some more to clear them.
And then he realized the man was wearing a mask.
A stocking mask.
His fear mounting exponentially, Palardy summoned what little strength remained in his body and raised it higher off the mattress.
And was shoved back down by a black-gloved hand on his chest.
The hand held him.
Pressed hard against his ribs.
Kept him from moving at all.
He tried to speak but could only groan through his scaled, blue lips. Then tried again as the man’s free hand reached into a pouch or a bag on his belt… reappeared with something that finally unlocked his vocal cords…
“Who?” he managed. “Why…?”
Palardy would die without an answer to the first question.
As for the second, his conscience had already answered it for him.
SEVENTEEN
From Reuters Online:
Web Posted at 1:14 p.m. PST (2114 GMT)
Ms. Breen offered no specifics about Gordian’s condition and present location but added that he was fully alert and had expressed his eagerness to return to work.
The billionaire defense contractor and communications entrepreneur became the subject of ill-health rumors when information surfaced yesterday that he had unexpectedly canceled several meetings with key Senate and business leaders…
After hearing Lieberman summarize Roger Gordian’s symptoms and lab results over the phone, Eric Oh, his colleague at public health, became concerned enough to ask him to fax over the case report the instant they hung up.
Oh waited at his machine, plucking each page out of the tray as it was transmitted. His hurried reading
