patient.”
Dean felt the knife jab his arm.
Needle, not a knife.
Thick needle, attached to a small vial.
“Damn!” he yelled, pulling himself upward.
“Sorry. I’m slightly out of practice,” said an apologetic voice next to him.
Still unsure where the border between sleep and consciousness was, Dean pulled himself upright.
“Grab this one,” said Kegan, holding out the test tube to Lia.
She took hold of it. It nearly slipped through her latex-clad fingers. The man at his side had slid another tube into the needle; blood was thumping into it.
“Mr. Dean, my name is Dr. Lester. I work for the CDC. I’m a disease expert. Well, that’s what my job description says. I kind of ended up a bit of a jack-of-all-trades.”
“What do I have?”
“We’re going to find out. For now I’d like to hear your symptoms.”
“Stomach feels like crap. Head’s light. I have — I had a fever.” Forgetting his other arm was attached to an IV, he started to raise it to his head. The bag jostled on its holder nearby and he stopped. “I think I have a fever.”
“Actually, we just took your temperature and you’re pretty close to normal.”
“Pretty close,” sneered Lia.
“Does this have to do with Kegan?” Dean asked.
“Let me finish taking the blood and then run the tests. We can talk when I’m done,” Lester said.
“How many days is that gonna take?”
“Just a few minutes. I’ll say one thing: your agency has some amazing resources.”
Dean grunted. Lia came over and propped a pillow beneath his head.
“No kissing,” warned Lester, his voice suddenly stem. “No body fluids.”
“He’s not much of a kisser anyway,” said Lia.
Dean laughed and realized he was feeling a lot better.
A half hour later, Lester came into the room with a grin on his face. He wasn’t wearing the gloves anymore. Lia, still scowling, curled her arms in front of her chest and fell into a metal chair nearby.
“Mr. Dean, tell me what you last had for dinner,” said the doctor, pulling over the other chair and sitting down.
“Some sort of beef thing with this white gloppy sauce,” said Dean.
“What else?”
Charlie recounted the meal he’d had after Lia picked him up. Potatoes, some horrid cabbage, beer, two pieces of chocolate ganache cake.
“You packed it away,” said Lester.
“I hadn’t eaten for a while.”
“Something you ate gave you clostridial food poisoning and gastroenteritis.”
“And the fever?”
“Part of it, I’m pretty sure,” said Lester. “Unusual, but part of it. I suppose it could be a generic virus, but in any event, I tested you for the synthetic rat-bite fever bacteria and you don’t have it. Neither does Lia.”
Lester explained a CDC team had isolated the bacteria that had sickened Gorman and the other confirmed case in New York. While they still had many more questions than answers, they could at least identify the bacteria by relatively simple tests — thanks to help from Desk Three and the NSA.
“So you can cure it then?” asked Dean.
“Not by a long shot, not yet. Gorman died a few hours ago.”
“How’d he get it?” asked Dean.
“I don’t know. That man you found in Dr. Kegan’s house — did you touch him?”
Dean shook his head.
“Touch the blood?”
“I know better than to mess up a crime scene,” said Dean.
“You could say the same for Gorman.”
“The guy was shot.”
“Yeah, but he had the disease. Or had had it. We’re not sure. There was definitely some of the organism in his blood.”
“He got better?” asked Lia.
Lester shook his head. “We don’t know. Maybe he’s just resistant somehow. It’s possible he got better. So far, the only people whom the disease has severely affected have died. That’s two. We have a bunch more very, very sick. I want to go back over what you found at the house again if you don’t mind,” he added. “Maybe we can figure it out together.”
“You don’t think Gorman just breathed it through the air?”
“Then you’d have it. And everyone who was in the house.”
“How do you get rat-bite fever?” asked Dean.
“Rat bites you.”
“Maybe you’d better check my blood again,” said Lia. “Everybody I work with is a rat, present company excepted.”
56
Johnny Bib waited as the small Bell helicopter hovered over the garage. The door on the left side opened and a bundle was lowered slowly by rope. When it hit the ground, Johnny ran forward, thinking he’d untie it. Instead, the man in the helicopter let go of the rope and it fell down on Johnny’s head as the chopper whirled away.,
This would not have happened to him had he taken his mother’s advice and learned to play the piano when he was five, Johnny thought to himself. It was a mistake he’d paid for all his life.
The bundle proved to be a large duffel bag, so packed that Johnny had to drag it along the ground to get it inside. He found the encrypted phone at the top and dialed into the Art Room.
“It’s Johnny Bib,” he said. “I thought I was going home.”
“Johnny, we have a lot to do,” said Rubens, who was in the Art Room. “You’re already in the house and —”
“There’s no more information here.”
“I’m going to let Chris Farlekas talk to you,” said Rubens. “He may have some ideas.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hi, Johnny. How are you?” said the Art Room supervisor, coming on the line.
“Lousy.”
“Sick?”
“Just lousy.”
“Come now. We need you to be strong.”
Farlekas was fond of “Win One for the Gipper” crap. He didn’t understand mathematicians at all. He probably couldn’t even balance his checkbook.
“Forty-three dollars and seventeen cents.”
“What’s that, Johnny?” asked Farlekas.
“My checking account balance.”
“Uh, okay. Listen, I’m going to put Dr. Chaucer on-line. We had some ideas.”
The line clicked.
