“Now that everybody’s arrived, I think we’d better get the meeting under way,” Megan Breen said. She looked around the large conference table at Nimec, Scull, Ricci, Thibodeau, and finally at the morning’s unexpected visitor. “Alex, it’s good to see you back, these god-awful circumstances aside.”
He gave her a somber but genuine smile. A lean, fit,
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smartly dressed man in his late forties whose corrective laser eye surgery had made his once-familiar wire glasses a memory, Nordstrum had been UpLink’s chief foreign affairs consultant before his retirement for personal reasons the year before.
“I just wish I could have returned sooner,” he said. “Gord’s fighting for his life, and I’m off trekking in Morocco, footloose and oblivious.”
“Bad things can happen, Alex,” she said, “whether you’re here or gone. That’s life.”
“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe I’m finished with being gone.”
Megan’s was less of a true response than a signal she wanted to get down to business. They had much to cover, and the clock was ticking.
“We’ve all seen the information on the compact disk Tom brought back from San Diego, and it’s an incredible amount to digest,” she said. “I’d hoped to organize the material in a report or have something ready on the digital projector. But there wasn’t a chance, so I had to settle for an old-fashioned chalkboard and pointer.” Megan paused and gestured at the transparent clamp binders she’d given to each of them. “As everyone can see, I did manage to make up printed transcripts of the audio portion of the carousel surveillance and the conversation between Quiros and Palardy.”
“We don’t need to get too fancy,” Ricci said. “With what Nameless gave me in Balboa Park, the threads are pretty easy to follow.”
“Some blanks gonna have to be filled in before we can do the boss any good,” Thibodeau said. “Otherwise it une cargaison. Not a cargo, but a load, y’hear what I’m sayin’.”
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Alex was nodding his agreement. “It’s like what I used to drum into the heads of my journalism under- grads. The six questions that are critical to any story,” he said. “Who, what, when, where, why, and how. We’ve gotten partial answers to most of them. We can make some fair guesses about the rest. But we need to find out more. And decide what needs to be found out first.”
“No argument from me,” Nimec said. “But before that, I figure it might pay for us to go through a quick rundown of everything we know.”
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Starting with the blonde.”
He motioned toward the green chalkboard on the wall behind Megan.
Written on it in her hand was:
???
T
Wildcat
T
Melina Laval aka Alison Kerry aka Janet Cardomon (real identity unknown)
T Enrique Quiros
T Donald Palardy
Megan went to the board, lifted her pointer, and held its tip to the line of aliases beneath the second arrow.
“The blonde it is,” she said. “The digital video we acquired from Nameless, as Tom calls him, establishes
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that she gave Quiros what Eric Oh believes to be some sort of activator for the viral agent-”
“This is from Quiros-Palardy, correct?” Nordstrum said. He was flipping through his copy of the transcript. “Apologies, everyone, but I’m still playing catch-up …”
“Yes,” Megan said. “We can guess the conversation occurred when Quiros passed along the activator to Pa- lardy.” She had moved her pointer down one line. “Some of our major unanswered questions still revolve around how Roger contracted the dormant virus and who else might be carrying it. Eric’s working with the Sobel gene tech people to assure that we’ll have a rapid screening test for the germ very soon. It’s frightening to contemplate, but virtually all of us could have been infected … you being the least likely, Alex, having been overseas. Which I hope won’t set you on a guilt jag again.”
He produced another wan smile. “And the activator?”
“A separate problem,” she said. “Unless Quiros was selling Palardy a complete load, we know they can be designed or adapted for individual targets. There were mentions of an ampule and liquid, so the assumption is that it was dispensed with a syringe. Injected into something Roger ate or drank. It would be a huge benefit to obtain a specimen of the activator Palardy slipped Roger. And we’re trying.”
“That what those guys in space suits are doing in the boss’s office this morning?” Scull said.
Megan nodded. “And in the cafeteria, and kitchen, and anywhere else in the building that edibles and drinkables might be kept,” she said. “I had a phone conversation with Eric at the crack of dawn, and he gave me some of the basics of viral biology. Most of it was leagues above my head. This is probably a terrible over382
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simplification, but from what I gather, viruses infect other living organisms by producing molecular proteins that let them fasten on to and penetrate the outer surfaces of the target cells. Eric thinks whoever designed the bug started out with a hantavirus, or something close, and modified it in important ways. We can’t know how many, but one of them allows it to be transmitted to humans by some route other than contact with rodents. Another presumably keeps it quiescent until the activator causes the release of binding and entry proteins. If we determine the activator, the scientists should be able to analyze its chemical makeup and learn what starts the bugs incubating. And how they attack their victims.”
“One thing,” Scull said. “How do we know Quiros didn’t sell Palardy a bill of goods about the activator? Don exposed the boss to it. Now he’s history. And the morgue docs haven’t come up with any results that show violent death. Or poisoning. From what they’ve told us, it looks like his heart gave out from the disease-”
“That’s only half accurate, Vince,” Nimec said. “The investigators know his heart quit on him. Period. There are poisons that can simulate a coronary seizure, and some of them are hard to detect. Especially when the vic’s system is already a mess from his sickness. The toxicologists still haven’t completed their batteries.”
“Even so,” Scull said, “if Quiros wanted him out of the picture, he wasn’t going to warn him about it. No matter what killed Palardy, the fact is he was infected. It could be that the activator’s one-size-fits-all. It could be the virus is what changes from person to person. Or could be neither of them does. I’m not trying to get us confused, but we’ve gotta be careful about our assump-
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tions. It could make a difference, as far as finding a cure for the boss.”
Megan nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “We’re not taking anything for granted. On a kind of reverse track, Eric’s team has already begun tests on Don Palardy’s blood and tissue specimens. And they’re working with Peruvian medical authorities to get hold of any remaining samples taken from Alberto Colon. Once they do a comparison study of viruses that infected and killed them-and we’re really just speculating about Colon on this one, since there’s lots about the circumstances of his death that his government has kept filtered-they’ll know more about the processing mechanism that creates the binder cells.”
“The blonde,” Ricci said. He had been listening silently for a while. “We should get back to her.”
Megan turned to him. “Yes, we should,” she said. “And not just because she’s easy.”
They exchanged glances. She wasn’t smiling. But the flicker of amusement in her eyes told Ricci the pun had been intentional, and he was surprised to realize it had brightened his mood a little.
“Here’s the score,” she said, bringing the pointer up to the board again, moving it between the blonde’s various chalked-on pseudonyms and Quiros’s name. “The Balboa park carousel surveillance obviously ties the woman to Enrique Quiros. But Quiros-Palardy ties both of them to Brazil…. What’s the exact quote in the transcripts?”
Ricci picked up and opened his binder, scanning its pages as he turned them.
“Here, it’s in the middle of page thirty, Quiros talking,” he said after a few seconds. Then he read: ” ‘When
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you wanted money to pay off gambling debts in Cuiaba, you were glad to sell off confidential information about the layout and security of an installation that it was your job to protect.’ ”
“Quote unquote,” Megan said.
“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Small world.”
Her pointer moved up to the second name from the top. “We know Brazil equals the Wildcat,” she said. “That comment alone would give us a clear idea who sent the blonde to Quiros. But we’ve also got what our computers kicked out on her when we layered Profiler over the NCIC database.” She looked at Nimec. “Pete, you were at your computer early doing the search. Might as well give us a summary.”