Scull thought for a moment.
“Say you’re a medical sherlock. There’s a disease you don’t recognize, you want to trace its origin, same’s I’d do with some radical political movement in Frickfrackistan,” he said. “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 die information’s in your pocket, you’re on the way to finding your germ. And men 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, PeteyrUpLink HQ,” he said. “Where the hell else but the boss’s home away from home?”
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was dreaming he was in the hospital. Or at least : it was a dream. It was hard to tell sometimes real and what wasn’t. Like the day he’d gone I’s office with the syringe. That had seemed was a dream, too. He remembered how he’d I to be floating in space as he walked through the ; sense of unreality. Of being inside and outside at once. And that was how he felt now. So it was all in his mind. Not just the bad things happened to him lately, the things he’d done, tiing since Brazil. The gambling, his selling nts to the space station facility to make his i wife leaving him… and then back to the U.S.A. ; bets, more shylocks, more betrayals demanded jjjNmd carried out. All a dream, every minute of it. day, week, and month, right up to and in- his coming down with the sickness. Merrily, , merrily, merrily, life was …
[life. Or something like that.
dream he’d been slipping into and out of to- these latest installments of his dream of life, or jNteam, whatever, he was in a hospital bed, tucked i clean sheets, feeling loads better. The fever was e, the glands in his throat swollen to the size “balls. And the heaves and coughs and the blood started coming out of him with the coughing, ; in his phlegm, then clots, streaking the sink |phe spat into it, darkening the water of his toilet, the bowl even after he’d flush and flush and
, all gone. Pain and trouble down the drain. The had treated him, the nurses were tender and at257
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays
tentive, 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 then* first baby, beautiful
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wife, and he didn’t want to leave her, he didn’t ito. –
dy opened his eyes. Unsure of his bearings, his of place confused. He seemed to be back in his in his moist and jumbled bed. Sometimes it 1 to be positive on awakening. The shades were i to keep the sun from lancing into his eyes. The t were out for the same reason, that terrible pain in The room was so dim, it was hard to know, thought he was in his apartment. Awake now. t he still had the feeling somebody was with him, bed.
} bunked rapidly. If this was his own place, if he longer in me dream, then nobody belonged in. except him.