“She was not unconscious when she went into her building,” al-Hassan replied. “Our leader will not like the possibility she told him of Peru.”
Griffin shot back: “I’ve got to say it again, al-Hassan, too many unexplained deaths and killings can draw a lot of attention. Especially if Smith’s told anyone about the attacks on him. The boss could like that even less.”
Al-Hassan hesitated. He distrusted Griffin, but the ex-FBI man could be right. “Then we must let him decide which course of action he likes least.”
Bill Griffin felt a weight lift from him. Not all the way off, because he knew Smithy. If Jon even suspected that Sophia’s death was not an accident, he would never back off. Still, Bill hoped the hardhead would believe she had made a mistake in the lab, and the attacks on him had no relation to her death. When there were no more attacks, he would give it up. Then Smithy would be out of danger, and Griffin could stop worrying.
__________
In the tile and stainless-steel autopsy room in the basement of the Frederick hospital, Smith looked up as pathologist Lutfallah stepped from the dissecting table. The air was cold and singed with the stink of formaldehyde. Both men were dressed completely in green scrubs.
Lutfallah sighed. “Well, that’s it, Jon. No doubt at all. She died of ” a massive viral infection that destroyed her lungs.”
“What virus?” Smith’s masked voice demanded, although he was pretty sure he knew the answer.
Lutfallah shook his head. “I’ll leave that part to you Einsteins at Detrick. The lungs and almost nothing else… but it’s not pneumonia, tuberculosis, or anything else I’ve ever seen. Swift and devastating.”
Smith nodded. With a giant effort of will, he blanked his mind against who was lying cut open on the stainless-steel table with its channels and slopes to catch blood. He and Lutfallah began the grim business of collecting tissue and blood samples.
__________
Only later after the autopsy was finished and Smith had taken off his green cap and mask and gloves and scrubs and sat outside the autopsy room alone on a long bench did he let himself grieve for Sophia again.
He had waited too long. He had let his excited chase of science and medicine around the globe keep him away too much. He had been lying a to himself that with Sophia he was no longer a cowboy. It was not true. Even after he had asked her to marry him, he had still left her for his pursuits. And now he could not get that lost time back.
The pain of missing her was sharper than anything physical he had ever felt. With a rush of aching comprehension, he tried to come to terms with the fact that they would never be together again. He leaned forward, and his face fell into his hands. He yearned for her. Thick tears poured through his fingers. Regret. Guilt. Mourning. He shook with silent sobs. She was gone, and all he could think about was that his arms ached to hold her one more time.
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CHAPTER
NINE
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9:18 A.M.
Bethesda, Maryland
Most people think of the behemoth National Institutes of Health as a single entity, which is far from the truth. Set on more than three hundred lush acres in Bethesda, just ten miles from the Capitol’s dome, the NIH consists of twenty-four separate institutes, centers, and divisions that employ sixteen thousand people. Of those, an astounding six thousand are Ph.D.s. It is a collection of more advanced degrees in one location than most colleges and some entire states are able to boast.
Lily Lowenstein, RRL, was thinking about all that as she stared out her office suite’s windows on the top floor of one of the seventy-five campus buildings. Her gaze swept over the flower beds, the rolling lawns, the tree-rimmed parking lots, and the office structures where so many highly educated and intelligent people labored.
She was looking for an answer where there was none.
As director of the Federal Resource Medical Clearing house (FRMC), Lily was herself highly educated, well-trained, and at the top of her profession. Alone in her office, she stared out at the prestigious NIH, but she did not see the people or buildings or anything else. What she was actually seeing and thinking about was her problem. A problem that had grown almost imperceptibly over many years until it weighed her down like the proverbial thousand-pound gorilla.
Lily was a compulsive gambler. It made no difference what kind; she was addicted to them all. At first she spent her vacations in Las Vegas. Later, after she took her first job in Washington, she went to Atlantic City because she could get to the tables faster. She could play Atlantic City on weekends, or on a single day off, or even a one-night stand in recent years as the compulsion grew with the size of her debts.
If it had stopped there— casino gambling and an occasional trip to the track at Pimlico and Arlington— perhaps it would have remained a minor monkey. It would have been annoying, draining away her good salary, causing rifts in her family when she canceled visits and failed to send Christmas or birthday presents to her nieces and nephews. It would have left her with few friends, but it would never have grown into the terrifying beast she now faced.
She placed bets by telephone with bookmakers, placed bets in bars with other bookmakers, and, finally, borrowed money from those who lent money to faceless, frantic souls like herself. Now she owed more than fifty thousand dollars, and a man who would not give his name had called to tell her he had bought up all her debts and would like to discuss payment. It shot chills up her spine. Her hand shook as if from palsy. He was polite, but there was an implied threat in his words. At exactly nine-thirty she was to meet him at a downtown Bethesda sports bar she knew only too well.
Terrified, she had tried to figure out what to do. She had no illusions. She could, of course, go to the police, but then everything would come out. She would lose her job and probably go to prison because, inevitably, she had cut a few corners in buying office supplies, and she had pocketed the difference. She had even dipped into petty cash. That was what compulsive gamblers did.
There were no more friends or family who would lend her money, even if she were willing to let them know she had a problem. One of her two cars, the Beemer, had been repossessed, and her house was mortgaged to the maximum. She had no husband, not anymore. Her share of her son’s private school tuition was in arrears. She had no bonds, no stocks, no real estate. No one was going to help her, not even a loan shark. Not anymore.
She could not even run away. Her only means of support was her job. Without her job she had nothing. She was nothing.
__________
From a rear booth in the sports bar, Bill Griffin watched the woman enter. She was about what he had expected. Middle-aged, middle-class, almost prim, nondescript. A few inches taller, maybe five-foot-nine. A few pounds heavier. Brown hair, brown eyes, heart-shaped face, small chin. There was a certain telltale carelessness about her clothes: Her suit bordered on shabby and did not fit as well as it should on the director of a big government facility. Her hair was ragged, and her gray roots were showing. The gambler.
But she was also a shade haughty as she stood inside the door looking for someone to come forward and claim her, the sign of the middle-rank bureaucrat.
Griffin let her stew.
Finally he stepped out of the booth, caught her eye, and nodded. She walked stiffly past tables and booths toward him.
“Ms. Lowenstein,” he said.
Lily nodded to control her apprehension. “And you are?”
“That doesn’t matter. Sit down.”
She sat, nervous and uneasy, so she went on the attack. “How did you find out about my debts?”
Bill Griffin smiled thinly. “You don’t really care about all that, Ms. Lowenstein, do you? Who I am, where I got the debts, why I bought them up. None of it matters a damn, right?” He gazed at her trembling cheeks and lips. She caught his look and stiffened her face. Inwardly he nodded. She was terrified, which made her vulnerable to alternatives. “I have your markers.” He watched her brown eyes as they shifted uneasily. “I’m here to offer you a way to get out from under.”
She snorted derisively. “Out from under?”
No gambler cared much about simply erasing debt. Gambling was a compulsion, an illness. Debt was an embarrassment and danger, but it had little impact until it meant the tracks, the bookmakers, anyone who ran a game would refuse to let you play without cash on the table. Griffin knew Lily was in a daily scramble to come up with enough to place more than a five-dollar track bet.