Corridor, stairs down, corridor, corridor, exit door: On the concrete apron, a sedan waited for them. As Booker got in the front passenger seat, Lamar settled in back beside Palumbo. The waiting driver glanced back at Lamar and said, “Feldstein, sir.”
“I’ve got a terrible tropical parasite, Mr. Feldstein, but not to worry. You can’t be infected just by riding in a car with me.”
“That’s good to know, sir,” Feldstein said as he popped the hand brake and tramped the accelerator.
“Is the site in the city?” Lamar asked Palumbo.
“No, sir. We’re flying out from here.”
“To where?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Palumbo’s apparent discretion must mean that the agent hadn’t been told the location. In Lamar’s experience, that was unusual.
“What’re we dealing with this time? Explosives, chemical, biological, nuclear …?
“Sorry, sir,” Palumbo replied, “but I’m really not at liberty to disclose anything.”
Extraordinary. The escorting agents always knew the nature of the threat. Usually they presented a briefing en route.
Two airliners waited on a taxiway to use the runway that was being held clear for Feldstein.
Following the centerline stripe, the young agent drove at such high speed, he seemed to think he was expected to achieve flight velocity.
The executive helicopter was parked at the extreme end of the runway, on the chevrons marking the overrun area. As Lamar Woolsey, Palumbo, and Booker got out of the sedan, the chopper’s rotors began to slice the air, casting scimitar shadows on the concrete.
The three men ducked under the blades, and the agents followed Lamar into the craft as Feldstein drove away.
Palumbo and Booker took the seats nearest the door, and Lamar made his way farther into the eight-passenger craft.
Another man was aboard, ensconced in one of the last two seats.
Lamar sat across the narrow aisle from Dr. Simon Northcott. “I’ve got a terribly vicious tropical parasite. What’s your excuse, Northcott?”
“Food poisoning.”
Belting in, Lamar said, “You lack imagination, my friend. As I’ve noted regarding other issues. Where are you coming from?”
“We took off from my hotel parking lot just minutes ago. I was looking forward to this conference.”
“Well, you never know,” said Lamar. “Maybe this time it’s not just a plot to poison millions. Maybe this time it’s the end of the world, and you wouldn’t want to miss that, would you?”
Northcott’s smile was indistinguishable from any other man’s grimace. He was a good enough fellow and incredibly intelligent, but his sense of humor had atrophied in the Paleozoic Era.
The whine of the engine escalated, and Lamar looked out the window as the pavement fell away.
“How does a bankrupt government,” Northcott said, “pay to have all these cars and helicopters and jets and field labs and swarms of mortician-faced agents standing by 24/7, coast to coast?”
“I’ve heard the secretary of the treasury has worked out a deal to sell the Chinese five Midwestern states, where the people are just too uncool, anyway.”
Northcott didn’t wince a smile, but stared at Lamar as if he might be serious. Crane-tall, hawk-faced, as lean as an anorexic stork, he hunched forward like a vulture on a tree limb. He really wasn’t an actively bad guy, and he truly was incredibly intelligent, but Lamar found him about as likeable as an attack of gout.
“What do they want with you this time?” Northcott asked. “Is it physics or maths?”
“You’re a geneticist and physiologist, so you probably wouldn’t be here if this had anything to do with explosives or chemicals. If they want me on a biological threat, my guess is it’s not physics or maths so much as it is chaos theory.”
If Northcott’s smile looked like a grimace, then his grimace was more like the expression of a man who found a live cockroach swimming in his soup at the very moment he broke a tooth on a ball bearing spooned from the same bowl.
“The butterfly effect, fractals, strange attractors, nonlinear equations—it has a voodoo feel to me.”
“Well,” said Lamar, “the field hasn’t been around half a century yet. When we’ve got a century and a half behind us, if we haven’t piled up multiple irrefutable proofs of basic contentions, I’d agree with you that we should stop calling it science and start calling it religion. And of course we already have quite a lot of proofs we’ve built upon.”
Northcott knew to what the century and a half referred, and he was about to skewer Lamar with pointed words when Agent Palumbo came along the aisle, holding on to the seats on both sides, and went down on one knee in front of them.
“ETA is fifty minutes. The pilot had a sealed directive for me. The site is in an unincorporated rural area in the higher foothills, a private residence belonging to someone named Grady Adams, and with him will be a veterinarian, Dr. Camillia Rivers. Both are witnesses, not suspects at this time. It’s a biological issue, but the decision has been made that decontamination and isolation protocols will not be necessary. The field lab needs only to approximate the sterility of a hospital operating room. Neither airtight nor positive-pressure antimicrobial suits will be required.”
“Then what the hell kind of biological threat would it be?” asked Simon Northcott.
Palumbo corrected him: “Sir, the directive calls it a biological issue.”
Northcott’s face clenched, the high points of his cheekbones and his nose as white as tensed knuckles, the rest of it red. “I’ve been yanked from the conference to be flown off at high speed to consider an issue?”
“Sir,” Palumbo said, “all I can say is, based on my experience, this might not be either a ticking-clock or a doomsday case, but it’s big somehow. Something different and way big. It came up quick, and D.C. calls it a Priority One Incident, which until now has meant only one thing—nuclear detonation imminent. Paul Jardine is on his way to the site now.”
Lamar had met Jardine a few times in the past six years. After the recent reorganization, he had been appointed deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security for the western half of the country, from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
Northcott said nothing more, but he looked neither mollified nor impressed.
