Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (10 page)

He got up, walked to the window and stared out at the flowering Atlanta trees, fresh and green in the morning sun.
Yes, on balance, we've been lucky. But now, something alarmingly new.
A brush fire of cases from the mountains of Washington. Maybe more than one brush fire, in more than one place. Too many cases, too fast and too deadly—and the connection with rats and rodents and fleas seemed terribly tenuous. Was it just the sylvan plague they knew? Or something slightly—and murderously—different? This was the question he had sent Dr. Carlos Quintana west to answer, winging his way from Atlanta to the western mountains for the second time in six months.
The right man for the job, Carlos Quintana—an odd, uneasy, little man, the perfect plague hunter, his mind stirring with an ancient, irrational cultural awareness of the imminent presence of Death—

A buzzer on his desk sounded. He took the phone, heard Mandy's voice. "Ted, are you operational?"

"Right. Bring 'em on."

"The President caught an item about that Seattle thing on the morning newscast. He wants to talk to you. Can you stand by at ten-oh-three?"

"Sure. Break in on anybody but Carlos."

"And the Secretary wants a briefing too. He'll be on-line in four minutes."

Ted Bettendorf sighed, loosened his necktie and settled down to the phone.

"La Muerte," the dark-haired man muttered, twisting in the cramped airplane seat and pushing the maps aside.

The woman beside him blinked awake. "Hm?"

"The Death," Carlos Quintana translated. "The word is . feminine in Spanish—isn't that interesting? There are some weird cultural reasons for that, but I won't bore you. Well, she may be female, but she isn't any lady. A lady at least would wear a deceptive fragrance, and this particular sweetheart can't be bothered. She stinks from here to Chihuahua and back."

Monique gave him a level look. "Honey, you're dog tired. Why don't you just lean back and sleep till we get to Denver?"

"Look, I was tired before we started, and I'm going to be a lot more tired before we finish. And how am I supposed to sleep? I keep looking at these maps and the more I look at them, the more this whole business stinks. There's a great big gap in the picture somewhere. We just aren't getting the whole story."

"So what do you think is missing?" Monique said.

The engines rumbled and the plane lurched in some choppy-air as it approached the escarpment of the Rockies. Carlos, who hated flying, clutched his seatbelt and hoped he wouldn't be violently ill right in front of this beautiful, talented woman. When the flight settled down again, he looked at her. "You mean you can't see the gap?"

"Not really. We're certainly dealing with plague, that's clear enough from those first cultures we've run in the Atlanta lab. They just confirm what Seattle and Fort Collins have reported. It's plague all right. A lot more plague than there ought to be."

Quintana snorted. "You might say so," he said. "But where are the rats? Where are the fleas? Doesn't that strike you odd? All this data piling in about a sudden, plaguelike illness, but not one word about rats or fleas."

"We'll find the rats and fleas," Monique said firmly. "They'll be there, don't worry. They always are."

"Maybe so," Carlos said uneasily, "but the pattern's all wrong. Look here." He flattened the maps out on their laps. "We've got the index case way up here in the Northwest, the girl died in the wilderness. Not down in a hospital, mind you. Out in the woods somewhere. She's got to be the index case, because everybody who came close to her has also died. We've got eleven cases so far in the Northwest alone, confirmed or suspicious, nine of them dead, and the Shoeleather Boys up there, along with the State Health Department, have pinned every one of them down to her. God knows what the count's going to be by the time we get to Denver. But no rats, and no fleas. Okay, now look here." The dark-haired doctor shuffled maps again. "We've also got this disaster at this little hospital in Rampart Valley, Colorado. That place was apparently contaminated from top to bottom in about three hours. A very sharp doc there pinned it down, thank God, and got everybody in sight taking prophylactic antibiotics, and even at that we already have five dead out of there by last count, according to our people in Fort Collins, and still no rats, no fleas. ..."

Monique pulled on her lower lip, frowning. "What did that doctor use there? Tetracycline?"

"For the antibiotic? No. Streptomycin and chloramphenicol, together. Full therapeutic doses."

"Both?
And five people still died? But Carlos, that's weird. Those drugs
stop Yersinia.
Unless he started the drugs so late—"

"He started them within an hour after he identified the bug under the microscope, you can't get much faster than that, and the people still died. So maybe you see what I mean about somehow not having the whole story?"

"I'm beginning to see."

"Well, I'm not quite clear yet just
where
that Rampart Valley case came from, but if a bunch of people have brought some plague down from the Northwest to central Colorado, and it's acting like this, we may just have a mess on our hands. Ted said the state of Colorado is already frantic about a publicity leak. This is the peak of their tourist season and one little news story could kill them." Carlos pushed the maps aside with a sigh. "I just hope Ted has gotten things organized out here by the time we arrive. Who are we supposed to meet in Denver? You have that list?"

Monique unfolded a memo sheet. "First there's Roger Salmon from our CDC base in Fort Collins. He's supposed to meet us at the airport in Denver. He's coordinating things, Ted said, already has a crew of Epidemic Intelligence Service people gathered in from Seattle, San Francisco and Mullin, Idaho—"

"Experienced people, I hope," Carlos said.

"Ted said they may be pretty green, but they've got good shoes. Then there'll also be a man up from Albuquerque, name of Bob Romano."

"Right, I've worked with him. Knows what he's doing in a field investigation." Carlos scratched his head. "There was somebody else Ted mentioned just as we left, a funny one, but he thought it might be important. Something about some other town. Somebody named Barringer . . . Farringer . . . ?"

"Barrington," Monique said. "He's a forester."

"A
what?"

"He takes care of trees. In the wilderness. He works for the Forest Service."

"So what are we going to learn from him?"

"I don't know," Monique said. "Maybe something about rats and fleas." Carlos glanced at her sharply, and she shrugged. "One thing, though—Ted said he was living with the first girl before she died."

"Ah, so." Carlos nodded. "In that case, I certainly
will
want to see him, and early on, too. I think maybe you'd better stick around for some of these first meetings, my dear. You're going to need the background as much as we are. And then I think you're going to have your work cut out for you when you get to Fort Collins."

"So do I," Monique said soberly. "If these little bugs they've been collecting for me are as nasty as they sound, we're going to need a full-scale hot microbiology lab to play with them. We are, that is, if we want to find out how these
Yersinia
are different from ordinary plague bugs—and how to stop them. . . ."

Like ships passing in the night, the Boeing 747 carrying Chet Benoiiel south from Denver to Atlanta whispered past the Eastern DC-10 carrying Carlos Quintana north from Atlanta to Denver a little bit before midnight. Neither man had ever met the other. Neither one would have wanted to.

Chet squirmed in his seat in the almost empty first-class cabin, trying somehow to get comfortable. A large-boned, beefy man of thirty-five, he was not built for air travel, and this trip had been a disaster from beginning to end. First that godawful bush flight by Lear Jet across the north slope into Kotzebue; the ten hours' wait there, in the heat and mosquitoes and the stink of rotting fish, for the Wienie-Bird flight down to Anchorage and on to Seattle; and the fast briefing meeting with Carey at Sea-Tac before he ran to catch the Continental flight to Denver, rush-rush all the way. And then, to top it off, that goddamned kid they'd planted right beside him in the first class Denver flight, because they'd overbooked the coach section and the kid said he was sick—acted it, too, for God's sake, coughing in his face all the way to Denver and gasping like a fish out of water—he should sue that goddamned airline for dumping that kind of company in his lap, practically. Then fourteen hours' bloody delay in Denver getting aboard this
crate—fourteen hours—
just because some crazies had called the airport and said a bomb was on board, and the airline didn't have another seat unbooked for the next two days. He'd almost called for a company plane, but decided he'd better not. There wasn't any emergency, after all; the meeting in Savannah

wasn't scheduled until day after tomorrow and the board was very picky about any exotic spending right now.

Chet coughed, trying to clear a frog from his throat that just wouldn't go away. All the sitting in airports and airplanes had made his muscles ache—his neck, his back, his legs. He'd put down quite a few double Scotches during the layover in Denver—nothing else to do, for God's sake—and his head was throbbing on account of it. Well, maybe a hair of the dog—he flagged the tall black stewardess for a double Scotch and sipped away at it, staring out the window at the darkness.

At least, he reflected, the meeting in Savannah was going to be worth every minute of the nasty trip. Ever since he'd first started with Sundown Explorations, ten years ago, he'd been waiting for a chance to really gig those Big Oil Bastards and now at last the time had come. Sundown had always been a little outfit. A very sharp outfit, what Chet liked to think of as Quality—but being small, they'd always had to pick up the crumbs after the Big Bastards had finished stuffing themselves. Take what the Big Boys couldn't be bothered with, lick their plates after them and pretend to like it. Well, no more—all that was going to change. Because by great good fortune and some clever detective work, Sundown now had the goods on the Big Bastards involved in that Upper Yukon Shelf ripoff, clear proof of the biggest exploration fraud that had ever been pulled in an industry where fraud was a way of life. A word from Sundown could blow the lid off the whole stinking mess and cost those Big Bastards multibillions in taxes, multibillions in penalties, multibillions in consumer reimbursements.

Of course, Sundown had no intention of blowing the whistle on anybody. They had the goods locked away in seventeen different strongboxes. They also had that whole south Wyoming field locked up tight, proven solid-gold, to provide for cash flow and security. All they had to do was go to a meeting in Savannah and tell those Big Oil Bastards just how things were going to be cut up. Give them plenty of time to think it over— maybe forty-eight hours. All the time they'd need to figure out how badly they wanted to make Sundown rich.

"You don't have to sell them anything, or ask for anything, or substantiate anything," Carey had told him at their hasty meeting in the VIP lounge at Sea-Tac airport a few hours before. "You're just the bright-eyed boy bringing them the information we promised; other than that, you don't know nothin'. Your company just wants to make sure they have this information before they make any important policy decisions on the Yukon Shelf, that's all. And if a single one of them looks crosseyed at you, you get up and walk out. If anybody says one word you don't like, you say 'Thank you, gentlemen,' and leave, right then—and you don't go back. We've got them by the balls this time, Chet. All you've got to do in Savannah is acquaint them with that fact. We'll do the twisting from this end."

Chet coughed suddenly and explosively, choking on his drink and knocking it onto the floor. When the black stewardess stooped down to clean it up, he leaned very close, pretending to help, suddenly aware of her light fragrance.
Might just make a play for this little honey,
he thought,
if I could get her to go on to Savannah with me. Talk about nice. And I haven 't been laid for a week.
He coughed again. When she brought him a new drink he tried to engage her in a little light chitchat, but she didn't seem to rise to the fly.
Oh, well, the hell with her. Plenty more where I'm going, and once the meeting's over, there '11 be plenty of time for fun and games.
He thought of the condo at Hilton Head, the big pool and the golf course and the lush company suite on the twelfth floor, and that sweet little beauty he'd met in Savannah the last time he'd been there. Maybe he'd give her a jingle after the meeting and see if she had some spare time. They usually had some time for a weekend at that condo, with its high ocean view, and the best goddam food they'd ever eaten, and all the booze and snow they could ever hope for, and a little high-quality entertainment thrown in—he shifted in his seat in anticipation. Matter of fact, maybe he'd call that girl tonight, after he'd gotten a little sleep and before all the suckers started turning up for the meeting. They could just buzz off to the condo for dinner and a few hours to get reacquainted. He coughed again and pulled on his drink, beginning to feel downright feverish.

In Atlanta, however, Chet's connecting Delta flight to Savannah turned out to be overbooked, and he was bumped onto a flight that left forty minutes later. By oddest coincidence, the tall black stewardess rode in the seat he'd had reserved as she deadheaded home to Savannah.
Serve the fat bastard right to have to sit and wait a while,
she thought bitterly. He was just one too many white men mentally undressing her in the past forty-eight hours.
Let him sit and rub his crotch,
she thought. And coughing right in her face, too. The girl shivered. You'd think even a slob like that would try to do something about his breath.