Breathless (24 page)

Stepping into the kitchen, he found the wolfhound sitting at the open pantry. At first there was no sign of Puzzle and Riddle, but then from the pantry appeared a white furry arm ending in a coal-black hand that offered a Ritz cracker slathered with peanut butter.

For a dog his size, Merlin routinely accepted any treat with a gentleness that was surprising, taking it with soft lips and quick tongue, never with a rudeness of teeth, finessing it from fingers instead of snatching. He accepted the Ritz cracker with his usual good manners.

As the dog munched the cracker and lavishly licked his chops, he turned his head to Grady. His expression suggested that henceforth his dad could sleep late every morning while his new best friends whipped up breakfast.

When Grady peered into the pantry, he discovered Puzzle and Riddle sitting on the floor as they had sat on the sofa the previous evening, not like dogs or even like prairie dogs, but as if they were human children. Their legs were straight in front of them.

Between her thighs, Puzzle held an open family-size jar of Skippy peanut butter. Riddle took a cracker from the Ritz box and passed it to her.

Reaching into the jar with her right hand, Puzzle scooped out a gob of Skippy’s finest. She smeared it on the cracker that she held in her left hand.

She returned the cracker to Riddle. He fed it to himself with his left hand while he plucked another cracker from the box with his right.

The fur around their black lips remained remarkably free of peanut butter; however, golden cracker crumbs littered their white coats.

“I’m surprised you’re not having some grape jelly with that,” Grady said.

The two astonishments looked up at him, smacking their lips with satisfaction.

“Sorry if you prefer chunky peanut butter. I’m afraid I only have smooth.”

In unison, the pair cocked their heads, regarding him as though he was the most peculiar creature they had ever encountered.

Grady stepped past Merlin and into the big pantry. He bent down to take the cracker box from Riddle and the jar of Skippy from Puzzle.

Although they didn’t attempt to hold fast to their treasures, they made soft sounds of dismay, a sort of warbling-mewling, and Riddle put a hand on Puzzle’s shoulder as if to comfort her.

Grady said, “If you’ve really moved in, like Cammy thinks, I guess I’ll have to monkeyproof the house.”

He snared the lid of the Skippy jar and took everything into the kitchen. He put the lid on the peanut butter, closed the box of crackers, opened a lower cabinet door, and dropped both items into a small trash can.

When he turned around, the two were sitting in the middle of the floor, intently watching him. Riddle continued to smack his lips, and Puzzle had three fingers in her mouth at once, assiduously cleaning away every trace of Skippy. They appeared to have brushed the cracker crumbs from their chest fur.

In the open pantry, Merlin sniffed the floor with the enthusiasm of a bloodhound, licking up the debris.

“The cracker box is still nearly full,” Grady said, “so I assume you only had a few. You still get kibble. But I’ll have to look into fitting out the pantry with a titanium-steel vault door with a laser scanner that reads my palm print.”

He rinsed the three drinking bowls and filled them with fresh cold water. Then he dished up three servings of kibble and placed them side by side on the floor.

As before, Puzzle and Riddle followed Merlin’s lead, sitting in
front of their bowls, waiting for the word from Grady—“Okay”—that formally announced
Breakfast is served
.

While the three pals ate as if they had never in their lives encountered peanut butter, Grady put a filter in the coffeemaker. From a can, he spooned enough Jamaican blend to make ten cups.

He heard a noise at the back door. Turning, he saw Merlin and Puzzle waiting while Riddle, standing on his hind legs, worked the knob with both hands.

Evidently, Riddle had already disengaged the deadbolt with the thumbturn. Now the latch bolt released and the door eased open.

Riddle dropped onto all fours and pushed the door out of his way. He scampered onto the porch, followed by Puzzle and Merlin.

Stepping to the window, Grady watched as the quick pair led the wolfhound across the yard to the taller meadow grass. Only the night before, Merlin had shown them that the meadow, rather than the lawn, was an appropriate toilet.

Grady went to the open back door and worked the thumbturn a few times, extending and retracting the deadbolt. The lock was simple to operate. No degree in engineering was required.

He couldn’t remember for sure, but they probably had seen him use the thumbturn.

At the coffeemaker again, he poured ten cups of water into the reservoir, put the glass carafe on the warming plate, and twisted the brew switch.

Returning to the window, he saw the three pals chasing around the yard: bounding exuberantly this way and that, tumbling, rolling, up and running again.

“Maybe if you watch me do it at dinner tonight,” Grady murmured, “you can have coffee ready for me in the morning.”

L
amar Woolsey took an early-bird flight out of Las Vegas and landed in Denver in time for a late breakfast, which he did not get to order, let alone eat, because two men were waiting for him when he came off the enclosed jet bridge into the terminal. They were in the area from which, since September 2001, everyone except airport personnel and ticketed passengers was excluded.

The moment that he spotted them, Lamar knew they were waiting for him. They had a look with which he was familiar: fully ready but pretending weariness, vigilant but feigning indifference. One of them had a hands-off cell phone, shaped like an ocarina but hardly bigger than a peach pit, hooked over his right ear.

Out of courtesy, so they would feel that their plainclothes disguise was effective, Lamar looked away from them and continued walking until the one without the cell phone called his name. Then he halted, turned to them as they approached, and said, “Ah, you must be with the conference.”

The one with the cell phone said, “No, sir,” and with a gesture
encouraged Lamar to step out of the flow of disembarking passengers.

Neither of them spoke the name of his agency, but when they flopped open their ID wallets, Lamar wasn’t surprised to see that they were with the Department of Homeland Security: Derek Booker, Vincent Palumbo.

“I assume I won’t be able to keep my commitment to speak at the conference.”

Encouraging Lamar to walk with them, Palumbo said, “No, sir, you won’t. The organizers have already been told you’ve got to withdraw from the program due to a sudden illness.”

“What illness might that be?” Lamar asked.

“It’s not been specified, sir. That’s up to you.”

“I’ll use my imagination. I’m quite imaginative. Maybe it’ll be a tropical parasite with outrageous symptoms.” Lamar carried only his laptop. “I’ve got a suitcase coming through on the luggage carousel.”

Booker said, “We don’t have time for that now, sir. Feldstein will bring it to the site no more than an hour after we’ve gotten you there.”

Lamar didn’t bother to ask them the location of the site. They wouldn’t tell him in public, lest they be overheard.

They escorted him to a locked service door where someone waiting on the farther side opened it in answer to Palumbo’s brisk knock.

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.”