No Immunity (4 page)

T
HE RECEIVER WAS SLIPPERY
in Brad Tchernak’s hand. He’d been up all night pacing back and forth across his studio, around the chest press and stationary bike, from the kitchen to the garage door, and for a two-hour stretch he strode along the beach. Kiernan couldn’t be bothered with the Adcock case; and she couldn’t be bothered with him. A perfect match. He’d come to that conclusion a dozen times in the last few hours. Her ethical standards were too pure to take on Adcock? On the gridiron he’d faced off against plenty worse than whatever Adcock was. No problem. Still, now he could hear the crack in his voice as he said to Adcock, “I knew Grady Hummacher—”

“O’Shaughnessy’s the one I want. She charges a bundle, I know that. I’ll pay it, but I’m paying for the best. I don’t deal with underlings.”

Sweat was running down his back. Christ, he had bent over at the line of scrimmage when the disks in his back were bulging so bad the fans in the stands must have seen them, and he hadn’t sweated like this. And as for Adcock, had the guy forgotten Kiernan blew him off? Was Adcock arrogant, or an idiot? He wanted to tell him to go to hell. But this case was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. A big-money case like this could set up Tchernak Investigations. “Kiernan’s out of town—”

“Look, I’ve got a guy missing here. He could be lying dead in the sand by now. I told her—”

“She’s dealing with an epidemic. North of Las Vegas. That’s a no-wait situation. Contagious hemorrhagic fever,” he added. Wouldn’t hurt to lay it on, big-case-like. His brow was sweating like Niagara. Maybe Kiernan was right; maybe he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, not if he went to pieces like this on a phone call. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and breathed in through his nose. He sounded almost normal as he said, “You’re Grady’s boss, that right? He missed a big meeting with you two days ago.”

“Right. If you know Grady, you know that flying close to the edge is his style. But he’s not a flake, and I’ll tell you, this was one helluva vital meeting for him.”

“And for you?”

There was a pause before Adcock said, “Right.”

The sweat all over Tchernak’s body suddenly felt cold, refreshingly cold. Reston Adcock had blinked. “I’m glad to help you, Mr. Adcock. I liked Grady. But I want to be thorough; I’ll proceed as if I were a stranger. I’ll start with what you’ve got in his personnel file. And of course what you know about him yourself.”

Adcock sighed. “I was hoping to get O’Shaughnessy on this right away. Like I said to her, Nevada’s a big, empty state. You make the wrong decision here, you forget what you need, it’s easy to die before someone figures out where you are.”

Was Adcock going to whine about Kiernan forever? “Oil exploration’s no desk job. Grady knows more about survival than ninety percent of mankind. Are you sure—”

“Listen, Grady Hummacher left Panama and arrived back here at McCarran a week ago. Tickets were on the company; I know he used them. He came in Friday. I was out of town till Wednesday. I scheduled him for Thursday at one.”

“He didn’t show?”

“No call, no nothing.”

“You didn’t call him?” Guy like Adcock would be on the horn by one-fifteen.

“Of course I called him. Had my girl try him then, Friday morning and afternoon. I like Grady; I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then I started to worry. Grady could have stopped off, had a couple drinks, made a wrong decision …”

“Adcock, I know what kind of guy Grady is, what he’d do, things he’d rule out by reflex. The guy lived above me for a year. I can …” He forced himself to stop and take another breath. “But if you’d rather wait till Kiernan gets back tomorrow—No, tomorrow is Sunday. Give her till Monday morning to be back in the office—” He could hear Adcock’s breath, a Niagara of its own.

“Yeah, fine, Churner—”

“Tchernak.”

“Yeah. I wait two days, I might as well call the mortician. So, yeah, come. Go through his apartment; think like he thinks, see if you can come up with any lead. Grady’s apartment’s in my name. This is all legal. How soon can you get here?”

Tchernak glanced at his watch. He glanced around the studio he’d lived in for over a year, the first decent place he’d had since he left football, with the first job off the gridiron in which he felt like he was living again. He owed Kiernan a lot. He’d miss her, and—he leaned over and scratched the head of the big dog lying at his feet—he’d miss Ezra.

But it was her own fault, right? Right.

“I’ll catch the ten o’clock flight and be at your office before noon.” He broke the connection, paused, and dialed the woman who took Ezra in emergencies. There was no telling how long he’d be gone.

T
HE AUTOPSY ROOM IN
the Constant Mortuary was suitable for its main purpose, embalming a body for a quick good-bye. On a scale of one to ten, San Francisco ranked about eight, the makeshift facility in Africa one, and this place about three. It didn’t have a dirt floor, and Kiernan felt obliged to give it a point for that. But even the smaller county where she had worked as the forensic pathologist provided a room three times this size, with a fridge room double this, and the freezer where “long-term residents” were kept at ten degrees was as big as this space. Here there was one troughed gurney, one set of sinks, a fluorescent tube on the ceiling, and a rattling exhaust fan that would render the autopsy tape almost inaudible.

She shook out her mask, a plastic apparatus akin to a tent covering face and neck, pulled it and the gloves on, opened the fridge door, and hauled out the gurney. The dead woman lay ashen and half draped on the cold metal.

Unwillingly, Kiernan stepped back against the support of the wall. She wrapped her arms around her ribs as if that could ward off the chill she felt. Ashes to ashes. Cold ashes when the fire is dead.

She clasped her arms tighter, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. The cold. She pushed the gurney back in the fridge, stepped into the hall, and ripped off her gear. She hadn’t felt like this in five years.

The dead woman was nothing like Hope Mkema. The dead woman looked Hispanic; Hope had been African. Here the winter air seemed to float in currents of its own will, circling legs, icing neck, licking her spine. When she had stood over Hope’s body five years ago, in the brick-and-tin hospital in Takema, the West African focal point of the Lassa fever epidemic, her shirt had stuck clammily to her back and sweat rolled so relentlessly down her forehead, she’d given up attempts to wipe it away. Hope Mkema’s skin had been a vibrant brown. She had had huge elfin eyes, high cheekbones in a heart-shaped face, and a wide smile so engaging people smiled back before words were spoken.

The first time Kiernan saw her was at the clearing that served as an airport for the brave. Hope was laughing then. “I understand you are here in spite of the Church. Perhaps I will take your place in Catholic heaven.”

“Not too soon, I hope,” Kiernan had said.

“I’d better not. My country can’t afford to lose one of its women doctors. We’re a rare, if not delicate commodity.” Her cadence suggested schooling in England. It was only later that Kiernan learned how much the village, her family, and Hope herself had mortgaged for her to become a doctor.

Still smiling, Hope had led her to a vehicle that had been rebuilt so often, it was no longer recognizable as a specific make of car. “I won’t ask how many hours you’ve been in transit from India. When you wake up, we’ll talk about that.” She hadn’t asked and Kiernan hadn’t told her why an American doctor who had been fired from the coroner’s office in northern California had gone to India nearly two years earlier, or what she had done before she volunteered at a clinic run by nuns in Maharashta. Or why, when word came of the need for doctors in the Lassa fever epidemic, she had volunteered to fly to West Africa. That day she had been too tired to formulate any answers, and later was thankful not to have to corral her muddled emotions into a manageable line of thought. And even now, years later, she couldn’t have said exactly what drove her toward a project on which three of the ten workers had died. Perhaps after two years of wandering in a strange country trying to banish memories of a life that was no longer possible, the idea of doing something vital, all-encompassing, was worth the chance of the small loss of herself.

When she woke, Hope Mkema had been working. The hospital, a pale brick rectangle filled with moaning patients on pallets on the floor with their families settled around them for the duration, reminded Kiernan of the railway stations in India in which families had lived for generations. The doctors had had to fight to keep even a curtain as a
cordon sanitaire
between the regular sick and those bleeding to death from Lassa fever. Inside the curtain of death, as the patients called it, the scene was different. No comforting relatives offering food and chatter. Here patients’ throats were too sore for water, spiking fevers banished thought, words were replaced with uncontrollable moans. Faces swelled to grotesque masks. Blood oozed everywhere, from gums, noses, eyes.

That was where Kiernan had come across Jeff Tremaine. She hadn’t realized he was on the project, hadn’t heard of him since she finished medical school. It took her a minute to place him, not just because he was here on the other side of the world but because he looked different, older, and strangely alive in a way he had never been in San Francisco.

“As soon as we get the shipment of ribavirin, we’ll be in good shape,” he’d said in lieu of greeting.

Kiernan had looked down at the patient moaning on the bed and known that that shipment would be too late.

Two weeks later the shipment was still behind the lines of guerrillas fighting a hundred miles away.

Two weeks later she had taken blood from hundreds of patients, readying the samples to see which of the feverish, pain-racked sufferers showed antibodies to Lassa and which fortunate ones had similar but nonlethal viruses. The heat was so intense that the fans scalded, and the water, boiled of necessity, never cooled below lukewarm. At dusk the regular twelve-hour day would end, and only emergencies would be treated in the precious light of the generator. Staff members would retreat behind thick mosquito netting, and revive themselves on dinners of barbecued goat and beer, if the refrigerator was working, or a local wine as potent as it was foul. No amount of additives masked the taste. It was destined to survive when all else died out, and they anointed it Cockroach Vineyards Last Squeeze.

At the end of her third week there, dusk had settled as Kiernan finished the frustrating process of taking a complete history of a patient through an interpreter with spotty English, checking for headache, muscle pain, sore throat, bloodshot eyes, bleeding gums, then taking urine and blood samples. The heat was like a leaden robe, making every movement a struggle. She deposited the samples and washed up. The hospital was already in night mode. Her mind was suspended between the case she’d just finished and the cold beer behind the mosquito netting.

“Doctor!” One of the nurses led her past the moaning patients to an elderly, frail woman lying deadly still just inside the main door. There were no frightened, ministering relatives as with most patients. There was no chance of taking a history; that would come later, if the woman survived. In the meantime fluid samples would have to do. Kiernan found a vein on the bone-thin arm, pulled up the blood. Just then the woman went into spasm, flailing arms and legs. The blood-filled needle flew into Kiernan’s arm.

Kiernan yanked it out and flung it to the floor, but of course that made no difference. They all knew what needle pricks meant. They had all seen the progress of Lassa fever—it took no longer than a week and a half to kill its victims. It was Jeff Tremaine who sprang into action. He had raised every hospital in the country on the phone lines. He had gotten the missionary phone-radio circuit humming, and finally tracked down the one batch of ribavirin inside the rebel lines, then spent nearly two days driving to get it.

“We don’t know that the blood I got in that needle prick is Lassa,” Kiernan had insisted when he got back with the vital cargo. She had mouthed the words carefully, sure then that she didn’t have a fever, was merely suffering from the extreme heat. “The old woman is sick all right. But we can’t use our only dose of ribavirin for me when we don’t know—”

“Kiernan, we have no choice.” Jeff was already filling the hypodermic. “We don’t use this, you may die. We wait, you may die.”

“There are people in these wards we
know
have Lassa—”

“Look, this isn’t a political issue, it’s a practical one. If we let our outside volunteer doctors die, we’re not going to get more doctors. Then plenty of local people are going to die because there are no doctors to care for them, no epidemiologists to trace their viruses, no hope of stopping the next epidemic before it spreads all along the trade route.”

“But—”

“It’s not your decision, Kiernan. It’s mine.”

She remembered Jeff Tremaine’s face, neither sympathetic nor angry, merely exhausted. It was Hope Mkema, beside him, who had offered her wide smile, a hand on Kiernan’s arm that reminded her she was still part of the team. Hope administered the shot. Kiernan let her eyes close and relaxed her vigil against the repugnant thought she had kept at bay for forty-eight hours: Even if there was only one dose of ribavirin, she wanted it. She had thought she was willing to die. But death had wrapped itself closer than her skin for two days and now it was all she could do to keep her terror at bay. The next day she lay too feverish to speak, her throat so raw each breath rasped flesh against flesh. And a week later, when her fever broke and she recovered enough to recognize people, she learned she had had an extreme fever that could have killed her, but it had not been Lassa. What saved her she never knew, but it had not been the ribavirin.

She realized they had exhausted the entire supply of ribavirin for her when she saw Hope Mkema. Hope was dying in the next room.

A nurse helped her to the foot of Hope’s bed. She stood staring in disbelief at the fever sweat that glistened on Hope’s skin, the blood that oozed so thickly, it turned her eyes to red patches. The pervasive moaning cut through the lines of educated and illiterate, doctors and patients, and reduced all sufferers to one. Hope’s wavering cry carried away the white coat of protection “Doctor” had promised. The sound flowed from her lips, and it took with it all that she was or had been.