of surgery had allowed him to put aside the crutches but not the pain.
“Still in the loop, even at NCI?” Freedman asked.
“Trying to be,” he said.
“Thank God there are only four like her.”
“She’s our fault,” he said, and paused to reach down and massage his calf.
“Maybe, but Mother Nature’s still a bitch,” Freedman said, watching him with her hands on her hips.
A small airlock at the end of the concrete corridor cycled them through to the main floor. They were now fifty feet below ground. A guard in a crisp green uniform inspected their passes and permission papers and compared them with the duty and guest roster at her workstation.
“Please identify,” she told them. Both placed their eyes in front of scanners and simultaneously pressed their thumbs onto sensitive plates. A female orderly in hospital greens escorted them to the cleanup area.
Mrs. Rhine was housed in one of ten underground residences, four of them currently occupied. The residences formed the center of the most redundantly secure research facility on Earth. Though Dicken and Freedman would never come any closer than seeing her through a four-inch-thick acrylic window, they would have to go through a whole-body scrub before and after the interview. Before entering the viewing area and staging lab, called the inner station, they would put on special hooded undergarments impregnated with slow-release antivirals, zip up in plastic isolation suits, and attach themselves to positive pressure umbilical hoses.
Mrs. Rhine and her companions at the center never saw real human beings unless they were dressed to resemble Macy’s parade balloons.
On leaving, they would stand under a disinfectant shower, then strip down and shower again, scrubbing every orifice. The suits would be soaked and sterilized overnight, and the undergarments would be incinerated.
The four women interned at the facility ate well and exercised regularly. Their quarters—each roughly the size of a two-bedroom apartment—were maintained by automated servants. They had their hobbies—Mrs. Rhine was a great one for hobbies—and access to a wide selection of books, magazines, TV shows, and movies.
Of course, the women were becoming more and more eccentric.
“Any tumors?” Dicken asked.
“Official question?” Freedman asked.
“Personal,” Dicken said.
“No,” Freedman said. “But it’s only a matter of time.”
Dicken handed the flowers to the orderly. “Don’t boil them,” he said.
“I’ll process them myself,” the orderly promised with a smile. “She’ll get them before you’re done here.” She passed them two sealed white paper bags containing their undergarments and showed them the way to the scrub stalls, then to the tall cabinets that held the isolation suits, as glossy and green as dill pickles.
Christopher Dicken was legendary even at Fort Detrick. He had tracked Mrs. Rhine to a motel in Bend, Oregon, where she had fled after the death of her husband and daughter. He had talked her into opening the door to the small, spare room, and had spent twenty minutes with her, unprotected, while Emergency Action vans gathered in the parking lot.
He had done all this, despite having already contracted Shiver from a woman in Mexico the year before. That woman, a plump female in her forties, seven months pregnant, had been severely beaten by her husband. A small, stupid, jackal-like man with a long criminal record, he had kept her alone and without medical help in a small room at the back of a shabby apartment for three months. Her baby had been born dead.
Something in the woman had produced a defensive viral response, enhanced by SHEVA, and her husband had suffered the consequences. In his darkest early morning vigils of pacing, tending phantom twitches and pains in his leg, alone and wide awake, Dicken had often thought of the husband’s death as natural justice, and his own exposure and subsequent illness as accidental blow-by—an occupational hazard.
Mrs. Rhine’s case was different. Her problems had been caused by an interplay of human and natural forces no one could have possibly predicted.
In the late nineties, she had suffered from end-stage renal disease and had been the recipient of an experimental xenotransplant—a pig kidney. The transplant had worked. Three years later, Mrs. Rhine had contracted SHEVA from her husband. This had stimulated an enthusiastic release of PERV—Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus—from the pig cells. Before Mrs. Rhine had been diagnosed and isolated at Fort Detrick, her pig and human retroviruses had shuffled genes—recombined—with latent herpes simplex virus and had begun to express, with diabolical creativity, a Pandora’s box of long-dormant diseases, and many new ones.
Ancient viral tool kits, Mark Augustine had called them, with true prescience.
Mrs. Rhine’s husband, newborn daughter, and seven relatives and friends had been infected by the first of her recombined viruses. They had all died within hours.
Of forty-one individuals who had received pig tissue transplants in the United States, and had subsequently been exposed to SHEVA, the women at the center were the only survivors. Perversely, they were immune to the viruses they produced. Isolated as they were, the four women never caught colds or flu. That made them extraordinary subjects for research—deadly but invaluable.
Mrs. Rhine was a virus hunter’s dream, and whenever Dicken did dream about her, he awoke in a cold sweat.
He had never told anyone that his approach to Mrs. Rhine in that motel room in Bend had had less to do with courage than with a reckless indifference. Back then, he simply had not cared whether he lived or died. His entire world had been turned upside down, and everything he thought he knew had been subjected to a harsh and unmerciful glare.
Mrs. Rhine was special to him because they had both been through hell.
“Suit up,” Freedman said. They took off their clothes in separate stalls and hung them in lockers. Small video screens mounted beside the multiple shower heads in each stall reminded them where and how to scrub.
Freedman helped Dicken pull his undergarment over his stiff leg. Together, they tugged on thick plastic gloves, then slipped their hands into the mitts of the pickle-green suits. This left them with all the manual dexterity of fur seals. Fingerless suits were tougher, more secure, and cheaper, and nobody expected visitors to the inner station to do delicate lab work. Small plastic hooks on the thumb side of each glove allowed them to pull up the other’s rear zipper, then strip away a plastic cover on the inner side of a sticky seam. A special pinching tool pressed the seam over the zipper.
This took twenty minutes.
They walked through a second set of showers, then through another airlock. Confined within the almost airless hood, Dicken felt perspiration bead his face and slide down his underarms. Beyond the second airlock, each hooked the other to their umbilicals—the familiar plastic hoses suspended on clanking steel hooks from an overhead track.
Their suits plumped with pressure. The flow of fresh cool air revived him.
The last time, at the end of his visit, Dicken had emerged from his suit with a nosebleed. Freedman had saved him from weeks of quarantine by diagnosing and stanching the bleeding herself.
“You’re
