Germ

Gregor looked down with a mild expression of surprise, as though he'd forgotten he wasn't alone. "Soon we will get you out of this sun and into your own bed. If you are fortunate, we may find you a private room." He shrugged. "But no matter, the ward can be pleasant at times. We do try to keep our patients comfortable."

"Why patch me up? What do you care?" Allen gently touched his swollen eye.

Gregor grunted. "Your injuries do not concern us."

"Then what makes me a 'patient'? I'm . . . not sick." Something in his chest shifted. He noted the snot crusting around Gregor's nostrils and suspected his own health had just taken a turn for the worse.

Gregor looked over the compound's seemingly abandoned fields and buildings. He pulled on the cigarette and shot a stream of smoke into the air, then coughed. "We think you are, Dr. Parker. If you are not, then our scientists have failed to do their jobs, and I will suffer this congestion for nothing." He squatted again and squinted at Allen. "And anyway, we promised Atropos a bonus for bringing you here."

"Bonus?"

Gregor waved a hand at him and made a face as though the details were beneath him. "Karl will cover all that with you. After you get settled." He tossed away his cigarette and held the gauntlet in both hands, appraising it.

"This, my friend, is legendary," he said. "The Atropos gauntlet." He turned it to appreciate it from different angles.

"I suppose you vacation at Auschwitz."

Gregor rapped the gauntlet hard against the bars.

Allen watched the tracking device fall from its armhole. It took every bit of self-control he could muster not to follow its trajectory to the ground. Instead, he locked his eyes on Gregor's face.

The German had not noticed. Yet.

Julia woke to find Stephen's yeti-like mug filling her vision. He was shaking her lightly and whispering.

"What?" she said, reaching for her pistol.

"It's beeping. The laptop."

She propped herself up with an elbow and saw she was in the van's rear bed. "How'd I get back here?" Her voice was thick with sleep. She remembered getting into the passenger's seat—and that was all.

"You fell asleep. I moved you."

Without waking her? She must have been exhausted. And he must have been very gentle. Still, it bothered her to know she could be manhandled without her knowledge. She was glad it was Stephen who had observed this weakness in her and not someone else. Like Allen. Behind him, the driver's seat was again flattened into a narrow bed.

"What time is it?" She raised her head to catch a glimpse out the window. She felt every muscle, every tendon. They were in the parking lot of what appeared to be a luxury hotel. Behind its tall facade, the sky was lightening. The laptop, programmed to continuously monitor the SATD transmitter, sat in the captain's chair behind the front passenger seat. And sure enough, it was beeping.

"5:38."

"Oh, man." She dropped back onto the bare mattress, closed her eyes. But the laptop's alarm was going off . . . She had to check into it . . . She had to . . .

Stephen was shaking her again.

"Okay, okay," she said, swinging her legs off the bed and sitting. She moved forward and knelt in front of the laptop as if at an altar. She supposed some people would think it an appropriate analogy, considering her dependence on the fool piece of technology. She forced her eyes to focus on the screen.

"The transmitter has stopped," she said.

"Stopped working?"

"No, I mean they aren't moving anymore. They've reached their destination."

"Where?"

She willed her sluggish fingers to type, instructing the SATD program to fine-tune its calculations, to triangulate the signal with area Global Positioning satellites, to cross-reference the information with every map held in its databases. The entire process took roughly fifteen seconds. She was pleasantly surprised by the SATD's precision, given her lack of detailed international maps.

"They appear to be . . . just northwest of. . . Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay."

"Paraguay? What's in Paraguay?"

"Apparently, Allen is. Does what you know about Paraguay jibe with anything we saw on the videos?"

"I have no idea. I suppose eastern Paraguay could be subtropical. Is that where this Pedro Juan town is?"

She checked the computer map. "Right on the Brazilian border."

"That abandoned base on the video had airstrips."

"There's a town here, almost touching Pedro Juan Caballero, on the Brazilian side . . ." She spoke slowly, leaning close to the screen.

"Yeah?"

"Ponta Pora. Allen said Goody mentioned something with 'pora' at the end of it. He said he thought maybe it was . . . something that had to do with internal bleeding, a rash . . ."

"Purpora."

"What if Goody had learned about Ponta Pora from Vero, and that's what he was trying to tell Allen?" She nodded and crawled back onto the mattress. "We're not due back at Sweaty's for a couple hours. Go back to sleep." When she opened an eye a minute later, Stephen was sitting on the driver's folded-down seat back, staring at her.

"What?" she asked.