Germ

"Isn't there something else we can do?"

She thought for a moment. "Call the airport. Find out which flight will get us closest to that town. Use a pay phone up the street, not in the hotel."

"Pedro Juan . . .?"

"Caballero," she said, rolling over, pulling herself into a ball. "Wake me at eight."

seventy-three

Stephen woke her precisely at eight, anxious to do

something—anything—that brought them closer to their goal of getting Allen back. By 8:20, they were sitting in the restaurant of the hotel in whose parking lot they'd spent the night. They'd washed up in the restrooms off the lobby, and now Julia used a cloth napkin to finish drying the nape of her neck and behind her ears. She'd ordered a breakfast similar to the one she'd had nine hours earlier in Chattanooga. This time Stephen had also ordered a substantial meal.

"It's a long way from here to there," he said, unfolding a map of the Western Hemisphere he had purchased in the gift shop while Julia was catching a few extra winks. He arranged the map so the eastern seaboard down through South America was centered on the table, and tapped the tip of his forefinger on Atlanta. "We have to be at the airport at 11:50 this morning."

"That's cutting it close." She'd woken with the skeleton of a plan rattling around in her head. They'd have to move quickly to get everything done in time.

"That's the last flight of the day for any airline." He ran his finger south to Sao Paulo, Brazil. "As it is, we don't get in till after midnight.

Tomorrow morning, we catch a commuter flight into Pedro Juan Caballero. Be there 'bout noon. Then we'll have to travel to wherever it is they took Allen." He shook his head, discouraged. "That's a long time for them to have him. According to the SATD, Atropos's plane made it in under ten hours. If it takes us half a day to find him, he'll have been there almost two days."

Julia frowned. "Half a day to find him may be optimistic."

"But you said—"

"We'll find him. It just won't be easy." She examined the map. It really was a long way. Farther, even, than Europe, though she'd always thought of South America as a near neighbor.

The waitress came and left, leaving their breakfast plates scattered across the Caribbean and Venezuela.

"How about chartering a jet?" Stephen suggested.

"The passports Sweaty's getting us will look great. They'll get us past busy airline clerks who are really checking for the destination country, but charter companies are very careful. They have to be, with pirates out there wanting to take their planes and terrorists looking to bypass airport security. I don't think our passports will work with them, and then we'd really be up the creek."

He nodded, solemn. "We're not going to miss that flight," he said firmly. He scooped an entire fried egg into his mouth and still had room to say, "So what's your plan?"

Allen lay on his side, his knees pulled to his chest, his arms hugging his legs. A metal crossbar pushed up through the green canvas of his cot, making his ribs ache. It was the least of his problems. A long time ago—hours? days?—when the sun had been high and hot, the guards who'd thrown him in the cage returned. They'd dragged him out, hauled him into a Quonset hut and down several flights of stairs, through dingy corridors to this room, this cell. Eight feet by eight feet, at best. The cot was bolted to the floor. A plastic wash bucket was his toilet. Wire mesh protected fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. There was no light switch; the tubes had burned bright white since his arrival.

The guards had stripped off his soiled clothes and left a khaki jumpsuit. People had peered through the window in the door and occasionally brought in water or a plate of inedible slop.

The first unattributable pain he noticed was in his eyes. They felt swollen, the eyeballs themselves stretching and pushing against the ocular sockets. The headache came next, a throbbing that picked up pace until it became a never-ending pressure. His vision blurred. His bowels cramped. His muscles arched. His fingernails hurt.

When two guards had pulled him from the cage, they might as well have worked a knife blade into his shoulder socket, the pain had been so great. Regardless, he had writhed around as if in the throes of a panicked escape attempt. Unable to break free, he had lunged for the ground, pulling his escorts with him. His face had struck the dirt. He found the tracking device with his lips and pulled it into his mouth. As the soldiers had forced him up, he swallowed.

It was still inside him, and he wondered if it was working. Certainly, the thing wasn't designed for such abuse. He had thought about what to do later and decided he couldn't risk being separated from it. He would have to swallow it again.

He thought about Stephen. He'd be hounding Julia to find him. He hoped she had understood his message and followed through with sending the data to Kendrick Reynolds. They would need all the help they could get to rescue him.