Germ

The president glared at the screen for a long time. Except for the rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed heavily, he might have been made of stone—frozen by a sight as hideous as Medusa and her serpentine locks. When he finally turned, gone were the fear and disgust that had marked his countenance since the first video began. The emotions that replaced them were unmistakable: righteous indignation and fierce determination.

Kendrick matched the expression with a scowl.

"Tell me," the president said in a voice of granite, "what do we do to stop this thing?"

seventy-eight

To distract her mind from the aches and stiffness of her body so sleep would come, Julia looked for familiar images in the intricate shadows on the ceiling. They were cast by the streetlamp shining through the lace curtains over their hotel room's window. Slowly her imagination turned the dappled pattern into figures: a grinning devil's face . . . a butcher's knife . . . a fat snake, poised to strike . . . flames . . . A slight flutter of the gossamer curtains gave these last two images eerie movement. She closed her eyes.

Their plane from Atlanta had landed at Sao Paulo's Guarulhos Airport shortly before midnight. By half past, they had taken a cab to one of the glitzy hotels on Paulista Avenue, walked a dozen blocks into seedier streets, and found a small hotel more suitable for vagrants than vacationers. She liked that the cabbie couldn't lead pursuers to them and that the hotel's night clerk was more interested in the tattered girlie magazine on the counter than in who was checking in.

She had calculated the odds of someone being able to track them down along their route to find Allen. It wouldn't be difficult. She had to assume Karl Litt had discovered the tracking device, which meant his people would be laying an ambush for them somewhere between Atlanta and their destination. It made more sense to trap them closer to Litt's headquarters, where his influence and familiarity presumably were greatest. Still, he might expect them to think that way and make his move farther from his home base, hoping to catch them off guard. She was determined not to let that happen. Even here, where it would be easy to let the sprawling Brazilian capital—with eleven hundred square miles and sixteen million inhabitants—lull her into a false sense of anonymity, she had to be on her toes.

Then there was Kendrick. He knew precisely where she and Stephen were heading, and if his purpose for wanting Vero's data was to conceal it instead of to find out what Litt was up to as he claimed, he would be after them as well. She'd risked everything to ask for his help. She didn't want to admit it to Stephen, but she figured they had a slingshot's chance in a gunfight of rescuing Allen without the firepower Kendrick could bring to the table. If he were one of the good guys, she wasn't sure what to expect. Would he threaten Litt into releasing Allen and use diplomatic channels to defeat him?

Litt wasn't a country, though, so what kind of pressure could the United States apply to him and his organization? She recalled a seminar at which the lecturer had pushed the notion that major corporations were the "countries" of the future. As technology made geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries obsolete, the seat of global power would shift from governments to boards of directors. Withholding innovations or using them to gain leverage over others would be the new way of demonstrating might.

By combining the nongeographical and apolitical aspects of a private organization and the militaristic might of a nation, Litt's plans might prove to be a sort of evolutionary bridge to a civilization where the Microsofts and ExxonMobils of the world dictated social policy and law.

She realized her mind had wandered and squeezed her eyelids tighter, until little plumes of red burst forth from the blackness. If beating the bush of hypothesis scared up anything, it was the fact that she knew almost nothing about Litt. Like a child making a monster out of a pile of laundry in the dark corner of her room, she had allowed the mystery of her enemy to grow into an omniscient, indestructible beast. Most likely he was some pathetic terrorist Kendrick Reynolds could squash with one strike from a team of commandos. It was this kind of action she had in mind when she sent Kendrick the chip data.

In a perfect world, she and Stephen would arrive at Litt's headquarters after Kendrick's men had done their thing. She and Stephen would find Allen in a jury-rigged medical tent getting a cursory physical or in some mobile command center being debriefed. They'd be commended for alerting the U.S. government about the terrorist danger; told to forget everything they knew about Litt, Ebola, and rumors of invasion in the interest of national security; and sent home in the belly of a C-130 to get on with their lives.