Germ

Julia turned also. A half dozen people had come through a door at the end of a Quonset hut and were streaming toward the gate.

"That's the Quonset Tate said the stairs were in," she said.

Stephen brushed by her.

"Wait!"

But he was gone, around the container and jogging down a small hill toward the huts. She started after him, then stopped when one of the guards raised his submachine gun. She yanked her pistol out of her waistband. She had the guard's head in her sights when he slipped away. She watched him apparently decide that the fleeing workers knew something he didn't. He turned and trotted through the gate, machine gun bobbing on its strap at his side. His buddy watched him go, then followed.

Stephen intersected the group of evacuees. He reached out, grabbed two handfuls of white lab coat, and lifted its occupant off the ground. He spoke, the man shook his head no, and Stephen dropped him on his backside. He snagged another man, got another negative response. She couldn't make out his words, but she knew the theme: Where's my brother?

Cautious—more cautious than Stephen, at least—she started for him. She kept her gun at her side and her finger flat against the trigger guard.

His latest captive pointed and must have indicated knowledge of Allen's location; Stephen swung the hapless soul around like a doll, clasped him in a headlock, and marched him toward the Quonset door.

Julia picked up her pace.

Suddenly from behind one of the other Quonsets stepped Atropos. He saw Stephen and his captive go through the door and started after them. Julia raised her weapon, taking aim at the killer. Another group of people came out the door, blocking her shot. Atropos was almost there. She raised her aim and shot the light fixture hanging over the door.

Atropos spun, backing away as he did, quick as a cat. He pivoted his left arm up and immediately squeezed off a round into a woman who had darted in front of Julia. The people broke into a dance of frenzied activity and hysterical screams. Two more Atroposes came around a corner. They reached their brother and advanced toward her as one. She ran to the side of the Quonset, running toward the rear with all of her strength, hoping they didn't reach the corner behind her too soon.

ninety-four

Heart blockage in the early stages of Ebola infection is a blessing. It saves the patient from the agony of feeling his organs melt away, of watching his flesh blister, swell, and split, of hearing his own screams until his throat wears out or fills with blood and bile. It comes from the same well of good fortune that drowns a man before he is eaten by sharks, or poisons a spy with a capsule of strychnine under the tongue before his enemy breaks out the tongs and cattle prods.

Allen Parker's heart was granting him this mercy—winding down, responding to the Ebola virus, which was attacking and short-circuiting the electrical impulses of his atrioventricular node. His breathing became shallow and labored. But the pain continued. His hands, which had been roaming his body looking for a way to snuff the fires that scorched him in a thousand places, slowed and stopped.

And with each minute, his heart dropped a few more beats, until—

No pain. Just like that, it was gone.

The little man in Stephen's grasp had stopped squirming

and now walked obediently ahead of him. With each explosion—

reaching them as muffled thunder and the trembling of the staircase they descended—Stephen thought he was going to bolt. But they were heading down into the subterranean complex, and the man wanted out of it—a direction Stephen blocked.

At the base of the staircase, his unwilling guide stepped up to a black tile in the wall, and the metal entry door clicked open. The man tugged at it and stepped into a poorly lighted corridor.

Stephen's nostrils flared at the redolence of earth and dust. He looked for signs that the corridor was dangerous, then stopped looking; safe or not, he was going in.

The man marched stiffly until they reached an intersection. He paused and selected the right-hand passage. They approached a door with a small square window showing brighter light on the other side. Before reaching it, they turned down another corridor.

Stephen, his big paw clamped around the back of the man's neck, gave him a shake. "No tricks."

"Please . . ." the man said. He pointed weakly in the direction they were heading. Finally he stopped in front of a door.

"Open it," Stephen commanded.

The man threw back a rusty bolt, turned the door handle, and dropped straight to the floor, out of Stephen's grasp. He rolled away, stood, and ran.

"Hey!" Stephen took two steps toward him, stopped. He looked back at the door. Light from inside sliced into the corridor from a thin breach. He pushed on the door.

A cardiac monitor's C-sharp rhythm of ventricular fibrillation struck him like a bad smell: heart failure on the brink of flatline.