Pandemic

"Fucking excellent, Haldane! But unlike those vacuous weak-kneed lasses back in Geneva, your movie-star looks are wasted on me." He burped. "I'd trade ten of you in a heartbeat for Maggie."

Haldane laughed. "How many years?"

"Twenty-four. We were just children, Haldane." McLeod looked over to him. "Still, no regrets. She's great, my Margaret. She raised the boys and put up with this" — he thumbed at his chest—"without ever complaining. And we can still laugh about it all. You can't ask for much more than that in a marriage."

Haldane shrugged.

"I can't anyway." McLeod squinted at Haldane, and then he pointed a swaying finger at him. "But you and your wife live the fairy tale, don't you?"

Haldane didn't reply. Instead, he reached for his glass.

"What?" McLeod's wild eyes went wider. "Trouble in Camelot?"

"Maybe," Haldane said noncommittally.

"Another man?" McLeod asked.

"Sort of," Haldane said, deciding not to elaborate.

"Ach, shite!" McLeod dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "Affairs aren't usually the problem."

"Oh, really?" It came out a touch more defensively than Haldane had intended.

"It's a symptom, Haldane. Like a bad sneeze from a virus," McLeod said, nodding in agreement with himself. "You don't treat the symptom, you treat the disease."

Haldane shook his head, less than delighted at the comparison of his wife's infidelity to a sneeze or a head cold. He drained the last of his vodka and changed the subject. "Duncan, they're calling it the 'Gansu Au."'

"Catchy."

"A bigwig from the States just phoned. She wanted to know if we had contained it."

McLeod put his glass down. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her it was too early to say, but it looks like the spread has stopped. In this city, at least."

"You know what, Haldane?" McLeod said as he held up three more fingers for the waiter. "I know we have to wait a few more days to find out, but my gut tells me it's contained here."

Haldane stared at his colleague. "So you think we've seen the end of ARCS?"

"Haldane…" McLeod ran a hand through his tangled spears of red hair, then he put the glass down and eyed Noah with a deadly sober expression. "God help us if we haven't!"

CHAPTER 15

ROYAL FREE HOSPITAL, LONDON, ENGLAND

Staring down at her unconscious four-year-old daughter, Alyssa, the lump cemented in Veronica Mathews's throat. Tubes and lines hooked Alyssa to machine after machine as if suspending her from a nightmarish, high-tech spider-web. Her bluish-tinged skin had grown translucent. Her angelic face had gone sallow. Her cheeks seemed to have lost their padding, inverting to hollows overnight. Under the sheets and blankets, her little chest heaved up and down with each breath the ventilator wrestled to push in and out of her waterlogged lungs.

Garbed in mask, shower cap, gown, and surgical gloves, Veronica sat as she had for most of the last forty-eight hours hunched over the railing of her daughter's bed, clutching Alyssa's cool hand. She had stayed at the bedside since the moment Alyssa was rushed into the Royal Free Hospital's Accident and Emergency, the British version of an E.R. In the past two days, Veronica had slept for only minutes at a time. She hadn't eaten at all. But she had no intention of moving. She was not going to leave Alyssa. Ever.

It had happened so quickly. Alyssa had developed a fever and a cough two days earlier. Just a run-of-the-mill cold, Mathews had thought at the time, but within twelve hours of the first cough, her four-year-old was gasping for air. Then she turned dark blue.

Now her baby lay comatose in a pediatric ICU bed, struggling for life with a double pneumonia that left the specialists bewildered. At first they had thought Alyssa might have SARS, so unusual were the many blotches on her chest X-ray. But the blood tests had ruled it out. The doctors told Veronica that they suspected Alyssa might be suffering from severe complications of the flu, but they admitted that they did not know with certainty. As a result they were taking no chances, insisting that all staff and visitors use the same precautions as had been employed with the SARS outbreak.

The sterile physical barriers between Veronica and her daughter — her only allowable physical contact was through two pairs of latex gloves — compounded her helplessness. Veronica was tempted to rip off her mask, cover her daughter's brow in kisses, and rub noses the way they had the other times one of the girls was sick. It was only the warning that such contact might lead to spread of the infection to her five-year-old daughter Brynne that stopped Mathews from breaking the strict contact precautions.