Pandemic

She laughed. "Who knows? Maybe, she's right," Gwen said, taking the weight off her foot by leaning against a chair. "Maybe I am overreacting."

Clayton shook his head. "You're doing your job, Gwen."

She nodded. "Something very strange is going on with this bug, Alex. I know it. I wish I were closer to the action."

He laughed. "Hey, that's my line! You sound like a washed-up ex-field operative."

"I just wish I had more to go on." She frowned. "Speaking of which, anything new on that missing lab equipment in Africa?"

"Our people are still looking into it, but I wouldn't hold my breath." He snapped his fingers. "I think it's gone."

"I don't like the sound of that," she said. "Any more cell chatter?"

"Just the usual." Clayton reached forward and brushed his hand against her wrist. In spite of the light contact, Gwen sensed his strength and confidence. She couldn't deny the sexiness of the gesture. It had been too long since she experienced anything akin to physical warmth.

"We still on for tonight?" he asked.

"Alex, I would love to—"

"Oh, no! You're canceling, aren't you?" Clayton covered his face in mock mortification. "It's prom night all over again. I'm going to wind up taking my mom out for sushi, aren't I?"

"Alex, I want to," she said. "But I'm not going to be in town tonight."

"I should have guessed." He shook his head and laughed. "You're flying to London, aren't you?"

YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

Clayton had it almost right. Gwen was going to London but not until the next morning. In the meantime, she had one interstate trip to make before heading overseas. The Lear jet flew her from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to Tweed-New Haven Airport in less than thirty minutes. The waiting car drove her directly to the Yale campus.

It was after six o'clock when the car pulled up in front of the pharmacy research laboratory, but even in the dark the sight conjured up a wave of memories. Gwen hadn't been back to the lab in more than fifteen years, but like everything else she had seen of Dr. Isaac Moskor's life the building hadn't changed in the interim.

Most of the building was dark, but behind the top row of translucent windows, the lights of Moskor's lab burned brightly. After clearing security at the front door, Gwen headed up the stairs to the fifth-floor lab. She rang the doorbell. The metal door opened, and on the other side stood her mentor, looming larger than life. His white hair was tousled, and his thick-framed glasses askew. His lab coat had black streaks and patches on it. He looked as if he had just slid out from underneath a car whose transmission he had been adjusting. Gwen recognized the disheveled appearance and the burning determination in his eyes. It meant Moskor had been wrapped up in an experiment of one kind or another. It meant he was happy.

"I get to see you twice in a month?" he grunted in his low-pitched Jersey accent. He shot her a crooked grin. "You get yourself fired or something?"

She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around the bear of a man. "Isaac, it's always a pleasure to see you."

"You too, kid," he said, breaking off the embrace. "Come see the old lab."

She followed him down a corridor into the main room of the laboratory. Along the back wall a row of cages rattled when she stepped into the room. Gwen remembered how the male rhesus monkeys always used to hoot and shake the cages when strangers, especially females, entered the room.

She might as well have stepped back into her postgraduate days of the late eighties. Most of the equipment was the same — lab tables, fridges, animal cages, and incubators — but there were new computers and other high-tech pieces of equipment scattered through Moskor's large lab. The sights, sounds, and smell of the place made Gwen realize how much she missed the milieu. The rewards of being a top-level government scientific administrator suddenly paled in the presence of the indescribable rush that came with the search for scientific truth, or even just the possibility of it, palpable in the air of her old research lab.

Moskor led her over to a row of microscopes on the table. "Gwen, you got to see this!"

Gwen leaned over the first microscope. She peered through the eyepieces and rolled a knob until the slide came into focus. The field lit up like a fluorescent green fireworks display. Between the luminescent areas were several dark cells. "African green monkey kidney cells?" Gwen asked without looking up.

"Yup."

African green monkey kidney was one of the best culture mediums for growing viruses in the lab. She recognized the bright green as direct fluorescent antibody or DFA staining, which meant that fluorescent-labeled antibodies had latched on to virally infected cells and lit them up in radiant green.

She stood up from the microscope and pointed at the slide. "Influenza?"

Moskor nodded. "An overwhelming infection, as you can see. Now look at the next slide. Same DFA stain. Same source blood."