“Look, I was tired before we started, and I’m going to be a lot more tired before we finish. And how am I supposed to sleep? I keep looking at these maps and the more I look at them, the more this whole business stinks. There’s a great big gap in the picture somewhere. We just aren’t getting the whole story.”

  “So what do you think is missing?” Monique said.

  The engines rumbled and the plane lurched in some choppy air as it approached the escarpment of the Rockies. Carlos, who hated flying, clutched his seatbelt and hoped he wouldn’t be violently ill right in front of this beautiful, talented woman. When the flight settled down again, he looked at her. “You mean you can’t see the gap?”

  “Not really. We’re certainly dealing with plague, that’s clear enough from those first cultures we’ve run in the Atlanta lab. They just confirm what Seattle and Fort Collins have reported. It’s plague all right. A lot more plague than there ought to be.”

  Quintana snorted. “You might say so,” he said. “But where are the rats? Where are the fleas? Doesn’t that strike you odd? All this data piling in about a sudden, plaguelike illness, but not one word about rats or fleas.”

  “We’ll find the rats and fleas,” Monique said firmly. “They’ll be there, don’t worry. They always are.”

  “Maybe so,” Carlos said uneasily, “but the pattern’s all wrong. Look here.” He flattened the maps out on their laps. “We’ve got the index case way up here in the Northwest, the girl died in the wilderness. Not down in a hospital, mind you. Out in the woods somewhere. She’s got to be the index case, because everybody who came close to her has also died. We’ve got eleven cases so far in the Northwest alone, confirmed or suspicious, nine of them dead, and the Shoeleather Boys up there, along with the State Health Department, have pinned every one of them down to her. God knows what the count’s going to be by the time we get to Denver. But no rats, and no fleas. Okay, now look here.” The dark-haired doctor shuffled maps again. “We’ve also got this disaster at this little hospital in Rampart Valley, Colorado. That place was apparently contaminated from top to bottom in about three hours. A very sharp doc there pinned it down, thank God, and got everybody in sight taking prophylactic antibiotics, and even at that we already have five dead out of there by last count, according to our people in Fort Collins, and still no rats, no fleas …”

  Monique pulled on her lower lip, frowning. “What did that doctor use there? Tetracycline?”

  “For the antibiotic? No. Streptomycin and chloramphenicol, together. Full therapeutic doses.”

  “Both? And five people still died? But Carlos, that’s weird. Those drugs stop Yersinia. Unless he started the drugs so late — ”

  “He started them within an hour after he identified the bug under the microscope, you can’t get much faster than that, and the people still died. So maybe you see what I mean about somehow not having the whole story?”

  “I’m beginning to see.”

  “Well, I’m not quite clear yet just where that Rampart Valley case came from, but if a bunch of people have brought some plague down from the Northwest to central Colorado, and it’s acting like this, we may just have a mess on our hands. Ted said the state of Colorado is already frantic about a publicity leak. This is the peak of their tourist season and one little news story could kill them.” Carlos pushed the maps aside with a sigh. “I just hope Ted has gotten things organized out here by the time we arrive. Who are we supposed to meet in Denver? You have that list?”

  Monique unfolded a memo sheet. “First there’s Roger Salmon from our CDC base in Fort Collins. He’s supposed to meet us at the airport in Denver. He’s coordinating things, Ted said, already has a crew of Epidemic Intelligence Service people gathered in from Seattle, San Francisco and Mullin, Idaho — ”

  “Experienced people, I hope,” Carlos said.

  “Ted said they may be pretty green, but they’ve got good shoes. Then there’ll also be a man up from Albuquerque, name of Bob Romano.”

  “Right, I’ve worked with him. Knows what he’s doing in a field investigation.” Carlos scratched his head. “There was somebody else Ted mentioned just as we left, a funny one, but he thought it might be important. Something about some other town. Somebody named Barringer … Farringer … ?”

  “Barrington,” Monique said. “He’s a forester.”

  “A what?”

  “He takes care of trees. In the wilderness. He works for the Forest Service.”

  “So what are we going to learn from him?”

  “I don’t know,” Monique said. “Maybe something about rats and fleas.” Carlos glanced at her sharply, and she shrugged. “One thing, though — Ted said he was living with the first girl before she died.”

  “Ah, so.” Carlos nodded. “In that case, I certainly will want to see him, and early on, too. I think maybe you’d better stick around for some of these first meetings, my dear. You’re going to need the background as much as we are. And then I think you’re going to have your work cut out for you when you get to Fort Collins.”

  “So do I,” Monique said soberly. “If these little bugs they’ve been collecting for me are as nasty as they sound, we’re going to need a full-scale hot microbiology lab to play with them. We are, that is, if we want to find out how these Yersinia are different from ordinary plague bugs — and how to stop them …”

  15

  Like ships passing in the night, the Boeing 747 carrying Chet Benoliel south from Denver to Atlanta whispered past the Eastern DC-10 carrying Carlos Quintana north from Atlanta to Denver a little bit before midnight. Neither man had ever met the other. Neither one would have wanted to.

  Chet squirmed in his seat in the almost empty first-class cabin, trying somehow to get comfortable. A large-boned, beefy man of thirty-five, he was not built for air travel, and this trip had been a disaster from beginning to end. First that godawful bush flight by Lear Jet across the north slope into Kotzebue; the ten hours’ wait there, in the heat and mosquitoes and the stink of rotting fish, for the Wienie-Bird flight down to Anchorage and on to Seattle; and the fast briefing meeting with Carey at Sea-Tac before he ran to catch the Continental flight to Denver, rush-rush all the way. And then, to top it off, that goddamned kid they’d planted right beside him in the first class Denver flight, because they’d overbooked the coach section and the kid said he was sick — acted it, too, for God’s sake, coughing in his face all the way to Denver and gasping like a fish out of water — he should sue that goddamned airline for dumping that kind of company in his lap, practically. Then fourteen hours’ bloody delay in Denver getting aboard this crate — fourteen hours — just because some crazies had called the airport and said a bomb was on board, and the airline didn’t have another seat unbooked for the next two days. He’d almost called for a company plane, but decided he’d better not. There wasn’t any emergency, after all; the meeting in Savannah wasn’t scheduled until day after tomorrow and the board was very picky about any exotic spending right now.

  Chet coughed, trying to clear a frog from his throat that just wouldn’t go away. All the sitting in airports and airplanes had made his muscles ache — his neck, his back, his legs. He’d put down quite a few double Scotches during the layover in Denver — nothing else to do, for God’s sake — and his head was throbbing on account of it. Well, maybe a hair of the dog — he flagged the tall black stewardess for a double Scotch and sipped away at it, staring out the window at the darkness.

  At least, he reflected, the meeting in Savannah was going to be worth every minute of the nasty trip. Ever since he’d first started with Sundown Explorations, ten years ago, he’d been waiting for a chance to really gig those Big Oil Bastards and now at last the time had come. Sundown had always been a little outfit. A very sharp outfit, what Chet liked to think of as Quality — but being small, they’d always had to pick up the crumbs after the Big Bastards had finished stuffing themselves. Take what the Big Boys couldn’t be bothered with, lick their plates after them and pretend to like it. Well, no more — all that was going to change. Because by great good fortune and some clever detective work, Sundown now had the goods on the Big Bastards involved in that Upper Yukon Shelf ripoff, clear proof of the biggest exploration fraud that had ever been pulled in an industry where fraud was a way of life. A word from Sundown could blow the lid off the whole stinking mess and cost those Big Bastards multibillions in taxes, multibillions in penalties, multibillions in consumer reimbursements.

  Of course, Sundown had no intention of blowing the whistle on anybody. They had the goods locked away in seventeen different strongboxes. They also had that whole south Wyoming field locked up tight, proven solid-gold, to provide for cash flow and security. All they had to do was go to a meeting in Savannah and tell those Big Oil Bastards just how things were going to be cut up. Give them plenty of time to think it over — maybe forty-eight hours. All the time they’d need to figure out how badly they wanted to make Sundown rich.

  “You don’t have to sell them anything, or ask for anything, or substantiate anything,” Carey had told him at their hasty meeting in the VIP lounge at Sea-Tac airport a few hours before. “You’re just the bright-eyed boy bringing them the information we promised; other than that, you don’t know nothin’. Your company just wants to make sure they have this information before they make any important policy decisions on the Yukon Shelf, that’s all. And if a single one of them looks cross-eyed at you, you get up and walk out. If anybody says one word you don’t like, you say Thank you, gentlemen,’ and leave, right then — and you don’t go back. We’ve got them by the balls this time, Chet. All you’ve got to do in Savannah is acquaint them with that fact. We’ll do the twisting from this end.”

  Chet coughed suddenly and explosively, choking on his drink and knocking it onto the floor. When the black stewardess stooped down to clean it up, he leaned very close, pretending to help, suddenly aware of her light fragrance. Might just make a play for this little honey, he thought, if I could get her to go on to Savannah with me. Talk about nice. And I haven’t been laid for a week. He coughed again. When she brought him a new drink he tried to engage her in a little light chitchat, but she didn’t seem to rise to the fly. Oh, well, the hell with her. Plenty more where I’m going, and once the meeting’s over, there’ll be plenty of time for fun and games. He thought of the condo at Hilton Head, the big pool and the golf course and the lush company suite on the twelfth floor, and that sweet little beauty he’d met in Savannah the last time he’d been there. Maybe he’d give her a jingle after the meeting and see if she had some spare time. They usually had some time for a weekend at that condo, with its high ocean view, and the best goddam food they’d ever eaten, and all the booze and snow they could ever hope for, and a little high-quality entertainment thrown in — he shifted in his seat in anticipation. Matter of fact, maybe he’d call that girl tonight, after he’d gotten a little sleep and before all the suckers started turning up for the meeting. They could just buzz off to the condo for dinner and a few hours to get reacquainted. He coughed again and pulled on his drink, beginning to feel downright feverish.

  In Atlanta, however, Chet’s connecting Delta flight to Savannah turned out to be overbooked, and he was bumped onto a flight that left forty minutes later. By oddest coincidence, the tall black stewardess rode in the seat he’d had reserved as she deadheaded home to Savannah. Serve the fat bastard right to have to sit and wait a while, she thought bitterly. He was just one too many white men mentally undressing her in the past forty-eight hours. Let him sit and rub his crotch, she thought. And coughing right in her face, too. The girl shivered. You’d think even a slob like that would try to do something about his breath.

  In Savannah the black stewardess caught the limo to the DeSoto Hilton, then walked south along Bull Street in the hot morning sun, through the three graceful plazas to Forsyth Park. From there she angled west into the maze of scruffy tenements toward home — the sad, noisome, rat-infested home she’d been trying to escape for something like a million years, and had never quite made it.

  16

  The flashbulbs and photofloods hit Carlos full-face the minute he stepped off the plane at Stapleton International Airport in Denver — POW! — and he realized instantly that he should have been prepared for it, and like a damned naked baby, he wasn’t. A microphone was shoved into his face, brandished by a wild-looking female. “Dr. Carlos Quintana, CDC?” Yes, yes. “Marge Callum, JTLM-TV News, Denver. Dr. Quintana, what can you tell us about the Black Plague epidemic that’s hitting people, down in Rampart Valley?” Epidemic? My God, woman, what epidemic? There isn’t any epidemic — “Well, there’s plague been reported down there, hasn’t there?” A few cases of plaguelike illness have turned up, yes. It hasn’t been precisely identified — ”But people have been dying from it, haven’t they?” It’s true a few victims have succumbed in an isolated area, but I assure you it’s completely under control — ”Well, if that isn’t an epidemic, how would you define the word epidemic, Doctor?” I wouldn’t, right now, ma’am, I’m trying to get down there to get some information about it — ”Aren’t you the Black Plague expert at the CDC, Doctor?” ***sigh***I’m just a working epidemiologist, ma’am, nothing more, and I’ve got a job to do if you’ll just please let me get past, here — ”Well, Doctor, I’m sure you’re very modest, but we have some viewers who would like to know the facts about what’s going on with this disease.” So would I, ma’am. That’s why I’m here, to dig out some facts, but so far I haven’t made it out of the airport — ”Well, let me tell you right now, Doctor, our viewers are going to recognize a coverup when they see one …”

  Somewhere beyond all the lights and gabbling reporters he spotted Dr. Roger Salmon from the Fort Collins, Colorado, CDC unit, tall, white-haired, horn-rimmed glasses, moving toward him with a couple of burly airport guards on either side. Carlos grabbed Monique by the arm, ducked under the mikes and started plowing through the crowd toward Salmon as fast as his slight wiry frame could manage, sensing bitterly that he’d blown it with that reporter, but not knowing what else he could have done. Trouble was, he never could manage to hold on to his temper or watch his acid tongue; all he’d been taught about handling inquiries gently, instilling confidence, making positive and comforting statements that didn’t sound evasive — all that always seemed to vanish every time he faced one of these hawks with a microphone trying to put words in his mouth. As he moved, with Monique in his wake, other microphones appeared, other bald, unanswerable questions came at him, but he just shook his head and plowed on. At last he reached Salmon, and the guards helped them break free of the pack.

  “Sorry that happened,” Roger said. “They promised us they’d bring the plane in at an alternate gate and announce it just at the last minute, but then they already had a plane there, and we were screwed.”

  “Never mind, just get us somewhere else.” Carlos nodded gratefully to the airport guards. “Almost anyplace else will do.”

  “Well … ” Roger Salmon hesitated. “We’ve been changing our plans by the minute. There’s nothing to do here in Denver, nor Rampart Valley either — I’ve got a dozen people working down there. We need to go to Canon City, south of Colorado Springs. We’ve really got trouble down there.” The man looked very tired and very nervous. “If you aren’t completely pooped out, I’ve got an army chopper waiting for us. We can leave right now.”

  “You’ve got plague in this Canon City?”

  “Twenty new cases in the last twelve hours.”

  Carlos pursed his lips. “Any rats?” he said. “Any fleas?”

  “I wouldn’t know — but there’s a guy down there who’s been doing a lot of legwork for us — ”

  “That would be our forester friend, I think,” Carlos said. “The first one I want to talk to when we get there.”

  17

  In Bozeman, Montana, Harry Slencik walked out on the porch of his little town house and looked at the elderly man sipping beer there. “Hey, Ben,” he said, “did you see that six P.M. newscast last night on Channel 5?”

  Dr. Ben Chamberlain scratched his grizzled beard. “Don’t watch TV much anymore, Harry. Same old crap, day after day. I just kinda eased out of it.”

  “Well, they said there’s some kind of Black Plague going on down in Colorado.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ben shrugged. “They always have a case or two every summer.”

  “But twenty-eight cases in a week? Amy says we ought to be payin’ attention.”

  The old doctor laughed. “Twenty-eight cases I don’t believe, Harry. Far as I know, there haven’t been twenty-eight plague cases in the West in a single year since the 1890s.” The doctor took another sip of beer. “And as for Amy, you can tell her I said we’ve had plague up in those hills above Grizzly Creek since long before we ever built our cabins out there.”

  “You’re kiddin’!” Harry stared at him.

  “Not a bit,” Ben said. “Plague doesn’t hit people, primarily. Never has. It’s a disease of rodents, and it’s passed on from one to the next by the fleas that live on ‘em. The fleas drink infected blood from the rodent, and when the rodent dies of the infection, the fleas go to another rodent, and vomit up some infected blood while they’re biting the new rodent, and it gets infected. People only get it when too many rodents die and the fleas have to look for something else to bite. People will do in a pinch, but the fleas would rather have the rodents.”

  “But we don’t have any rats up in those hills near our cabins,” Harry protested.

  “Not city rats, no. But we’ve got pack rats around all the time, trying to get into the cabins in winter. They’re just native wood rats, is all they are. And then there’s the squirrels, and chipmunks, and ground squirrels, maybe rabbits, marmots up in the higher country. There was a case down in New Mexico a few years ago when a couple of kids got fleabites from a dead coyote and came down with plague — I read about it in a journal.”