Panacea (35 page)

And that gave Nelson an idea.

“Once we get to France, give me all you've got on this deputy sheriff.”

France … he really should be headed back to New York and Sloan-Kettering …

But damn the tumors, primary, metastatic, and otherwise, the final phase was going to need his personal touch, more than a little micromanagement.

After all these years of frustration, he sensed they were approaching the home stretch and he wanted to be in on the kill.

And it
would
be a kill—multiple kills.

The Leviticus Sanction was overdue for a workout.

 

THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER

 

1

Damn-damn-
damn!

Steven glanced at the clock/radio/iPod port next to Marissa's bed:
1:08
. Add six hours and that meant it was seven
A.M.
in Paris. Another three hours before Laura landed and he could get hold of her.

Marissa coughed again, and once again Steven laid a hand on her forehead. He didn't need the thermometer to know she was burning up, but he grabbed it and pressed it against her forehead anyway. He checked the readout:

102.4°
F
.

Christ! He'd given her Tylenol about an hour ago but it hadn't dented the fever one bit.

Okay. He couldn't take this anymore. Brookhaven Medical Center was just up the road. He'd take Marissa to the emergency room there and have her checked out. He didn't know how Laura would react to that, exposing her to a roomful of sick people and all, but he saw no other option.

Nurse Grace had said it looked like an everyday virus, and maybe it was. But the cough bothered Steven—that and the fever he couldn't break. What if it was pneumonia? What if the fever kept going up?

Throughout Marissa's life he'd deferred all medical questions and decisions to Laura—so comforting to have an expert on the premises or available at all times—but now she was thousands of miles and a number of time zones away, and incommunicado to boot. He felt totally at sea, with no land, not even a marker buoy in sight.

He needed help—now.

He pulled out his phone, speed-dialed Laura's cell, then listened to her outgoing message.

“Hi, this is Laura. I'll state the obvious: I can't answer right now, so leave a message and I'll get back to you ay-sap.”

After the beep he said, “Laura, it's me. It's one
A.M.
and Marissa's burning up. I can't break her fever so I'm taking her up to Brookhaven where they can check her out. I know you won't get this till you land. Hopefully everything will be squared away by then and we'll be back home. Call me back right away. Talk to you soon.”

He knew she was waiting for test results on Marissa's blood so he had no doubt she'd check her texts and voice mail as soon as she landed.

Marissa stirred as he bundled her in her bed comforter and carried her downstairs.

She opened her glassy eyes and said, “Mommy?”

“No, it's Daddy, sweetie.”

But oh, man, does Daddy wish Mommy were here.

 

2

Bradsher turned on his phone as soon as the plane's wheels squeaked on the Charles de Gaulle runway. Nelson glanced at his watch. He'd set it back to Paris time immediately after takeoff. It read 9:03—they'd landed two minutes early.

A long flight. The Company had managed to snag two first-class seats on the last Alitalia jet out of Ben Gurion. It involved a two-hour layover in Rome, but it did land them an hour ahead of Fanning. Nelson had wanted to arrive first, and here he was.

Bradsher leaned close and whispered, “Monitoring reports that the doctor's husband left her a voice mail. The child's fever is up and he's taking her to the emergency room.”

Not good, Nelson thought. But nothing that couldn't be remedied.

He'd had the techs leave Fanning's voice mail only half blocked: People could leave messages but she could not access them. When she checked she'd hear, “No new messages.”

Incoming calls to her home number and her husband's cell were being monitored. Any call originating from France, or any European country, for that matter, would trigger an uncompletable-call message. Any calls to her phone from the U.S. would receive the same message.

Text messages would be blocked in both directions and rewritten accordingly.

“Erase it,” Nelson said.

“Will do. Want to substitute something?”

Nelson knew they had the technology to perfectly duplicate the pitch and tone of any voice over the phone. But nuances of speech and inflection were something else. An ersatz message might pass muster between acquaintances, but not spouses. Fanning and her husband might be divorced, but they'd known each other too long for Nelson to trust synthesized speech.

“No. Just make it disappear. If the child is fine and returns home, we'll unblock everything and they'll chalk up the missing message to a tech glitch. But I don't want any distractions getting in her way. I want her
focused
.”

“Got it.”

He watched Bradsher's thumbs fly as they tapped out a message.

“Where to next?” Nelson said when he finished.

“We have a car meeting us. We'll head south to a place called Ballainvilliers. It's about an hour's ride, more or less, depending on the traffic. We have a farmhouse there.”

Nelson knew all about the farmhouse. The Company had crammed it with monitoring equipment so it could keep tabs on various radical Islamist groups in and around Paris, and on a few choice French officials as well. That hadn't been enough to stop the
Charlie Hebdo
and the subsequent massacres but it would allow Nelson to monitor Fanning's movements.

“What about living quarters?”

“We use the Relais des Chartreux Hotel on the border of Ballainvilliers and a neighboring district, Saulx-les-Chartreux. We have reservations. If you want to stop there first…”

“I would. We have an hour before Fanning lands. I'd like to be settled in by the time she does.”

Nelson let Bradsher take the lead on an expedited trip through customs, then through the airport to the ground transportation area where a black Mercedes sedan awaited them. Once they were settled in the rear and the driver had them on their way, Nelson removed a sheet of paper from his computer case. He'd written a password on it. He handed it to Bradsher.

In answer to the agent's questioning look, he said, “Guard dog.”

Bradsher looked puzzled for an instant, then his eyes widened. “I've been cleared?”

“I would think the answer to that is obvious, don't you?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“But wait until later to read it.”

Pickens hadn't officially cleared Bradsher yet, but Nelson had no doubt he would. The Company found the episode embarrassing, and with good reason, so it restricted access. But Bradsher would be dealing with the man—indirectly and, inevitably, directly soon enough—so he deserved to know what he was up against.

But Bradsher wouldn't be alone on the learning curve. Nelson was working on a way to inform Fanning of her guard dog's true identity. His original plan was to get the same information into the hands of a certain Suffolk County deputy sheriff and have him tell her. But with her phone blocked to calls and voice mails from the States, that wasn't going to work. No worry, he'd come up with a way.

As they drove through Paris, Nelson was only dimly aware of the mix of the familiar and unfamiliar—something called Flunch followed by a McDonald's, and then a KFC followed by a Pomme de Pain. He began to feel strange. A slight nausea. He'd never been prone to car sickness, but this could be what it felt like.

Eventually they came to a low-slung hotel behind a high hedge. He was aware of a red canopy emblazoned with
Relais des Chartreux Hotel
. He began to notice wavy lines of light sparkling in his peripheral vision as he found his room and keyed open the door. Bradsher said something to him as the door closed but it seemed to come from down a long hallway.

The sparkly lights brightened until they consumed his vision. He felt his body shaking like a sapling in a storm, and then the world exploded.

 

3

“You have no new messages.”

Laura ended the call and tapped her phone against her thigh as the plane taxied to its gate.

Okay. She'd expected that. It was four
A.M.
back home and no news was definitely good news in this case. The only reason Steven would call her was if Marissa had taken a turn for the worse. She imagined them both sleeping soundly—Marissa in her bed and Steven, all uptight and worried he'd miss something, snoring in a chair in her room.

No text from Grace either, but she hadn't expected one. Way too early for PCR results. Polymer chain reaction tests weren't like a CBC or a glucose; they took time. But the CMV PCR result was what Laura most wanted to hear.

Negative … please be negative.

“Wow,” Rick said, staring at his phone.

“What?”

“Long-winded message from Stahlman. Better listen for yourself.”

“Bad news?”

“Not at all. Just something he could have said in two or three sentences.” He tapped his phone's screen. “Here. Let me replay it.”

She put it to her ear and heard Stahlman's voice.

“Good morning, Mister Hayden. I trust you had a comfortable flight. After our conversation last night, I rattled some cages on this side of the pond and had contacts wake up a few people over there. It seems the fellow you'll want to speak to is an historian named Jacques Fontaine at Université
de Toulouse-Le Mirail, but he won't be available until tomorrow.

“Not wanting to waste time, I gave the matter some thought and realized that a shooting star is prominent in the tattoos, so why not combine astronomy and Gaul and see if there was a comet or meteor shower that had some significance back in those days.

“So I've contacted a certain Doctor Simon Duval of the Paris Observatory and put him on retainer to help in any way he can. However, although the observatory itself is in Paris proper—on the Left Bank, as a matter of fact—anyone you might wish to talk to is rarely there. All the astronomers cluster in a satellite campus in Meudon, a suburb on the exact opposite side of Paris from the airport. It's only a five- or six-mile trip, so you should be able to cab there with no problem. Call me after you've spoken to Duval.”

Laura handed the phone back to Rick.

“Gonna save this one,” he said, tapping the screen. “I'll never remember those names and places.” He turned to her as he stowed it in a pocket. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Wanna talk to an astronomer?”

What she really wanted to do was sleep. Turning this way and that in an airport lounge was no way to get a restful night's sleep. She'd managed to doze during the flight, and though the first-class seats were wide and reclined almost flat, nothing beat a bed.

“Do I have a choice?”

“You're the boss. You look beat.”

“I
feel
beat. Why don't
you
look beat? Oh, wait. I know. How did you put it? You can doze off anywhere, anytime, in any position. Your SEAL training, right?”

“Right.”

This was not the time or place, but she was determined to call him on that before the day was up.

“Let's get it over with,” she said. “I just hope I can stay awake while he's talking.”

“I'll keep nudging you.”

“As long as it's just a nudge. No more of that thigh stuff.”

“Sorry. Didn't know any other way to keep you quiet without Mister Shin Bet knowing.”

“What made you think you had to keep me quiet?”

“People being interrogated don't realize how much they give away in what they consider innocent chatter. You think you're making idle conversation, just filling in the uncomfortable silences that interrogators purposely leave, but all the while you're giving away the farm. Best course is a short, to-the-point answer. Or if you've got to talk,
you
ask questions. Interrogators hate that.”

“And you know this how?”

“SEAL training, what else?”

She balled her fists. Soon, Mr. Haddad or Mr. Hayden … very, very soon …

 

4

Where the fuck was Laura and why the fuck wasn't she answering her phone?

Steven was ready to hurl his cell across the emergency department. Either that or scream. But that would frighten Marissa.

He looked at her, supine on the gurney, an IV running into her left arm, sound asleep but restless. Every so often she'd have a coughing fit.

He'd seen the concern in the ER doc's face when he'd told him she'd had a recent stem-cell transplant. He'd ordered blood work and a chest X-ray.

In the meantime Steven had left Laura three voice mails and hadn't heard a word back. Maybe if he texted—

“Glad you're here.” The ER doc was stepping through the curtains, his expression grim. “We're going to have to move your daughter.”

“You're admitting her? Is that necessary?”

“Afraid so. The X-ray shows pneumonia. But Brookhaven isn't the place for her.”

He felt his blood turning to ice. “What? I don't…”

“A regular child, no problem, but an HSCT patient…” He took a breath. “She needs a PICU.”

His numbing brain took a few seconds to process the familiar acronyms: human stem-cell transplant … pediatric ICU …

“ICU?”

“Your daughter is a sick little girl. I called her oncologist and he wants her in Stony Brook Children's. They have all the pediatric subspecialties she's going to need.”