Weapon of Choice (19 page)

Stacy gulped down another sausage and checked her watch, “Mom, I really have to run.” No time now to listen to her mother reminisce about the heartbreaking losses in their lives: Dad and Stacy's two older brothers.

Stacy had changed her departure date, so she had to stop at the ticket counter, but the lines were short. She'd arrived at the airport in plenty of time. Once on the plane she found it half empty, no Thanksgiving rush on Friday.

In Atlanta she had to change planes for another Delta flight to Tampa; she had enough time to call her lab. Someone should be there to assure her that all was under control, that she had no worries other than chasing off to Tampa to see what was going on at
Laura's hospital. She looked forward to seeing Laura and wondered what was wrong with her daughter—which one of the twins? Stacy could never tell them apart despite their distinctly different personalities.

“CDC. Lab Fifty-Two.” The male voice was familiar: Charles. Stacy wished she had reached one of the technicians. She disliked this man at a visceral level and she sensed that the feeling was mutual. Charles always had been civil, she had to admit; her problem was that he did not communicate with her. At issue was the color of her skin—a major obstacle when dealing with white supremacists, which he was. She'd seen the literature on his desk. Organizations that burned churches, set off bombs, condoned these acts of terrorism, and even assassinations. Targets of these hate crimes? Surprise. Blacks. Yes. And also Jews. Homosexuals, too? She wasn't sure. The good news: many of these bigots had been arrested across the South last year. Stacy wanted to believe that the white supremacists' reach had diminished. Or had they just gone underground?

“This is Stacy. Just checking in. How's everything, Charles?”

“Oh, I'm so glad you called in. Thanks.” Charles normally didn't bother to thank anybody for anything. She waited for him to continue, reminded of how much she detested his Georgia drawl. “I didn't know what to do. I'm the only senior scientist on call for the weekend. And I have to go home. I am so sick I can hardly stand. Vomiting and diarrhea. Dehydrated, too. I made myself come in, thinking that maybe I'd feel better, but I'm feeling worse.”

Stacy did think that Charles's voice sounded weaker than usual. His typical tone was petulant, right in line with his wimpy persona. “Okay,” she said, pausing, as she debated what she should do. As far as she knew, he'd never called in sick. Why now? All these circumstances conspiring against her. This was what management was all about?

“Stacy, I don't have anybody to cover here. And the cultures need to be replated. I'll get through them today, but if I'm this sick, I will not be in tomorrow. I have a terrible fever. I don't know when I'll be okay to come back.”

“Shoot. I got called into Tampa on a case or I'd come in.” She didn't say that she was standing at that moment in the Atlanta airport. Priorities filtered through her mind: her job at the CDC laboratories; her promise to go to Tampa; her dedication to Laura.

“I have to go. Bad cramps. I just wanted you to know that I won't be able to come in at least for the rest of the weekend.”

“Okay.” Stacy repeated, then the phone on the other end went dead.

The CDC would be on skeleton staff, but someone in administration would be there to connect her to the technicians in the lab. Because the bacteria they worked on were so lethal, only a highly trained senior-level scientist was allowed inside the incubator or inside the level three PC labs during active biomatter transfer. But the techs would have access to the computer records. If they could confirm that Charles had actually replated the cultures, the bacteria would be good for another twenty-four hours. So if she flew to Tampa, took care of matters there, she could return tomorrow in time to replate the cultures again on schedule.

As she placed the call to the CDC, she wondered how tough it'd be to get a morning flight from Tampa to Atlanta. Delta ran several a day, but could she fly early enough to get her back in time? Worst-case scenario, if she couldn't schedule a flight, she could always rent a car for the eight-hour drive, but with the extra cops on holiday patrols, would have to watch her speed.

Over the airport's speaker system, she heard her flight being called. The CDC office clerk had picked up quickly, but she still was waiting to speak to one of the technicians.

“I just have a minute, so I'll be quick,” she said when one of her favorite techs finally picked up. She explained what she needed them to do and asked if Charles had completed the series of replates.

“Yes, I know, he's sick.” She cut him short. “Tell me about the cultures.”

“Dr. Jones, yes, I have the computer printout. He took care of the cultures.”

“I'll be in tomorrow to do the next plate transfers,” Stacy said, “but it may be late—sometime between three and seven p.m. Can you make sure that I have a tech to help me get set up?”

“I'll stay, Dr. Jones,” the tech said. “Me and the wife are expectin' another baby. I need the overtime.”

F
RIDAY
, N
OVEMBER
29

Charles's boss—before they promoted Jones—had been influential in the creation of The American Biological Safety Association (ABSA). Out of that came the delineation of biological safety levels—BSL—designated BSL1 through BSL4. All federal agencies and university and private laboratories as well as hospitals and industrial complexes that handled pathological organisms now had a framework by which they could protect their workers and the public, as well. The BSL level assignments designate the most dangerous pathogens as four and the least as one, with two and three being intermediate. This classification correlates to the designations P1 through P4, for pathogen protection level, a shorthand understood by personnel at all levels in the field of microbiology.

The exotic staph organisms that Charles's lab handled were potentially lethal. All procedures in the BSL3 classified—P3 Lab—were conducted in laminar flow cabinets with containment hoods and HEPA air filters. Personnel wore full-body protective clothing and gas masks, and stringent protocols were in place and monitored vigorously. Ingress and egress through double doors with both human and electronic surveillance prohibited anyone not specifically authorized to be in any given lab. No exceptions.

Since Charles's laboratory grew bacteria deliberately engineered to resist every known antibiotic, access to it was restricted to scientists with doctoral degrees and intensive training in antimicrobial technique. When live cultures were exposed, only he and Jones could pass the biometric identification process and enter the double
doors to the domain of their lab and incubator. Once they had worked with the cultures and stored them away, their techs could clean up and prep the lab for the next round of “hot” experiments. UV-CD lamps were left on when the lab was unoccupied to keep all surfaces sterile.

At the outset, Charles had not planned to screw up Stacy's holiday plans, but if he could make her miserable life even more miserable, that was a bonus. The option to simply not show up without notification meant their immedidate supervisor would be called in on an emergency basis. No point in kicking up all that fuss. Besides, he liked Stan Proctor—had liked the man—before he'd promoted a Negro woman. Charles reporting to Stacy? Unthinkable. “Your race is your religion, son,” his father had recently told him. “White Supremacy rules. Don't you ever forget it.”

But now, Charles never would have to take orders from Stacy Jones. He'd never again set foot in the CDC lab. Maybe not even in Atlanta. Once the staph was released, the folks at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, would track it to his program at the CDC. Those folks at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases didn't mess around. The USAMRIID brass would go ballistic. Rumor was, the Fort Detrick hierarchy wanted to make the case that the CDC staph program is indistinguishable from bioterrorism and should pack it in. The CDC countered that their program was a vital hedge to protect the public if ever ultra-lethal or super-resistant staph strains showed up in the population. Except for USAMRIID, the CDC was the last agency to run such a program after the NIH Labs' resistant-staph program bit the dust in Bethesda a few years ago.

Charles didn't think they'd shut down his program, but he didn't know much about politics. That was his dad's department. Never mind. He had Will Banks's word for it: by tomorrow night, Charles would be out of the country. The Order, Banks claimed, had safe houses everywhere in the world. But where exactly would they send Charles tomorrow night? Will still hadn't told him. Would they tell his parents? Certainly they'd let his father know; Chas was a big deal in The Order. For a chilling instant, Charles thought of
Russell, laid out on a cold slab at the morgue. Sweet Jesus, he had to go to Russell's wake tonight as Will had directed.

Charles told himself to stop thinking about Russell. What good did it do—other than scare the heck out of him. He was committed now. He would not falter. He had the staph in the test tubes, in nourishing media. Now, all he had to do was store them at room temperature till it was time to transport them to the Palace Hotel kitchen—and then inoculate the cream puffs as instructed by the pastry chef. After that, Will Banks would take over the operation. Charles, The Order's all-time MVP, would be the hero of all his glory dreams.

One final look around the lab. A light over one of the containment hoods flickered, the negative pressure system hummed in the claustrophobic sterile room.

He'd chosen tubes of media to transport the bacteria, not the clumsy bulk of petri plates. While in the incubator, he'd secured the specimens he'd secreted yesterday. Turning his back to the security cameras, he expertly transferred the inoculum from petri dishes to his transfer tubes. Sterile technique. No nervousness whatsoever. He did this every day. It was his craft.

Satisfied, he replaced the contaminated petri plates in their hiding place and simply walked out of the secure zone, tubes tucked into a pouch strapped to his waist.
Too close to his testicles?
That thought amused him. Good thing he wasn't smuggling out radioactive material. But the grin faded when he thought of Russell. Only a few days ago Russell with his background in nuclear technology had been his competition. But The Order had picked him. Satisfied? he asked himself.

Putting on his best hangdog, sick look, Charles shuffled toward the office he and Stacy Jones had shared. He answered the ringing phone. Stacy. How considerate of her to call at this moment. He was about to leave her a message. Faking hoarseness, he told her that he was not feeling well, that he would not be in tomorrow, and he hung up the phone.

For the benefit of any unseen witness, he made a show of bolting for the men's room. There he hid out in the stall for a while, and
artfully mussed his hair a bit more before returning to his office. After he'd safely nestled the culture tubes in the padded section of his briefcase, Charles collected the few mementos from the lone shelf behind his desk. Coughing and fake sneezing for the security cameras, he made his way down the long hallway lined with locked office doors and out of the building.

F
RIDAY
, N
OVEMBER
29

On one hand, Emma Goode was honored—who wouldn't be?—the newspaper had planned an extravagant party in her name in the grand ballroom of the Palace Hotel. On the other hand, she felt a bit used. The sixty-nine-year-old black woman, born in the Deep South in 1916, picked up the cream-colored, engraved vellum invitation, still not quite believing that she was the honoree. Tomorrow night.
The Atlanta Daily Reporter
, the newspaper founded by her father, was making her their poster child. The society section of the
Atlanta Constitution
, the mainstream Atlanta newspaper, lay on the table, her photo on the front page. Medium-brown skin, nose sprinkled with freckles, hair streaked with gray and pulled back in a bun. In the photo, she stood at the door of the
Reporter
's new building, in the trim, coral silk business suit that accentuated the slim figure, hardly changed since her wedding day forty-three years ago.

Emma and her husband, Edward, each had put in almost fifty years at the
Atlanta Daily Reporter
. As it turned out, each would retire at the same age. But for Edward, seventy had come twelve years ago. Emma could have chosen to retire with him, but she'd been only fifty-seven then, and at the peak of her journalism career. The city was a hotbed of racial tension and the
Atlanta Daily Reporter
was the voice of the Negro—about Negroes for Negroes.

For the first nine years of his retirement, Edward puttered cheerfully around their large house in an upscale, but segregated neighborhood. He'd busied himself with the grandchildren and taken up household chores. He looked after their finances, even became
a gourmet cook. Then gradually he had started to slide—but she'd missed the clues. He just seemed more and more listless, and then one day, three years ago, he simply did not wake up in the morning. He'd been seventy-nine years old. She remembered both of her sisters advising her way back when, not to marry a man twelve years older—she'd just end up a widow. They were right, but she would not have missed a day with Edward. Life without him would have been no life at all.

Emma had not succumbed to depression, but Edward's loss did seem to sap her physical energy and drain her emotional reserve. Their seven children helped sustain her, along with the challenges of her job and her pride, always, in her family's newspaper.

The party tomorrow night may be in her name, but it really was the celebration of her beloved newspaper. And that was fine. She was turning seventy—after fifty years, she could retire gracefully. She couldn't really remember not working at the paper. She'd started during high school, spending summers in the Circulation Department. During college she worked evenings and summers in Accounting. Then with a journalism degree from Atlanta University, she launched into reporting, and finally, editing, the news. First her mother, and then one of her sisters, cared for her children when she went back to work after each of seven pregnancies.