Snakehead (31 page)

A lab assistant took Margaret up in the elevator and along endless corridors. She was young and bright, with sparkling eyes and conversation that bubbled out of her like water from a spring. Margaret barely heard her. Shown into a tiny cluttered office that overlooked more parking garages to the rear, Margaret sat miserably on the edge of a hard plastic seat clutching her dripping umbrella. Her sneakers and her jeans from the knees down were soaking. After several minutes the door opened and she looked up as Mendez came in, a stained white lab coat hanging open over his shirt, a rumpled tie trailing loose at the neck. His face lit up. ‘My dear, you’re drenched. Can I get you a coffee? Water?’

‘No, no.’ Margaret stood up, embarrassed. ‘I just called in to see if it would be okay for me to stay at the ranch tonight.’

Mendez’s smile was at its most beatific. ‘My dear, you don’t have to ask.’ He took her hands in his. ‘My home is yours, for as long as you like. You know that.’

She shrugged awkwardly. ‘It’s just…I don’t have a key, Felipe,’ she said.

Mendez laughed. ‘But you don’t need one. Just my entry code. I’ll write it down for you.’ He tore a sheet of paper from a pad, scribbled a four-digit number on it and handed it to her. ‘If you want to hang on for half an hour, I’m almost finished here. I could give you a lift.’

‘I’ve got my car,’ Margaret said. ‘Anyway, I’d like to get back and get showered and changed.’

‘Of course.’ He paused. ‘You can spare a minute, though? I have something to show you.’

She followed him into a laboratory at the end of the hall, and slipped on a lab coat. ‘You know why it was called the Spanish flu?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. It originated here in the United States, didn’t it?’

‘So we believe. But we were still fighting a war then, and news of the pandemic was suppressed in most of the countries involved in World War One. It was first most widely reported in the Spanish press. Hence the Spanish flu.’ He waved her toward a monitor on a bench near the back of the lab, and she watched as he slipped a cassette into the built-in VCR. ‘You’re familiar with viral cytopathic effect?’ he said.

‘Of course.’

The screen came to life in a seething mass of tiny organisms dividing, multiplying and ultimately destroying their host cells. Cell necrosis. She almost recoiled from the monitor. She knew without being told what she was looking at. ‘It’s what killed Steve,’ she said. ‘It’s the Spanish flu.’

‘One stage advanced,’ Mendez said. ‘Another mutation down the line. It used its time in Dr. Cardiff to morph itself. To the virus, the good doctor was no more than a living laboratory, a human rat with which to experiment. I would suspect that, if anything, this new version of itself could be even more virulent.’

Margaret was repulsed. ‘They recovered the virus at autopsy?’

‘From the lungs, I believe.’ Mendez looked at her sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry, Margaret. You…were fond of Dr. Cardiff.’ It was a statement, not a question.

She nodded mutely. In her head she had a clear, brutal and bloody image of Steve on the autopsy table.

‘But you do understand, such steps must be taken in order to fight this thing.’ She nodded again, and he said, ‘Anatoly Markin once told me about a Russian scientist called Ustinov who accidentally injected himself with Marburg while conducting experiments with guinea pigs. It was part of their biowarfare program. The poor man took three weeks to die, quite horribly. And when they recovered the virus from his organs they found that through the live incubator of a human being it had mutated into something altogether more stable and powerful. So they used the new strain as the basis of their further weapons research and called it “variant U”. Markin told me they thought Ustinov would have been amused by it.’ He shrugged, a tiny sad smile stretching his full lips, and nodded toward the monitor. ‘Perhaps we should call this “variant C”.’

Margaret looked at him coldly. ‘You know what, Felipe? Chances are Steve would probably have have been amused by that, too. He had a pretty bizarre sense of humour. Personally, I just think it’s sick.’ She took a moment to collect herself. ‘I’ll see you back at the house.’ And she swept out leaving Mendez to reflect on an error of judgment.

* * *

By the time she got to the ranch, the storm had passed. The air was hot and damp and hung in shifting strands of mist over the lake. The sky was torn along its western fringes, revealing ragged strips of blood-red sunset behind the cloud. The chestnut mares stood glistening in the meadow, nostrils raised to the sky, sniffing as if they could smell the coming night.

Clara barked and danced around Margaret as she made her way through the gun room and into the kitchen, but quickly returned to sulk in her basket when Margaret gave no indication that she was going to feed her. The dirty dishes piled on every available workspace were depressing, and Margaret wondered why Mendez didn’t simply have someone come in for a couple of hours each day to keep the place clean. The smell of stale cigar smoke and alcohol hung sour in the living room. She switched on the ceiling fan, kicked off her shoes and went upstairs to her room to find some clean underwear.

She stood for a long time under the shower, letting the hot water cascade over her upturned face and run in snaking rivulets between her breasts, pouring in a stream from the thatch of golden hair that covered her pubis. It felt so good she didn’t want it to stop. Fatigue swept through her, deliciously warm, irresistibly enticing. She soaped herself with a soft sponge, smearing the lather in luxurious bubbling sweeps across her skin and then allowing the water simply to wash it away. She worked the shampoo through her hair and then rinsed it until it squeaked between her fingers, letting the water wash the soap from her eyes before she opened them to see the fleeting movement of a shadow beyond the bathroom door. A tiny, startled exclamation escaped her lips and she instinctively crossed her arms over her breasts.

‘Who’s there?’ she called, but there was no response. The door was lying about six inches ajar, and she could see into her bedroom, clothes strewn across the bed where she had dropped them. She immediately turned off the shower, goosebumps standing up all over her body. Still there was no sound, and there was no further movement. She pushed open the door of the shower cubicle and grabbed a soft white towel from the rail, wrapping it around herself and stepping quickly out on to the mat. ‘Hello,’ she called again, and was answered by the same silence as before. Tentatively, she pulled the bathroom door open wide and saw that the bedroom was empty. Had she imagined it? And then she remembered that she was not alone in the house. Perhaps Clara had wandered in, curious about the strange perfumed smells. And she let out a deep breath for the first time in what felt like minutes.

Partly reassured, she rubbed herself quickly dry, slipped into her bra and panties and towelled her hair until it hung in curling clumps over her shoulders. She dragged a clean white tee-shirt over her head and pushed her legs into a pair of dark blue baggy cotton cargoes. A sense of security returned with the pulling on of clothes. She tugged a comb through her hair and padded barefoot down the stairs.

Mendez was sitting in the smoking porch puffing on a freshly lit cigar. CNN was playing on the big screen in the living room and on the small TV in the porch. Margaret glanced through the passage leading to the kitchen and saw Clara eating from her bowl. The reassurance that she had clung to briefly in her bedroom quickly evaporated, and was replaced by a sick feeling in her stomach. She slipped on her sneakers and opened the door into the porch. Mendez dragged his eyes from the screen and smiled. ‘There you are, my dear. Good shower?’

‘How long have you been here?’ Margaret asked.

He frowned. ‘I just got in.’ Clara pushed past Margaret’s legs in the doorway and dropped herself at her master’s feet.

‘And you haven’t been upstairs?’

‘No.’ His frown deepened. ‘Margaret, what’s wrong?’

She shook her head, not sure whether to feel foolish or suspicious. Was it possible that he had been in her room, watching her in the shower? Clara had been busy eating, so it wasn’t the dog she had seen. ‘Nothing,’ she said lamely. ‘I just thought I heard someone up there, that’s all.’

Mendez laid his cigar in the ashtray and stood up to cross the porch. He was strangely flushed, so that his white goatee appeared to stand out from his face. ‘My dear, all this is getting to you. You need to relax. Let me get you a drink.’

‘No, thanks.’

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her face. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

Her stomach was churning now. There was the oddest look in his eyes. ‘I’m fine.’

His head was raised slightly, eyes half closed, as if he was breathing her in, the smell of her fresh and fragrant and warm. She tried to wriggle free of the hands on her shoulders, but they gripped her more tightly. And then suddenly she found herself pulled hard against him, and his face was pressed to hers. Wet lips, a clash of teeth, the smell of cigar smoke and the rasp of whiskers on her soft skin. She felt his erect penis pushing hard against her stomach, his tongue in her mouth. And for a moment thought she would be sick.

With a huge effort, she pulled herself free of him and stood back, gasping half in fear, half in anger. ‘Jesus, Felipe, what the hell are you doing!’

He looked at her with something like panic in his eyes. ‘Margaret, I’m sorry,’ he blurted, and took a step toward her.

She stepped quickly back. ‘Don’t come near me!’ She was breathing hard, fists clenched, trying to control an urge just to turn and run. She knew now that he had been in her bedroom watching her all that time.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said again. ‘Please don’t leave. It won’t happen again, I promise. You’ve no idea how lonely it gets here. How lonely I’ve been since Catherine…’ His voice trailed away and he looked miserable, turning his gaze to the floor, unable to meet her eyes. ‘I’ve always thought you were…’ He lifted his eyes to look at her. ‘…desirable. I used to envy Michael. It’s what I found hardest to forgive him. That he took you away. That when he broke with me I could no longer see you. I could hardly believe it when I saw you sitting at the conference table at Fort Detrick. It was as if fate had brought you back to me.’

Margaret stared at him in disbelief. ‘You’re sick, Felipe.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. Sick with regret, Margaret. Sick that I allowed some base sexual instinct to spoil things between us. I promise…’ His spaniel eyes pleaded with her. ‘…I promise it won’t ever happen again.’

‘No, it won’t,’ she said, and she turned and strode back into the living room, lifting her purse from the recliner. ‘I’ll come back and get my stuff in a day or two.’

‘Margaret…’ she heard him call after her as she went out through the kitchen. A sad, plaintive call of abject misery. She almost felt sorry for him.

Chapter Twelve

I

It was after ten when she got back to Houston. The sky had cleared and the mercury fallen. The night air had a chill cutting edge to it as she crossed the car park and up the ramp into the lobby of the Holiday Inn. At reception they told her that Li was in room 735, and she rode the elevator up to the seventh floor. Her head felt full of fog. Nothing seemed clear to her any more. All the shapes and patterns of her life, which she had tried so hard these past twelve months to define with decision and clarity, were blurred and confused. She felt vulnerable and, worst of all, lonely. The safety and comfort she had hoped for at the Mendez ranch had vanished in a moment. And now there was only one avenue left open to her. But it was a road she had travelled before and found it led nowhere safe.

Li opened the door of his room and stood against the light, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. He loomed over her, taller than she ever remembered him. The television was on in the background, his room filled with the smoke of many cigarettes.

‘Room service,’ she said.

He said, ‘I didn’t order anything.’

‘I read your mind.’

‘And what did you see there?’

‘Two people. A bed. Sex. Sleep.’

‘In that order?’

‘In any order you like.’

He pursed his lips and stood for a long time thinking. ‘I don’t have any change,’ he said.

She frowned. ‘What for?’

‘A tip.’

‘It’s a complementary service.’

‘In that case you’d better come in. I’ve never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth.’

She pushed the door shut behind them. ‘I’m not sure I like being called a horse.’

‘But you have such lovely fetlocks.’ He stooped to crook an arm behind her knees and lift her off her feet. She put her arms around his neck.

‘As long as you don’t feel the need to take a horsewhip to my hind quarters.’

He smiled. ‘Some women quite like that.’ He paused. ‘I’m told.’

‘Not by me. I’d be inclined to think it might spoil the ride.’

‘Or spur you on to greater things.’ He laid her on the bed and leaned over her, so that his breath brushed her face.

She grinned and slipped a hand inside his boxers. ‘That’s all the spur I need.’ And she closed her eyes and let a huge wave of sexual escape break over her. For a few minutes of exquisite pleasure she could be free of a life that was falling apart yet again. She felt his hands on her skin, his lips on her face, her breasts, and as he entered her, she flung her legs around his back and pulled him to her so tightly that she squeezed all of the air out of his lungs.

* * *

Afterwards, they lay for a long time in silence. The light of the television flickered in the darkness of the room, the canned laughter of a nonexistent studio audience modulating in time to the regulation thirty-second gags of some mediocre sitcom. Eventually, Li raised himself on an elbow and saw that Margaret’s face was wet with tears. He sat upright. ‘What’s wrong?’

She reached up and ran her fingers over his split lip, the bruising high on his cheek and around his left eye. ‘It’s just me,’ she said smiling sadly. ‘And life. I never seem to get the two things running in harmony.’ And she told him about Mendez. His abortive sexual advances. A sad and lonely only man, she said. And she told him how she was homeless now and unable to concentrate on her work, or on anything very much. She told him about the virus they had taken from Steve during autopsy. How it had used him to grow stronger, smarter. And she told him about her despair that there would ever be a way out of any of it.