Snakehead (40 page)

But Margaret knew she wasn’t. She knew things they didn’t. She remembered last night with a dreadful clarity. At least, she remembered some of it. Though not how it ended. How she had got to be here. She forced herself up on to an elbow and saw deputies from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s department standing around looking at her with unabashed curiosity. There were forensics investigators in white Tivek suits, and men in plain clothes. One of them blotted out her view of the rest of the room. Mendez’s sitting room. She had at least had time to log that. And she was lying on his settee, covered in a blanket. She refocused on the face looming over her, and connected it with the voice she had recognised earlier. It was Hrycyk.

‘Jesus, Doc,’ he said. ‘What the hell happened here?’

She forced dry lips apart and became aware of her tongue seeming to fill her mouth. ‘You tell me,’ she said, and she allowed herself to drop back into the softness of the settee. He disappeared from her field of vision, and returned a moment later with the back of a chair which he leaned on, watching her closely.

‘Neighbour about half a mile away down the road phones the cops. What sounds like a car horn’s been going without a break for more than an hour. Cops get here just as daylight’s breaking. They find Mendez in his Bronco, slumped on the wheel. What’s left of his head is laying right on the horn. He’s got a big hole in his chest. His right foot is jammed on the accelerator and the engine is gunning at top rev. There’s a dog in back, behind a mesh grill, barking itself hoarse.’ He paused and took out a cigarette.

Margaret heard Elizabeth saying, ‘I’d rather you didn’t light that, Agent Hrycyk. This is still a crime scene.’

He grunted and put his cigarettes away again. ‘You goddamned people are all the same,’ he said. ‘So where was I? Oh, yeah. Garage door’s raised right up in the roof. Headlights of the Bronco shining right inside. And you’re laying there in your goddamned birthday suit clutching a double-barrelled shotgun. Mendez is dead as a dodo. And it sure as hell looks like you’re the one who made him that way.’ He searched her face for a long time, apparently looking for some response. Finally, he couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. ‘Why’d you shoot him, Margaret?’

She was aware of a hush falling all around her. Hrycyk wasn’t the only person in the room who wanted to know. ‘Because he was the one,’ she said eventually.

‘The one what?’ Hrycyk frowned.

‘The one who engineered the virus,’ Margaret said. She drew her arm out from beneath the blanket and held it out for him to see. The pinprick left by the syringe was still visible. ‘He injected me with it.’ And without warning her eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m infected. The bastard infected me.’

Hrycyk’s eyes were like saucers. ‘Jesus, Margaret,’ he said. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

She pulled herself up on one elbow again and brushed the tears from her eyes. There was something else in her head. Something important. Something she had meant to do before. ‘I need to get out to the lab,’ she said.

‘What lab?’ Hrycyk asked.

Elizabeth said, ‘Take it easy, Doctor.’ And to Hrycyk, ‘You’re getting her excited.’

Hrycyk ignored her. ‘What lab?’ he asked again.

‘Mendez has a lab. Here at the ranch.’ Margaret fought to remember why it was important. She struggled to sit up, and the blanket fell away.

Hrycyk blushed, embarrassed by her nakedness, and quickly pulled the blanket up to her shoulders. ‘For Christ’s sake, someone get her something to wear!’

Elizabeth took over and wrapped the blanket around her until someone came with a towelling dressing gown and Margaret’s sneakers. Margaret slipped the soft towelling around her and tied it tightly at the waist. Then she slid into her sneakers, and with help got to her feet. She staggered a little as she felt the blood rushing from her head. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ Elizabeth said.

‘I need a drink,’ Margaret said, and one of the deputies brought her a glass of water. She drained it in a single draught and stood gasping. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

‘Where we going?’ Hrycyk asked.

‘Across the meadow. There’s an old barn…’ She grabbed Hrycyk’s arm. ‘Just stay with me.’

He took her hand, and put a supporting arm around her waist. He appeared awkward, embarrassed by his own concern. It didn’t fit, somehow, with his image — or the one he liked to project. Out of all context, Margaret wondered suddenly if he was married and asked him.

He looked at her in amazement. ‘Is that a proposal?’

‘You wish,’ she said.

He grinned. ‘Silver wedding anniversary next year. Got two kids at college.’

Margaret wondered why she was surprised.

The chestnut mares were frolicking at the far end of the meadow. Sunlight slanted across the grass, steam rising as it burned off the dew. In the far distance, two long strands of mist hung above the lake. Mendez’s Bronco stood silent, its nose buried in the upright between the garage and the house, its windshield shattered. Margaret could see the blood inside. But the body had already been removed. Police vehicles, a forensics van, an ambulance, and several unmarked cars blocked the dirt track leading to the road. A couple of crows sat on the fence watching as Margaret led a small entourage of law enforcement people across the meadow, supported on the arm of Agent Hrycyk.

The barn was shaded by trees and dark inside. Margaret remembered from last night the smell of cow dung in the treads of its huge tyres. They crossed the dusty floor and she pointed out the trap. A couple of the sheriff’s men moved forward to open it, and one went down the ladders to find the lights. When they came on, Margaret insisted on climbing down herself. They helped her from above and below, and she stood shakily in the pit where she had listened to Mascagni’s Intermezzo from
Cavalleria Rusticana
only fourteen hours ago, when she still had a whole life ahead of her.

Fluorescent lights flickered to life as they went into the lab. It was just as Margaret and Mendez had left it the previous night. Hrycyk whistled softly. ‘So this is where he did it, huh? Created a monster you can’t even see. Jees. It’s like Frankenstein’s surgery.’ He turned to Margaret. ‘What is it you’re looking for?’

She shook her head, eyes darting across every surface. ‘I don’t know.’ She frowned as if in pain. ‘I can’t remember.’ Whatever it was cast a huge shadow across her mind, but somehow she could neither see nor touch it.

She scanned the wooden-topped bench in the centre of the room, the gel electrophoresis machines, the digital camera, the iMac and scanner, then jumped focus to the far worktop. Something, she knew, had lodged in her brain. Something she had seen here. Something significant that had not immediately occurred to her. There was the small electric oven for doing blots, the other iMacs, the electron microscope, and all the detritus of jars and bottles, papers and books, coffee-maker and ashtray. She ran her eyes past the incubators and freezer to the stereo and small centrifuge. And then suddenly she realised what it was. She swung her eyes back to the worktop. ‘The coffee-maker,’ she said.

‘What?’ Hrycyk was nonplussed.

She broke free from the bewildered INS agent and made her way across the lab. There were cupboards below the worktop. She eased herself down on to her haunches and opened the doors. The top shelf was crammed with vacuum-sealed packs of washed Arabica Colombian coffee. A couple of packs on the bottom shelf were open, and some beans had spilled across the melamine. There was an electronic coffee-grinder with some grounds still in it. But the coffee had long since lost its freshness.

Hrycyk crouched beside her. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘So he liked coffee.’

‘That’s just the point,’ Margaret said. ‘He was allergic to it.’

II

Margaret and Hrycyk sat in silence in Mendez’s office at Baylor. They had been there two hours. A secretary had come in and offered them coffee. They both refused and accepted an offer of water instead. Margaret felt like death. She had refused medical treatment, and after making her official statement, Hrycyk had driven her straight here with samples of the coffee. He had disappeared on several occasions for five minutes at a time, and come back smelling of cigarette smoke.

They both looked up as the door opened, and a young man in his thirties, dark hair flopping across a flushed face, came in. Unlike his former boss the young geneticist’s lab coat was crisp and clean and fully buttoned. He looked at them both and then sat down and held up a coffee bean between forefinger and thumb. He nodded. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘That’s what does it. Mendez spliced a promoter into his virus that is activated by a protein recognising the unique chemical flavour of Colombian washed Arabica coffee.’ He half-smiled, shaking his head in admiration. ‘Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. The man was a genius.’

‘A dead fucking genius,’ Hrycyk growled, and the young man flinched as if he had been slapped.

Margaret felt relief surge through her like a prescription relaxant. She could have wept. As long as she never drank coffee again both she and her child would be safe, even if she had to live with Mendez’s viral contaminant for the rest of her days. She said, ‘Colombian coffee. He had a finely honed sense of irony. He didn’t figure we were smart enough to understand it, or figure out what it was.’

‘Dead wrong, huh?’ Hrycyk chuckled, as if he thought he had made a joke.

‘The thing is,’ Margaret said, ‘maybe the Chinese
don’t
drink much coffee. But I’ll bet there’s Colombian in most blends in most coffee shops in America. It can only be a matter of time. Somehow we’ve got to get that message across. Fast. It could take just a single case to start the pandemic.’

* * *

She stood in the phone booth at the end of the hall fumbling in her purse for the FEMA list. She was certain it was there somewhere. She found various pieces of paper, folded and crumpled and smeared with eye make-up, near the bottom of the bag. But no FEMA list. She cursed and flipped with trembling fingers through her address book instead, and found Li’s home number in Georgetown where she had made the scribbled entry a couple of days before. She wanted to tell him that Xiao Ling was going to be okay. And somewhere, lurking at the back of her mind, was a hope she would not even dare to acknowledge, that somehow this might change things. She ran her credit card through the reader and tapped out the number. It rang in her ear. Long, single rings. Five of them. Six. Seven. After the tenth ring she reluctantly accepted that there was no one home and gave up. She had not made a note of his cellphone number. That was on the FEMA list which, in her mind’s eye, she saw now lying on her office desk. She hurried back along the corridor looking for Hrycyk.

III

They turned the corner at the intersection of Wisconsin and M, and passed beneath a golden dome supported on Greek pillars. From here they had a view down M Street toward the bridge over Rock Creek. Tall narrow shopfronts in red brick, trees newly planted along the sidewalk still in green leaf. Xinxin, happier than Li could remember, kept running ahead, only reining herself in when Xiao Ling or Meiping called on her not to go too far. They were an hour ahead of Houston time, and it was a beautiful morning, more like spring than fall. The sky was painfully clear, and the warmth of the sun on their faces lifted their spirits. Their White House tour was in the afternoon, and they had the morning to kill.

Xinxin knew where they were going. Li had taken her and Meiping on several occasions to the M Street Starbucks, and she was salivating already at the thought of the hot chocolate slathered in caramel that he would get for her. Outside Johnny Rockets, Li led them across the road through traffic that had ground to a halt. For a moment he considered taking them into Café Häagen-Dazs next door for an ice cream. But ice cream wasn’t on the list. They passed the Bistro Français and turned into the narrow rough brick doorway that opened into Starbucks Coffee Shop. A poster read: REMEMBER THE GOOEY, STICKY, BUTTERY-SWEET, LIP-LOCKING LOVE OF CARAMEL?

It was busier than Li had expected. People sat reading newspapers or talking in animated groups at tables beneath pictures of steaming mugs of Caramel Apple Cider and Caramel Macchiato. Li sat the girls up at the bar that ran along the window, and left them looking out at Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Parlour across the street to go and fetch their order. He came back with tall cappuccinos for himself and Meiping, Xinxin’s favourite chocolate and caramel, and plain bottled water for Xiao Ling.

They talked excitedly about their trip to the White House. Li had secured them a VIP tour, and Xinxin wanted to know if they would meet the President’s dog. Xiao Ling watched Li and Meiping drinking their coffee and wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,’ she said. ‘It smells horrible.’

Li shrugged. ‘An acquired taste.’

‘Have you never tried it?’ Meiping asked.

Xiao Ling shook her head.

‘Mine’s great!’ Xinxin said.

Li laughed. ‘Yeah, but it’s not coffee, little one.’

His cellphone rang in his pocket, and for a moment he hesitated to answer. Only a handful of people knew this number, so it could only be official business. But that official business might include confirmation of their flight tomorrow, so he fished it out of his pocket and flipped down the mouthpiece.
‘Wei,’
he said.

‘Li Yan?’ A group of people at the next table laughed loudly at some inane joke and he could barely hear her voice. But he knew it was Margaret and he was at once tense. He stood up and moved away toward the door, slipping behind the glass and pressing a finger to his other ear.

‘Margaret?’

‘Li Yan, it’s coffee.’ There was a strange urgency in her voice. ‘Don’t let her drink coffee.’ And he did not immediately understand. How could Margaret know they were in a Starbucks?

‘What do you mean?’

‘The trigger. It’s in coffee.’

And even as her words sank in and he made the connection, he saw, through the glass, Meiping offering her cappuccino to Xiao Ling to try. She was laughing. And he could see the words form in her mouth, almost hear them above the din.
It’s only coffee. What harm can it do?