Upon A Pale Horse (33 page)

He called the office once he was in the elevator, and told them that he wasn’t feeling well and was en route to the doctor. With his headache, it didn’t take much acting skill for him to sound compromised, and the conversation didn’t last long. Jeffrey called Monica once in a taxi on the way to his appointment, which was not coincidentally only a block from the Pasteur Institute, where the French scientist had his offices and lab.

“Jeff! Thank God you called. I’ve been so worried,” she answered, not waiting for him to say anything. “I tried to reach you a few times, but it went straight to voicemail.”

The funny thing was that she really did sound concerned, and he marveled again at her powers of duplicity. Unless she really was worried – that he’d disappeared and hadn’t told her where he was going.

“I’ve been vegetating at the hotel. This concussion took more out of me than I thought. I’m in Paris, on the way to the neurologist.”

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like crap. I’m glad he’s going to see me. I really have my doubts about the doc in Zurich.”

“Will you call me as soon as you’re through with him?”

“Sure. But it kind of hurts to talk. That’s why I’ve been off the radar.”

“I understand. I know I wouldn’t be chatty if my head had been used as a soccer ball.”

“That’s about how it feels. Listen, I’m going to go now. Save my energy,” Jeffrey said, anxious to get off the line. His voice really did sound terrible, so he didn’t have to fake it much.

“All right. Call me later,” Monica said, and he hung up, not wanting to hear her say anything more about her supposed feelings for him, which he could sense coming. He wasn’t sure how he was going to break off their relationship – or rather, her duty in his bed – but he would come up with a reason when he returned.

Then again, with what he now knew about the virus, the end of the world might wind up being the perfect reason to want some time to himself. All he’d been able to think about since he’d woken up on the train were the German’s words and his shocked appearance when he’d seen the drawing of the virus.

The thought that Jeffrey was the only thing standing in the way of the apocalypse was like a crushing weight on his shoulders, and the anxiety that had been nestling in his stomach returned with full force as he slipped the phone into his pocket and leaned back in the seat, the streets of Paris gliding by as the car made its way to the Left Bank.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Check-Up

“Monsieur, the doctor will see you now,” the comely young receptionist said in delightfully accented English. Jeffrey stood and followed a second, equally fetching attendant, who led him to a sumptuous office with an en-suite exam room, the furniture high-end recreations of antique French provincial treasures. More than anything, the first impression Jeffrey had upon entering the room was of it being exquisitely tasteful.

Which perfectly matched the stately man in his early sixties who stood in one corner of the room, his conservative Hermès tie loosened, staring out the window. When the doctor turned to face him, Jeffrey was immediately struck by the man’s presence, which emanated from him with a glowing aura, like that of a celebrity.

“Monsieur Rutherford.
Bon
. You are here. Welcome. Please sit down, and tell me how I can help you,” the physician said, his English perfect, pointing to a chair in front of his desk.

Jeffrey sat and the doctor asked him a series of questions about his symptoms, degree of discomfort, and so on. He told the doctor about his recurring headaches, not needing to exaggerate his discomfort and worry. The older man nodded and motioned for Jeffrey to join him in the exam room.

Jeffrey knew what to expect and slid up onto the examination bed. The doctor approached and began probing his head wound.

“It’s healing nicely. I see no complications. Swelling is almost completely gone, and your hair is long enough so it covers the area, so it is not obvious, you know?”

“That’s not a huge consideration. I just want to know that there’s nothing they missed or that’s going wrong. Sometimes the pain is blinding.”

“Mmm. Yes, I imagine it can be. Take hold of each of my fingers and squeeze as hard as you can with both hands, please.”

Jeffrey complied, and then the doctor did a full neurological workup, taking him through the paces. At the end of the encounter the doctor waved him back to the desk, pausing to study Jeffrey as he made his way back to his seat. He wrote up some quick notes, humming under his breath, and then looked up at Jeffrey as if he’d forgotten he was still there.

“
Bon
. I see no abnormalities, so that is good news. If the scan was normal, then I would say that the headaches are simply a residual effect of the trauma and will fade over the next few days. Have you been resting, avoiding stress and movement?”

Jeffrey didn’t say what sprang to mind – that he’d been singled out to save the human race and traversed half of Europe over the last day.

“Yes,” he lied.

“Good. Then continue doing so and you’ll be fine. If you are still experiencing problems in a week, or if you start to experience any double vision, we will have another appointment, yes? Until then, we must let Mother Nature take her course.”

Jeffrey thanked him for his time and left the suite, stopping to pay the receptionist before taking the elevator to the ground level.

Outside, he glanced in both directions down the gray street. Clouds hung over the city, threatening rain. The sidewalk had a few pedestrians making their way towards the main boulevard, and Jeffrey joined them in their pilgrimage, his thoughts elsewhere, on retroviruses and global contagion and death, as well as on a woman who had cheerfully lied to him with the conviction of a Wall Street banker – and on a bitter academic in the Virginia countryside…and his beautiful daughter.

So immersed was he in his inner world that when he stepped off the curb he was almost run down by a truck, its horn blaring as it narrowly missed him. The driver made an obscene gesture as the engine revved and the big vehicle blew past him. He froze in his tracks, and then carefully crossed to the far side and continued on his way, the thin line between life and death again reinforced, in case he’d forgotten the precariousness of his mortal state.

THIRTY-NINE

An Appointment

Jeffrey rose as dawn’s first light seeped through the overcast lingering over Paris. His head felt marginally better, fifteen hours of rest having done him good after the prior two-day marathon. After the visit to the doctor, he’d returned to his room and made the obligatory calls to Monica and to his secretary, and after an early meal he’d locked himself away and forced himself to stay in bed so his body could have a needed opportunity to heal.

Sleep hadn’t come easily, as he’d worried away at the issue of how to get to François Bertrand, the preeminent virologist in France and a legend in academic and medical circles, one of the top members of the team that had discovered HIV thirty years earlier. Now in the winter of his years, at seventy-two he still worked five days a week in his beloved laboratory, and was considered a national treasure by the French people.

Jeffrey had eventually drifted off into uneasy slumber after taking a pill the Swiss had given him, but his night had been filled with vivid nightmares of himself walking slowly through a hospital ward with the dead abandoned in the halls, covered with stained sheets, anonymous women and children in rusting beds stacked together, gasping for their last breaths as their haunted eyes sought him out, drowning from their bodies’ immune responses to a hellish plague from which there was no defense.

When he bolted awake he was shaking, adrenaline flooding through his system, and he cried out, for a moment still in with the sick, sentenced to impossible-to-imagine death. His bearings returned after a few panicked gasps, and his racing heart began to slow as he blinked and groped on the nightstand for his watch.

Jeffrey groaned and pushed himself to a sitting position, and then forced himself to his feet and stumbled half-asleep to the bathroom, where it took seemingly forever for the water to get warm. Once in the shower he dismissed shampooing his hair and instead scrubbed himself vigorously with the provided lavender soap, as if he could wash away the lingering sense of dread that was now his constant companion. Even as he watched the suds swirl down the drain, the clock was ticking, and vials of global death could be on their way for dispersal. He was trying not to allow the size of the responsibility he’d been unwittingly stuck with to paralyze him, but it was hard, given what he now knew.

He deliberately took slow, deep breaths as he toweled dry, regaining control of himself with a pronounced effort that set his head to throbbing again, the pain now as familiar as a favorite song. He needed to focus. How was he going to get to see the scientific equivalent of a rock star? The question nagged at him as he shaved, and then he realized he needed to do more research before he could come up with a coherent plan. Right now he was operating in the dark, and he needed to change that, quickly.

Jeffrey called down to the front desk and asked for housekeeping to make up his room while he was having breakfast. He locked his valuables in the safe and took his phone with him, so his watchers would see normal movement. A table set for two near the hotel restaurant entrance afforded him a good view of the lobby, but either his newly acquired spy skills were dormant before his first cup of coffee or there was nobody watching him.

Service was slow, and it took him an hour to finish up, which gave him more than enough time to plan his day. To anyone paying attention he would appear to be bed-ridden, but as soon as he confirmed that his room had been serviced he’d be slipping out the service entrance and completing the tasks that had been accumulating in his mind like cords of firewood. He stopped at the front desk and told the clerk that he was not to be disturbed and to hold all calls until further notice.

Back in the room he stashed his wallet and phone in the safe and peeled off a thousand euros, folding the notes into a thin wad and slipping them into his trousers. He’d been having second thoughts about the wallet since being mugged – it was conceivable a tracking device had been slipped inside it, although he hadn’t been able to find one. But he didn’t know everything that was possible, and as with his German trip, he’d decided to err on the side of caution and leave everything that could be compromised in the room while he went about his business on the sly.

The service door was unattended, and Jeffrey had no problem easing it open and stepping out into the alley, heaping garbage containers signaling that it was trash day. Two minutes later he was a block away and making for an internet café, the smell of coffee drawing him as much as the computers. He ordered a cappuccino and bought some time at one of the terminals, and then spent the next hour researching everything he could find on Bertrand, which was plenty. The man seemed to enjoy the reputation he’d built, and there were literally hundreds of articles from the last decade, including a number of YouTube videos of him speaking at scientific gatherings.

Jeffrey watched several as he sipped his brew, and the sense he got was of a charming figure who was somewhat ill at ease with the constant limelight. An academic more at home in the lab than on the stage, but still inexhaustible in his communication with the media.

That made Jeffrey’s approach easier. He would again pose as a journalist, this time a freelance investigative reporter doing a series of articles on retroviruses. But unlike the case at the German nursing home, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to smile his way past the Pasteur Institute’s security, so he would need to get business cards printed up, at minimum, and go in through the front door with his act polished to a mirror gleam.

He jotted down the Frenchman’s contact information and created a blind email account using his middle name – Stanley – and once it was active he emailed a brief introductory message to Bertrand, in the hopes that someone on his end checked his correspondence. He chose his words carefully, requesting some time with the scientist as a featured figure in his new article series.