“La Muerte,” the dark-haired man muttered, twisting in the cramped airplane seat and pushing the maps aside.
The woman beside him blinked awake. “Hm?”
“The Death,” Carlos Quintana translated. “The word is feminine in Spanish — isn’t that interesting? There are some weird cultural reasons for that, but I won’t bore you. Well, she may be female, but she isn’t any lady. A lady at least would wear a deceptive fragrance, and this particular sweetheart can’t be bothered. She stinks from here to Chihuahua and back.”
Monique gave him a level look. “Honey, you’re dog tired. Why don’t you just lean back and sleep till we get to Denver?”
“Look, I was tired before we started, and I’m going to be a lot more tired before we finish. And how am I supposed to sleep? I keep looking at these maps and the more I look at them, the more this whole business stinks. There’s a great big gap in the picture somewhere. We just aren’t getting the whole story.”
“So what do you think is missing?” Monique said.
The engines rumbled and the plane lurched in some choppy air as it approached the escarpment of the Rockies. Carlos, who hated flying, clutched his seatbelt and hoped he wouldn’t be violently ill right in front of this beautiful, talented woman. When the flight settled down again, he looked at her. “You mean you can’t see the gap?”
“Not really. We’re certainly dealing with plague, that’s clear enough from those first cultures we’ve run in the Atlanta lab. They just confirm what Seattle and Fort Collins have reported. It’s plague all right. A lot more plague than there ought to be.”
Quintana snorted. “You might say so,” he said. “But where are the rats? Where are the fleas? Doesn’t that strike you odd? All this data piling in about a sudden, plaguelike illness, but not one word about rats or fleas.”
“We’ll find the rats and fleas,” Monique said firmly. “They’ll be there, don’t worry. They always are.”
“Maybe so,” Carlos said uneasily, “but the pattern’s all wrong. Look here.” He flattened the maps out on their laps. “We’ve got the index case way up here in the Northwest, the girl died in the wilderness. Not down in a hospital, mind you. Out in the woods somewhere. She’s got to be the index case, because everybody who came close to her has also died. We’ve got eleven cases so far in the Northwest alone, confirmed or suspicious, nine of them dead, and the Shoeleather Boys up there, along with the State Health Department, have pinned every one of them down to her. God knows what the count’s going to be by the time we get to Denver. But no rats, and no fleas. Okay, now look here.” The dark-haired doctor shuffled maps again. “We’ve also got this disaster at this little hospital in Rampart Valley, Colorado. That place was apparently contaminated from top to bottom in about three hours. A very sharp doc there pinned it down, thank God, and got everybody in sight taking prophylactic antibiotics, and even at that we already have five dead out of there by last count, according to our people in Fort Collins, and still no rats, no fleas …”
Monique pulled on her lower lip, frowning. “What did that doctor use there? Tetracycline?”
“For the antibiotic? No. Streptomycin and chloramphenicol, together. Full therapeutic doses.”
“Both? And five people still died? But Carlos, that’s weird. Those drugs stop Yersinia. Unless he started the drugs so late — ”
“He started them within an hour after he identified the bug under the microscope, you can’t get much faster than that, and the people still died. So maybe you see what I mean about somehow not having the whole story?”
“I’m beginning to see.”
“Well, I’m not quite clear yet just where that Rampart Valley case came from, but if a bunch of people have brought some plague down from the Northwest to central Colorado, and it’s acting like this, we may just have a mess on our hands. Ted said the state of Colorado is already frantic about a publicity leak. This is the peak of their tourist season and one little news story could kill them.” Carlos pushed the maps aside with a sigh. “I just hope Ted has gotten things organized out here by the time we arrive. Who are we supposed to meet in Denver? You have that list?”
Monique unfolded a memo sheet. “First there’s Roger Salmon from our CDC base in Fort Collins. He’s supposed to meet us at the airport in Denver. He’s coordinating things, Ted said, already has a crew of Epidemic Intelligence Service people gathered in from Seattle, San Francisco and Mullin, Idaho — ”
“Experienced people, I hope,” Carlos said.
“Ted said they may be pretty green, but they’ve got good shoes. Then there’ll also be a man up from Albuquerque, name of Bob Romano.”
“Right, I’ve worked with him. Knows what he’s doing in a field investigation.” Carlos scratched his head. “There was somebody else Ted mentioned just as we left, a funny one, but he thought it might be important. Something about some other town. Somebody named Barringer … Farringer … ?”
“Barrington,” Monique said. “He’s a forester.”
“A what?”
“He takes care of trees. In the wilderness. He works for the Forest Service.”
“So what are we going to learn from him?”
“I don’t know,” Monique said. “Maybe something about rats and fleas.” Carlos glanced at her sharply, and she shrugged. “One thing, though — Ted said he was living with the first girl before she died.”
“Ah, so.” Carlos nodded. “In that case, I certainly will want to see him, and early on, too. I think maybe you’d better stick around for some of these first meetings, my dear. You’re going to need the background as much as we are. And then I think you’re going to have your work cut out for you when you get to Fort Collins.”
“So do I,” Monique said soberly. “If these little bugs they’ve been collecting for me are as nasty as they sound, we’re going to need a full-scale hot microbiology lab to play with them. We are, that is, if we want to find out how these Yersinia are different from ordinary plague bugs — and how to stop them …”