It was almost 4:00 A.M. — 7:00 Atlanta time — by the time Carlos and Monique were checked into the discreet separate rooms Roger Salmon had arranged for them in the new Holiday Inn just south of Colorado Springs. “That’s an hour’s drive from Canon City, but you’ll need some rest before you go down there, and facilities are better here.” On the way down Roger had briefed them on the status quo in Rampart Valley and the thoroughly disturbing developments in Canon City — new cases turning up all over down there, an infection that was moving too fast, far too fast, an atypical pattern even for something as volatile as plague. “The first cases down there obviously came from the camping party up in Washington,” Roger told them, “but these last ones have got to be secondary cases. Denver is getting very nervous about a major panic down here, and the TV newscasters obviously smell a very juicy scare story. We’ve got to get a handle on this thing very soon or we’re going to be in deep trouble …”
Yes, but get a handle on what, exactly? Carlos wondered. He had hoped to get a few hours’ sleep before Frank Barrington came pounding on his door — Roger had already contacted the man and set up an early morning meeting — but sleep proved elusive considering the sort of yawning chasm Carlos found himself staring into. Then, just as he was dozing off about 6:00 A.M. the phone jangled and he discovered that Denver was not the only place that was getting nervous. It was Ted Bettendorf on the phone from Atlanta, and his usually calm voice sounded just a little ragged. “Carlos, what in hell did you tell those TV people in Denver last night?”
“Tell them? I told them nothing. Nada. Nichts. Gornish.”
“Have you seen the morning ABC newscast? They quote you as saying we have a major epidemic in central Colorado, with uncounted people sick or dead, and we don’t know whether we can control it or not — Jesus, Carlos, they just went on and on.”
“Holy Mother of — ” Carlos leaped out of bed. “They didn’t actually show me saying any of those things, did they?”
“No, you were just on the screen. This was all some woman’s voice-over commentary.”
“Well, they just made it up, that’s all. All I told them, on camera or off, was that there were a few sick people we were investigating, and that everything was under control. I followed the rule book on Contacts with the Press the best I could, but you know what those people do when they want a story — ”
“Look, I don’t know what you told them,” Bettendorf said, “and you probably don’t either, but I know what I just got told. I just had the President on the line, the third day straight now, and he caught that morning newscast, and he was fit to be tied. Demanded to know what was going on out there that he didn’t know about. He was very upset, babbling something about panic in the streets during his administration and people dinging the Governor of Colorado to declare the whole state a disaster area, and how all he needs right now is a nice big public-health mess that we can’t control, right out in the middle of a major western state — well, you get the picture.”
“Okay,” Carlos said, “the next newshawk that comes around I’ll shoot on sight. Meanwhile, I need about six hours to find out what floats out here and what doesn’t, and I’ll be back to you.”
He hung up, got dressed and went down to the coffee shop for some breakfast. Monique was already there. “Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “They’re ready for me up at Fort Collins anytime you say. I’ve already got them started setting up a Hot Lab so we can handle the samples they’ve been collecting. I get the shakes every time I think about what I may find.”
“Yeah, well, everybody else has got the shakes, too, right up to the President, but we’ve got some work to do before you take off. This Barrington guy will be here at seven, for openers.”
Frank met them in the lobby as he came in off the street, the little Chicano doctor and the tall willowy blonde. There were quick introductions, and then Carlos led them to a small conference room. Frank glanced at Monique, wondered fleetingly how any woman that beautiful could want to spend her time rooting around in a bacteriology lab. But once in the room he turned his attention to Carlos. “So you’re the troubleshooter from CDC,” he said. “I just hope to hell you’re going to be able to stop this damned thing.”
“Stop it?” Carlos made an elaborate gesture. “Of course I’m going to stop it. Why do you think I’m here?”
“Whatever it was that hit Pam Tate may not be so easy to stop.”
“Pam Tate? Ah, yes.” Carlos’s face fell. “The unfortunate young woman. Your fiancée, I understand, and maybe a key to the puzzle.” He looked up at Frank. “Look, my large friend, I was being facetious, and it was in bad taste. I apologize. No, I most certainly am not going to be able to stop this damned thing, not in any sense of wiping it out. Nobody yet has managed to wipe it out in four thousand years of recorded history, and I don’t really think I’m going to be the lucky fellow. With a few good breaks and a lot of help from Monique and a lot of others I’m hoping at best to nail down this particular outbreak long enough to learn something about it and keep it from turning into a real mess. But I’m going to need those breaks, because something very strange is going on.”
“That’s for certain,” Frank said. “If it’s really plague, it’s been moving like lightning.”
“And you’ve been in Canon City?” Carlos said. “Tracing down contacts?”
“And finding a lot of sick people,” Frank said. “Here, I brought everything with me.”
He handed a large bundle of note sheets to Carlos. The little doctor sat down at the table and went through them carefully, page by page. Then he went through them again. “Remarkable,” he murmured. “You just came down from Washington on your own and started in on this?”
“I had to do something, and I knew that Pam had had contact with these people.”
“Remarkable,” Carlos repeated. “You’ve done this kind of work before?”
“Not really. But it seemed pretty common-sense to me. You find somebody sick with a contagious disease, you try to trace back to find out who he got it from, and then trace ahead to see who he might have given it to.”
“Yeah. Where I come from we call it epidemiology,” Carlos said wryly. “You’ve had no medical training at all?”
“I had two years in medical school, four or five years ago, before I had to drop out.”
Carlos looked up. “Oh, really? What happened? If I’m not too nosy.”
“Nothing terrible. My father came down with a bad cancer. Somebody had to mind the farm, and I was elected. By the time he died, we had to sell out to meet debts and expenses, and by then the idea of being a doctor had kind of lost its charm anyway — I’d seen enough for a lifetime, with Dad. A spot with the Forest Service came open and I grabbed it.”
“Well, this is very good work you’ve done down here. It’s going to give us a running start, and I want you to stick around, if you can. But right now the burning question is what happened to Pam Tate — and how in hell it could have happened.”
“You mean so fast?”
“Exactly,” Carlos said. “Ordinarily an infectious disease behaves in certain characteristic ways that you learn to recognize. That’s one of the ways that you tell Disease A from Disease B. Of course, Monique’s little bacteria cultures are a big help, too — but clinical patterns may be more important. Take leprosy, for instance — an infectious disease that normally spreads directly from person to person, but only after longstanding, very close physical contact with someone who’s infected. Even after the organism invades the new victim, it often takes from five to fifteen years of incubation before it really starts to move. It’s a deadly disease, all right, but very slow, very indolent. Plague has a characteristic pattern, too, but it’s totally different from leprosy. Plague doesn’t normally spread from person to person. The usual pattern is Rat gets sick, Flea bites Rat, Flea bites Man, Man gets sick. Then once the organism gets in the human body by this complex infective chain, it normally takes some three to five days to grow in there before fever or any other signs of illness appear.” The doctor looked up at Frank. “Compared to leprosy, it’s really explosive, it’s so fast, but we’re still talking about three to five days as a sort of minimum. Not twelve hours. Not even forty-eight hours. Which brings us to your Pamela Tate and the absolutely incredible report I have on her from our Shoeleather men up there.”
“Pam Tate went fast,” Frank said.
“If the story’s true,” Carlos said, “she went faster than I ever heard of anybody going, with plague. Look at the timing. From the story I have, she started up that mountain in full good health about four A.M. on a Monday morning. By Monday evening she was symptomatic — coughing, feverish, feeling sick. By then she was actually spreading infection to others by casual respiratory contact — it was the only contact she had with these Colorado people. By sometime on Tuesday — Day Two — up at Lancelot Lake, she was violently ill, and she died of pneumonic plague sometime before dawn of Day Three, and other people later contracted virulent infection just from contact with her body.” Carlos sighed. “Well, my friend, for classical plague that story just doesn’t hang together. Some vital piece is missing. I’m hoping you can fill it in.”
Frank shook his head. “The story you just outlined is exactly what happened. Except that she did have contact with some dead rodents that first day.”
The doctor looked up. “How do you know that?”
“She wrote it in her log. The little journal she kept.” Frank produced Pam’s notebook from his pocket.
Carlos took it to a window, opened it in the bright morning sunlight and began reading, very slowly, very carefully, stopping now and then to take notes of his own. After a long while he handed it back to Frank. “Well, there are the rats and the fleas, as far as Pam was concerned. Amazing. But she couldn’t have passed the fleas on to all those other people. To one or two of them, maybe, but not all of them.” He got up and paced for a moment. “You know, this business about the dirty, ragged boy is very strange.”
“I can’t make any sense out of that,” Frank said.
“Oh, I can,” Carlos said. “That’s why it’s so strange. One of the oldest persisting folk tales in history involves some kind of a demon-creature who always appeared just before the plague. The story turns up again and again. Ted Bettendorf, my boss in Atlanta and a major scholar of plague, has written papers about it. As far back as 100 A.D. Apollonius of Tyana was writing that the plague in Asia Minor was always preceded by the appearance in crowded places of a man whose eyes flashed fire — how about that? Philostratus, his biographer, confirmed the story five hundred years later. And then there was a thirteenth-century text — Ted has actually seen this one — written by some medieval chronicler called Gunther of Brandenburg who wrote, ‘Never yet has the plague come but one has first seen a ragged, stinking boy who drank like a dog from the village well and then passed on …’ “
“You don’t actually believe that, do you?” Frank said.
“Please. Of course I believe it. I mean, I believe it was believed. True or not — I couldn’t say.”
“I don’t believe it,” Frank said.
“Ah, well. Would you believe in the Day of the Dead in old México? No, you probably wouldn’t. Little candy skulls with your name on them. But I do.” Carlos shrugged eloquently. “There’s the difference between you and me. But let’s come back to the present. Tell me about this town you live in, this Leavenworth, Washington. No connection with the prison, I presume?”
“No, it’s just a little mountain village. The town fathers prettied it up with an Alpine Village theme a few years ago — Swiss false fronts on the main street, German names, knackwurst for breakfast, all that sort of stuff. Turned it into a modest tourist attraction, very beautiful location at the foot of the mountains, good fishing, and it’s close to a lot of trailheads leading to the Central Cascades.”
“Nice and clean? Good sanitary facilities?”
“They work overtime at it. Clean and pretty as a Dutch girl’s nose.”
“No rats around, I suppose.”
“Well, sometimes pack rats get into people’s attics in the winter,” Frank said.
“No, I don’t mean pack rats. I mean the big brown rats with the long naked tails.” Carlos held his hands apart. “The big humpbacked bastards that measure two feet from nose to tail tip and hang around alleys and sewers and waterfronts.”
Frank shook his head. “I’ve never seen one of those there. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one in my life.”
“Count your blessings,” Carlos said. “What about the place you and Pam were living? An old building?”
“Brand-new. The builder couldn’t sell it because of interest rates, so he gave us a break on the rent for an upstairs apartment.”
“No mice around?”
“No.”
“Did Pam have a cat?”
“Matter of fact, she hated them. We didn’t have a dog, either. We just weren’t around the place enough to keep a dog, especially with the summer work load.”
Monique, busy taking notes, looked up. “Any birds? Budgies, parakeets?”
“No birds.”
Carlos chewed on his thumb, then took a deep breath. “Okay, my large friend, now I have to crowd you a little — but it’s critically important. You said Pam was in peak physical condition that Monday morning when she started up the mountain. Perfectly healthy in every way. How did you know that?”
Frank flushed. “She sure seemed to be in pretty good shape the night before.”
“Okay, like specifically.”
“Hell, man, you can’t take a woman like that to bed without knowing whether she’s sick or not,” Frank exploded. “You could tell in a million ways. We were very, very close. We were fine-tuned to each other, mentally and physically. Her job demanded top physical conditioning or she just couldn’t have hacked it. What’s more, she was one of those people who had to be really high on what she was doing or she tended to droop, and she wasn’t doing any drooping.” Frank took a deep breath. “Everything I remember about her that night and morning spelled exuberant good health to me. That morning, as usual, she got out of bed like she was shot from a cannon when the alarm went off. Then she decided I was too slow crawling out, so she got hold of a foot and started pulling. There was a little horseplay, a little wordplay, a little light fooling around, but I finally let her win and rolled out and started helping her stuff her pack. Well, Doctor, that is not a picture of a woman who’s sick.”
“No,” Carlos said gloomily, “I guess it isn’t. But what about earlier? What were you two doing two or three days before that particular morning?”
“The Thursday before, she came down from the Enchantments over Asgard Pass into Colchuck Lake and down Eight Mile creek to the road. Caught a ride, so she got home a little earlier than usual. We’d finagled three days off at the same time, so we went to Wenatchee for dinner and a show, stayed over with some friends, and then went to a country auction on Friday. She found some cheap kitchen cabinets that caught her eye, so we hauled them home and spent the rest of the weekend refinishing them. That was about it.”
Carlos regarded the big forester for a long moment. “Could something possibly have happened to Pam on that previous trip, before she came out on Thursday? Dead rodents or anything like that?”
“Not that I know of,” Frank said. “She was a sharp girl. If anything had happened, she’d have put it in her logbook, and probably told me as well. She didn’t say anything, and when I checked back through the book later I found nothing.”
“There were no breaks in her skin that you know of? No scratches? Sores? Flea bites?”
“I guarantee you, she didn’t have any flea bites.”
Carlos sighed and walked across to rub Monique’s shoulder. “Well, there you are, my dear,” he said. “You see why I’m nervous.”
“Yes,” she said. “I certainly see.”
“A whole chain of infections, all moving far too fast, with a very high ratio of direct person-to-person contact. No rats, and no fleas in between. And most if not all of these cases traceable to a single totally impossible index case. You know what that adds up to, God help us.”
Monique sighed and nodded. “An atypical variant. A wild one that writes its own ticket.”
“Well, pinning that down is up to you at Fort Collins,” Carlos said. “You’ve got plenty of samples to work on.”
“Yes, but they’re old samples. Run a bug like that through a few successive culture plates and you don’t know what you’ve got.”
“Don’t worry, the Shoeleather Boys will get you enough new samples. And Frank and I are going out tomorrow to find some of these dead rodents he’s been talking about. We’ll bring you some fresh meat.”