The excitement was palpable the next day as Sally Grinstone flew down to Colorado Springs from Denver in a plane carrying a whole squadron of CDC people coming in to relieve some of the ones who had been running a long string of twenty-two-hour days in Canon City. It was from them that she learned that the main headquarters in this plague fight was in Canon City, not Colorado Springs, and that one Dr. Carlos Quintana was the man to see for a news story, if there was going to be any story. It was also from the relief workers that she learned that Terry Linder was dead, subliminally the real reason she’d decided to come out here at all — God, that man should win a posthumous Pulitzer for those plague stories he wrote, the greatest piece of medical reporting she’d seen in half a lifetime, and that was not excluding her own … And finally it was from the relief workers that she learned that a new antibiotic drug had surfaced just in time in Canon City, and helped the CDC people finally pull the fat out of the fire down there, or so the rumor went. Having picked their brains by the time they had reached Colorado Springs, Sally crowded her luck still further and cadged a ride down to Canon City with several of the CDC crowd in a rented Chevy, and thus arrived half a day sooner than she had expected.
Not that it did her any good, in the long run. Wherever Dr. Carlos Quintana might have been, he was not immediately available, and he wasn’t holding press conferences nor giving exclusives to investigative reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer, especially female reporters. In fact, one of his aides made it quite clear that Dr. Quintana currently had a thing going about reporters, especially female reporters; he’d already locked horns with one during this current Colorado plague business and was definitely taking the attitude of once burned, twice shy.
Well, Sally reflected, it wasn’t the first time she’d run into a stone wall. She did get to talk to a dozen or so of the Shoeleather crowd who had been working with the good doctor there, and pulled out enough background from a few of them to make at least a back-page or supplement story — maybe a good retrospective summary piece, if it really was true that things out here were finally coming under control …
It was all very workaday and ordinary for Sally Grinstone, and she gave it half a day’s time and then headed back toward Denver in disgust. And indeed, the trip might have been a total loss, from her viewpoint, except for that flight back to Denver, when she happened to trip over the foot of a heavy set man in a gray suit with a heavy black five-o’clock shadow — a man whose grim face, even at her fleeting glance, seemed strangely familiar; in fact she’d seen it very recently in some other place — where was it? And then it clinked down in place: Mancini. Indianapolis and a drug-company press conference. Production man from Sealey Labs. And then the obvious question: Why here? with no answer forthcoming. And beneath that unanswered question a less obvious but plainly disquieting thought: God. If those plague fighters are counting on Mancini and Sealey Labs for anything what-so-ever, the fat could really be in the fire …