At CDC in Atlanta, Mandy was just putting down the telephone when Dr. Ted Bettendorf headed out of his office for a five-minute sandwich in the commissary. “Now that’s interesting,” she said, giving him an odd look. “I think that’s a call you’d better return yourself.”
Ted stopped in midstride; Mandy never bothered him with trifles these days. “How so?”
“Damnedest thing I ever heard. That was a Perry Haglund. He’s one of our Shoeleather Boys in Lincoln, Nebraska. That is, he was one of our EIS people in Lincoln until Lincoln got hit and he packed up and went back home to Willow Grove, Nebraska, allegedly to help out there if the plague came, but more likely to get out of Lincoln.”
Ted motioned her to follow him. “Come talk while I eat. Why should I call somebody in Willow Grove, Nebraska, when I’ve got exactly four minutes to eat in before I have to come back here and spend an hour of delight with a team from Sealey Labs? Wait a minute — Haglund. Rings a bell. Used to be in Lincoln, you say? You’re right. A good guy, had some public-health background. And he was one of the crew that helped Carlos in Canon City.”
Mandy nodded. “You’ve got him. I don’t know how good a guy he is; after Haglund ran for home we lost seven CDC people in Lincoln in one fast week waiting for your Mr. Mancini to produce, but maybe his conscience is bothering him now or something — ”
“So what did he want?” Ted pushed open the commissary door, stood aside for Mandy.
“He just wanted us to know that a couple of weird con artists are trying to set up some kind of phony drug sale in Willow Grove, Nebraska, and he’s been rung in on it, and he wants to know what he should do.”
“Phony drug sale?”
“Some kind of homemade antibiotic.”
“In Willow Grove, Nebraska?”
“Right.”
Ted wolfed down half a sandwich. “I would laugh, except I don’t think you think I should laugh.” He looked at her. “Look, I’m trying to goose Sealey Labs into springing enough 3147 to help get the city of Pittsburgh off the ropes, and you want me to worry about somebody peddling snake oil somewhere in Nebraska. Why?”
Mandy shrugged. “According to this Haglund guy, these people are operating very strangely. So far, Willow Grove has had no plague, but they don’t think it’s going to be long before they have it. Willow Grove is a county seat, about twenty thousand people, but there are a whole bunch of little nearby towns where everybody’s kind of holed up, following Haglund’s advice about no public meetings, no church services, everybody stay home and eat out of the freezer and so on. So this woman turned up from somewhere down in Kansas and went straight to the local doctors, there are two of them, pretty sharp guys, and she also went to Haglund as the nearest semblance of a public-health officer around, and she set them up that she has a way to keep Willow Grove and all those other little towns free of plague.”
“By magic or by willpower?” Ted said.
“She says her partner is whomping up some new antibiotic that’s supposed to stop the plague in its tracks. They want to supply Willow Grove with all they can use — before the plague gets there.”
“I see,” Ted said. “And what’s the asking price on this new antibiotic?”
“They don’t want to sell it. They just want to trade it for all the plain tetracycline these doctors and the local pharmacies can lay their hands on.”
Ted scowled. “Well, that’s a new wrinkle. But it’s still just a con, Mandy. Or else they’re a couple of nuts.”
“Maybe so. They’re sure claiming the world for the new drug — and nobody has any except them.”
“I see. And they want to run a nice little clinical test on Willow Grove, Nebraska — is that it?”
Mandy leaned toward him. “Ted, that’s exactly it. Haglund called because that was exactly what they told the doctors. But they also told them that it had already been tested. In our own CDC facility at Fort Collins. They say it’s the drug that Sealey buried and ran 3147 in as a ringer. The exact same drug. And these people say they can make it in quantity.”
“And kill everybody in Willow Grove, Nebraska. God! Remember that guy peddling the fake vaccine to half the people of Joplin, Missouri? You know what happened to all those people — ” Bettendorf stood up very suddenly. “Look, maybe I’d better do something. Let’s get back to a phone. I can damned well check with Fort Collins and find out why nobody around there denied that newspaper exposé about a phony drug switch after the first tests — Monique Jenrette did the testing, she should know, and she’s still out there.”
Back at the office, he turned to the girl. “Where’s this Haglund’s number? Okay, fine, let’s hope a couple of trunks are open all the way. It should be eleven in Colorado. You get me Fort Collins and get Monique on the line for me first. Just Monique, nobody else. Then you go downstairs and stall Sealey Labs. I’ll come rescue you as soon as I can.”
Back in his inner sanctum, Ted tried to clear his head, bring back in focus that newspaper story that had raised such a fuss. Sealey and Mancini had denied it fiercely, but Fort Collins had never denied it, and then he had simply lost track of following it up. He was not a superstitious man and he seldom paid attention to hunches, but something crawling up his spine was telling him very loudly that there was something more to this odd story than a couple of snake-oil peddlers trying to make a fast buck out in the ding-weeds. If some kind of kitchen-stove outfit was busy making some kind of rump drug that might wipe out twenty thousand people, and were dragging Fort Collins CDC into it as their backup — well, CDC’s rep was not faring too well anywhere at all these days, and a bad grassroots scandal could be a terrible albatross —
The phone buzzed. Ted grabbed it. “Monique? Ted Bettendorf in Atlanta — ”
He heard Mandy’s voice. “Sorry, Ted, you’re not going to get Monique. She’s not there anymore.”
“Not there!”
“She hasn’t turned up for a week, they say, and they went out to her place and she’s nowhere around. It looks like she and her boyfriend have just quietly packed up and gone west. Or some other direction.”
“Okay, go on downstairs and hold the fort. I’ll be along in a minute.” He dropped the phone on the hook and sank into his desk chair, shaking his head. Monique just bagging it at a time like this? Monique? He couldn’t believe it. Monique was too solid — and the boyfriend she was with was solid too — or at least Carlos had once thought so. For a moment he had a shaky feeling, as though stable underpinnings were shifting subtly, as though stability were an illusion and nothing was holding still — but it passed in a wave. Tired, he was getting tired, too tired. He took out the telephone memo Mandy had handed him, then reached for his private line and slowly began dialing Perry Haglund’s number.