23
Limoges, France. January 19
For twenty minutes after leaving Michel Dieppe’s home, Elise and Noah did not exchange a word. The cloud cover was thick and the natural light was gray as dusk, but despite the snow flurries and the menacing wind gusting around them, they reached a silent understanding that they would walk back to their hotel.
Halfway down the rue de Consulat, Elise stopped on the sidewalk outside one of the grand buildings lining the street. Noah walked a few steps farther before slowly turning to face her. He waited for her to speak.
“Noah, just because Benoît Gagnon and Philippe Manet happened to know each other, does that really change anything?”
Anger pushed away Noah’s disquiet. He avoided eye contact with Elise and stared instead at the snowflakes accumulating on the sidewalk. “Sounds to me like they more than just knew each other,” he said.
“No question.”
“Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—any prion disease, for that matter—is not sexually transmitted.”
“I am aware of that,” she said coolly, standing her ground. “But the two victims might have shared the same food, non?”
“Doesn’t fit,” Noah said, measuring his words. “In almost two hundred previous human cases, there have never been any reported clusters or associations between the family and friends of victims. So why here—when we’ve only identified three victims—are two of them intimately linked?”
She held open a palm. “Obviously this throws another…what is the expression?…wrench into the situation.”
“I could open up a hardware store with all the wrenches I’ve collected since I came here,” he said, but there was no levity in his tone.
“We discussed this before. Limousin has a small population. At some point, we were bound to discover associations between the people involved.”
Noah locked eyes with her. “What is it with you, Elise?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head. “Me?”
“Why are you so desperate to write everything off as coincidence?”
Elise folded her arms across her chest. “What makes you say that?”
“Right from day one, you and everyone at the E.U. have wanted this to be just another outbreak of BSE with a few human victims as collateral damage.”
“Why would we want that, Noah?” she said frostily. “As you have seen, this is a disaster for the European agricultural community.”
“Maybe the alternative is even worse.”
“What alternative?”
Noah wasn’t sure how to put his darkest thoughts into words, so he simply shook his head and said, “I don’t know.”
Elise raised an eyebrow. “Is it not possible that after your experience with the ARCS virus and those terrorists…”
“Yes?”
She uncrossed her arms. “That perhaps you are more…suspicious now?”
“You mean paranoid?”
“I mean what I said.”
“Maybe I was naïve before my experience with ARCS. Maybe I am jaded now. Who knows?” He narrowed his gaze. “What I do know is that my experience tells me all is not what it appears here. It’s like this whole time we’ve been trying to wedge together a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pieces.”
Elise clasped her hands in front of her. “You say that, and yet we have heard that the recent victims looked exactly like previous vCJD sufferers on autopsy. And we’ve found a central cattle supplier—proven to produce dangerous and illegal feeds—as the source for all known infected cows.”
Noah leaned closer to her. “Yes. But we also have a disease that spreads with the speed of a common cold, and kills as fast as any virus. Nothing like a prion.”
“I thought that microorganisms constantly mutate.”
“Mutate, of course. Subtle changes that occur over time. They don’t become new diseases overnight!” He numbered the points with his gloved fingers. “Now we have victims who are sexually involved. There are supposedly infected cows coming from a farm that has never been known to have a symptomatic case. People touched by the investigation into this prion have been dying in fires and car accidents. And we have an informant who tracks me to my hotel in the middle of the night, and then spies on me at a train station.”
“You don’t know that he was there to spy on you.”
“Just another coincidence, right?” Noah snapped. “Like the fact that someone searched my room in Limoges as soon as we left for Paris.”
Elise’s mouth fell open. “What are you talking about?”
“Somebody broke into my hotel room and combed through my notes and research papers.”
She closed her mouth, but her eyes were still wide with surprise. “How do you know? Is anything missing?”
“No, but I had a marker in my notebook. It was moved.”
“Could that not have been an accident? Maybe when the hotel maid was cleaning—”
“No!” Noah was so frustrated by her reflex rationalization that he didn’t bother explaining how secure the clip was. He fought off a scowl and calmed his voice. “It is strange, though.”
Elise pursed her lips and viewed him warily. “What is?”
He stared at her for a long moment. “That someone seems to know where I am at all times.”
Her eyes darkened. “Are you implying that I might have told someone?”
“What I am saying is that very few people know my schedule in France.”
Their breath crystallized between them for several seconds. “Except me?” she whispered hoarsely.
“And Javier,” Noah said. “He seems very well apprised of what we are up to.”
“He is my boss!”
“Is that all he is?”
Elise glared at him, fire in her eyes. “You have no right,” she said between gritted teeth. Tears suddenly welled up and spilled down her cheeks. She spun away from him and stormed off.
Noah watched her stride away. His anger suddenly dissolved, replaced by guilt. With shoes sliding on the slick sidewalk, he broke into a jog after her. He reached her at the street corner, where she stood waiting for a break in the traffic. He laid a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it away without turning. “Leave me alone, Noah,” she said softly.
His hand fell off her shoulder. “I am sorry, Elise. I was out of line.”
The traffic cleared momentarily, and Elise hurried across the street without acknowledging the apology.
Noah watched her go. He stood, immobilized, in the same spot as the pedestrian light cycled through two more color changes. Feeling his phone vibrate in his pocket, he dug it out and brought it to his ear. “Noah Haldane,” he barked.
“Catch you at a bad time?” the familiar voice said.
“Gwen?” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she said, amused. “You called me, remember?”
“I did, didn’t I?” he said, pleased to hear her voice.
“You said you wanted to run something by me.” Her tone grew more serious. “What’s going on over there, Noah?”
“I’m not sure.” He moved away from two other pedestrians waiting for the light and stood off the edge of the sidewalk. “I think the situation is more involved than it first appeared.” He gave her a quick update of the recent events, including the break-in.
“Shouldn’t you go to the police?” Gwen asked.
“With what? A farmer who ran from me, and a bookmark that was moved in my hotel room?”
“C’mon, Noah,” she said. “You are obviously being shadowed.”
Shadowed. He bristled at the word. “If I am, then it’s probably the E.U. or the French government keeping tabs on me.”
“Why bother if you’re already with one of their envoys?”
“Maybe they don’t trust Elise?” But he did not believe his own explanation.
“Hmmm. And would a government send a grizzled farmer to tip you off about the cattle supplier, and then have him wait for you outside a train station?”
“No.” With wind biting at his neck, he turned up the collar of his jacket.
“Other factors are at play here,” she said. “Noah, you need to be careful, you understand?”
“We’re talking about me, Gwen.” He summoned a chuckle. “Remember? I’m the one who runs out of collapsing buildings ahead of the women and children.”
“The way I remember it, you saved me from that building.”
“Yeah, but you were hit on the head. I could have told you anything afterwards.”
“True,” she said with a light laugh. “Maybe chivalry is dead, after all.”
“Long dead,” Noah said. “Enough about me and France. What’s new with you?”
“Usual sky-is-falling kind of stuff that fuels this town.” She told him of the latest bioterrorism threats worrying the authorities in Washington.
As Noah listened to Gwen’s matter-of-fact description of recent threats—anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, and botulism being just a few—he was reminded again of the momentous responsibility that she shouldered with such poise. “I guess a few mad cows and an angry farmer don’t seem so bad compared to your load,” he said.
“Noah, there are people here who can cover for me for a couple of days. Why don’t I come over there and see if I can lend a hand?”
Feeling as isolated as he ever had, Noah longed to have her by his side. He pictured her thoughtful eyes and captivating smile. He had a flashback of Gwen walking naked in that effortlessly sexy way toward him where he lay in the bed. But he forced himself to shake off the mental image. “Gwen, France is outside of the Bug Czar’s jurisdiction. Your crown wouldn’t shine as brightly here.”
“Crown?” she scoffed. “I don’t even get a decent dental plan with this job.”
Noah laughed, hiding his disappointment that she didn’t put up more of a fight.
“You keep me in the loop, Noah Haldane.”
“Dead center, I promise.”
“And Noah…” Her voice dropped. “Be careful, all right?”
As he hung up, he glanced at the call display that showed Gwen’s cell number. The sight reminded him of the two missed calls from the same local phone number two evenings earlier. He tried the number again, but the line rang unanswered, just as before. As he was hanging up, an idea hit him.
He hurried across the street and continued toward the hotel. Three blocks later, he walked past the cybercafé he had spotted before. He ordered an espresso and sat down at an empty terminal. Struggling with his French spelling, he had a few missteps before he found his way to the website that provided reverse-phone-number searches. He typed in the number from his cell’s display of missed calls. The system paused as the hourglass icon hovered on the screen, and then it coughed up a name: Dr. Louis Charron.
The implication hit him like a punch.
Noah studied his cell phone screen again. Charron called for the second and last time at 10:07 P.M. He thought back to the French newspaper article about Charron’s car accident. He remembered it said that Charron died before midnight, which meant that little more than an hour after trying twice to contact Noah, the neurologist had been so drunk behind the wheel that he veered off a straight road and slammed into a tree.
Noah’s veins filled with ice.
What the hell is going on here?