The Fourth Horseman Page 3

  Ted Bettendorf knew without the slightest doubt that his answer had to be no. The question was: why? The reason had to be plausible — scientifically supportable — or they could challenge him in a court appeal, and very well might. But the only argument he could think of at the moment was that the program would tie up the Hot Lab for one-third of a year, which meant it couldn’t be used for anything else once the program was started. This smallpox research was not critical to human life, right now — but something critical could turn up at any moment …

  He squirmed, searched through other reports. He knew of nothing. A human rabies case, fatal, from New Mexico, transmitted by bat guano in a cave. Two hundred and seventy-three new cases of leprosy identified in the last twelve months, a stable, steady growth of that disease each year for the past six years, much of it imported with refugees, nothing yet to become alarmed about. A sharp upsurge in new pulmonary tuberculosis in the slums, a hundred percent consistent with the continuing cutback in welfare funds. An oddly shifting pattern for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, more cases in the southeastern states than in the West — but other than things like that, nothing to hang his hat on.

  Well, he thought suddenly, it really didn’t have to be decided tonight. By the rules, he had fourteen days to respond to this request, and he would by God take fourteen days this one time. Tomorrow he would set Mandy to searching for something he could use. Maybe tonight somebody is dying of something that will make a difference, he thought wryly. A reach, perhaps, but there you were. Ted Bettendorf threw the sheaf of papers on his desk, scribbled a brief note on the paper in front of him and climbed wearily to his feet. In the words of the immortal Willis McCawber, Esq., he thought, “Something will turn up …”

  6

  In another CDC office in Atlanta, Georgia, on the night Pam Tate died, Dr. Carlos Quintana was still dictating correspondence at 8:30 P.M. when Monique came in with a foot-high stack of folders in her arms. “You’re going to hate me for this,” she said.

  “Impossible,” Carlos said firmly. “Nothing you could do could create such a situation. But why are you still here?”

  “Because you need this stuff for your report on that Legionella outbreak in Kansas City,” she said. “It’s all microbiology, and it’s going to take you three weeks just to analyze it, unless you persuade me to leave my microscope and come do it for you. And Ted is going to be breathing down your neck in one week, because that’s when he wants your report, wrapped up and finished.”

  “Yes, I know.” The young man came around the desk as she dumped the pile of folders there. He placed his hand on her hip and kissed her gently. She was a striking woman: long slender legs, blond hair, an even, intelligent face, deep breasts. Fantastically competent behind that microscope, he thought. And elsewhere. He leafed through the first few folders. “Splendid excuse for working late tonight,” he murmured. “Who could argue with one of Ted’s deadlines?”

  “You aren’t going to like what you find here,” Monique said.

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because you are a nitpicking perfectionist, my friend, who spent almost two weeks out there trying to tie up that mini-epidemic in a nice, neat scientific package — but there’s nothing remotely neat about this lab data that you need to support your case. The truth is, it’s one big indecisive mess. My people did the best they could with the stuff your people shipped us, but Jesus, Carlos … ”

  The young doctor laughed. “My dear, you worry about the damndest things. Believe me, somewhere in your pile of data here I will find the answers I need. For now, all I’m worried about, since I’m obviously going to have to work so late, is where we should have dinner. Barron’s, would you think?”

  She looked at the darkly handsome young man, realizing that he was laughing at her — as usual. “Do you really think that’s wise, so soon again?”

  He shrugged elaborately. “Por qué no?”

  “Porque Angela is going to get wise one of these days.”

  “My dear, Angela was wise the day she was born. Don’t worry yourself. So. It’s Barron’s, then?”

  She nodded finally. “Sí,” she said. “Cómo no?”

  7

  In the black south-side ghetto of Chicago, on the night Pam Tate died, Sidonia Harper lay on her cot in her second-story tenement room, staring into the darkness long after she should have been sleeping.

  It was amazing, Siddie thought, what you could tell just from the sounds and smells that came to your room. Here, in the summer heat, there was no hiding from the rank garbage smell that came billowing up from the fire-escape alley outside her window. No fresh air ever penetrated here — you didn’t expect it to. In the darkness outside she could hear others, sitting out on the metal steps above and below — talking, smoking, now and then laughing, a beer can clattering down onto the alley pavement, a giggling discussion of the weatherbeaten tomcats patrolling the overflowing trash cans. Somewhere else in the building a party was going on, with shrieks and whoops and the thrumming of punk-rock music. And somewhere, inevitably, somebody was cooking cabbage, adding its reek to the fetid garbage stench. Siddie knew them all by their sounds and smells — but there was no way she could go out to join them.

  It had been a long day for Siddie. The Man from social services had come today, like he’d said he would, to bring her his answer, like he’d said he would, and the answer was no. There wasn’t going to be any banister-lift to carry her and her wheelchair down from this second-story flat to the ground floor below. There wasn’t any money for that, the Man said. Everything had been cut back, so they had to do without the frills. A banister-lift wasn’t a matter of life or death, the Man had pointed out. And after all, she did have her chair. It wasn’t as if she had to stay in bed all the time.

  So there she was, she thought, good old no-frills Siddie, taking it on the jaw again. Maybe once a week, if she was lucky, she or her mother could get a couple of the boys from upstairs to carry her down the long flight to the ground floor, along with her chair, so she could have an hour — a whole hour! — of freedom from this tiny second-floor prison. The rest of the time — well, this was home, baby, and this was where she stayed.

  She stirred, got her arms under her, and laboriously shifted the upper half of her body over from one side of the cot to the other for a while. Some eighteen-year-old girls might have wept at the news the Man had brought today, but not Sidonia Harper. There was a dogged toughness about her that made even her mother wonder sometimes. As soon as she’d heard what the Man had to say, she’d started revising her thinking about more freedom, making peace with the denial. She’d learned how to make peace with a lot of things since that awful night two years before when she’d gone through the fire-escape rail and down to the concrete alley below …

  So there wouldn’t be any lift to carry her chair down. Well, that was all right. Someday, she thought, things were going to be different and she wasn’t going to need any lift.

  8

  On a mountainside north of Leavenworth, Washington, on the night after Pamela Tate died, Frank Barrington reached the uppermost corner of the 160-acre controlled-burn area about four-thirty in the morning and turned west along the firebreak line his crew had been busy digging for the past three weeks. He turned to survey the vast burned-out area below him, parts of it still flaming, other parts billowing dense clouds of acrid smoke, and nodded in satisfaction. Here and there above the firebreak line, in the thick forest along the ridge of Rattlesnake Mountain, he could see spot fires smoldering, but they didn’t worry him. If the crew could get them before the sun got too much higher in the sky, they had this slash burn made.

  Down the line toward him a big girl came trudging along, a huge black water pack on her back, hard hat down over her ears. She was even grimier than Frank was, smeared from top to toe with ashes and soot. She looked very tired. “Ho, Becky,” Frank said as she stopped to wipe sweat off her forehead.

  “Hi,” the girl said. “Larry finally got that tanker pump working again, so we’ve got some water up here at last. Where do you want us to put it?”

  “Those spot fires up there,” Frank said. “I’ll get Billy and Sue up here to help you. How does it look farther over?”

  “Not too bad,” the girl said. “There was a flare-up over beyond that granite rockfall that scared me a couple of hours ago; I thought it was going to jump the line, but only a few sparks went over.” She sighed wearily. “I’m just glad we finally got the bugger burned, that’s all. Before we had a lightning storm and the whole mountainside went up.”

  The “bugger” was 160 acres of heaped-up piles of small logs, stumps, branches and other debris left over from a logging operation two years before, baked tinder-dry by long seasons of hot summer sun and no rain — a terrible forest-fire hazard in these steep Cascade mountains until it could safely be burned out. The problem was finding the chance: after watching closely for three weeks, it had not been until 8:30 the previous evening that the humidity had finally gotten high enough to make a controlled burn possible, and Frank and his crew had made their move. As Fire Boss, it had been his responsibility to coordinate the whole operation — send out the lighting crews to touch off the heaps of rubble, keep the tanker trucks rolling to supply the pumps carrying water through hoses high up the mountainside, patrol the firelines himself for spot fires and bring in crewmen where they were needed. Now, nine hours later the acute danger was over as long as the wind didn’t come up, but it would be another ten hours of mop-up before any of the crew could leave. Damned logging companies, he thought. They love to get their greedy hands on those logs — but they can’t be bothered with a decent cleanup. Forest Service has to do that.

  His walkie-talkie crackled and he took it off his belt. “Frank? Larry he
re,” a tiny voice sounded. “How’s it doin’?”

  “Looks pretty good so far,” Frank said.

  “It looked great from down here. Seen anything?”

  “I jumped a big bull elk about an hour ago, right up here in all that smoke.”

  “Smoke don’t bother those big guys any,” Larry said. He paused. Then: “Frank, the Super just called. Wants you back down at the office.”

  Frank blinked at the walkie-talkie. “In Leavenworth? When?”

  “Like right now. That’s what he said.”

  “Hey, man, I’ve got a slash burn going. I can’t just walk off and take a twenty-mile drive.”

  “I’m supposed to relieve you,” Larry said. “He wants you down there fast.”

  The burn was still far too hot to pick his way through it, and it took Frank half an hour to get down the outside fireline to the place where the pickups were parked. He looked at Larry, already shouldering the Fire Boss’s pack, but Larry just spread his hands and shrugged. As Frank started his pickup down the rough mountain road toward the highway to Leavenworth, he grew more and more apprehensive. Nobody hauls a man off a burn like this, he thought, unless there’s a real bastard of a fire going somewhere else. He didn’t have the only first-attack fire crew in the Wenatchee District, for God’s sake — but if something else wasn’t burning, why would the Super be in his office at 5:30 in the morning?

  Forty minutes later Frank stalked into the little Leavenworth Ranger Station, filthy and reeking, and stuck his head in the door of the Super’s office. “Hey, man, what’s going on? You got a big fire somewhere?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.” The Super was a small, wiry, balding man of about sixty with blue eyes and a gentle face. “Nothing like that at all. Come on in, have a seat.” He waited until Frank settled his huge bulk onto a frail office chair, his face quite unreadable. “That burn doing all right up there?” he asked.

  Frank frowned. “Of course it is. You talked to Larry, you know it’s going fine. You didn’t call me off to ask me that.”

  “No, that’s true. I didn’t.” The Super avoided Frank’s eyes, fiddled with a marking pen on his desk. Then he took a deep breath. “Frank, I understand that you’ve been close to Pamela Tate this summer, is that right?”

  Frank looked at the man. “You might say that.”

  “Maybe very close,” the Super said.

  “We’re engaged to be married,” Frank said. “Is that close enough?” He sat forward and stared at his boss, frowning. “Why? What about Pam? She’s on patrol up in the Enchantments right now. She’s not due back until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Did she seem sick in any way when you saw her last? Before she started up there this time?”

  “Lord, no,” Frank said. “She was healthy as I am. Say, what the hell is this, anyway? Is something wrong with Pam?”

  “I’m afraid Pam ran into some trouble on this patrol,” the Super said quietly. “I thought you’d better know.”

  Frank was on his feet towering over the desk. “What kind of trouble, up there? A bear? There hasn’t been a grizzly up there since we shot that old sow eight years ago.”

  “It wasn’t a bear, it was something else. A hiker found her lying half in and half out of her tent about noon yesterday and packed all the way out to report it. We sent Doc Edmonds and two of the trail crew up there in a chopper last night the minute we got word. They brought her out. Just got down an hour ago. They dropped her pack and tent over at her apartment.” The Super paused. “She — she looked like she’d been worked over with a ball bat.”

  “Great God. Nobody ever assaults anybody up in a place like that! But at least she’s healthy as a horse. She’ll mend.” Frank turned for the door. “Where is she now? Wenatchee General? I’ve got to see her.”

  “Frank, you don’t understand. Pam’s dead. She was dead when the hiker found her. We brought out her body.”

  The big man stood frozen by the door for long seconds. Then in horrible slow motion he raised a huge clenched fist and drove it smashing into the wall by the door, once, twice, three times, until the plaster crumbled. “You aren’t lying to me?” he said finally. “This isn’t some kind of lousy joke?”

  “I don’t make that kind of joke,” the Super said, “and I’m not lying. I’m as sick about it as you are.” His voice broke momentarily. “I don’t know what happened up there, Frank, but whatever it was, it was something foul. Doc Edmonds should still be there at the morgue in Wenatchee. He may have some answers by the time you get there, if you want to go down.”

  He didn’t know how he got there, his vision frozen down to a tunnel, his mind frozen, his emotions frozen. He didn’t even know where the morgue in Wenatchee was located, but presently he found it, a long, gray, antiseptic-smelling room with two bare stainless-steel tables and white bathroom tiles on the floor dipping down to two metal drains. A bank of big filelike drawers along one side of the room, with red tags on the doors. At the end of the room was a small office-laboratory with glass windows looking out onto the morgue room. He saw Dr. Harry Edmonds there, writing on a long yellow legal pad. The doctor, thin and bearded and fortyish, came out to meet him. “Frank, I’m sorry as hell about this …”

  Frank shook his head. “Nothing you did.”

  “If there’s anything I can do … ”

  “Yes. You can tell me what happened.”

  Doc spread his hands. “It looks like pneumonia, plain and simple. She’d been dead about ten hours when the hiker found her on Wednesday. That’s about all I can tell you.”

  “Pneumonia! I can’t believe it. Doc, I was up at four Monday morning, helping her stuff her pack for that patrol. She wasn’t sick then, not even a little. She hasn’t been sick all summer, and she was in absolutely prime physical shape on Monday morning. Now you tell me what kind of pneumonia cuts somebody like that down in forty-eight hours or less?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes an atypical bug turns up.”

  “Did you take any tests?”

  “I took a sputum smear and stained it. It just showed a gram-negative rod, looked a lot like an ordinary colon bacillus except it didn’t take the stain very well. But some strains of E. coli can be murder when they get into the lung.”

  “What about cultures?”

  Doc sighed. “I plated out the sputum, of course, and some lung tissue, and some blood. But I’m not sure anything will grow, it was almost thirty hours post-mortem before we even got the stuff in an incubator. The X rays were pretty plain, though.” He pulled out films and stuck them up on a viewer. “I took these with a portable machine. Even post-mortem you can tell there was no functioning lung tissue at all. Solid beefsteak. And my physical exam confirmed it — no air movement at all.”

  “But so fast … ” Frank groped for something to say. “What about the autopsy?”

  “No legal permission. Her only family is her father. We contacted his engineering office in New York. He’s down in the jungle in southern India somewhere, designing artesian wells. There aren’t any phones, no way to reach him.”

  “What about the Coroner?”

  “He’s satisfied there was no foul play. Won’t issue the order.”

  “Look, I was engaged to that girl,” Frank said angrily. “Maybe not officially, exactly, but I was. Let me give permission for an autopsy.”

  “That wouldn’t satisfy a judge, Frank. I’m sorry. But that reminds me.” He picked up a small box from the office desk and handed it to Frank. “I think you ought to have these, legal or not.”

  The box contained two plain gold earrings and a small star-sapphire pendant on a white-gold chain. There was a brownish smudge on the oval surface of the blue stone. Frank worked consciously to control his shaking hands as he tucked the box in his pocket. “I want to see her, Doc.”

  The doctor’s tired eyes met his straight on. “I don’t think you do, Frank, believe me. Not really.”

  “I’ve got to.”

  The doctor walked over to one of the drawers in the wall and drew it out full length. He pulled down the gray plastic cover and turned his back. A long moment later Frank turned away too, his face as gray as the plastic. “Those welts.”