The Red Lotus Page 19

  She shook her head as he reached behind him onto the credenza—metal and pressed wood, straight from an office supply warehouse—for a second laptop. He turned on his own computer and then attached it with a cable to Austin’s. “This isn’t rocket science or a serious spy hack you’re about to see. Trust me, I’m no computer geek. Any IT nerd can do what I’m about to show you.”

  “Which is?”

  He opened Austin’s MacBook and, as he started to boot it up, held down a key on the keyboard. “I’m pressing on the T. Now, wait for it…there we go.” His eyes went to his own computer. “Your boyfriend’s Mac is now appearing on mine as an external device. Imagine an external disc drive.”

  “So you can see what’s on it? So we can see what’s on it?”

  He nodded and clicked on something, then on something more, and then turned around his own laptop so she could view the screen for herself. “Of course, there’s nothing to see.”

  It looked to her like a brand-new computer screen with an empty desktop.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, confused.

  He shrugged. “It means it’s been wiped clean. Everything has been erased. You’re looking at the factory settings.”

  “He erased it before he went biking that day?”

  “Or he erased it from his phone.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “The ‘Find My iPhone’ feature,” he went on. “It’s magic. A great way to find a device and a great fail-safe for whatever’s on the device if it’s lost or stolen. You wash it.”

  She thought of the word wash. She’d never heard it before in this context. “Still, we don’t know if Austin was the one who washed it.”

  “No, we don’t,” the PI agreed.

  She held up his iPad. “And this?”

  “Well, that’s like his phone. I can’t get into that without his password. But speaking from experience?”

  “Go on.”

  “His iPad would have appeared on that app on his phone right above or right below this MacBook.” He pointed at Austin’s laptop. “If someone erased this bad boy, I promise you, they erased his tablet, too.”

  19

  Douglas looked at the photos that were spread, very much like the pieces of a collage, on the kitchen table in his apartment. They’d been printed on regular, eight-and-one-half-by-eleven-inch copy paper, but they were still crisp. Douglas could see what he wanted. Once upon a time, he had worked on his high school yearbook—one more thing for his college application, one more way to meet cute girls—and now he was having one of those Proustian flashbacks to being sixteen and back in Ms. Simonetti’s air-conditioned classroom in Dallas and looking at the photos they were going to use to create a two-page spread of students mugging around the cacti that lined the school’s front walkway. The images before him now, however, weren’t teenagers with backpacks and books and silly (or sheepish) grins. They were rats. Dead rats. There were nine of them, printed in vivid color.

  He pointed at one, its brown fur lost to open pustules or matted with dried blood. Beside it was a ruler for perspective. “Look at the length of his tail. Look at his midsection. He was a big boy,” Douglas observed to the fellow beside him. It was just the two of them, and they were munching on bagels and lox. It was raining this morning, but not an especially cold and damp autumnal rain. It had actually been rather pleasant when he had gone to the deli around the corner to retrieve their breakfast. He’d worn a yellow slicker with a hood and had another of those flashbacks to when he was younger: he’d been a boy, perhaps eight, and he’d been sitting beneath the awning in their backyard, not far from their swimming pool—it was an inground pool, but it was modest, the sort everyone in that neighborhood had—while watching the raindrops on the surface of the water and examining the new baseball cards his mother had just bought him. He had been wearing a raincoat very much like the one he owned now, and he had been so happy that afternoon. It was one of his favorite memories from his childhood. “How long did it take?” he asked, once he’d swallowed another bite of his breakfast. The lox was pinker than the claret red of the blood by the rats’ pustules, but his mother was an amateur painter, and she would have grouped the paint tubes of the pink and the red in nearby slots on the rack she used to sort them.

  “For the rat to show symptoms or for the rat to die?” the younger man asked Douglas.

  “Both.”

  “Hours.”

  “Symptoms and death in hours?”

  “Yes.”

  Douglas thought about this. “Tell me more. Hours is…vague. I’m presuming you mean less than a day. Or days. But are we talking two hours or twenty-two hours?”

  “Your rat scientist—Sinclair—said they usually showed symptoms in about two hours and none lasted more than a day. None. Some died within twelve hours.”

  “And these were all vaccinated against the original plague strain?”

  “Yes. But he says the new strain is pretty gnarly stuff. Horrible. The new virus is antibiotic resistant.”

  Douglas licked a small drop of cream cheese off his index finger and then waved it at him to correct him. “We’re not working with a virus. This is bacteria. Now, bacteria are—or can be—antibiotic resistant. But not viruses. If you’re ever working with a virus, the term is antiviral resistant.”

  “Well, this sure as hell isn’t rat-bite fever.”

  “No. Obviously, rats don’t get rat-bite fever.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Douglas admitted. Then he continued, “The incubation period is much longer for rat-bite fever in humans. A week to a month. But, interestingly, the symptoms are not all that dissimilar to…this. Chills and a rash. Inflamed lymph nodes. Fever, of course—hence the name.”

  “And rat-bite fever isn’t fatal.”

  “Oh, it can be. But antibiotics are very effective against it. Even that old standby, penicillin, often works.”

  “Did you ever consider becoming a doctor?”

  Douglas sighed and thought back to 2001. He did one semester at medical school before enlisting. He assumed at the time he’d go back. He never did. He recalled the raincoat he’d owned then and wondered why in the world he was so bloody wistful—so damn sentimental—today. Raincoats, baseball cards, his mother’s paints. He shook it off. “I did,” he admitted. “But then I found more interesting and more lucrative pursuits.”

  “Like this.”

  “I guess.”

  His visitor motioned at the photos of the rats. “And they can give this to people?”

  “Well, they can transport it.”

  “That scares the shit out of me.”

  “It should. But, then again, perhaps it shouldn’t: You don’t work in the labs. You don’t touch the pathogen or breathe in the pathogen or—like these rats—have it injected into your veins with a syringe.”

  “In the Middle Ages…”

  “Go on.”

  “In the Middle Ages, a third of Europe died. How long did it take a person to die from the plague?”

  “Days. A week at most.”

  “And they were in pain as they died?”

  “Always.”

  “So, this is better. Because it’s faster.”

  “Well, it would be,” Douglas said, preferring to remain speculative. “If it ever comes to that. But first Sinclair has to ensure his transgenic rats are resistant to the bacteria. Right now, it kills people and it kills rodents. As you can see. The great pandemics of the Middle Ages were stalled, at least in part, because the rats died, too.”

  “Of the disease,” Oscar said, and Douglas rather enjoyed this oddly mentorial moment.

  “Yes. But also because they didn’t have enough people—well, people’s garbage—left to feed them. Let’s face it, Oscar, rats need us. They need our refuse. And when the rats die
d, they couldn’t act as carriers. Initially their fleas, which had the bacteria, had no place to live and looked to the humans as hosts. But then people started quarantining themselves—because they were terrified, not because they knew a damn thing about fleas and bacteria—and that further slowed the outbreak.”

  “Yeah. I would have stayed inside and hidden under the damn bed.”

  He smiled ever so slightly. “Anyway, before someone can seriously weaponize the pathogen, we need rodents that won’t wind up like these poor critters on the table. We want carriers. Not corpses.”

  “But no one would ever actually use it. It’s all deterrence.”

  “Yes,” Douglas said soothingly to this bureaucrat with the shaved head, “mutually assured destruction.” A part of him was struck by how calming his voice always became when he lied. Of course they’d use it: there was always a renegade nation or a rogue leader willing to employ this sort of horror. Usually they used it on their own people. But someday? Someday, when the Irans or the North Koreas of the world decided that the nuclear option was just too expensive, they’d see the value in playing chicken with biological weapons—that is, if they could be assured that they worked. “That’s the wonderful thing about weapons like this, Oscar. They are unbelievably lucrative regardless of whether they’re ever used.”

  “I hope so.”

  “No need to hope. It’s a sure thing. Just be patient. You will be G5 rich by the time we’re finished.”

  “But that’s still down the road,” the administrator murmured ruefully.

  “Yes. But not as far as you think.”

  “What’s next then?”

  “Your acquaintance. The one who died in Vietnam…”

  “I won’t make his mistakes, Douglas. I promise.”

  “You don’t even know what his mistakes were.”

  “I know he violated your trust.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “Because he’s dead.”

  Douglas nodded, a little impressed. The logic was infallible. “Austin was up to something really, really nasty. As nasty as the work going on in the university labs. But the difference? I don’t know this for a fact, but I believe behind my back he brought—or was going to bring—a sample of the pathogen to Vietnam.”

  “Shit. Really?”

  “Really. We took care of the buyers. His prospective buyers. But I need to know who would have given him the sample and how in the world he brought—or would have brought—it across the globe. He sure as hell didn’t slip it inside a toothpaste tube. Sinclair insists he doesn’t know who would have helped Austin. He insists he didn’t do it himself.”

  “You’re not sure you believe him.”

  “It’s obviously a very small cadre of people who are involved. Some are more passionate than others. On the other hand, there must be thirty young researchers in those labs. Any one of them could have been bought and harvested the pathogen for Austin. So…”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m not sure I trust anyone,” Douglas admitted. He dabbed at his lips with a paper napkin. Then he took the photos on the table and stacked the papers together like giant playing cards—or, he thought, like giant baseball cards—and squared the edges. He made a tidy pile.

  “Get a tour of Dr. Ho-jin Myung’s lab. He’s Korean. Explain there’s a possible donor. A big giver.”

  “Where does he fit in?”

  “He might not fit in at all. But he has family in North Korea.”

  “Austin was selling this shit to North Korea? That’s not mutually assured destruction. They would use it. That’s crazy! That’s—”

  “Yes,” Douglas agreed, cutting him off. “It is. But from their perspective? Much easier to finance and hide than a nuclear program. Now, one more thing. Give me your phone.”

  Oscar hesitated, but only briefly, before handing it to him.

  Douglas opened the app with the photos and permanently deleted all of the ones of the rats. “Is there anything else I need to erase?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “Okay, then,” Douglas said, returning the device.

  “I assumed that was why you didn’t want me to just email you the photos,” he said. “You didn’t want a trail.”

  “Spycraft these days depends a lot on technology, and I respect that. I certainly have plenty of tech in my world. But technology also leaves a trail. Email servers. Guccifer two-point-oh. Phishing scams and attacks. Even flash drives trouble me. There’s something to be said for the tried-and-true, old-fashioned techniques. Dead drops. Clandestine meetings. I would have done well in 1935. Even 1985. As you know, I prefer not even to text.”

  With that, Douglas picked up the stack of papers and angled the edges ever so slightly. Then he tore them in half. “See? These will be gone in an instant.”

  “You need a shredder,” the other fellow suggested, laughing, and then they said their good-byes and he was gone. Douglas stared at the back of his door for a long moment. He hoped he was making a better choice with Oscar Bolton than he had with Austin Harper. He thought so. Still, he had underestimated Austin. He’d have to watch and see.

  Most of the world uses the term rat king incorrectly. I mean, I did. It isn’t at all what you suppose. Most people assume that a rat king is the leader of a rat pack, the alpha rodent in a colony. That’s not true.

  Oh, there might be a kingpin or top dog in the burrow.

  But a rat king is something more disgusting than a single big or powerful rat—and more pathetic. A rat king is a Gordian knot of rats that is going to die as one, probably cannibalizing itself in the end.

  What happens is this. A bunch of rats get their tails linked together, frozen by feces or food, or stuck by whatever gluelike substance they’ve skittered around in. As they try and disentangle themselves, they only pull the knots tighter. Voilà: a big ball of scared, angry, writhing rats.

  Grotesque, right? Grotesque and sad.

  Look, everyone cares about the rats and the mice, the clean ones and the transgenic ones. We really do. It’s one thing to give an animal cancer as part of a research protocol; it’s quite another to anesthetize one improperly, even by accident, so the creature is experiencing real pain during a procedure.

  I mention this so you understand that we’re not the beasts you think we are.

  All of the work that we were doing with those animals? All of the work that so many urban university hospitals were doing with those animals? Often, we were just trying to get ahead of the next pandemic and find the antibiotics that would work.

  Unfortunately, if you want to test an antibiotic, that means you have to have a pathogen.

  And that’s where things began to get murky.

  20

  Alexis was grateful that Ken Sarafian had accepted the case. When she’d first arrived at his office, he had seemed so dubious that she thought he was going to try and disabuse her of the notion that it was worth either her time or his. But the more she’d told him, the more interested he had become.

  The assignment was clear and well defined: he was to nose around and see if he could find an explanation for why Austin might have lied or why he had ventured to Vietnam twice in twelve months. The investigator would not focus upon how the man might have been killed or who might have been responsible. They agreed that while the police she had met probably weren’t expending a lot of energy on the hit-and-run—which was how, Alexis had said, they viewed it—it wasn’t something he could (or should) take on from New York City. She gave him the names of a few of Austin’s friends and the name of one person who wasn’t really a friend but whose name came up whenever Austin was recounting the experience of being shot while expecting only to toss darts at a bar in the East Village. Douglas. Austin didn’t like to talk about it and se
ldom did. But it sometimes crept into conversations. How could it not? It was how the two of them had met, how their romance had begun. Austin had never seen Douglas again as far as Alexis knew, and so neither had she. But of all the stories that Alexis had shared with the detective, it was clear that this was the one that interested him the most, and she had the sense that he might begin there.

  It had been raining when she had arrived at Ken’s office, but it had stopped now, and the sky was lightening to the west. It felt like the sun would be out by midafternoon. She hoped this was a good sign.

  * * *

  . . .

  When Alexis arrived at the ER, she was thrilled to see that the other physician on duty was an older woman she liked named Callula May Artois—who went by Callie May—and among the nurses were Mike Orosco and Sarah Whitten, both of whom were spectacularly competent. But she was also relieved because none of them knew that she had been dating a hospital executive named Austin Harper who had been killed in a bike accident in Vietnam. It was a big hospital: they probably had no idea yet that a fellow employee was even dead. They certainly didn’t know that the person with whom she had been on vacation had been killed. Toril had been right: the FBI hadn’t come here after talking to Sally Gleason. And so Alexis didn’t have to begin her workday by enduring their commiseration or sympathy, she didn’t have to start by answering any questions. That would come soon enough. It might be tonight. It might be tomorrow. She would hear from his friends. Soon enough she would become the girlfriend of a charismatic guy who’d died tragically—far too young—while on a bike tour. And she dreaded that. People would want details. They would want to know what she knew. They would ask her what they could do, and just imagining the conversations caused her to shiver.

  And so she was grateful when Mike started to give her the rundown on the cubicles.

  “There’s an old woman in four who thinks her black stools are normal. We’re giving her a blood transfusion right now,” he began. “There’s a young woman—an artist of some kind—who has a hook in her thumb in seven.”