24

Long Island, New York

Three moving vans stood outside the front entrance of EcoBacter as Kaye parked her car. She walked past two men dollying a stainless-steel lab refrigerator past the reception desk. Another hefted a microplate counter, and behind him, a fourth carried the body of a PC. EcoBacter was being nibbled to death by ants.

Not that it mattered. It had no blood left anyway.

She went to her office, which had not been touched yet, and closed the door forcefully behind her. Sitting in the blue office chair—worth about two hundred bucks, very comfortable— she switched on her desktop computer and logged in to her account on the International Association of Biotech Firms job board. What her agent in Boston had told her was true. At least fourteen universities and seven companies were interested in her services. She scrolled through the offers. Tenure track, start and ran a small virology research lab in New Hampshire...professor of biological science at a private college in California, a Christian school, Southern Baptist...

She smiled. An offer from UCLA School of Medicine to work with an established professor of genetics—unnamed— in a research group focusing on inherited diseases and their connection with provirus activation. She marked that one.

After fifteen minutes, she leaned back and rubbed her forehead dramatically. She had always hated looking for work. But she could not let her momentum be diverted; she had not won any prizes yet, might not for years to come. It was time to take charge of her life and move out of the shallows.

She had marked three of the twenty-one offers as worth looking into, and already she was exhausted, her armpits wet with sweat.

With a sense of foreboding, she checked her e-mail. It was there that she found a curt message from Christopher Dicken at the NCID. His name sounded familiar; then she remembered, and swore at the monitor, the message it bore, the way her life was going, the whole ugly ball of wax.

Debra Kirn knocked on the transparent glass of the door to her office. Kaye swore again, very loudly, and Kim peeked in, eyebrows arched.

“You yelling at me?” she asked innocently.

“I’ve been asked to join a team at the CDC,” Kaye said, and slammed her hand on the desk.

“Government work. Great health plan. Freedom to do your own research on your own schedule.”

“Saul hated working in a government lab.”

“Saul was a rugged individualist,” Kim said, and sat on the edge of Kaye’s desk. “They’re cleaning out my equipment now. I figure there’s nothing left forme to do here. I’ve got my photos and disks and...Christ, Kaye.”

Kaye stood up and hugged her as Kim broke into sobs. “I don’t know what I’ll do with the mice. Ten thousand dollars worth of mice!”

“We’ll find a lab that will hold them for you.”

“How can we transport them? They’re full of Vibrio\ I’ll have to sacrifice them here before they take away the sterilization equipment and the incinerator.”

“What do the AKS people say?”

“They’re going to leave them in the containment room. They won’t do anything.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“They say they’re my patents, they’re my problem.”

Kaye sat again, then thumbed through her Rolodex, hoping for inspiration, but it was a futile gesture. Kim had no doubt she would find work in a month or two, even be able to carry on with her research using SCID mice. But they would have to be new mice, and she might lose six months or a year of her time.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Kaye said, her voice cracking. She held up her hands, helpless.

Kim thanked Kaye—though for what, Kaye hardly knew. They hugged again, and Kim left.

There was little or nothing she could do for Debra Kim or any of the other ex-employees of EcoBacter. Kaye knew she had been as much a part of this disaster as Saul, as responsible for it through her own ignorance. She hated fund-raising, hated finances, hated looking for jobs. Was there anything practical in this world that she did like to do?

She reread Dicken’s message. She had to find some way to get her wind back, get on her feet, join the race again. A short-term government job might be just what she needed. She could not imagine why Christopher Dicken would want her; she barely remembered the short, plumpish man in Georgia.

Using her cell phone—the lab phone lines had been disconnected—Kaye called Dicken’s number in Atlanta.