53

Washington, D.C.

Augustine jogged briskly along the Capitol mall, following the dirt jogging path beneath the cherry trees, now dropping the last of their blossoms. An agent in a dark blue suit followed at a steady lope, turning to run backward for a moment and scan the trail behind.

Dicken stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, waiting for Augustine to approach. He had driven in from Bethesda an hour earlier, braving rush-hour traffic, hating this clandestine nonsense with something approaching fury. Augustine stopped beside him and jogged in place, stretching his arms.

“Good morning, Christopher,” he said. “You should jog more often.”

“I like being fat,” Dicken said, his face coloring.

“Nobody likes being fat.”

“Well, in that case, I’m not fat,” Dicken said. “What are we today, Mark, secret agents? Informers?” He wondered why they had not yet assigned an agent to him. He concluded it was because he was not as yet a public figure.

“Goddamn damage control experts,” Augustine said. “A man named Mitchell Rafelson spent the night with dear Ms. Kaye Lang at her lovely condominium in Baltimore.”

Dicken’s heart sank.

“You walked around the San Diego Zoo with the two of them. Got him a badge into a closed Americol party. All very convivial. Did you introduce them, Christopher?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Dicken said, surprised at how miserable he felt.

“That wasn’t wise. Do you know his record?” Augustine asked pointedly. “The body snatcher from the Alps? He’s a nut case, Christopher.”

“I thought he might have something to contribute.”

“To support whose view in this mess?”

“A defensible view,” Dicken said vaguely, looking away. The morning was cool, pleasant, and there were quite a few* joggers on the mall, getting in a little outdoors activity before sealing themselves into their government offices.

“The whole thing smells. It looks like some kind of an end run to refocus the whole project, and that concerns me.”

“We had a point of view, Mark. A defensible point of view.”

“Marge Cross tells me there’s talk about evolution” Augustine said.

“Kaye has been putting together an explanation that involves evolution,” Dicken said. “It’s all predicted in her papers, Mark—and Mitch Rafelson has been doing some research along those lines, as well.”

“Marge thinks there will be severe fallout if this theory gets publicized,” Augustine said. He stopped windmilling his arms and performed neck-stretch exercises, grabbing each upper arm with the opposite hand, applying tension, sighting along the extended arm as he bent it back as far as it would go. “No reason for it to get that far. I’ll stop it right here and now. We got a preprint from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut in Germany this morning that they’ve found mutated forms of SHEVA. Several of them. Diseases mutate, Christopher. We’ll have to withdraw the vaccine trials and start all over again. That pushes all our hopes onto a really bad option. My job might not survive that kind of upheaval.”

Dicken watched Augustine prance in place, pounding the ground with his feet. Augustine stopped and caught his breath. “There could be twenty or thirty thousand people demonstrating on the mall tomorrow. Somebody’s leaked a report from theTaskforce on the RU-486 results.”

Dicken felt something twist inside him, a small little pop, combined disappointment with Kaye and with all the work he had done. All the time he had wasted. He could not see a way around the problem of a messenger that mutated, changing its message. No biological system would ever give a messenger that kind of control.

He had been wrong. Kaye Lang had been wrong.

The agent tapped his watch, but Augustine screwed up his face and shook his head in annoyance.

“Tell me all about it, Christopher,” Augustine said, “and then I’ll decide whether I’m going to let you keep your goddamned job.”