Tiny ferns of ice sprouted around the edges of the airplane window. Twenty thousand feet below, the gray conical mass of Oregon's Mount Hood erupted from surrounding forest, its slopes draped with the dirty tatters of last winter's snow.
"Sir, we'll be landing soon. You'll need to stow that laptop."
Brisling looked up at the flight attendant. "What? Oh, it's not mine." Removing the USB drive, he closed the laptop computer. Then he twisted around, he slipped it between the seats, and asked the lady behind him to pass it on. Three rows back, the kid he had borrowed it from was still sleeping off whatever he had done in Atlanta the night before.
The 737 touched down at Portland International Airport, and Brisling caught a taxi into town. Crossing one of many bridges spanning the Willamette River, they wended their way up into the forested hills just west of downtown. Overhead, a giant gondola ferried passengers from the river up to University Hospital, a sprawling hillside campus overlooking the city.
Back in Atlanta, Brisling had bought his ticket to Portland on nothing more than a hunch and a clue, and a lucky clue at that: Nurse Mindy-Mandy's story about the devoted wife frittering away her life savings on a third husband and his failing heart. Brisling tried to convince himself that the nurse's recognition of one of the JCAV victims was nothing more than statistical inevitability, six degrees of separation and all that. Yet he could not shake the idea that he had gotten lucky, that he had stumbled onto this clue. It worried him. Perhaps his mind had slipped a notch. Perhaps De Soto was right. Still, he thought as the taxi pulled up to the main entrance of University Hospital, it was better to be lucky than clueless.
Brisling paid the driver and took the handle of his rolling suitcase. Even though it contained nor more than it did when he left Seattle, it felt far heavier. Smoothing down his perma-rumpled suit, he entered the hospital lobby. The last time he had visited University Hospital was fifteen years ago, maybe twenty, a medical conference of some sort. He recognized nothing. The lobby was all blond wood, funky furniture and bearded baristas peddling six-dollar lattes. At least they had vending machines, the good kind that actually sold candy bars and soda pop.
Purchasing a can of Pepsi, Brisling wheeled his suitcase past the stainless-steel elevator doors to the nearest hospital ward he could find, Cardiology of all places. It was busy, bordering on chaotic, telemetry alarms chiming, harried nurses darting in and out of rooms. Perfect.
He strode past the distracted ward clerk and headed for the physicians' workroom. A resident and a medical student in a short white coat eyed him briefly then resumed their charting. Choosing a computer that had been left logged onto the hospital's electronic medical record system, Brisling sat down and cracked open his can of Pepsi. Then he entered the name of the devoted wife, pecking the keys with his index fingers.
And there she was, listed as next-of-kin for a fifty-six-year-old man who had died in January of 1993 after a three-month hospitalization for severe congestive heart failure. Brisling opened the husband's chart, raking it for clues, an experimental therapy gone awry, a medical accidentâanything that might explain how his wife was exposed to a manufactured virus like JCAV. But there was nothing, just three tenuous months on the transplant list, culminating in a short run of ventricular fibrillation. Nothing. Bubkes.
But the devoted wife was not the only JCAV victim from Oregon. There were dozens of them, too many for chance alone. Back in Atlanta, waiting for his flight to Portland, Brisling had begun calling their next-of-kins. Was your loved one ever a patient at University Hospital in Portland? He asked each of them. No? An employee? How about a visitor? The first six calls were duds, distant relative with little knowledge or uncaring ones who could not be bothered to stretch their puny brains past last weekend's football game, let alone the 1990s. But the seventh call was a hit, the sister of a janitor who had worked for decades at the hospital. Then another hit, the wife of a lawyer who had been hospitalized after a car crash in 1992. And another, the daughter of a woman who had given birth to three children at University Hospital in the 1980s and 1990s.
During the flight, Brisling called even more next-of-kins, much to the annoyance of the passengers seated around him. More hits followed, dozens of JCAV victims all linked to the same hospital. Somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, Brisling's lucky clue coalesced into a hypothesis: JCAV had escaped, or had been released, from University Hospital, Portland, Oregon, late in the year 1992.
Now Brisling looked over his shoulder and caught the ward clerk's eye. Turning back to the computer, he hastily typed the name of the JCAV victim who had been a hospital janitor in the 1990s. The employee health records were sparse, just passing mentions of routine screening tests. Nothing.
He tried the lawyer's chart, an actual patient who had spent two weeks recovering on the fifth-floor rehab unit after a nasty car crash. Again, bubkes.
Then he checked the deceased mother's obstetrical records. It was a short read, three vaginal deliveries and no complications. The last of her children had been born on New Year's Day, 1993, while just two floors below, the devoted wife waited with her husband for the new heart that would never come.
Nothing linked them together.
A heavy hand gripped Brisling's shoulder, and he whipped around. The hand belonged to a brown-skinned man with a shaved head and tattoos all over his muscled body. He wore pink surgical scrubs. "Can I see your hospital ID?" he said in perfect American English.
Brisling frantically clicked the mouse, hoping to open a web browser. Six windows popped up in rapid succession. "Uh . . . just checking the baseball scores."
"Can I see your hospital ID?"
Brisling reached into his jacket pocket, but all he found was the little bottle of nitro tablets and the temporary CDC badge Genevieve had given to him back in Atlanta. He handed over the badge.
The man puckered his lips and handed it back. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to call security."
"What? Let me talk to the charge nurse."
"I am the charge nurse." He waved over the security guard, a old, portly man sitting at a desk by the elevators. He shuffled over and listened patiently as Brisling mumbled something about being a visiting professor.
The guard gestured toward the elevators. "Sorry Doc, but if you don't have a valid hospital ID, you'll need to leave this area."
Brisling sized him up. He looked Italian, but the name on his badge was Greek. "This is ridiculous. Let me speak to the Chief of Medicine."
"You can speak to the President of the United States, as long as it's not here. Come on now." He reached for Brisling's arm.
"You can't be serious."
"Come on, Doc. Let's go." With one hand, he took Brisling's suitcase, and with the other, he shepherded him out of the workroom, past the nursing station to the bank of shiny elevators in the lobby. He set the suitcase down. "Here. This is a public area. Don't let me catch you anywhere else without proper ID."
Something flashed in the stainless steel of the elevator doors, a thought, an idea. A hypothesis. Brisling turned to face the guard. "How long have you worked here?"
The man sucked in his belly and puffed out his chest. "Now don't you go there, Doc. Save yourself the trouble. I kicked the Chief of Surgery out of here once because she didn't have her ID, and guess who's still working here."
"No. No. I really do want to know how long you've been here."
The guard released his belly. "All right. Twenty-nine years. Thirty this December. I started out slinging hash in the south cafeteria when I was nineteen. Then I got hired on security. Been with it ever since. I've seen a lot of people come and go."
Brisling jabbed his finger at the marble floor. "How long have you worked security here, in this hospital?"
"It's been my beat all along."
"Were you here in 1992?"
"Except for two weeks of vacation."
"Do you remember anything odd happening that year?"
"What do you mean by odd?"
"Anything out of the ordinary, anything at all."
"I suppose that's about when they remodeled the fourteenth floor."
"Remodeled?"
"They turned the whole floor into lab space."
For some inexplicable reason, Brisling caught a whiff of formaldehyde, that acrid chemical stench. With it came the inevitable flashback of medical school anatomy class, the mangled cadavers with their greasy flaps of skin and ropy muscles. "What kind of labs?"
"I do remember they had a forensics lab up there, you know all that DNA stuff, like from the O. J. Simpson case. But they packed up and left."
The whiff of formaldehyde was gone, but it left behind the image of a naked man lying on a cold steel table, split from stem to stern, his organs parceled out in pans on a side table. A glistening brain lay sliced up like a loaf of bread next to a disembodied scalp of chocolate-brown hair.
Of course. Brisling chided himself for forgetting his own goddamned patient. It was all right there on the death certificate. Brisling had filled it out himself before leaving Seattle. Age 47 . . . Cause of death: bacterial pneumonia, due to respiratory failure, due to coma, due to progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, PML . . . Birthplace: Portland, Oregon . . . Occupation: molecular-biology lab technician.
Brisling pointed at the ceiling, his finger trembling. "Did a John Lundquist work up there?"
The guard scratched behind his ear.
"He would have been young, in his early twenties."
"White kid?"
Brisling nodded.
"I do remember a Lundquist . . ."
Brisling's heart did a little trot.
". . . but not a John."
Lundquist was not a common name. What were the odds? "Did he have curly brown hair?"
"That sounds about right."
Perhaps his Lundquist went by a different name, his middle name. Brisling could see it on the death certificate. He had spelled it out in full on a separate line. It started with the letter C, yes a C. Was it Chris? Colton? Caleb? Carson? Christ! Brisling closed his eyes, the smell of formaldehyde flooding back again.
"You all right, Doc?"
Brisling opened his eyes and gripped the guard's shoulders. "Carl! Did he go by Carl�"
The guard reached up took Brisling by the wrists. "Easy now."
"Did he�"
Gently, he removed Brisling's hands. "Carl. Yeah, that's it. Carl Lundquist. I remember that kid."
"Did he work in that lab on the fourteenth floor?"
"As a matter of fact, he did."
Brisling's heart quickened to a canter. John Carl Lundquist had been a molecular-biology lab technician. And he had been infected with a genetically engineered virus.
Brisling turned slowly to face the elevator doors. "What the hell was he doing up there?"
The guard joined Brisling in facing the elevator doors. "I don't know. Whatever those scientists do. He was always coming and going at odd hours. He used to ride those things six, seven, eight times a night, always going to the men's room down here."
Brisling caught his own distorted reflection in the burnished steel. The elevators. Jesus H. Christ. That was what linked them all togetherâthe devoted wife, the janitor, the lawyer, the motherâthe elevators! They all had to ride them every day.
The guard was laughing at some memory. "I'm not sure what Carl was doing in the men's room all the time, but from the amount of soda pop that kid drank, I'd say he was pissing up a storm."
Pissing up a storm, his JCAV-laced fingers touching the elevator buttons eight times a day. The thought of it twisted Brisling's gut with quivering fear. John Carl Lundquist was infected in his own goddamned lab. Lundquist was patient zero. Wittingly or unwittingly, he had started it all.
_________________
Thank you for reading Chapter 30!
At what point in the chapter did you realize it was Carl, the scientist from Chapter 3? Little reminders are planted in this chapter: the vending machine, the elevators, the guard.
-Frode
Photo: https://cdn.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/videos/15649771/thumb/1.jpg