I, Richard - Elizabeth George [68]
Charlie stared at the woman. She couldn't digest the information she was being given quickly enough to make a coherent reply.
“I can see he didn't tell you any of this. He must've wanted to protect you. I admire that. It was decent of him. Typical, too. He was a great guy. But I wish he'd confided in you because then at least we'd know what we were dealing with here. We could set our minds at rest. As it is… Either that stuff's out there waiting to wreak havoc on the state of California or it's safe at the Centers for Disease Control. But in either case, I need to know.”
The Centers for Disease Control. “What is it?” Charlie asked, and the words sounded hollow to her ears and dry in her throat. “I thought Biosyn made pharmaceuticals. Cancer drugs. Medication for asthma and arthritis. Maybe sleeping pills and antide-pressants.”
“Sure. That's part of it. That's Division I. But Division II is where the real money is, where Eric and I worked, where Ex-antrum is.”
“What is it?” Charlie repeated, dread rising up in her throat like bile.
Sharon looked around. She said, “We need to order something. If we don't and if someone sees us here, it's going to look suspicious. We've got to get a waitress's attention.”
They managed to do so, each of them asking for scones and tea which both of them knew they would not touch. When their order came, Sharon poured from the pot and said, “Exantrum is Cabot's key to immortality. It's a virus. It was discovered in standing water in a cave… this was about two years ago. A hiker went inside a cave in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A hot day. He finds a pool of water. He splashes himself on the face with it. He's dead in twenty-one days. Hemorrhagic fever. The doctors in North Carolina don't know where the virus came from but it looks enough like Ebola to make people freak. Atlanta gets onto it and everyone starts tracing where this guy has been, who he's seen, what he's been up to. They're looking at his associates through a microscope, they're looking at his passport to see if he's been out of the country, they're looking at his family to see which of them might've passed something on from someone else. They can't figure it out. Cabot follows all this but does his own detective work because he thinks this is something different from Ebola and what he's wanted from the day he graduated from UCLA is to have a name that gets associated with something that changes the world, like Jonas Salk or Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming. He's probably thinking cure at first, but the government comes calling once Cabot has the stuff isolated and it gets twisted into disease. Uncle Sam'll pay big bucks for a weapon like Exantrum. You put it into water, you drink it, you splash it onto your face and it gets into your eyes, you let it touch a hangnail, you get it in your nose, you have a scratch on your body, you step in it, you breathe it… take your choice. It doesn't matter how you come into contact with it because the end's the same. You die. It's for biological warfare. For use against the Iraqis if they get out of line. Or the Chinese if they start shaking their sabers. Or the North Koreans. Cabot stands to make a fortune from it, and Eric was going to let the world know.” Sharon looked at her teacup and turned it in its saucer. She finished with, “He was a really good man. A decent good man. I only wish I'd had his courage. But the truth of the matter is I don't. So I need to get the Exantrum back to the lab if Eric hadn't made contact with the journalist yet.”
“He…he wouldn't have kept it at