Contagious

Perry shook his head. “I don’t talk about that.”

“I’ve noticed,” Margaret said. “Look, everyone understands it’s traumatic. Believe me. You have to overcome this. I know you don’t want to think about what happened with Bill, but—”

“Don’t talk about him!” Before the words were even out of his mouth, Perry leaned toward her and banged the table hard with his fist. Margaret flinched, eyes wide in surprise and fear. Clarence’s gun came up, leveled right at Perry’s chest.

Perry quickly leaned back. G.o.ddamit. He’d lost it. Scared Margaret. That was the last thing he wanted to do.

Margaret looked back at Clarence. “Put that d.a.m.n thing down.”

Clarence lowered the gun.

“My bad,” Perry said.

She put her gloved hand on his forearm. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sorry to bring up awful memories, but you’ve got to start doing the right thing.”

“The right thing?” He stood and set a fresh beer bottle on the table in front of her. A gift. She wouldn’t drink it, but it’s the thought that counts.

“You’re a smart cupcake, Margo,” Perry said. “But you don’t know the right thing here. Trust me, the right thing is to let me help them.”

“Like you helped these people?”

Perry nodded. “Exactly.”

He started to walk out, then stopped and turned to face her. “And that suit, Margaret. That’s the worst suit I ever saw. You buy a suit like that, I bet you get a free bowl of soup.”

“But it looks good on you,” Margaret said. “Caddyshack. I own that one, too.”

Perry smiled and gestured toward Otto, who looked horribly uncomfortable at the whole situation. “Margie, you’re too cool for Mister Funbags over there. Enjoy your new playmates.”

He walked out of the kitchen, hoping that one beer he’d left Margo wasn’t the that would have pushed him over the top.

He needed to sleep. Sleep, without hearing Bill’s voice.

NOTHING IN THIS HAND

Dew waited in his car while Anthony Gitsham and Marcus Thompson connected the two semi trailers to make the MargoMobile fully operational. The two trailers weren’t really trailers, they were flatbeds, each carrying a container that was eight feet wide by ten feet high by forty feet long. As standard-size cargo containers, the things could easily be transported by rail, by ship or even by air with a cargo helicopter. Once combined, the two containers made for a highly portable BSL-4 autopsy facility.

Painted blue and scuffed up a bit to make them look rusty and well used, they didn’t rate a second glance on the highway. But it was only the outsides that looked beat up—the inside areas gleamed with the pristine whiteness of a high-tech hospital.

Three months ago there’d been no such thing as a mobile lab rated for BSL-4. That was as bad as it got—ebola, Marburg, superflu, s.h.i.t like that. Some company had had the trailer on the drawing board. Margaret found out and insisted it was just the thing for the crazy, secret work of Project Tangram. Dew had agreed. So had Murray, who’d funded the rush job on a prototype and then ordered two more. At a this-week-only sale price of $25 million each.

f.u.c.k it, Murray had said, it’s only taxpayers’ money.

The things you could do with a black budget. When the trailers were delivered and the team checked them out, Amos had called them the MargoMobile, and the name just stuck.

Big dollars or no, Dew couldn’t argue with Margaret—the trailer combo was a bargain at any price. The BSL-4 tents Margaret had used at various hospitals worked, but you needed to set them up, you had to deal with a concerned hospital staff, local media, et cetera. The MargoMobile solved that. You could take the full BSL-4 lab right to the bodies and do what had to be done. The thing even had a microwave incinerator, for f.u.c.k’s sake—one-stop shopping from body acquisition to disposal.

The two trailers set up in parallel. From the rear, the right trailer, Trailer A, had normal cargo doors. Opening those up revealed two more doors—the cargo doors were just a front. The door on the left led into a small computer center, ten feet long by five feet wide. One thin desktop ran the length of the room. It supported three keyboard-and-mouse combinations that rested in front of three flat-panel monitors mounted on the walls. Add three office chairs and you were in business. Other equipment provided secure encrypted transmission to anyone on the trailer’s frequency or could plug into a full NSA-caliber satellite uplink. Voice, video, data, whatever you needed. The communication equipment was originally meant to provide a secure connection to the CDC or the WHO, but it worked just as well for an old CIA spook.

The right-side door led into a claustrophobic, three-foot-wide airlock that ran ten feet into the trailer before it reached a second airtight door. That door opened into the eight-by-ten-foot decontamination center. In there, dozens of nozzles shot out a high-pressure combination of chlorine gas and concentrated liquid bleach. Lethal to anything from a microbe to a man. Once you got through decon, a final airtight door let into the main area: an eight-foot-wide, twenty-foot-long autopsy room. An area about the size of a typical living room to deal with the deadliest pathogens the world had to offer.

The left-hand trailer, Trailer B, held a narrow dressing room with lockers for the hazmat suits and gear. That room wasn’t part of the airtight area—you had to walk into the dressing room, get suited up, then walk back outside and go through the Trailer A airlock to reach the autopsy room. Trailer B also held air compressors, refrigeration units, filters, generators, a nine-slot cadaver rack like you’d find in any morgue, and a clear-walled containment chamber designed for living hosts. That cell held two autopsy trolleys, side by side, with just enough room between them for someone to walk in, turn around and walk out. If they did have to use this cell, the host (or hosts) would likely be strapped down to the trolley: safety and secrecy, not comfort, were the rules of the day.