Darwin’s Radio. Greg Bear
sprinted for the door and caught up with Dicken in the courtyard. He was climbing into a small rental Nissan.
‘Excuse me!’ she called out.
‘Sorry. Gotta go.’ Dicken slammed the door and turned on the engine.
‘Christ, you sure know how to arouse suspicions!’ Kaye said loudly enough for him to hear through the closed window.
Dicken rolled the window down and grimaced amiably. ‘Suspicions about what?’
‘What in hell are you doing here?’
‘Rumors,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to see if the way was clear. ‘That’s all I can say.’
He spun the car around in the gravel and drove off, maneuvering between the main building and the second lab. Kaye folded her arms and frowned after him.
Lado called from the main building, poking out of a window. ‘Kaye! We are done. You are ready?’
‘Yes!’ Kaye answered, walking toward the window. ‘Did you see him?’
‘Who?’ Lado asked, face blank.
‘A man from the Centers for Disease Control. He said his name was Dicken.’
‘I saw no one. They have an office on Abasheli Street. You could call.’
She shook her head. There wasn’t time, and it was none of her business anyway. ‘Never mind,’ she said.
Lado was unusually somber as he drove her to the airport.
‘Is it good news, or bad?’ she asked.
‘I am not allowed to say,’ he replied. ‘We should, as you say, keep our options open? We are like babes in the woods.’
Kaye nodded and stared straight ahead as they entered the parking area. Lado helped her take her bags to the new international terminal, past lines of taxis with sharp-eyed drivers waiting impatiently. The check-in desk at British Mediterranean Airlines had a short line. Already Kaye felt she was in the middle zone between worlds, closer to New York than to Lado’s Georgia or the Gergeti church or Mount Kazbeg.
As she reached the front of the line and pulled out her passport and tickets, Lado stood with arms folded, squinting at the watery sunlight through the terminal windows.
The clerk, a young blond woman with ghostly pale skin, slowly worked through the tickets and papers. She finally looked up to say, ‘No off going. No taking.’
‘Beg pardon?’
The woman lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if this would give her strength or cleverness and tried again. ‘No Baku. No Heathrow. No JFK. No Vienna.’
‘What, they’re gone?’ Kaye asked in exasperation. She looked helplessly at Lado, who stepped over the vinyl-covered ropes and addressed the woman in stern and reproving tones, then pointed to Kaye and lifted his bushy brows, as if to say, Very Important Person!
The pale young woman’s cheeks acquired some color. With infinite patience, she looked at Kaye and began speaking, in rapid Georgian, something about the weather, hail moving in, unusual storm. Lado translated in spaced single words: hail, unusual, soon.
‘When can I get out?’ she asked the woman.
Lado listened to the clerk’s explanation with a stern expression, then lifted his shoulders and turned his face toward Kaye. ‘Next week, next flight. Or flight to Vienna, Tuesday. Day after tomorrow.’
Kaye decided to re-book through Vienna. There were now four people in line behind Kaye, and they were showing signs of both amusement and impatience. By their dress and language, they were probably not going to New York or London.
Lado walked with her up the stairs and sat across from her in the echoing waiting area. She needed to think, to sort out her plans. A few old women sold Western cigarettes and perfume and Japanese watches from small booths around the perimeter. Nearby, two young men slept on opposite benches, snoring in tandem. The walls were covered with posters in Russian, the lovely curling Georgian script, and in German and French. Castles, tea plantations, bottles of wine, the suddenly small and distant mountains whose pure colors survived even the fluorescent lights.
‘I know, you need to call your husband, he will miss you,’ Lado said. ‘We can return to the institute – you are welcome, always!’
‘No, thank you,’ Kaye said, suddenly feeling a little sick. Premonition had nothing to do with it: she could read Lado like a book. What had they done wrong? Had a larger firm made an even sweeter offer?
What would Saul do when he found out? All their planning had been based on his optimism about being able to convert friendship and charity into a solid business relationship …
They were so close.
‘There is the Metechi Palace,’ Lado said. ‘Best hotel in Tbilisi … best in Georgia. I take you to the Metechi! You can be a real tourist, like in the guide books! Maybe you have time to take a hot spring bath … relax before you go home.’
Kaye nodded and smiled but it was obvious her heart was not in it. Suddenly, impetuously, Lado leaned forward and clutched her hand in his dry, cracked fingers, roughened by so many washings and immersions. He pounded his hand and hers lightly on her knee. ‘It is no end! It is a beginning! We must all be strong and resourceful!’
This brought tears to Kaye’s eyes. She looked at the posters again – Erblus and Kazbeg draped with clouds, the Gergeti church, vineyards and high tilled fields.
Lado threw his hands up in the air, swore eloquently in Georgian, and leaped to his feet. ‘I tell them it is not best!’ he insisted. ‘I tell the bureaucrats in the government, we have worked with you, with Saul, for three years, and is not to be overturned in one night! Who needs an exclusive, no? I will take you to Metechi.’
Kaye smiled her thanks and Lado sat down again, bending over, shaking his head glumly and folding his hands. ‘It is an outrage,’ he said, ‘what we have to do in today’s world.’
The young men continued snoring.
Christopher Dicken arrived at JFK, by coincidence, on the same evening as Kaye Lang, and saw her waiting to go through customs. She was transferring her luggage to a cart and did not notice him.
She looked dragged-out, wan. Dicken had been in the air himself for thirty-six hours, returning from Turkey with two locked metal cases and a duffel bag. He certainly did not want to run into Lang under the present circumstances.
Dicken was not sure why he had gone to see Lang at Eliava. Perhaps because they had separately experienced the same horror outside Gordi. Perhaps to discover if she knew what was happening in the United States, the reason he had been recalled; perhaps just to meet the attractive and intelligent woman whose picture he had seen on the EcoBacter web site.
He showed his CDC identification and NCID import pass to a customs supervisor, filled out the requisite five forms, and slouched through a side door into an empty hall.
Coffee nerves gave everything an extra sour edge. He had not slept a wink on the entire flight, and had slugged back five cups in the hour before landing. He had wanted time to research and think and be prepared for the meeting with Mark Augustine, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Augustine was in Manhattan now, giving a talk at a conference on new AIDS treatments.
Dicken carried the cases to the parking garage. He had lost all track of time on the plane and in the airport; he was a little surprised to discover dusk falling over New York.
He made his way through a labyrinth of stairs and elevators and drove his government Dodge out of long-term parking and faced the bleak gray skies above Jamaica