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The C.D.C. has a coveted award called the John Snow Award. It is presented each year to the E.I.S. officer who is judged to have done the best case investigation. Walter Mellis was suggesting to Alice Austen that there was a possibility that the New York case could lead to a John Snow Award.

She did not buy it. 'Is this case part of your project?' she asked. Mellis had some kind of a mysterious project going, a project that no one at the C.D.C. wanted to be involved with, or so she'd heard.

'My project? The Stealth Virus Project? Yes — it is. My idea is that there may be unknown viruses out there. They don't cause obvious outbreaks. They sneak around. They're not very contagious, so they just hit one person here and one person there. They're Jack the Ripper viruses, serial killers — stealth viruses. Lex Nathanson knows a little bit about the Stealth Virus Project, and I've asked him to keep an eye out for anything like this.'

She noticed that he was wearing a beeper on his belt. She wondered why he needed a beeper.

'Are you telling me everything?'

Mellis put his hand up. He sighed. He was accustomed to people ducking his project. It didn't seem to be going anywhere. 'Look,' he said, 'if you don't want to do this, I'll call Lex and tell him we just don't have anyone available right now. He'll understand. It's no big deal.'

'No. I'll go.'

Mellis looked a little surprised. He opened up his file folder and pulled out a Delta Air Lines ticket and a government expense sheet. He put them on her desk. 'I appreciate this,' he said.

Vision

Alice Austen drove her Volkswagen Jetta back to her rented condominium in Decatur, a few miles from the C.D.C. She changed out of her uniform and put on a blue silk-and-wool skirt and a silk blouse.

She put some extra clothing into a travel bag, along with a book to read, although she knew she'd never read it. A big chunk of space in the bag was taken up by her leather work boots, which were encased in a white plastic garbage bag tied with a twist tie. The boots were Mighty-Tuff boots, the kind construction workers wear, with steel toes and nonskid waffle soles. They were her autopsy boots. She put her laptop computer, a cellular telephone, and a green federal-issue cloth-covered notebook — an epi notebook, they called it — into her briefcase. The green epi notebook was for keeping all her data and records of the investigation. She packed a small digital electronic camera. It took color photographs and stored them in memory cards. The memory cards could be plugged into her laptop computer, and she could review the images on the screen.

She placed a leather folder containing her autopsy knife and sharpening tools on top of the things in her travel bag. The knife is a pathologist's main piece of professional equipment. She also threw in a Boy Scout knife, fork, and spoon set, for eating meals in a rented room. She would not be staying in a hotel. The C.D.C. travel allowance was ninety dollars a day for accommodations in New York City. You can't get much in the way of a hotel room in New York for ninety dollars, so she would be staying in a bed-and-breakfast.

* * *

Her flight took off in clear weather. The moon was down, and the stars were bright in the dark sky. Austen watched North America move slowly below the aircraft, a cobweb of lights imposed on blackness. Cities approached and fell behind — Charlotte, Richmond, then Washington, D.C. The Mall was visible from thirty thousand feet, a luminous rectangle against the Potomac River. The federal government looked small and helpless from up here, like something you could step on with your foot.

They went into a holding pattern around Newark Airport, and when they turned and prepared to land, coming in from the north, they passed close to Manhattan. Looking out her window, Austen unexpectedly saw the organism called New York City. The beauty of it almost took her breath away. The core of the city seemed to emerge from the black waters that surrounded it in a lacework of light and structure, like a coral reef that glowed. She saw the buildings of midtown Manhattan shimmering in the Hudson River, so remote and strange as to seem almost imaginary. The Empire State Building was a spike washed with floodlights. Beyond Manhattan lay expanses of Brooklyn and Queens. To the south she recognized the luminous bulge of Staten Island, and the lights of the Verrazano Bridge hanging in a chain. Closer to the airplane, the waters of Upper New York Bay spread out like an inky rug, devoid of light, except for the sparkling hulls of ships at anchor, their bows pointed to sea with an incoming tide.

Austen thought of a city as a colony of cells. The cells were people. Individually the cells lived for a while and were programmed to die, but they replaced themselves with their progeny, and the organism continued its existence. The organism grew, changed, and reacted, adapting to the biological conditions of life on the planet. Austen's patient, for the moment, was the city of New York. A couple of cells inside the patient had winked out in a mysterious way. This might be a sign of illness in the patient, or it might be nothing.

* * *

The bed-and-breakfast apartment where the C.D.C. had rented a room for Alice Austen was in Kips Bay, on East Thirty-third Street, between Second and First avenues. Kips Bay is a seventies-era development of blocklike concrete buildings surrounded by gardens, nestled up against a huge complex of hospitals. Her hostess was a German widow named Gerda Heilig, who rented out a room looking toward the New York University Medical Center and the East River. It was a pleasant room with a desk and an antique carved German bed that squeaked when Austen sat on it. The room was full of books in German. There was no telephone.

Austen placed her knife pack on the desk and opened it. Inside the leather folder were two short knives and a long knife. They were her autopsy blades. The short knives were like fish-fillet knives. The long one was a prosector's knife. It had a straight, heavy, carbon-steel blade. The knife was two and a half feet long. It was almost like a short sword. It had a comfortable handle made of ash wood, the same wood used in axe handles. She kept a diamond sharpening stone in her prosection pack and a round edging steel. In case they asked her to participate in the autopsy, she wanted to be ready with her own knife. She wet the stone with water under the bathroom faucet, and ground her knife on it, testing its edge on her thumbnail. When you touch the edge of a prosector's knife to your thumbnail, you want it to stick, to grab the nail, the way a razor grabs. if the edge slides or bounces over your thumbnail, it is not sharp.

The long knife made a whisking sound as it passed over the diamond block. Then she refined its edge on the steel rod — zing, zing, zing.

West of Babylon

IRAQ, THURSDAY, APRIL 23

April in Iraq is normally dry and blue, but a cool front had moved down from the north, bringing an overcast sky. The United Nations Special Commission Biological Weapons Inspection Team Number 247 — UNSCOM 247, it was called — was traveling along a narrow paved highway at the edge of the desert to the west of the Euphrates River, with its headlights on, moving slowly. The convoy consisted of a dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles. They were painted white, and they displayed large black letters, 'U.N.,' stenciled on their doors. The vehicles were plastered with gluelike dust.

The convoy arrived at a crossroads and slowed to a crawl. All the vehicles' turn signals went on at the same time, blinking to the right. Vehicle by vehicle, the UNSCOM 247 convoy turned to the northeast. Its destination was the Habbaniyah Air Base, near the Euphrates River, where a United Nations transport aircraft waited to fly the inspectors out of the country to Bahrain. There they would split up and go their separate ways.

A white Nissan Pathfinder 4 × 4 in the middle of the convoy slowed when it came to the crossroads. Its right turn signal came on, like the others. Then, suddenly, with a roar and a whipping whirl of tires, the Nissan broke out of line. It swung left onto a ribbon of cracked tar heading west, and departed at high speed into the desert.

A hard voice broke over the radio: 'Snap inspection!'

It was the voice of Commander Mark Littleberry, M.D., U.S. Navy (Retired). Littleberry was in his sixties. He was a tough-looking man ('the indestructible Littleberry,' his colleagues called him), but his age showed in the gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on his nose and in the silver at his temples. Littleberry worked as a paid consultant to various U.S. government agencies, most especially to the Navy. He had top security clearances. Through his Navy connections, he had been appointed an UNSCOM biological-weapons inspector. Now he was sitting in the passenger seat of the breakaway Nissan, with a military map of Iraq draped across his knees. He was holding a small electronic screen in his hands.

The Iraqi minders had been traveling behind the UNSCOM convoy in a rattletrap column of vehicles — beatup Toyota pickup trucks, smoking dysfunctional Renaults, hubcapless Chevrolets, and a black Mercedes-Benz sedan with tinted windows and shiny mag wheels. Most of these vehicles had been seized in Kuwait by Iraq during the Gulf War, and they had seen constant use by the Iraqi government in the years afterward. Some of the cars had been cannibalized from junk parts, and they had body panels of differing colors.

When the Nissan broke away and Mark Littleberry's words 'snap inspection' crackled over the radio, it created confusion among the Iraqi minders. Their vehicles came to a grinding halt, and they started yelling into hand-held radios. They were reporting the breakaway to their superiors at the National Monitoring Center in Baghdad, which is the Iraqi intelligence office that supplies minders to U.N. weapons-inspection teams. There was a pause. The minders were waiting for orders, since no minder who valued his life would do anything without orders.

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