Calypso Directive (15 page)

Prague, Czech Republic

J
ULIE PONTE SMACKED
her lips together. She had just finished applying a fresh coat of lipstick, and was using the tiny lighted mirror of her car's sun visor to make sure the job had been done properly. Adequate coverage with no smears. No red on her teeth. Good. She ran her fingers through her blonde hair, trying to fluff in some body. The shampooed luster and bounce from the previous morning's shower was gone. She sighed and let her arms fall into her lap. She felt foolish.

“Why am I nervous? There is absolutely no reason to be nervous,” she muttered.

It had been over five years since she had last seen Will.

He shouldn't have trouble recognizing her, she thought. Her hair was shorter, but only by three or four inches. Nothing a guy would notice. Her eyeglasses were new; her staff had commented that they made her “look serious.” She didn't know about that. Realizing she was still wearing them, she quickly took the thin brown frames off and threw them in her purse. With one final peek in the mirror, she was ready. Five minutes was already too much time to have wasted primping in a parked car. She was late, and it was time to rescue Will.

She had visited Prague a number of times since moving to Europe, and she knew her way around the city center. From where she had parked, even at a brisk pace, it would take her ten minutes to reach the Astronomical Clock in the center of the Old Town. The walk would give her a few more minutes to stew.

There was much to be worried about. The abrupt way Will had ended their online IM conversation had scared her. Maybe the police had arrested him. Then, there was the babble about being kidnapped and put in quarantine. She had trouble swallowing that one. Finally, there was the issue of his health. Although she wanted to believe his claims, she had prepared herself for the possibility that Will was suffering from paranoid delusions.

She checked her watch: 2:11 AM. One more block to go.

As she rounded the corner, the pointed Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady before Týn rose into the skyline. Like twin sentinels standing watch over the Old Town, they towered over every other structure in view. In keeping with gothic architectural coda of their era, the spires were built asymmetrically—with the broader right spire and the thin left spire representing the masculine and feminine elements of society. Her gaze shifted from the spires to the courtyard in front of the Astronomical Clock.

She scanned the faces of the sparse crowd for Will. A handful of people were loitering around the clock, even at this late hour, but Will was nowhere in sight. Her heart sank. He had logged off the computer before she could give him her mobile number. She had no choice but to wait. She would stay all night and through the next day if necessary. She spotted some chairs left out in front of one of the nearby cafés and decided to sit and wait for Will there.

As she approached the chairs, she noticed a man sleeping in one of them. The pose was unmistakable—classic Will Foster. Legs extended, crossed at the ankle. Chin against his chest with one fist jammed uncomfortably under his left cheek. Many a college night she had found him asleep in the library, in this position, with a textbook sprawled across his lap.

She smiled.

Up close, she was taken aback. He looked terrible. The dark circles under his eyes reminded her of how football players look with their grease paint before a game. The three days of stubble on his face was not enough to camouflage his sunken cheeks and unnatural pallor of his skin. Most disturbing of all, however, was that she had never seen him so thin. Her heart melted; she wanted to stroke his chestnut brown hair and tell him the nightmare was over. She was here to rescue him; she would take care of him now. But she resisted.

She stood over him, bent slightly at the waist, and tried to wake him. “Will, wake up. It's Julie.”

Nothing.

She tried squeezing his shoulder. “Will, wake up. It's me.”

Without warning, his left hand shot out and clamped onto her throat. His eyelids popped open, revealing fully dilated pupils. His right hand balled into a fist, which he recoiled into the “cocked and ready” position beside his temple.

She yelped. His hand was a vice on her throat. The carotid artery in her neck throbbed, and it was becoming difficult to breathe.

Will did not remember falling asleep. One minute he was sitting waiting for Julie—admiring the twin spires of a church whose name he did not know—and the next minute they'd found him. Like thieves in the night, they had snuck up on him, and grabbed him on the shoulder. His heart was in his throat. One thing was certain, he would not go quietly.

“Will! Stop. It's me,” she managed in a raspy whisper.

Like a lighthouse beacon guiding a ship into safe harbor, her voice drew him out of his fog. The scowling orderly in a white lab coat morphed into an angel.

He released her throat.

“Julie?”

She rubbed her neck with her fingers, and took a step backward, trembling. “Christ, Will. If you could've seen the look in your eyes . . . For a moment there, I thought you were going to kill me.”

Standing up, he opened his arms wide to her. “I'm so sorry, Julie. I thought you were . . .” At first, her mouth crinkled with doubt, but then the corners of her lips curled into a grin. She stepped in and they hugged each other for a long moment, and for the first time in months Will felt the touch of human warmth against his cheek.

Like an alarm siren in his mind, an image of Rutgers and Frankie, writhing in misery, popped into his conscious. Abruptly, he pulled away from her.

“Julie, we need to keep a buffer between us. I don't know if I'm contagious. If you became infected like the others I've been in contact with, I don't know what I'd do.”

“For you, it's a risk I'm willing to take. Besides, if you were infected with something that virulent, then you'd probably already be . . .”

“Dead?”

She grabbed him firmly on both his arms. “It's obvious you're not well. I mean Jesus, Will, I've never seen you so thin. But, don't worry about me. Would it make you feel any better to know I have Ciprofloxacin, Streptomycin, and Doxycycline in my purse?”

“What are those?”

“They're three of the most powerful antibiotics on the market. So if you have a dangerous infection—an infection worthy of being quarantined, like tuberculosis—then you'll start popping pills, and I'll start popping pills, and we'll find a way to get through this. On the other hand, if you have a virus, then even the best antibiotics won't help you. Either way, we need to get you checked into the research hospital in Vienna.”

“No hospitals. Absolutely not.”

Julie considered arguing the point, but they didn't have time.

“Okay. No hospitals.” She grabbed his hand, and with a tug, she began leading him back to the car. “Let's go.”

Her confidence bolstered his spirit.

“God, you're a sight for sore eyes,” he said.

She smiled. It had been a long time since anybody had told her that.

“Thanks. You too.”

•     •     •

“
NICE
,”
WILL EXCLAIMED
as she unlocked the driver's side door of her 2005 navy blue Opel Astra.

“What? This is Europe, Will. Not everyone drives an SUV here. Europeans are very practical, you know. Besides, this car has more personality than some of the technicians in my lab.”

Within ten minutes they had reached motorway D1 heading south out of Prague. At two thirty in the morning, traffic was light.

“God, this is so surreal . . . you being here,” Julie said.

“Surreal for you. The end of a nightmare for me.” He looked over his shoulder and out the rear window for the third time in as many minutes.

“Why do you keep doing that?”

“To see if we're being followed.”

“We're not being followed.”

“The only way to know if we're being followed is to watch and see if we're being followed. Those same headlights have been behind us for a while now.”

Julie sighed. “That car was already on the motorway when we got on. I merged in front of him. Relax. No one is following us.”

“Easy for you to say. You don't know what they're capable of,” he grumbled.

Julie was silent for a moment. It was as good of an opportunity as she was going to get. Enough small talk, it was time to learn what she was dealing with.

“Will, tell me what happened to you.”

He nodded but didn't answer. He wanted to talk to her; he wanted to tell her everything. He also desperately wanted to sleep. His aching body reminded him that he still had not fully recovered from his four-story plummet in the stairwell. He rubbed his eyes, trying to organize his thoughts.

“Start at the beginning. I'm here to help, not to judge,” she pressed.

He exhaled a deeply. “It started with Natalie. No, actually it started when I lost my job.”

“You were fired?”

“Yeah. The recession hit my firm pretty hard. I made it through the first round of cuts, but not the second. Then, not even a month after I was axed, Natalie dumped me. Things sort of spiraled out of control from there.”

“That sounds like Natalie. What did you ever see in her anyway?” Julie said, with a hint of wry satisfaction.

He sighed. “You never even met Natalie.”

“I'm sorry, go on.”

“Anyway, things got rough for me. Try living in Manhattan without a job—that equation doesn't factor very well. Plus, Natalie spent money like a fiend, so my cash situation was shit.”

“Did you get severance?”

“Three months, but I used it to pay the rent, the bills, and to eat. I was freaking out. I needed a job desperately, but there was nothing.
Nuh - thing
. Nobody was hiring. I couldn't even land an interview.”

“What happened?”

“A buddy told me about this gig he did in college to earn extra cash. He signed up for a clinical trial to test a drug that stimulates melatonin, or something like that. He said all he had to do was take these pills and show up twice a week for blood draws. He said they paid him three thousand bucks for it. He must have been in the placebo group, he said, because nothing ever happened to him. Er, nothing he knows about anyway.”

“Tell me you didn't,” she groaned.

“I did. I signed up for a fast-track swine flu vaccine trial. Five hundred bucks to be a guinea pig for the vaccine. I figured it was something the doctors would probably recommend I get anyway, so why not get paid for it?”

“Whose vaccine were you testing?”

“What do you mean whose vaccine? It was an H1N1 vaccine.”

“No, I mean who was the manufacturer running the trial? Glaxo, Baxter, Novartis?

“None of those. It was a company called Leighton-Harris Pharmaceuticals.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Apparently the vaccine I was a test subject for was a live virus variant.”

“Okay, so what happened?”

He fiddled with his hands. “At first, nothing. They gave me two shots, a couple weeks apart. They also took some blood samples and cheek swabs. Then, out of the blue, they called me back. I met with a new guy, a doctor, not just the regular admin weenies. The doctor told me I was infected with a mutated strain of the H1N1 virus.”

“That's virtually impossible. Did you tell him that's impossible, Will?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You
do
know what my previous job was, right? I was the account manager for those annoying singing chicken ads. Cluckers Fried Chicken was my biggest client.”

She shot him a quizzical look.

“Oh, come on. You know the jingle:

Don't be a sucker,
Ya gotta eat at Cluckers.
When you're pickin' chicken,
Follow me!”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, that's terrible. Did you write that?”

“Of course not, I was the ad program manager. I'm the guy who puts it on TV to torment everyone in the country during prime-time. Anyway, my point is: Do you really expect
me
to banter with a virologist about the minutiae of the H1N1 virus?”

She made a conciliatory grunting sound. “They told you you were infected?”

“Yes, and that I needed to be quarantined for public safety.”

“What! Quarantined? Were you symptomatic?”

“Keep your eyes on the road,” Will said clutching the armrest as the car drifted dangerously onto the shoulder. Julie jerked the wheel, piloting the sedan back into its lane. After a deep, calming breath, he continued. “Anyway, what was so strange is that I felt completely fine.”

“Did you tell the doctor that?”

“Of course, that was the first thing I told him. He said that was part of the reason I needed to be quarantined. The mutated version of the virus was something they had never seen before, and it had unprecedented concentration levels in my blood. He said that he had no idea what the virus was going to do to me and how contagious or virulent the strain was.”

“Will, this doesn't make any sense at all to me. It's completely unorthodox. Do you remember the name of the doctor who told you this nonsense?” Julie said, her ire rising.

“Xavier Pope. Shit, how could anyone forget a name like Xavier Pope.”

“Xavier Pope was the doctor who quarantined you?”

“Have you heard of him?”

“Of course. He's famous, well, in the medical community he is. But Xavier Pope is not a doctor. He's a research scientist, like me.”

“Wait a minute, are you telling me this guy Pope lied about being a doctor?”

“No, he's a doctor, but not an MD. He's a PhD. Pope is a micro-biologist who specializes in infectious diseases.”

Will's mind began to race. The events of the past five months had never made sense to him, but he had grown comfortable with certain basic assumptions, like the fact that Dr. Xavier Pope was a
real
doctor. Now everything he saw, heard, and believed had to be called into question. The deception was growing more complex at every turn.