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“He cannot,” he said softly, and his eyes moistened.
“Why?”
“Because Müller has put me in his place here.”
“I don’t—”
“Carlo was injecting the virus in a—” he paused, searching for the right word “—in a ‘patient’ when the ‘patient’ struggled. Carlo was pricked by the needle or scratched by the ‘patient’…that part is unclear…but the result is that he somehow infected himself….”
“He has yellow fever?”
Napoli shook his head.
“Had yellow fever.”
He nodded to the men on the gurneys.
Rossi looked, then looked harder, and suddenly was sick to his stomach.
He now recognized the grotesque body on the far right as that of the gentle mathematician.
Dear Holy Mother, Rossi thought, and motioned with his hand in the sign of the cross.
“None of us is safe,” Napoli whispered.
[ TWO ]
Woburn Square
London, England
2010 25 February 1943
Major Richard M. Canidy, United States Army Air Corps, bounded unnoticed up the stone steps to the first-floor flat at 16 Woburn Mansions. Solidly built and good-looking, the twenty-five-year-old displayed such confidence in his quick stride that if any bystanders had seen him approach the massive wooden door of the flat they would have mistakenly believed that not only was he supposed to be there but that he may very well have owned the place.
The flat instead was home to the beautiful Ann Chambers, with whom he had recently shared—and he hoped soon would again share—some very special times.
No matter how much that idea appealed to him, however, right now it was not the reason for his haste to get to the flat—and inside.
If I don’t get the door open in the next second, he thought, I’m going to piss my pants. My back teeth are floating….
Canidy knew that the door had a solid-brass handle-and-lock set, the type with a thumb latch that, when left unlocked, a simple depressing of the latch caused the bolt to pull back from its place inside the doorjamb and the door could then be swung inward. And he knew that it was old and worn.
If the lock isn’t busted, he thought, odds are good she’s left it unlocked again.
In one fluid move, he found the handle in the dark with his right hand, pushed on the latch with his thumb, and leaned forward in anticipation of the door’s swinging inward.
A split second after the electrical pulses traveled from his thumb to his brain, and the brain interpreted these pulses to mean that the latch did not depress and that the door was in fact locked, his brain received priority electrical pulses of information from his right shoulder—in the form of a sharp pain—that the brain then interpreted to mean the door had not swung inward…that it had not moved at all.
Dammit!
He winced and yanked at the door handle, pushing at the latch again and again, causing the lock set to rattle.
The door remained locked, but the rattle told him that there was more than a little slop in the old mechanism.
Hitting the solid door did his bladder absolutely no good, and he found himself doing a little anxious dance to try to hold back the inevitable.
He quickly pulled out his pocketknife, opened the blade, and carefully slipped it in the crack between the door edge and the doorframe, just above where the bolt engaged the strike plate. As fast as he could, he worked the knife blade downward and then methodically back and forth, the blade little by little depressing the bolt against its spring until the bolt was clear of the doorjamb.
