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He scratched the side of his nose. “You wouldn’t have been tempted by my charm?”
She made a rude sound. “You wouldn’t have got close enough for me to know you were charming.”
“This may sound callous, but if that’s the case, I’m glad you were getting shot at the other day. If you believe in fate, then it was meant to be that I’d be sitting there, at loose ends, just when you were on the losing side of a gun battle.”
“Or it was sheer chance. It remains to be seen whether that was good luck or bad luck—for you, I mean.” And perhaps for her, as well, though she thought she should count her blessings, that even if events went drastically sour, at least she’d had laughter in her life again for a short while.
“I can tell you that,” he said lazily. “It was the best luck I’ve had in a long time.”
She watched his face and wondered what it was like to live inside his skin, to be so optimistic and at peace with one’s self. She couldn’t remember feeling that way since she was a teenager, though she’d been happy while she had Zia.
After Zia’s death, peace and happiness had been totally alien. She had been so focused; all she’d thought about was vengeance for her friends, for Zia. Now Swain was in her life, and her goal had been transformed from something personal to something so hugely important that she had to struggle to grasp the scope of it. Her personal feelings had been made insignificant, and reality had swept her to a different perspective. She knew that although a person never stopped grieving for lost loved ones, the quality of grief changed from gut-gnawing agony to dull pain, to acceptance, to remembering the good times—and sometimes all of those things were felt within a very short time, in no particular order. Her focus had been shifted from herself, her loss, to something outside herself, and with that shift the pain had changed, become less immediate and all-consuming.
She didn’t know how long the surcease would endure, but she was grateful for every moment of it. Swain was responsible, she knew, for a lot of her shift in mood just by being his brash, very American self. Of course, he could lift a woman’s mood just by walking down the street with that lazy, loose-hipped gait of his. She knew because she had seen women watching him, and she knew the effect he had on her.
He reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Stop worrying so much. Everything will be okay.”
She gave a rueful laugh. “You mean: my mystery caller will turn out not to be Rodrigo; he can tell us everything we need to know about the lab’s security; we get in without any trouble, totally destroy the virus, kill Dr. Giordano so he can’t do this again, and get away without anyone the wiser?”
He thought about it. “Maybe not everything; that’s a big laundry list. But you have to have faith things will work out for the better one way or the other. We can’t fail, therefore we won’t.”
“The power of positive thinking?”
“Don’t knock it. It’s worked for me so far. For instance, I was positive I’d get in your pants from the minute I saw you, and look at us now.”
They were once more at a standstill, with a thousand things that needed doing and nothing they could do that day. Swain’s security system expert didn’t get in touch, but now that they knew what they were up against, they both thought the security measures in place would be far more complex than any the run-of-the-mill expert would ever see.
Just to see what they could find, they went to an Internet café to research influenza, before they went to the hotel. There was so much to read that in the interest of saving time, they each paid for computer time and divided the hits between them.
At one point during the afternoon, Swain checked his wristwatch, then took out his cell phone and punched in a long series of numbers. From where she was Lily couldn’t hear what he was saying, but his expression was serious
. His conversation was brief, and when it was over, he rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache.
While the computer was loading a large file, she went over to him. “Is something wrong?”
“A friend was in a car accident in the States. I called to check his condition.”
“How is he?”
“Unchanged. The doctors say that’s actually good. He lived through the first twenty-four hours, so they’re a little more optimistic than they were before.” He rocked his hand. “He could still go either way.”
“Do you need to go there?” she asked. She didn’t know what she would do without him, but if this was a really close friend—
“I can’t,” he said briefly.
She took that to mean he literally couldn’t, that he was persona non grata in the States and wouldn’t be allowed in. She touched his shoulder in sympathy, because she knew how he felt. She probably wouldn’t ever be able to go home again, either.
He was scrolling through the CDC Web site. The first time he’d pulled it up, he hadn’t found anything really interesting, but he’d kept clicking on related sites that had links to the CDC, and he gave a satisfied grunt as a long list popped on the screen. “Finally.” He clicked on Print.
“What do you have?” Lily asked, bending down to read over his shoulder.
He lowered his voice so no one could overhear what they were saying. “A list of infectious agents and the safety precautions taken with each one.” He nodded at the computer she was using. “What do you have over there?”
“A projection of illnesses and deaths during the next pandemic. Nothing useful, I don’t think.”
“This should tell us what we need. If it doesn’t, my friend in Atlanta can fill in the blanks. I should have asked him a bunch of these questions this morning, but I hadn’t had time to think about it and he called me a bastard anyway, since it was three AM there when I called him.”
“Understandable.”
