Breathless

indistinguishable from any other man’s grimace. He was a good enough fellow and incredibly intelligent, but his sense of humor had atrophied in the Paleozoic Era.
    The whine of the engine escalated, and Lamar looked out the window as the pavement fell away.
    “How does a bankrupt government,” Northcott said, “pay to have all these cars and helicopters and jets and field labs and swarms of mortician-faced agents standing by 24/7, coast to coast?”
    “I’ve heard the secretary of the treasury has worked out a deal to sell the Chinese five Midwestern states, where the people are just too uncool, anyway.”
    Northcott didn’t wince a smile, but stared at Lamar as if he might be serious. Crane-tall, hawk-faced, as lean as an anorexicstork, he hunched forward like a vulture on a tree limb. He really wasn’t an actively bad guy, and he truly was incredibly intelligent, but Lamar found him about as likeable as an attack of gout.
    “What do they want with you this time?” Northcott asked. “Is it physics or maths?”
    “You’re a geneticist and physiologist, so you probably wouldn’t be here if this had anything to do with explosives or chemicals. If they want me on a biological threat, my guess is it’s not physics or maths so much as it is chaos theory.”
    If Northcott’s smile looked like a grimace, then his grimace was more like the expression of a man who found a live cockroach swimming in his soup at the very moment he broke a tooth on a ball bearing spooned from the same bowl.
    “The butterfly effect, fractals, strange attractors, nonlinear equations—it has a voodoo feel to me.”
    “Well,” said Lamar, “the field hasn’t been around half a century yet. When we’ve got a century and a half behind us, if we haven’t piled up multiple irrefutable proofs of basic contentions, I’d agree with you that we should stop calling it science and start calling it religion. And of course we already have quite a lot of proofs we’ve built upon.”
    Northcott knew to what the century and a half referred, and he was about to skewer Lamar with pointed words when Agent Palumbo came along the aisle, holding on to the seats on both sides, and went down on one knee in front of them.
    “ETA is fifty minutes. The pilot had a sealed directive for me. The site is in an unincorporated rural area in the higher foothills, a private residence belonging to someone named Grady Adams, and with him will be a veterinarian, Dr. Camillia Rivers. Both are witnesses,not suspects at this time. It’s a biological issue, but the decision has been made that decontamination and isolation protocols will not be necessary. The field lab needs only to approximate the sterility of a hospital operating room. Neither airtight nor positive-pressure antimicrobial suits will be required.”
    “Then what the hell kind of biological threat would it be?” asked Simon Northcott.
    Palumbo corrected him: “Sir, the directive calls it a biological
issue.”
    Northcott’s face clenched, the high points of his cheekbones and his nose as white as tensed knuckles, the rest of it red. “I’ve been yanked from the conference to be flown off at high speed to consider an
issue?”
    “Sir,” Palumbo said, “all I can say is, based on my experience, this might not be either a ticking-clock or a doomsday case, but it’s big somehow. Something different and way big. It came up quick, and D.C. calls it a Priority One Incident, which until now has meant only one thing—nuclear detonation imminent. Paul Jardine is on his way to the site now.”
    Lamar had met Jardine a few times in the past six years. After the recent reorganization, he had been appointed deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security for the western half of the country, from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
    Northcott said nothing more, but he looked neither mollified nor impressed.
    Lamar said, “Agent Palumbo, I’m sorry. The engine noise, the rotors … I didn’t get the owner of the residence, the site. What did you say his name was?”
    “Adams, sir. Grady Adams. The veterinarian is Dr. Camillia Rivers.”
    “Within every chaos,” Lamar said, “is an eerie order waiting to be revealed.”
    “Sir?”
    Lamar said, “Just talking to myself, son.”
    “Sir, we’re now in a communications blackout until the end of this. I have to impound your cell phone and laptop.”
    The laptop was at Lamar’s feet, and he presented his cell phone to the agent.
    “Sir, I