No Immunity

could do nothing but shake their heads while the hombres died. And they’d keep him quarantined to see if he died too. The panic squeezed him tighter. “Oh God, there is no answer.” 1 Maybe back in Panama ... rain forest... someone would know... something. Roots... bark... tribal healers, they’d know.
    He shook his head clear again. Of course he couldn’t take the hombres back to Panama . He could never slip them onto a flight, sick as they were. He had to get them someplace safe here in Nevada . Whom could he trust?
    He did know’ a place. Not the exact location, just the number. In Nevada there were plenty of people who needed to disappear. Girls outrunning pimps, guys too far into the mob, gamblers who’d ratted out one friend too many. Plenty of trade for a safe house. Two sick kids would be peanuts.
    He headed north. He knew not to call till he got there.

CHAPTER 2

    “I NEED YOU on this autopsy, Kiernan.”
    “No ‘Hello, how are you? How’ve you been for the last five years?’ ” Kiernan O’Shaughnessy fingered her short dark hair and leaned forward on her desk. When she’d last seen Jeff Tremaine on the plane out of the epidemic site in Africa he had been tall, blond, and despite months in the equatorial sun, pale and burning with anger. Anger at her. She had been at the makeshift Lassa fever hospital only a month, but pictures of the patients staggering down the slippery slope of fever, terror, convulsions, and death still invaded her dreams. Even now, when she’d bolt awake, it would take her a full minute to realize she was safe at home in her La Jolla duplex and the hot film that coated her body was not blood, merely sweat. But those terrified faces never left her. She wasn’t a woman to indulge in what-ifs, but when she thought of Africa it was always, If only we’d had enough ribavirin to stop the virus reproducing. If only zoe’d gotten it sooner. If only... For Jeff Tremaine the problem had been simple; he merely blamed her.
    Jeff Tremaine might need a forensic pathologist, but she’d have sworn she would be the last one he would call. “I’m a private investigator now. I haven’t done an autopsy in five years. And I’ve never been licensed in Nevada . Find yourself a local forensic pathologist.”
    “There isn’t one in the county.”
    “Get one up from Las Vegas , then. A pathologist from there will have seen everything.”
    The buzz on the phone line seemed to grow louder. After a moment he said, “I can’t chance word leaking about this death.”
    “Why not?”
    “I’ll tell you when you get here.”
    “Aren’t you being a mite paranoid?”
    “Not inappropriately so.”
    “That’s what they all say, Jeff.” Kiernan stifled a laugh. Her med-school class had had no dearth of candidates for Class Paranoid, but Jeff Tremaine had not been one of them. Against the liberal backdrop of San Francisco , Tremaine had seemed a throwback to the days of gingham curtains and Dwight D. Eisenhower. His goal had been to return home to eastern Nevada, settle into his father’s office on Main Street, and minister to every mining casualty and sick baby within a hundred-mile radius. As far as she knew, he had never marched against the military or protested a parking ticket. He was a play-by-the-rules guy; he kept the rule book in his pocket and he had been affronted every time someone—student, patient, hospital administrator, or faculty member—had ignored it. In his four years in San Francisco Jeffrey Tremaine had been affronted a lot. He was the last man she would have expected to volunteer for anything as dangerous and quixotic as a contagious-hemorrhagic-fever project on the far side of the world. “Look, Jeff, surely you can tell me what you found in this body—”
    “I can’t. That’s just it. I don’t know.”
    She sighed, and tried another tack. “Why me?”
    “Because you were in Africa , and”—the buzz on the line was stronger, but his gasp for breath was still audible—-“because you know how fast things can spread.”
    Her breath caught. She felt the hot sweat on her back. “Call the heaith department, Jeff. Right now!”
    “I can’t be sure.”
    “They’ll make that decision.”
    “It’s more complicated than that.”
    “If you’re talking about anything like Lassa fever, you don’t have a choice. You call them, or I’ll do it myself.” There was a hoarse, scratchy sound on the line; it took her a moment to recall it as his odd, nervous