No Immunity

Listen, this is crucial. People are dying. Pick up, dammit! Okay, I’ll try you again in a few minutes.”
    How long had it taken from the infection of the index case of Lassa fever in Africa to villages of nothing but maggots? If only they’d gotten to that index case.... That had been the great what-if dream the medical team had played with night after night. Now she sat in the pick-up cab, drank some of the coffee, nibbled on the Granola bars, and redialed Tchernak and then her own number. When he didn’t answer this time, she shifted to Message Retrieval.
    The first three messages could wait. It was the fourth that caught her attention. “Tchernak, Adcock here. That other number doesn’t answer. Don’t you even have a goddamn phone machine? What kind of detect—? Listen, I got a closer read on that number for you, but you’re gone from the restaurant. You still in Vegas? Call me. Seven seven one, two seven seven two. If you don’t get through, try me again. I’m going to check the hospitals again— something you could have been doing, Tchernak.”
    Kiernan smacked the Off button so hard she knocked the phone out of her hand. Adcock? Reston Adcock? The Reston Adcock who had demanded she drop everything to find his missing employee? Now he was dealing with Tchernak? What the hell did Tchernak think he was doing? Quitting without notice was bad enough, but absconding with her case was something else. And to work for a sleaze like Adcock.
    Oh, shit. Did Tchernak know Adcock would walk over anyone? He’d been right next to her when she told the guy she didn’t deal with clients who had no ethics, but he was so busy pointing out that he knew Adcock’s missing guy that he’d glossed right over the danger. And when Adcock called him and offered him the job, he’d have stepped right up like he’d been called in to replace the quarterback. And now he was missing! “Oh, Tchernak, what have you gotten yourself into?”
    And now Adcock was calling hospitals. Again. Just the logical precaution in a missing-person’s case? That couldn’t have any connection to the dead woman’s virus…
    Surely.
    She picked the phone up off the floor of the cab and dialed Adcock’s number.
    “Yeah?” The line was thick with static as if it was connected to another cell phone.
    “Reston Adcock?”
    “Hey, who’s this?”
    “Kiernan O’Shaughnessy here. I finished up and I’m here in Las Vegas. My associate, Bradley Tchernak, left me your number to contact him.”
    “Guy’s got some sense of humor.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “I don’t know where he is, and now you, his boss, don’t know either. If I handled my business like that, there’d be oil seeping all over the ground and not a bit of it marked.”
    “About the message you left on our California answering machine…“
    “Haven’t heard shit from him since then. It’s like the guy’s dropped off the face of the earth.”
    He wasn’t here, he wasn’t home. It was way too late for flights, so he wasn’t in a plane somewhere. He would never have walked out on a case, particularly not his very first one. The only way he’d leave the field would be if he’d been carried off. This was worse than she’d imagined. What had Tchernak gotten himself into? He was too big to slither out a back window. Too decent, too eager to help. She stared out at the rumpled black mountains, dry and endless. Tchernak could be anywhere; his battered body could be lying a hundred yards off the highway and no one would find him. But if she picked up his trail from Adcock, she’d have a chance.
    What about the dead woman? And Connie? And maybe Jeff and everyone in Gattozzi? Were they less important than Tchernak?
    “Where are you, Adcock?”
    There was a hesitation before he said, “Vegas.”
    She said, “Have everything you showed Mr. Tchernak ready at your office. It’ll take me three hours to get there. You were calling the hospitals. I’m assuming you didn’t find your guy.”
    “Not him or the Panamanians.”
    “Panamanians?”
    “Jeez, didn’t Tchernak tell you anything?”
    “Adcock, you want to discuss business management at three-thirty in the morning? Just tell me who these boys are and why you think they might be in the hospital.”
    “They’re seismic aides Hummacher brought in from Panama.”
    “Brought in why?”
    “Only one reason, to keep the competition from getting to them.”
    “Give me what you’ve got on them too.” She got the address,