"You'll need to stow your laptop for landing," said the flight attendant.

Tiny ice ferns sprouted around the edge of Brisling's window. Twenty thousand feet below, the conical mass of Oregon's Mount Hood erupted from the forest, its slopes draped with the dirty tatters of last winter's snow.

"Sir, you'll need to stow that laptop," the flight attendant insisted.

"Oh," said Brisling, emerging from his thoughts. "It's not mine." He closed the laptop and removed the USB drive. Then he twisted around, slipped the laptop between the seats, and asked the lady behind him to pass it on. Three rows back, the kid he had borrowed it from was still sleeping off whatever he had done in Atlanta the night before.

The 737 touched down at Portland International Airport, and Brisling caught a taxi into town. They sped along I-84, crossing one of a dozen bridges spanning the Willamette River before climbing the forested slopes just west of downtown. Overhead, a giant gondola ferried passengers from the river up to Pill Hill and University Hospital, a sprawling hillside campus overlooking the city.

Back in Atlanta, Brisling had bought his ticket to Portland on nothing more than a hunch and a clue, and a lucky clue at that: Nurse Mindy-Mandy's story about the devoted wife frittering away her life savings on a third husband and his failing heart. Brisling tried to convince himself that it was statistically inevitable that his nurse would recognize one of the JCAV victims, six degrees of separation and all that. Yet he could not shake the idea that he had gotten lucky, that he had stumbled onto the clue. It worried him. Perhaps his mind had slipped a notch. Perhaps De Soto was right. Still, he thought as the taxi pulled up to the main entrance of University Hospital, it was better to be lucky than clueless.

Brisling paid the driver and took the handle of his rolling suitcase. Even though it contained nor more than it did when he left Seattle, it felt far heavier. Smoothing down his perma-rumpled suit, he entered the hospital lobby. The last time he had visited University Hospital was fifteen years ago, maybe twenty, a medical conference of some sort. He recognized nothing. The lobby was all blond wood, funky furniture, and bearded baristas peddling six-dollar lattes. At least they had vending machines, the kind that actually sold candy bars and soda pop.

Purchasing a can of Pepsi, he wheeled his suitcase past the stainless-steel elevator doors to the nearest hospital ward he could find, Cardiology of all places. It was busy, bordering on chaotic, telemetry alarms chiming, harried nurses darting in and out of rooms. Perfect.

He strode past the distracted ward clerk and headed for the physicians' workroom. A resident and a medical student eyed him briefly then resumed their charting. Choosing a computer that had been left logged onto the hospital's electronic medical record system, Brisling sat down and cracked open his can of Pepsi. Then he entered the name of the devoted wife, pecking the keys with his index fingers.

And there she was, listed as next-of-kin for a fifty-six-year-old man who had died in January of 1993 after a three-month hospitalization for severe congestive heart failure. Brisling opened the husband's chart, raking it for clues, an experimental therapy gone awry, a medical accident—anything that might explain how his wife was exposed to a manufactured virus like JCAV. But there was nothing, just three tenuous months on the transplant list, culminating in a short run of ventricular fibrillation. Nothing. Bubkes.

But the devoted wife was not the only JCAV victim from Oregon. There were dozens of them, too many for chance alone. Back in Atlanta, waiting for his flight to Portland, Brisling had begun calling the next-of-kins. Was your loved one ever a patient at University Hospital in Portland? He asked. No? An employee? How about a visitor? The first six calls were duds, distant or uncaring relatives who could not be bothered to stretch their puny brains past last weekend's football game, let alone the 1990s. But the seventh call was a hit, the sister of a janitor who had worked for decades at the hospital. Then another hit, the wife of a lawyer who had been hospitalized after a car crash in 1992. And another, the daughter of a woman who had given birth to three children at University Hospital in the 1980s and 1990s.

During the flight, Brisling called even more next-of-kins, much to the annoyance of the passengers seated around him. More hits followed, dozens of JCAV victims all linked to the same hospital. Somewhere over the Rocky Mountains, Brisling's lucky clue coalesced into a hypothesis: JCAV had escaped, or had been released, from University Hospital, Portland, Oregon, late in the year 1992.

Now Brisling looked over his shoulder and caught the eye of the ward clerk. Turning back to the computer, he hastily typed the name of the JCAV victim who had been a hospital janitor in the 1990s. The employee health records were sparse, just passing mentions of routine screening tests. Nothing.

He tried the lawyer's chart, an actual patient who had spent two weeks recovering on the fifth-floor rehab unit after a nasty car crash. Again, bubkes.

Then he checked the deceased mother's obstetrical records. It was a short read: three vaginal deliveries and no complications. The last of her children had been born on New Year's Day, 1993, while just two floors below, the devoted wife waited with her husband for a new heart.

Nothing seemed to link them all together.

A heavy hand gripped Brisling's shoulder, and he whipped around. The hand belonged to a huge white guy with a red beard and tattoos everywhere. He wore purple surgical scrubs. "Can I see your hospital ID?" he said in a voice that matched his frame.

Brisling frantically clicked the mouse, hoping to open a web browser. Six windows popped up in rapid succession. "Uh . . . just checking football scores."

"Do you have your ID?"

Brisling reached into his jacket pocket, but all he found was his bottle of nitros and the temporary ID badge from the CDC. He handed over the badge.

The man puckered his lips and handed it back. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to call security."

"What? Let me talk to the charge nurse."

"I am the charge nurse." He waved over the security guard, a portly Black man who was sitting at a desk near the elevators. He shuffled over and listened patiently as Brisling mumbled something about being a visiting professor.

"Sorry, Doc," said the guard, gesturing toward the elevators. "But if you don't have a valid hospital ID, you'll need to leave this area."

"This is ridiculous. Let me speak to the Chief of Medicine."

"You can speak to the President of the United States, as long as it's not here. Come on now." He reached for Brisling's elbow.

Brisling jerked his arm away. "You can't be serious."

"Come on, Doc. Let's go." With one hand, he took Brisling's suitcase, and with the other, he shepherded him out of the workroom, past the nursing station, to the bank of shiny elevators. "Here," he said, offering Brisling the suitcase handle. "This is a public area. Don't let me catch you anywhere else without proper ID."

An idea flashed in the stainless steel of the elevator doors. "How long have you worked here?" asked Brisling.

The guard sucked in his belly and puffed out his chest. "Now don't you go there, Doc. Save yourself the trouble. I kicked the Chief of Surgery out of here once because she didn't have her ID, and guess who's still working here."

"No. No. I really do want to know how long you've been here."

The guard released his belly. "All right. Twenty-nine years. Thirty this December. I started out slinging hash in the south cafeteria when I was nineteen. Then I got hired on security. Been with it ever since. I've seen a lot of people come and go."

Brisling jabbed his finger at the marble floor. "How long have you worked security here, in this hospital?"

"It's been my beat all along."

"Were you here in 1992?"

"Except for two weeks of vacation."

"Do you remember anything odd happening that year?"

"What do you mean?"

"Anything out of the ordinary, anything at all."

"I suppose that's about when they remodeled the fourteenth floor."

"Remodeled?"

"They turned the whole floor into lab space."

For some inexplicable reason, Brisling caught a whiff of formaldehyde, that acrid chemical stench. With it came the inevitable flashback of medical school anatomy class, the mangled cadavers with their greasy flaps of skin and hardened organs. "What kind of labs?"

"I do remember they had a forensics lab up there, you know all that DNA stuff, like from the O. J. Simpson case. But they left."

The whiff of formaldehyde was gone, but it left behind the image of a naked man lying on a cold steel table, split from stem to stern, his organs parceled out in pans on a side table. A glistening brain lay sliced up like a loaf of bread next to a disembodied scalp of chocolate-brown hair.

Shit. How could he have forgotten his own patient? It was all right there on the death certificate. Brisling had filled it out himself before leaving Seattle. Age 47 . . . Cause of death: bacterial pneumonia, due to respiratory failure, due to coma, due to progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, PML . . . Birthplace: Portland, Oregon . . . Occupation: molecular-biology lab technician.

Brisling pointed at the ceiling, his finger trembling. "Did a John Lundquist work up there?"

The guard scratched behind his ear.

"He would have been young, in his early twenties."

"White kid?"

Brisling nodded.

"I do remember a Lundquist . . ."

Brisling's heart did a little trot.

". . . but not a John."

Lundquist was not a common name. What were the odds? "Did he have curly brown hair?"

"That sounds about right."

Maybe he went by a different name, his middle name. Brisling could see it on the death certificate; he had written it out in full on a separate line. It started with the letter C. Was it Chris? Colton? Caleb? Carson? Christ! He closed his eyes, the smell of formaldehyde flooding back again.

"You all right, Doc?"

Brisling's eyes opened, and he gripped the guard's shoulders in his hands. "Carl! Did he go by Carl ?"

The guard reached up took Brisling by the wrists. "Easy now."

"Did he go by Carl ?"

"Yeah," he said, removing Brisling's hands. "That's it. Carl Lundquist. I remember that kid."

"Did he work in that lab on the fourteenth floor?"

"As a matter of fact he did."

Brisling's heart quickened to a canter. John Carl Lundquist had been a molecular-biology lab technician. And he had been infected with a genetically engineered virus.

Brisling turned to face the elevator doors. "What the hell was he doing up there?"

"I don't know. Whatever those scientists do. He was always coming and going at odd hours." The guard joined Brisling in facing the elevator doors. "He used to ride those things six, seven, eight times a night, always going to the men's room down here."

Brisling caught his own distorted reflection in the burnished steel. The elevators. Jesus H. Christ. That was what linked them all together—the devoted wife, the janitor, the lawyer, the mother—the elevators! They had to ride them every day.

The guard was laughing at some memory. "I'm not sure what Carl was doing in the men's room all the time, but from the amount of soda pop that kid drank, I'd say he was pissing up a storm."

Pissing up a storm, his JCAV-laced fingers touching the elevator buttons eight times a day. The thought of it twisted Brisling's gut, a quivering fear. John Carl Lundquist was infected in his own lab. Lundquist was patient zero. Wittingly or unwittingly, he started it all.

_________________

Photo: https://cdn.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/videos/15649771/thumb/1.jpg