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Автор Робин Кук
Robin Cook
Contagion
FOR PHYLLIS,
STACY,
MARILYN,
DAN,
VICKY,
AND BEN
JEROME P. KASSIRER, M. D.
Vol. 333, No. 1, p. 50, 1995
I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues who are always graciously willing to field questions and offer helpful advice. Those whom I’d particularly like to acknowledge for
DR. CHARLES WETLI, Forensic Pathologist and Medical Examiner
DR. JACKI LEE, Forensic Pathologist and Medical Examiner
DR. MARK NEUMAN, Virologist and Virology Laboratory Director
DR. CHUCK KARPAS, Pathologist and Laboratory Supreme Commander
JOE COX, Esquire, Lawyer and Reader
FLASH WILEY, Esquire, Lawyer, Fellow Basketball Player, and Rap Consultant
JEAN REEDS, Social Worker, Critic, and Fabulous Sounding Board
PROLOGUE
June 12, 1991, dawned a near-perfect, late-spring day as the sun’s rays touched the eastern shores of the North American continent. Most of the United States, Canada, and Mexico expected clear, sunny skies. The only meteorological blips were a band of potential thunderstorms that was expected to extend from the plains into the Tennessee Valley and some showers that were forecasted to move in from the Bering Strait over the Seward Peninsula in Alaska.
In almost every way this June twelfth was like every other June twelfth, with one curious phenomenon. Three incidents occurred that were totally unrelated, yet were to cause a tragic intersection of the lives of three of the people involved.
11:36 A.
M.DEADHORSE, ALASKA
“Hey! Dick! Over here,” shouted Ron Halverton. He waved frantically to get his former roommate’s attention. He didn’t dare leave his Jeep in the brief chaos at the tiny airport. The morning 737 from Anchorage had just landed and the security people were strict about unattended vehicles in the loading area. Buses and vans were waiting for the tourists and the returning oil company personnel.
Hearing his name and recognizing Ron, Dick waved back and then began threading his way through the milling crowd.
Ron watched Dick as he approached. Ron hadn’t seen him since they’d graduated from college the year before, but Dick appeared just as he always did: the picture of normality with his Ralph Lauren shirt and windbreaker jacket, Guess jeans, and a small knapsack slung over his shoulder. Yet Ron knew the real Dick: the ambitious, aspiring microbiologist who would think nothing of flying all the way from Atlanta to Alaska with the hope of finding a new microbe. Here was a guy who loved bacteria and viruses. He collected the stuff the way other people collected baseball cards. Ron smiled and shook his head as he recalled that Dick had even had petri dishes of microbes in their shared refrigerator at the University of Colorado.
When Ron had met Dick during their freshman year, it had taken a bit of time to get used to him. Although he was an indubitably faithful friend, Dick had some peculiar and unpredictable quirks. On the one hand he was a fierce competitor in intramural sports and surely the guy you wanted with you if you mistakenly wandered into the wrong part of town, yet on the other hand he’d been unable to sacrifice a frog in first-year biology lab.
