Brisling stood in the hospital lobby by the elevator doors, watching as finger after finger tapped the call button even though it was already illuminated. How many microbes did each finger deposit? How many did it withdraw? And how often was the damn button cleaned? Not very, according to the tapestry of fingerprints on the stainless-steel doors.

The doors opened, and Brisling stepped inside. Like most humans, he harbored certain apprehensions about the elevator's mechanism, primal fears rooted in the brain stem, encoded in DNA: the fear of falling, the fear of being trapped. But as the elevator climbed toward the fourteenth floor, a new fear gripped Brisling's mind, high in the cortex, a cold fear, dark and terrible. A man-made fear.

Brisling was greeted by a woman wearing a lab coat. She was white, maybe fifty, with those soft, pretty facial features that accompanied some women's heaviness. She called herself Barbara, and she was the head lab technician for a scientist Brisling did not know, Rachel Shapiro, MD, PhD, whose lab now occupied the space where Carl Lundquist worked in 1992.

The Shapiro lab was modern, sleek, and odorless, not even a whiff of phenol. Big windows overlooked the city. Far to the east, the dirty snow of Mount Hood glowed grayish-pink in the early evening haze.

Barbara joined Brisling at the window. "Dr. Shapiro told me to give you whatever you needed. Are you two collaborating on something?"

"No." He turned to face her, his hand brushing against the leaves of a potted plant growing on the windowsill, one of many.

"Ach," said Barbara, leaning over to gather up the tiny white flowers littering the sill—dandruff from a strange plant with dark green leaves rimmed in fiery blue. As she swept the petals into a wastebasket, Brisling noticed a course tremor in her hands.

"So, what can I do for you?" she said.

"Dr. Shapiro says you've worked here since 1992."

"1991, actually. I was Rachel's—Dr. Shapiro's—first hire. I've been with her ever since." She fell silent. Then swallowing hard, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "I had to cut back to half-time a few months ago . . . for medical reasons."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

She raised her hand, sniffling. "No, I'm sorry. You don't need to hear this."

Brisling waited the requisite amount of time. Then he asked his question. "Did you know Carl Lundquist?"

She looked up sharply, brown eyes bloodshot. "Carl? Yeah, I knew him."

"Did he work here in 1992?"

"He worked next door. But he was only there for a year, maybe sixteen months, then they shut down the lab. They left everything behind. We junked most of it and kept a few things for ourselves, including this plant." She swept more of its petals into her hand and brushed them into the wastebasket.

"Do you know what Carl was working on back then?"

"Well, their lab did a lot of contract work for the state medical examiner's office, mostly RFLP on blood samples and some occasional stuff from the State Crime Lab."

"Was he working with live viruses or recombinant DNA technology?"

"Absolutely not. I would have known if he was doing BSL-3 work." She paused. "Is Carl in some sort of trouble?"

An odd question. "No," said Brisling.

"Do you know how he's doing?"

Two odd questions. He turned to face her. "Why do you want to know?"

Now it was Barbara's turn to gaze out the window. After a long pause, she said, "I've been doing a lot of reflection lately, looking back on how I've treated people in my life. Just the other day, I was thinking about Carl. I wasn't very nice to him."

"What do you mean?"

"He asked me out on a date once, and I was a total bitch about it. He was nice enough, I suppose, but kind of a slob, I mean like really grimy. And we didn't hang out in the same crowds at all. He was a Mötley Crüe and Poison type of guy, and I was more of an Enya and Cranberries girl. I was way into the Irish music scene back then." She looked to Brisling. "Wasn't everyone?"

No. "Why did they shut down the lab?"

"Something happened. It's the reason I asked if he was in trouble. Carl was working on a specimen from the Burns Ice Man—you know, that prehistoric body those college students found in a cave. It was pretty controversial at the time."

Brisling vaguely remembered. "What type of specimen was Carl working on?"

"Body fluids, I think."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Um . . . I want to say stomach contents, but I'm not sure."

"Do you think the specimen could still be here?"

"No. That I'm sure of." She went to a back room and retrieved a cardboard box. Setting it on the workbench, she said, "Aside from the equipment and the plants, this is all they left behind."

Inside the box were several laboratory notebooks. Brisling found one corresponding to the second half of 1992. He thumbed through its numbered pages and matched carbon copies. It was mostly hand-written notes describing simple molecular-biology protocols and calculations for molarity and pH. But three quarters of the way through, the writing stopped abruptly, the remaining pages blank. Brisling checked the page numbers forward and backward. Then he lay the notebook open on the benchtop, pressed it flat, and ran his finger down the cleft. Someone had removed three pages along with their carbon copies.

He looked up at Barbara. "Why are there pages missing?"

"Because they took Carl's specimen and all the data he collected on it."

"Who took it?"

"Federal marshals. They just stormed in one morning and confiscated everything."

Brisling shivered at the memory of federal agents raiding his own office and labs at the CDC, the shock of it, the shame. "Why did they do that?"

"Because the Native Americans won their lawsuit."

Now Brisling remembered the Burns Ice Man, the raging debates, the editorials and countereditorials, scientific domain vs. Native American sovereignty.

"Some local tribe took custody of the body and buried it," Barbara was saying. "Nobody knows where."

Brisling's head began to throb. Was there a connection? Carl Lundquist was the leading candidate for patient zero, the first to be infected with JCAV, late in 1992. At that same time, he was handling a specimen from the Burns Ice Man, a prehistoric body preserved in cave ice—a body claimed by Native Americans, the sole racial group JCAV had been designed to spare, to pass over. Was there a connection? How could there be?

Brisling let his forehead rest against the cool glass of the window. The sun was setting now, its weird ochre light feathering down onto the city below. It all seemed to be rusting before his eyes, grinding to a halt, dying, disintegrating.

The data are the data.

A prehistoric body. A man-made virus.

The data are the data, no matter what.

Image taken from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/491385009312541024/