Blown Read Free Page B

as blue glass, palm fronds ruffled by a breeze. The beach was empty. Only she and the sun were on it. She said nothing, and went back to trashing her files.

Chapter 3
    HARPERS FERRY, WEST VIRGINIA, 5:33 P.M.
    He’d changed into jeans and a hunting jacket once he got back to the truck, tossing the fatigues in a Dumpster full of marathon trash. It was a seventeen-minute drive through the late afternoon traffic to Adams-Morgan, where he stopped only long enough to send a fax. He ate the lunch Bekah had packed for him while he drove north, through the populous suburbs of Prince George’s County across the Maryland border. At the edge of Baltimore he picked up the interstate and turned southwest, toward Hillsboro. It all took maybe an hour. 5:33 by his digital watch.
    No one had questioned him. Nobody had thought his solitary water station looked strange among the boisterous Marines. Nobody followed him home. Daniel Becker took the endurance of his luck as a Sign. The Leader stood at his right hand.
    At Harpers Ferry, he eased the truck onto the verge of the road above the massive confluence of two rivers and pulled out his cell phone. Rebekah would want to know he was okay.
    A horn blared as a huge sport utility vehicle—Japanese, Daniel noticed—shouldered past his pickup. A woman with a blond head of hair solid as a military helmet commanded the wheel. She had four kids in the back and they rode in their raised seats like royalty borne on a palanquin. Bitch, Daniel thought wearily. Mindin’ my own bizness while you take over the entire highway with your foreign car costs more’n my whole trailer. You and your kids’ll be the first bodies on the bonfire, I’ll tell you what.
    He almost reached for the M16 he kept behind the driver’s seat, but then Rebekah picked up and he caught her voice like the lifeline it’d always been. “Hey, girl,” he said.
    “Daniel.”
    “First errand’s done. Couple more to go.”
    “All right.”
    “Need any milk?”
    “I’ll see you at home.”
    How long had it been, he wondered as she hung up, since his wife had told him she loved him? Not since Dolf was put in the ground. He stabbed at the phone’s buttons and looked around for the bitch in the SUV. Gone.
    Daniel pulled out into the stream of traffic. He’d dump the truck in the lot behind Lanier’s package store and pick up the bike. Just in case his calculations were wrong, and somebody had been watching after all.

Chapter 4
    WASHINGTON, D.C., 9:15 P.M.
    The rumors of widespread illness began three hours after the marathon was officially over, and the broad hill on the Virginia side of the Potomac where the race ended was bare of everything by that time except protein-bar wrappers and empty electrolyte bottles and a space blanket or two, crumpled and dancing in the rising November breeze. Darkness fell early that day; a front had moved in from the west and rain threatened. By dinnertime the Marines had dismantled their water stations and checkpoints and loaded them into military transport trucks. Nothing of the race was left but bad news.
    The initial reports were anecdotal: nausea and vomiting among a disparate group of marathoners. There were twenty-six cases in the nation’s capital . . . there were forty-five . . . there were eighty-three. But who wouldn’t puke after running more than twenty-six miles? The newscasters downplayed the stories; one doctor suggested a flare-up of salmonella. Then the winner of the men’s race—a twenty-year-old Zairian named Felix Nguza, already in New York for a flight out of the country—turned up in a midtown emergency room prostrate with diarrhea. George Enfield caught a glimpse of the guy’s face, beaded with sweat, on the evening news.
    Dana had finished the race in four hours and sixteen minutes, though she’d been forced to stop twice at aid stations to have her insulin level checked. George had found her three times during the day: in Georgetown, at the Reflecting Pool,