I'd put out the Bat-Signal all over the world, and had managed to scramble together a last-second rendezvous with several of my allies before my meeting with Senator Gardner. This was our first shot at getting HAC taken seriously by the world, and I wanted to go over everything one last time to make sure we had our story straight.
I looked beside me at Chloe, sleeping peacefully with her head against my arm.
No wonder she was exhausted. We'd talked pretty much nonstop on our transcontinental trip back to the States, going over all possibilities about HAC. I was a little amazed at how quickly we also slid into more personal matters. Our childhoods, families, the kinds of things that really mattered.
Chloe's mother had died when she was five. Her father was a career military man, an officer in the French Foreign Legion, who often left her on her grandparents' isolated cattle farm in Auvergne. Her grandfather, a retired civil engineer turned farmer, opened her eyes to the wonders of the natural world-farming, gardening, and especially animals.
As the plane wheeled toward the terminal, Chloe woke up and, seeing me watching her, sat upright as she rubbed her eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Nothing to be sorry about," I said as the seat belt light bonged off.
When we'd made it off the plane, I stopped in front of a breaking-news feed scrolling across a newsstand TV.
"What is it?" Chloe said.
"I don't know," I said. "I was hoping CNN picked up on the animal attacks in Botswana."
It was craziness, all right. But not ours. A girl with a shaved head, some sort of pop singer, was attacking a car with a broken umbrella while a dozen paparazzi recorded her every move.
KITTY KATRINA SHAVES HEAD, ATTACKS PAPARAZZI. HAS KITKAT GONE OFF THE DEEP END? shouted the crawler at the bottom of the screen.
"Who's Kitty Katrina?" Chloe said, looking at the screen, confused.
I shrugged.
"Welcome to America," I said.
Chapter 35
THE ROCKFORD HOTEL, where our meeting was scheduled to take place, is situated in a run-down, slightly sketchy area of southeast D.C. across the water from Buzzard Point.
We checked into separate rooms and dropped off our things. I showered and used the quick moment of peace and solitude before the meeting to call Natalie. It was early afternoon on a Wednesday, and I was pretty sure she was off work at the moment. Her phone rang until I got her voice mail.
"You've reached the voice-mail box of"-said a robot, and then a pause, and Natalie's bright bell of a voice carefully saying her own name-"Natalie Shaw."
"Please leave a message after the tone."
"Hi, Natalie," I said into the void, looking out the hotel window at the Potomac. "I'm back in the States. I saw your e-mail. I just wanted to talk things out. I'm in D.C. right now, but I'll be back in New York tomorrow, I hope. Let me know what's up."
In fact, I was mainly worried about Attila. It had been almost a week since I'd left him. I hadn't heard back from Mrs. Abreu, either. I hoped he was all right.
I had work to do.
"Are you sure we're in the right place?" Chloe asked as we entered the shabby hotel ballroom. The carpeting was criminally ugly-stain-mottled and worn thin in the heavily trafficked spots.
There was a small crowd milling around a table set with cheap hors d'oeuvres, water pitchers, and coffee urns. It was a sea of flannel, glasses, and beards, swarming around the free food as enthusiastically as the vultures I'd seen in the Okavango Delta.
"Believe me," I said. "We're in the right place."
On our way to the front of the room, we passed a young, skinny white guy with intense blue eyes and blond eyebrows that disappeared into his face. He was wearing a red tracksuit and a white Kangol hat, and was bent in ferocious attention over the glowing oracle of his iPad. Spotting us, he jumped out of his seat and gave me an awkward fist bump.
"Word to your moms, Ozzle," he said.
"Dr. Strauss, thanks for coming," I said, introducing him to Chloe. "Eberhard was just awarded the microbiology chair at the University of Bonn."
Chloe and I walked on. "You see why I need you now?" I said, gesturing at the rows of World of Warcraft diehards we passed. "These guys are all beyond brilliant, but, as you can see, PR is not their strong suit. That's why it's so important that you agreed to come with me."</ol>
"And I thought you wanted me for my mind," Chloe said, smiling.
"Give me the tape, Oz. The audiovisual is in operating order," said a fresh-faced kid dressed as though he were ready for a rodeo. His shoulders were hunched up to his ears and his long arms dangled stiffly at his sides. He turned and sniffed loudly at Chloe's hair.
"Your hair smells good," he said in a too-loud voice, half Okie and half machine, as if Robby the Robot had grown up in a Steinbeck novel.
"Jonathan, thanks, man. Here you go." I handed him the tape and ushered Chloe along.
"Don't mind him. That was Jonathan Moore. He's an autistic savant, and one of the best agricultural engineers in the world. He's a renowned animal communicator. He was one of my first contacts when I started researching HAC. He helped me work with Attila."
I had rolled the dice and told Chloe about Attila on our flight. I even showed her my wallet pictures. She said she thought I was brave for having rescued him. So she seemed cool with it. Go figure.
Chapter 36
SOME MINUTES LATER I found myself on the stage, tapping the podium microphone. The feedback squealed and settled down. The murmuring room went silent, and all heads swiveled in my direction.
"Without further ado, folks," I said, nodding to Jonathan, who gave me a thumbs-up by the projector. "This is what is happening in Africa. It speaks for itself. I recorded this two days ago in the Okavango Delta in Botswana."
I stepped back into the dark to watch the room watch the video. I was pleased to see that they were stunned. When the male lions' heads appeared in the field, a wave of whispers rose up in the room. These were some very smart folks, and I'd definitely gotten their attention.
When Jonathan turned the lights back on, the roomful of whispers broke into a full-blast cacophony of forty people trying to shout over each other all at once.
"Come on, folks," I called over the din as I waved the legal tablet in my hand and stepped up to the microphone. "My meeting with the senator is only a few hours away. His first question is going to be, why is this happening? We have proof not only of this inexplicable hyperaggressive behavior in lions but also of an unprecedented change in their social behavior. We need to come up with some workable theories."
"How can this be, Oz?" my former evolutionary biology professor, Gail Quinn, said. "How can this have happened overnight?"
"I don't know, Gail," I said. "That's what I called you all here to try to help me figure it out. My best guess so far is that it may be some sort of radical new adaptive zone. I'm thinking that there may be a dramatic change in the environment that for some reason we haven't been able to pick up on yet."
"Which aspect of the environment is changing, though?" somebody said.
"My money is on a viral agent, Oz," Eberhard Strauss said. "As I said before, these behaviors, especially the hyperaggression, are symptomatic of rabies. I am not saying it is rabies, but it may be some virus that attacks the nervous system."
"I considered that," I said. "But for one thing, rabies is transmitted from animal to animal through bodily fluids. That might explain what's going on in the wild, but in the recent L.A. lion attack and escape, the animals were completely isolated."
"Assuming that incident has anything to do with this," someone said.
"That's right. Assuming it is, though-bear with me-how could isolated zoo animals have been affected?"
"It could be airborne," Strauss pointed out. "Or carried by parasites. Mosquitoes, fleas." He ticked off possibilities on his fingers. "The meat they were feeding the lions in the zoo could have been infected. You name it. Many possibilities."
"Let me throw out another argument against the virus theory," I said. "An animal with rabies, or similar diseases that attack the nervous system, usually exhibits more symptoms than hyperaggressive behavior. Erratic muscle movement, mange, dermal lesions, hydrophobia. The lions that killed my friend looked quite healthy to me. Physically, at least. And the zoo lions in California weren't displaying any physical symptoms, either. I certainly wouldn't rule out a virus at this point, but it would have to be one we've never seen before."
"Has there been an autopsy on any of these animals?" asked Dr. Quinn.
"No," I said. "The African authorities won't allow it. That's one of the first things I'm going to bring up with the senator."
"What about an autopsy on the zoo lions in L.A.?" somebody shouted.</ol>
"Good question," I said.
"If it's not a virus, then we may be talking about a cascade change in the environment," said Alice Boyd, a regal, silver-haired septuagenarian, a MacArthur fellow from the University of Washington. "Have you thought about solar flares? A geomagnetic reversal? I'm only thinking of the way that animal behavior sometimes changes rapidly before a major geological event-earthquakes, tsunamis. Maybe something's coming. A cosmic event that these animals are somehow sensing."