Red Cliff had gone from a secluded, foreboding fortress to a compound bustling with activity. The Neighbors’ helipad was getting frequent use, and street traffic into and away from the place was as steady as the surf. The Army Corps of Engineers erected a communications center almost overnight, giving everyone the cell phone service they couldn’t seem to live without.

For his part, Lou had been transfused three units at a small community hospital, and then medflighted to Bangor, where tests and exploratory surgery gave him only good news. Numbness in several fingers, and weakness in his right hand along the distribution of the ulnar nerve, but nothing time shouldn’t take care of. Twenty-four hours later, in a sling, he was back at Red Cliff, where he elected to stay rather than to travel back to Atlanta.

He communicated with Cap several times a day, but only for a few minutes each time. According to Dr. Win Carter, the head of Arbor General, Cap’s condition was heading steadily downhill, and each minute brought Lou new fears that a treatment, assuming one was even successfully developed, could arrive too late.

Lou awaited news about the Phagecil experiment near a makeshift memorial of flowers and cards dedicated to Agent Tim Vaill that had been put together at the base of the now boarded-up window. The Coast Guard had recovered Alexander Burke’s shattered corpse, largely eaten by fish and the sea, lodged between two barnacle-covered boulders near the shoreline, but Vaill’s body had yet to be found.

Beth Snyder had flown to Red Cliff to meet the “saviors,” as she had dubbed Lou, Kazimi, and Humphrey. When news came from the Coast Guard that they were abandoning the search for Vaill, she, Lou, and Chuck McCall held a brief vigil of silence, lit a candle, and threw it off Red Cliff into the charging waves. According to Snyder, Vaill and Maria would be memorialized at the FBI headquarters in D.C., and at all of the field offices, joining the thirty-six agents who had preceded them as Service Martyrs.

Lou was on his third cup of coffee, alone by the window farthest from the crowd, when Humphrey wheeled over. Despite the stresses of performing almost any task, Humphrey had been working around the clock, and had supervised installation of two air-conditioning units so that the temperature of the lab could be kept at below sixty—the temperature for keeping his CP under optimum control. Kazimi, who thrived in warm temperatures, showed his mettle and spirit of cooperation by wearing a parka.