Then there were the headaches—blinding, distracting pain, mostly above his right ear, where the bullet had been removed, but also behind his eyes. There was nothing predictable about what brought them on, and nothing reliable to make them go away. They usually lasted just three or four minutes, maybe two or three times a day, but the duration had been getting longer, and the pain worse. Yesterday’s attack had lasted nearly a half hour. Thankfully, he was alone in his hospital room at the time.

Tylenol and Motrin were no help, and he didn’t dare mention them to his boss or his doctor. If he did, he would be out of the field in a blink, and in all likelihood, back in the hospital. Some sort of migraine, he convinced himself. Half the people he knew had them. A few of them every day. Until Alexander Burke was behind bars or roasting on a spit in hell, he would do his best to get through them and control his irritability toward McCall.

Vaill checked the house using high-powered binoculars just as Lola Burke entered her living room. She was a slender, pretty woman with shoulder-length blond hair, wearing a blue knit sweater and form-fitting jeans. Her face was fresh and innocent, almost cherubic. It would have been tough to pick her out of a line-up as the wife of the FBI’s most-wanted man in America. Vaill kept watching as she passed out of the living room, then returned. Having aced all his psychological profiling and behavioral analysis classes at Quantico, he could sense the woman was nervous—maybe waiting for something.

“I think we’re clear, Chuck,” Vaill said. “Let’s go have ourselves a little chat.”

Vaill never dreamed he’d be doing fieldwork so soon after being discharged from the hospital. Against his wishes, Beth Snyder had tried to give him a cushy desk job with the task force assigned to monitor the Doomsday Germ. He was to work with the huge team trying, so far unsuccessfully, to pin down any of the Society of One Hundred Neighbors. Finally, with his doctor’s go-ahead and his own burning passion to avenge Maria, Snyder had relented, but only after extracting from him a pledge of objectivity.

At the start of the Doomsday Germ crisis, a top-secret communications pipeline had been established involving every hospital. The goal of the pipeline was to record each documented case of the Doomsday Germ. The FBI put hospital administrators on notice that information leaks would not be tolerated. Any such leak could result in obstruction charges and even impact JCAHO accreditation, vital for a hospital’s federal funding.