The Angelic Virus

PROLOGUE


The long, healing sleep, as Matthew Lawrence thought of it ever after, had lasted a little over two weeks: from a frigid, snow-blinding Friday evening in late March, to a sunny Saturday afternoon in early April.

Hopelessly obsessed by the experience, Matt dwelled on it endlessly: before sleeping, upon waking, while climbing a mountain or riding in a car- whenever he was alone, or left alone by whomever he happened to be with. Each time he tried with renewed effort to recapture as much of the journey through time and space from the fragments embedded in his memory nets.

He had not seen God, nor any of God's seraphs-- at least not as entities he could relate to in human terms. But he had experienced myriad other wonders in his sojourn through a once hidden universe where time was detached from space, the past from the present, and the sentient dead mingled freely with the living. Far more than a dream, it was a journey created by a mind unleashed and unbound, allowing him at last to access all the knowledge stored in the hundred billion neurons in his brain since birth, perhaps even since the beginning of time; a voyage too perilous for the living-- for who would want to return from it? -- but one granted the near-dying or newly dead. Or possibly a soul between rebirths.

Yet, wondrous though the dimly-remembered experience had been, this was only the half of it and not the mystery Matt Lawrence needed to solve. In the weeks his mind had roamed, his body had lain on a bed in a small Vermont farm: A healing place that had somehow nourished and strengthened him. Now, after an almost two years stay, he had left this haven in the forested mountains of the State, to venture south on a journey far more arduous than he could have imagined.

More disturbing than the fast-moving crowds he encountered at airports and train stations was the intense sense of displacement and detachment that overcame him from time to time. It was as if his brain had to keep unscrambling and reorganizing memories in order to cope with the ever-changing surroundings: a process that normally occurred during dreamful sleep but was happening to him now. Though short-lived, these spells of blurred reality unnerved Matt enough to make him regret he'd ever left his Shangri-la-like sanctuary in the Green Mountains of Vermont. But before embarking on an even greater adventure in Europe, he had two very different, yet related, things to do: meet an old friend in Delaware and pull off a minor heist at the Philadelphia hospital where he had once been a patient.



Chapter One


From up, down, and across the street, they converged on the subway entrance at the corner of Tenth and Locust in Philadelphia: three people with such last names as Millner, Leone, and Harrington, who did not know one another and had nothing in common-though that would soon change.

First down the worn, metal-plated steps was seventy-two-year-old Edna Millner from Haddon Heights, New Jersey. She descended the stairs slowly, clumsily, holding tight to the handrail. The film of tears that had blurred her vision on leaving her sister Grace's hospital room had dried in the cold, windy March day, but she still felt so dazed and forlorn that she kept losing contact with her surroundings for moments at a time. Edna was childless and a widow. She had been a widow for the past twelve years, though it seemed more like a century. Her older sister Grace was her only living relative in the area and, from what Grace's doctors had told her, unlikely to leave Thomas Jefferson University Hospital alive. A part of her sister's heart - a valve - had somehow turned to stone. How was such a thing possible? Edna wondered, but did not ask. And once Grace was gone, she would be alone in an empty house and a neighborhood so changed in composition that she knew few of its storeowners and was afraid to walk the streets after dark. But she must not start crying again now. Edna told herself; she did not have a clean handkerchief in her purse.

Next down the subway stairs came Dave Leone, a medium-sized man with a stocky build, rounded face, and receding hairline. Dave was a smiler, his wife, and before her, his mother, had told him it was his best feature and, without meaning to be flirtatious or smug, he smiled at most people he passed on the street. But Dave wasn't smiling at anyone today; he had too much on his mind.

Leone was a computer repairman who, for most of the past fifteen years, had worked for Commodore International in West Chester, Pennsylvania, before it went broke. Now, with his partner, Gino Girardi, Dave ran a computer repair business of his own. What with twenty five percent of the PCs coming off the assembly line flawed in some way, it had seemed a promising and profitable venture. But customers were so scarce that they were barely meeting expenses. To save his business, Gino wanted to involve him in a quick, slick deal, " a sure money-maker" -- which it probably was, except for the fact that it was illegal. A friend of Gino's had heisted a large batch of microprocessor chips, small as matchbooks, that powered most of the new IBM PCs, and was willing to sell them cheap. By offering to upgrade the computers that came into the shop, they could make a bundle, Gino claimed, and Dave didn't doubt it. But he had never before done anything unlawful in his life and, with a wife and four-year-old son depending on him, he didn't want to begin now. So, what to do: pass up the deal and risk going broke, or go ahead with it and risk jail?

Usually a brisk walker, but now so weighed down by worry that he moved like an arthritic old man, Dave entered the dingy subway station with its gray concrete floor and canary yellow walls and headed for the turnstile. Patiently, he waited for the old woman ahead of him to fumble in her purse for a token and put it into the slot. Finally she did, and with his mind still on the discouraging meeting he'd had earlier with a loan officer at Fidelity Bank in downtown Philadelphia, Dave inserted his own token.

Last of the three that would soon be linked by bizarre circumstance, and of a strikingly different demeanor than the others, thirty-year old Janice Harrington followed Leone through the turnstile and down the stairs to the subway platform on the lower level. Rather than looking forlorn or preoccupied, Janice, who had just come from visiting her obstetrician at Thomas Jefferson Hospital was as excited and happy as she could be. She was almost five months pregnant now and couldn't wait to tell her husband, Pete, that their future child would be a boy. At first, Janice hadn't wanted to know the gender of her baby. Afraid it might haunt her dreams. But unlike her previous two pregnancies, which had ended in early miscarriages, this baby had made its viability known through vigorous kicks, and Janice could not resist asking her doctor what the latest ultrasound images showed. Pete, a high school science teacher and assistant baseball coach, would be thrilled as she had been when he learned the answer.

As David Leone was the first of the three to notice the strange-looking man standing behind a pillar on the platform, his mouth and hands moving in animated conversation with himself. Though their eyes met for an instant, Dave's intuition warned him not to smile or stare. The man wore a soiled green parka, its pockets bulging, and a black knit cap. He was tall and broad-shouldered with a scraggly beard, large watery eyes, and a recurring twitch at the right side of his mouth. But his most striking feature, the one that nearly drew Dave into taking a second look, was the blotchy brown spots on his cheeks and brow that made it hard to tell at a glance whether he was black or white.

The man's name was Carl Lund, and he worked for The Philadelphia Inquirer, delivering stacks of newspapers by truck when he was able to, which wasn't often, because of his lapses into mental illness. In his early years, both Carl and his twin brother Tom had been much in demand by research psychiatrists, some from as far away as Sweden, because of the puzzle they represented. Though the brothers were identical in every way that could be measured, Carl was schizophrenic and Tom was not. In yet another of the mysteries of his disease, Carl had been granted a decade of normal development and family life before the hardwiring of his brain began to unravel. His auditory hallucinations and erratic, sometimes violent, behavior had begun in earnest when Carl was ten, and he spent the next twenty-two years of his life in and out of mental institutions and on various anti-psychotic drugs. Both his perpetual lip twitch and the caf-au-lait spots on his face were the result of certain medications given to him in the past.

In his more lucid moments, Carl couldn't help wondering what cruel trick of fate had made him so different from his brother. But no one, including the dozens of doctors who had studied him through innumerable blood tests and x-rays and radioactive isotope scans, could tell him. His brother was the lucky one, Carl had thought, until told that Tom, along with a hundred or so other American soldiers, had been blown apart by an Iraqi scud missile that hit their barracks in far-off Saudi Arabia while they all slept. So there it was, the long-sought answer to the envy he'd felt towards his brother, his compensation. He was the luckier one, after all. While he lived in two worlds, Tom lived in none.

Carl had a second brother - though no one, except one of two of his more trustworthy psychiatrists, knew about him. When he was eight years-old, his mother had given birth to a third male child whose spinal canal was so horribly deformed that he lived only a few hours. Though he had never been given a name, Carl called him Timmy and, beginning at age ten, talked to him often. Of all the voices chattering away in his head, Timmy's was the clearest and the one he paid attention to the most.

Now, freed by choice from the mind-dulling effects of the medication he was supposed to take, Carl heard both Tom's and Timmy's voices calling to him with equal clarity, calling him again and again to come over and join them. But to secure a special arrangement for the brothers to always be together, Carl was told that he had to bring three other souls along on the journey. At first, Carl had questioned the necessity of this, but his brothers were insistent, there could be no deviations, and so on the third day of the third month of the year, as close to three in the afternoon as he could arrange, Carl prepared to carry their orders out.

Lund had chosen the time for the sacrificial murders well: the mid-afternoon lull before the suppertime peak in commuter traffic. When the mounting roar and rumble announced the approach of the westbound train, there were only six other people on the platform. Lund strolled the length of the four-car train, peering in the windows, before finally entering a middle car.

A stocky middle-aged man and two women, one old, one young, sat at one end of the compartment and a white-haired man, his face obscured by the newspaper he held out in front of him, at the other. Lund took a seat behind them and waited impatiently for the subway doors to close.

It was now 3:01 p.m.

Edna Millner blinked in astonishment as she saw the large, scruffy-looking man who had just passed her in the aisle turn and point a long-barreled black handgun at her and the two others at the front end of the car. What in the world was he doing? she wondered, before realizing that they were about to be robbed, or worse and let out a shriek.

"Hey, what's going on?" Dave Leone cried out, half-rising from his seat. "What do you want?"

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