"Richard Preston - The Cobra Event" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

and a silk blouse.
She put some extra clothing into a travel bag, along with a book to read, although she
knew she'd never read it. A big chunk of space in the bag was taken up by her leather work
boots, which were encased in a white plastic garbage bag tied with a twist tie. The boots
were Mighty-Tuff boots, the kind construction workers wear, with steel toes and nonskid
waffle soles. They were her autopsy boots. She put her laptop computer, a cellular telephone,
and a green federal-issue cloth-covered notebook -- an epi notebook, they called it -- into
her briefcase. The green epi notebook was for keeping all her data and records of the
investigation. She packed a small digital electronic camera. It took color photographs and
stored them in memory cards. The memory cards could be plugged into her laptop computer,
and she could review the images on the screen.
She placed a leather folder containing her autopsy knife and sharpening tools on top of the
things in her travel bag. The knife is a pathologist's main piece of professional equipment. She
also threw in a Boy Scout knife, fork, and spoon set, for eating meals in a rented room. She
would not be staying in a hotel. The C.D.C. travel allowance was ninety dollars a day for
accommodations in New York City. You can't get much in the way of a hotel room in New York
for ninety dollars, so she would be staying in a bed-and-breakfast.


Her flight took off in clear weather. The moon was down, and the stars were bright in the
dark sky. Austen watched North America move slowly below the aircraft, a cobweb of lights
imposed on blackness. Cities approached and fell behind -- Charlotte, Richmond, then
Washington, D.C. The Mall was visible from thirty thousand feet, a luminous rectangle against
the Potomac River. The federal government looked small and helpless from up here, like
something you could step on with your foot.
They went into a holding pattern around Newark Airport, and when they turned and
prepared to land, coming in from the north, they passed close to Manhattan. Looking out her
window, Austen unexpectedly saw the organism called New York City. The beauty of it almost
took her breath away. The core of the city seemed to emerge from the black waters that
surrounded it in a lacework of light and structure, like a coral reef that glowed. She saw the
buildings of midtown Manhattan shimmering in the Hudson River, so remote and strange as to
seem almost imaginary. The Empire State Building was a spike washed with floodlights. Beyond
Manhattan lay expanses of Brooklyn and Queens. To the south she recognized the luminous
bulge of Staten Island, and the lights of the Verrazano Bridge hanging in a chain. Closer to the
airplane, the waters of Upper New York Bay spread out like an inky rug, devoid of light, except
for the sparkling hulls of ships at anchor, their bows pointed to sea with an incoming tide.
Austen thought of a city as a colony of cells. The cells were people. Individually the cells
lived for a while and were programmed to die, but they replaced themselves with their
progeny, and the organism continued its existence. The organism grew, changed, and
reacted, adapting to the biological conditions of life on the planet. Austen's patient, for the
moment, was the city of New York. A couple of cells inside the patient had winked out in a
mysterious way. This might be a sign of illness in the patient, or it might be nothing.


The bed-and-breakfast apartment where the C.D.C. had rented a room for Alice Austen
was in Kips Bay, on East Thirty-third Street, between Second and First avenues. Kips Bay is a
seventies-era development of blocklike concrete buildings surrounded by gardens, nestled up
against a huge complex of hospitals. Her hostess was a German widow named Gerda Heilig,
who rented out a room looking toward the New York University Medical Center and the East
River. It was a pleasant room with a desk and an antique carved German bed that squeaked