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nothing. Marya had witnessed more than a few untimely deaths in her native Estonia. She merely dropped a kiss on the slumbering child’s head and carried her around the screening curtain that divided Dana’s part of the emergency room. George’s eyes followed them a trifle absently; then his gaze strayed back to the motionless figure on the gurney. Dana had lost consciousness again. It was as though she’d clung to the world as long as Mallory did, wanting every last second she could have with her daughter.
    Her face was gaunt, her eyes unmoving beneath the still lids; for an instant he was afraid that she’d left him already—that she’d chosen that moment of Mallory’s departure to skitter away herself, without the pain of good-bye. He sank down on his knees by the side of the bed and reached through the metal railing for her hand. The fingers were chilled and unresponsive. Something between a groan and a sob tore from his throat.
    “What is it?” he’d demanded of the supervising physician as she wheeled his wife through the crowd of people in Sibley’s ER. “Her diabetes? Dehydration? What? ”
    “She ran the Marine Corps?” the doctor asked grimly. “We’re seeing a flood of people who did. Something was tainted. We don’t know what. Just hold on and we’ll try to stabilize her gastric system. I’m afraid I can’t give you a private room, Mr. Speaker—”
    All around him, in pairs and groups and lonely solitude, were men and women of every age and ethnic background, doubled up in pain. George stopped counting at sixty-three. Had all these people run the marathon? He began to grasp the extent of the problem, began to be terribly afraid. The doctors would not—or could not—tell him what was wrong with his wife. He started calling every contact he could think of—people at the FDA, Dana’s personal physician, his Chief of Staff simply for comfort—at nine-thirty on a Sunday evening.
    There was a brief moment when Dana gave him some hope, after the violence of the vomiting and the exhausting bouts of diarrhea—a period when the morphine had taken hold, and her tortured entrails were blessedly quiet. She’d stared at the ceiling, her fingers locked in his. “I want to talk to Steve,” she said.
    “Steve Price?”
    A nod. “I want to tell him. What I saw.”
    The Enfields had known Steve Price for nearly ten years, since the journalist had traded the editorship of his family newspaper for an investigative reporter’s job at the Washington Post . But why Dana wanted to talk to Steve, of all people—rather than her best friend or her sister or even himself—baffled George.
    “Please,” she said faintly. “Get him now.”
    He called the cell phone number he found in his Palm Pilot and caught Price on the second ring.
    “Shit,” the journalist muttered when George told him where he was. “I was afraid of this. I’ve called your house four times. You know it’s ricin?”
    George hadn’t known. He told Price to get his ass to the hospital and hung up shouting for Dana’s doctor. Demanding an antidote—any kind of antidote—for a poison that’d never had one.
     
    Price spared George the unwanted words of commiseration. He leaned over the gurney to kiss Dana’s cheek, oblivious to the odor of blood and vomit that rose from her failing body.
    “Hell of a race, girl,” he said. “Unbelievable. You rock.”
    She smiled crookedly at him and closed her eyes. “I want you to take down what I have to say. I want it to get to the right people.”
    He pulled out a tape recorder. “Shoot.”
    “I remember where things went wrong,” she said. “Mile twenty. Hains Point.”
    George saw Price’s expression change, saw the brows draw down and the lines around the mouth harden. There was something about Hains Point—something Price already knew. “You’re sure? What do you remember?”
    “I was feeling like crap—I’d taken a shot in my thigh, but I was afraid I was going to faint. I