Weapon of Choice Read Online Free PDF Page A

They got a double whammy with Jones, who was both a woman and black. “Colored,” his parents would call her.
    â€œNot a personal call,” Jones said, turning back her attention to her stack of petri dish cultures. “A friend in Tampa has a patient with probable HIV. Not that I’m an expert, but—”
    â€œWe’re supposed to go through channels,” Charles said, “before we get involved.” He didn’t know whether Jones had been told about her promotion yet, and he wanted to get in his jibes, petty as they were, before she technically became his boss. Even when that happened, she wouldn’t be able to touch him. By the end of the week, he’ll have requested a transfer to anywhere she wasn’t.
    Jones seemed to ignore him. “Tampa isn’t San Francisco or D.C. or New York City,” she said, inspecting a plate under a scanning microscope. The exotic staph organisms that the lab handled were potentially lethal and access to their Center for Disease Control P3 Lab was restricted to scientists with doctoral degrees and intensivetraining in antimicrobial technique. “My friend Dr. Nelson doesn’t know whether her hospital ever has had a case. Well, you heard what I told her. Anything you’d have added?”
    Charles had to tread lightly. He couldn’t quite say,
Put the poor bastard out of his misery and cremate the remains
. Public correctness had been his watchword ever since Dr. Pierce had recruited him into The Order two years ago in Arlington. He had to remain non-confrontational even when The Order had openly advocated putting AIDS victims in “cities of refuge.”
    Not waiting for his reply, Jones continued from under the stainless steel containment hood. He could just make out what she said. “Something interesting going on with our flesh-eating AZ3510 series. Remember the fulminate growth we saw two days ago? Two days ago, I recultured the plate, and today there’s nothing. It must have burned itself out. Nothing left for antibiotic sensitivities, and I really wanted to try the paralexins series we got in from Keystone Pharma.” Jones recapped the petri dish and withdrew her head from under the protective hood. “That culture’s so virulent, burned itself out before I could replate it. Can you move these, please, from a forty-eight-hour to a twenty-four-hour schedule?”
    You black bitch. Trying to tell me how to run the lab?
The two of them had M.D. degrees, but he also had a Ph.D. in genetics from Emory, and she had a master’s in Public Health from Harvard. A Ph.D. trumps a M.P.H. any day, but no, not here at the CDC. His father’s words reverberated in Charles’s head whenever he faced Stacy Jones: “Because you are white,
you
will always tell
them
what to do, no matter what.”
    The lab phone rang and Jones picked it up. “Sure,” she said. “Lunch? That’d be fine.”
    That would be the call
, Charles thought. Stacy Jones, of African descent, a woman of color, about to be promoted ahead of him, a white male, of European descent, Southern aristocracy. At first he’d felt shame, then he thought about his Aryan Nation brothers in The Order. They talked and talked about something radical. A catalyst. Could this injustice be what they needed to fire them up? One of their own, passed over for a colored woman. Isn’t this what TheOrder had been warning the members about all this time? The Order had to do something to protect the future of white children.
Something radical
.
    Jones looked up at the wall clock. “I’ll put these cultures away,” she announced. “Stan Proctor asked me out to lunch. Imagine. Can you lock up the lab, Charles, when you leave?”
    His grimace was so taut that he had to consciously unlatch his jaws. Jones ordering him around enraged him—but what had she said just before that? About the AZ3510 culture? Ultravirulent?