Stinger

by Nancy Kress

“Hey, girl. Hey there, old girl. How’s the girl …?”

  Damn. He was already lost. Marcy had won. He was going to take the damn dog.

  “Robert, she’d be so much happier with you than with me … Oh, don’t mind the TV. It’s programmed to come on for the seven o’clock news. I usually watch it while I eat dinner.”

  She said it calmly, but to Robert it sounded sad. Eating alone with the TV. Although, where was the TV? He heard a broadcast-type voice, “… stories tonight about yet another TWA crash and a sensational …” but he didn’t see a TV set, not even after he’d pushed Abigail out of his face.

  “So, will you take her?” Marcy said tensely.

  Cavanaugh finally located the broadcast voice; it was coming from an antique cherry armoire with polished brass knobs. Marcy must figure a TV was too recent for her Federalist-Chinoiserie decor.

  “… just learned that the Centers for Disease Control are investigating in southern Maryland …”

  “Robert? Will you?”

  “… previously unknown strain of malaria that attacks blood cells that …”

  Cavanaugh shoved away Abigail, bolted across the room, and flung open the cherry armoire. Tom Brokaw’s face lectured him.

  “… urging citizens not to panic. I repeat, these findings are preliminary. Nonetheless, Baltimore Sun journalist Libby Turner, who broke the story in this evening’s edition of that newspaper, received confirmation from Dellridge Community Hospital in La Plata that …”

  “Oh, my God,” Cavanaugh said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “What is it?” Marcy said, “what’s wrong?”

  “… article also raises a sensitive point: Is this new disease, which apparently attacks mostly African Americans, being treated with the same seriousness as if the victims were white? That question is already being debated on the Internet, where rumors first alerted Ms. Turner to …”

  Rumors on the Internet. Judy? But he had warned her—

  “Robert, I asked you what’s wrong!”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” he said.

  “What wasn’t?”

  “The public was supposed to be told in a reassuring way. Not as a civil rights issue.”

  “… further confirmation from La Plata that the FBI has already questioned hospital personnel at …”

  “Shit,” Cavanaugh repeated inanely. His cell phone rang.

  “… speculation that if the new disease is not an act of nature, it could well be a bioweapon disguised as …”

  “Bob? Listen, it’s Felders.”

  “What—”

  Marcy said, “Robert, please tell me what’s going on!”

  Felders said, “I heard the idiotic news report and realize that if it’s in southern Maryland, it’s you and Seton.”

  “Ehhrrrmmm,” Cavanaugh said. Could Felders hear Marcy in the background? Would he recognize Marcy’s voice after three years? Did Felders think the malaria/stroke outbreak was terrorism? Why was Felders calling?

  “Listen, I know you don’t work for me anymore, Bob,” Felders said, “but mentoring dies hard, I guess. I just wanted to offer a piece of advice.”

  Despite himself, Cavanaugh grinned. When Felders mentored, he owned. It drove most agents nuts, but Cavanaugh hadn’t really minded. They didn’t come any more competent than Felders.

  “Like I said, I got Seton in your Resident Agency. What kind of idiot is he, anyway? He shouldn’t be in charge of a lemonade stand. He told me he had to get off the phone to ‘comment to the press crowd outside.’ You should have heard his tone. The pope appearing on his goddamn balcony.”

  Ah, Felders. Why couldn’t Dunbar see through Seton like that?

  “Anyway,” Felders raced on in his New York rat-a-tat style, “I wanted to tell you to stay away from the press while you’re doing this investigation. The whole thing sounds like a nut theory to me, but after Libby Turner and CBS, the Bureau is going to have to investigate it anyway. We’ll look like racists if we don’t. Anyway, you’re going to be talking to local hate groups, right? Those guys only like the press on their own terms. If you’re trailed by reporters, you’ll never get close to the people you’re going to need to talk to. You especially don’t want your face on TV. Let that idiot Seton talk for the cameras. You don’t go anywhere near your office. Don’t go home, either. There’re only two agents in southern Maryland, and by now every reporter on the East Coast knows your name and address. They’ll be camped on your lawn trying to wring quotes out of you. Tell Judy not to talk to them either.”

  Cavanaugh suddenly realized that Felders’s voice carried beyond the receiver. Marcy was listening intently.

  “Got it,” Cavanaugh said.

  “Good. It’s going to be a wild goose chase, but the lower profile you keep, the better you’ll come out of it after the insanity stops.” He hung up, Felders style, without saying good-bye.

  Marcy smoothed her already smooth hair. “Where will you stay while you investigate?”

  “A motel, under a Bureau ID.”

  “You can stay here.”

  It caught Cavanaugh by surprise, which must have showed on his face. Marcy smiled.

  “As I said, I’m leaving on a nine-thirty flight for Dallas. I’ll be gone at least a week, more likely two. If you’re not going home to … to Judy, then you can’t take Abigail there. If you stay here, nobody will know where you are, Abigail won’t be howling at the kennel, and I’ll feel like I’ve repaid you a little for relieving me of the dog.”

  The logic was impeccable, the presentation flawless. And yet under the negotiating skill, Cavanaugh sensed something else. Something new in his ex-wife: a desire to be useful. What had her lover the wunderkind CEO done to this self-assured woman to ever make her feel she wasn’t?

  “Okay, sure,” Cavanaugh said. “Thanks.”

  “Good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to pack for my business trip.”

  She left the living room, as graceful and poised as Cavanaugh remembered. He stood still on the Oriental carpet, planning. Call Dunbar, call Judy, call Jim Farlow …

  Abigail whimpered and rolled over on her belly, waiting for him to scratch her. It brought back a host of memories of his former life. The dog, the picnics at the beach, Marcy …

  But things were different now.

  Before he made the first of the calls to launch his investigation, he knelt and examined Abigail’s happily exposed belly, looking for mosquito bites.

  “We’re besieged by calls,” Jerry Dunbar said. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Half of them are from people ‘turning in the terrorist group that caused the disease.’ Candidates include space aliens, Republicans, insurance companies, Madonna, the vice president, and the City of New York. Somehow a rumor got started that the big bus crash yesterday happened because the driver was black and had a stroke like Senator Reading’s.”

  “Jesus,” an agent said.

  “The other half of the phone calls are from Headquarters. They want this thing solved yesterday.”

  The twelve agents around the table nodded sleepily. It was 7:00 A.M. in Baltimore. The first of the Public Health Service/CDC bulletins had already aired on the radio; Cavanaugh had heard it while driving in. It was sane, balanced, and reasonable. It was also too late. Panic had already flamed, including at the FBI. This was the initial meeting of the hastily assembled—most of the agents had been in bed asleep—team against “the malaria terrorists.”

  Nobody present was completely convinced it was a terrorist attack, not even Cavanaugh. But Libby Turner’s follow-up stories had everything: Public danger. Racism. Paranoia. Death. Pictures of malaria-carrying mosquitoes blown up ten times their size, so that they resembled the enormous car-chomping mutated bugs of 1950s B movies. Naturally the journalists loved it. Naturally they wrote about it. To be fair.

  Cavanaugh didn’t want to be fair. Like most agents, he considered journalists jackals. Howling, braying, preying on the weak, settling for carrion. Interfering
with solid, methodical law enforcement.

  “Cavanaugh?” Dunbar said, breaking into his train of thought.

  “‘Let slip the dogs’ of the Baltimore Sun.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I asked you,” Dunbar said, “how much time can you take from your other cases for this special team?”

  “All of it.”

  Dunbar nodded. Apparently he took this as no more than a sign of how conscientiously Cavanaugh took directives from Headquarters. Felders would have known it also meant Cavanaugh had nothing else worth his time.

  “I’m case agent on this, on record,” Dunbar said, which meant Headquarters needed to show the public that a high-ranking supervisor was in charge. “But you’ll do the major field work, Robert. It’s your jurisdiction. However, everything to the press goes through me or the Press Office. Everything. That’s ironclad.”

  The twelve agents—the number was another concession to the “terrorism” the public perceived and the Bureau didn’t—nodded again. Everyone understood. This one was hot, so they would go through the motions, even if the motions were bullshit. Then Cavanaugh would write a final report, and everybody could forget about the whole thing.

  “Okay, let’s divide it up. Firchen, Santos, Phaffer, you talk to the hospitals and the next-of-kin. Cavanaugh will brief you. Horne, McFarlane …”

  Dunbar organized the team, then let Cavanaugh fill everybody in. All the while he was doing so, he kept one ear cocked toward the secure phone at the end of the conference room. The other agents did, too. With a highly publicized terrorist attack—even one with no terrorists except those dreamed up by the press—sometimes a genuinely dangerous group would claim credit. Or more than one group. Headquarters would funnel those claims to this team, and thus provide probable cause for warrants, subpoenas, maybe even grand juries. Very often the result was information useful to other on-going cases. It was like following plastic bread crumbs to real gingerbread houses.

  Of course, the claimants might phone the newspapers instead of the FBI. But in that case, the Post or Sun or Times would phone Headquarters.

  However, by the end of the meeting, no one had as yet taken responsibility for malaria reading. The secure phone stayed silent.

  Melanie Anderson gulped the last mouthful of hot coffee in the kitchenette of her Weather Vane Motel room. Late, late. It was already 7:00 A.M. and she and Krovetz were supposed to leave at 7:10 for the field. Melanie wore only a white, one-pocket T-shirt and panties, her thick, shoulder-length hair half-combed. And Krovetz, that hotshot, would knock on her door early, she just knew it. He was that eager.

  Well, so was she. She and Krovetz were going to take a break from interviewing next-of-kin for the epidemiological curves. Instead, they would leave the rest of the team issuing more guidelines for protecting the populace, and they would visit the epidemiological center: twenty-five square miles of small towns, woods, fields, and marshland. A lot of space—but Melanie had a theory to narrow it farther. To test it, she and Joe would gather specimens.

  Thank God things were finally getting done.

  No, actually, thank that reporter, Libby Turner. Although thinking about Libby Turner’s article in the Sun made her think about Robert Cavanaugh, which made her so furious she slammed her empty coffee mug into the sink.

  He had actually called her last night to suggest that she had leaked the P. reading terrorism theory to the press! After she’d given Farlow her word of honor that she wouldn’t! Melanie had blistered the phone receiver with her reply, then hung up. Arrogant honky cop!

  She yanked on socks and jeans, dragged a comb through the other half of her hair and pushed it into a ponytail, smeared on insect repellent. She was lacing up her field boots when the phone rang. Krovetz. No, he’d just show up. Cavanaugh? If he dared accuse her again …

  “Is this the CDC nigger bitch?”

  A heavy male voice. Melanie went still.

  “Yeah, I know where you are. I see you every day, running around with those white men scientists. What’re you, their off-duty recreation? Well, not for long. Get out of our state, bitch, or else you might be next to get bitten by some rabid mosquito.” Forced heavy laughter.

  Quietly she hung up the phone.

  Call Cavanaugh? Tell Farlow? No. Whoever made that hate call wasn’t responsible for genetically engineering a parasitic variant. An organization that could do that owned brains, and this was just a stupid racist pig. Another in the sty.

  She found she was standing with her arms wrapped around her body, protective. Impatiently, she bent to finish lacing her boots, then looked for her cap. But she jumped when the knock on the door came, and she kept the chain on until she saw it was Joe Krovetz.

  “Mel? Ready to go? Car’s loaded.”

  “I’m ready. Did you remember the dry ice?”

  “Of course.” He grinned at her, so eager to get started that Melanie grinned back. They weren’t all like that caller.

  Crossing the parking lot, she eyed the teenagers lounging around the gas station, the motel employee hosing down a sidewalk, the customer pulling away from a unit on the far end of the motel, people going in and out of the 7-Eleven. Did you call me? You? You?

  Why do you hate us so fucking much?

  They drove southeast toward the river. A mile or so short of the Potomac River Bridge, Melanie pulled the car off the highway and onto a side road, and they entered a different decade.

  Away from the highways, she’d found, much of southern Maryland looked just like this. Dirt roads cut through dense woods of mixed hardwoods and pine. Whenever the land lifted, small hidden farms appeared: fields of corn or carrots or tobacco. The scattered homes were either farmhouses or trailers, their small yards splashed either with flower beds and statues to Saint Mary, or with abandoned tires and rolls of chicken wire. One sign, sometimes hand lettered, appeared over and over. DOGS TRAINED FOR AGGRESSION.

  Between the isolated farms or trailers, the land was still wild: steep ravines, fallen trees, the constant drone of insects. A deer flashed across the road, melting into the woods.

  “Okay, here,” Melanie said. “You take that side of the road and I’ll take this.”

  “Gotcha.” Joe stopped the car and climbed out. To the left the woods weren’t quite as thick as in other places, patterned with sunlit dells and fallen logs. In the distance, barely visible above the trees, rose a dilapidated barn roof. To the right the ground fell away sharply in a muddy bank, then leveled off into swampy ground covered with reeds, stagnant pools of water, and the drowned remains of small trees. Both left and right were good breeding grounds for A. quadrimaculatus.

  Joe said, “I’m still not sure we’re going to find anything new, Mel.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Nope,” Joe said, unoffended.

  Melanie liked that. The kid was easy to work with. He was always cheerful, he was willing to think out of the box, and never once had he shown the slightest awareness that she was female. That made things much easier. Melanie didn’t date white men, and it was tiresome having to explain why not.

  Joe loaded himself with light traps, plus the subliming dry ice that mosquitoes mistook for human breath. He vanished into the trees. Melanie slid down the steep bank toward the swamp.

  This wasn’t a part of epidemiology that Melanie usually engaged in. But this was her theory, and so far she was the only one who believed in it. She’d begun with the fact that the center of this attempt at genocide was centered in a rural subsection of Maryland rather than, say, in D.C. That suggested two possibilities, neither of which precluded the other. The first was that whoever had done this horrendous thing had deliberately released the altered and infected Anopheles in an out-of-the-way location, where the epidemic would have a chance to take firm hold before the small rural hospitals even realized it existed. And that’s exactly what would have happened if a United States senator hadn’t been bitten and then died at a sophisticated Ne
w York hospital that ran obscure tests to find out why. If Senator Reading hadn’t been an inadvertent meal for a diseased mosquito, God knows how many more poor blacks would have died before anybody realized what their strokes actually were.

  As it was, the official death toll had reached fifty-six: fifty-three blacks, one Greek, two India Indians. Many of the dead were kids. Kids liked to be outdoors in the summer.

  The second possibility was that the release of the diseased mosquitoes had been accidental. Premature. Somebody had been transporting the vectors from wherever they had been created to wherever they were supposed to be used. And some had escaped. That’s why Melanie and Joe were out in tall, wet grass, looking for clues. Route 301 ran right through the epidemiological center, and it contained the bridge to connect this God-forsaken backwater with Virginia and the deep South.

  The ground was wet. Mud rose almost to the top of Melanie’s field boots. She squished halfway across the open ground and bent over a ditch. Anopheles quadrimaculatus deposited its eggs on the surface of standing fresh water, usually water surrounded by heavy vegetation, with some shady areas. That described most of southern Maryland, where the water table was so high that inland swamps were as common as salt marshes. Anopheles larvae, called wigglers, liked to feed in the sun, rest in the shade. Sure enough, the ditch held a floating mass of eggs. Melanie scooped them up carefully and put them in a collector. Gary would examine some, hatch some. It was a numbers game. Were there pockets of third-or-fourth generation breeding that could indicate a single-point release of initial vectors? The only way to find out was to carefully sample the undisturbed breeding grounds.

  “Hey! You! Look this way!”

  Her head jerked up. Two men splashed across the wet ground toward her. Fear iced her spine—until she saw the logo on their truck, parked behind Joe’s car: CHANNEL SIX NEWS.

  “Damn!” one of the men said. He raised his leg and tried to shake the mud off his polished leather shoe and bottom four inches of pants leg. “Hey, Dr. Anderson! Look this way!” The other man raised a minicam.

  Melanie pulled the brim of her baseball cap down and turned her back. She waded away from the men, across even swampier ground. The newsmen weren’t dressed for that. But the two splashed after her, the cameraman filming, the reporter cursing the mud and muck. “Dr. Anderson! Don’t go! Could you please show us which mosquitoes are the ones carrying the malaria? Do you have one in a jar we can shoot?”