Stinger

by Nancy Kress

ARE! WE MUST MUST MUST SHOW THEM JUST HOW DEEP THIS BETRAYAL GOES, AND THAT WE AREN’T GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!

  SUBJ: DONOHUE

  FROM: REMAILER@WORLDNET.NET

  TO: MALAR-R@WORLDNET.NET

  LET THE SPEARCHUCKERS ALL KILL EACH OTHER OFF. PROSECUTING DONOHUE IS JUST A WASTE OF TAXPAYERS MONEY. GIVE HIM A LAB TO MAKE SOMETHING THAT WILL GET THE OTHER 90% OF NIGGERS. GO, ANNIE QUAD!!!!

  Judy rubbed her eyes. She’d been sitting for hours at her computer in the Rivermount house, surfing the Net. The medical lists, the government bulletin boards, the news channels, and now the chat rooms on malaria reading. Why? She didn’t know exactly. Because it was important. Because it threw into sharp focus the mess simmering—now erupting—just below the surface of American life. Because she might want to write an article about it if she could find the right angle.

  Because somewhere out there, Robert was investigating it.

  He was going to call her today. He hadn’t called for two weeks, but he was going to call today. She’d woken up this morning knowing that, and hadn’t been able to work since. Noon, and she was still in her nightgown. Noon, and she hadn’t eaten anything. Noon, and she was surfing the Net on one phone line while her eyes strayed to the phone on the other line. She was acting like a clinging brain-dead dependent stereotype, and she knew it and she couldn’t seem to do anything else.

  SUBJECT: (NO SUBJECT ENTERED)

  FROM: MELORIAD@RPI.EDU

  TO: MALAR-R@WORLDNET.NET

  THE POSTINGS TODAY SICKEN ME. WE NEED TO PULL TOGETHER HERE, NOT GET CAUGHT UP IN BLAME OR GLOATING OR PARTISANSHIP. DON’T YOU SEE THAT IF SOMEONE COULD DO THIS TO ONE ETHNIC GROUP, SOMEONE COULD DO IT TO ANY OTHER? EVERY HERITAGE HAS SOME GENETIC ANOMALIES THAT COULD BE EXPLOITED. IS SAFE!

  Judy nodded. This MeloriaD was right. And that might make a hook for an article, if Judy could find out enough about the specific genetic anomalies of other ethnic groups. The Irish, say—until the last few hundred years they’d been isolated for centuries; maybe that was long enough for viable genetic mutations to occur and be dispersed throughout a population. Maybe the Chinese? No, some group better represented in the United States would make a stronger article. Not the Italians; everybody in the Mediterranean world had tromped through Italy. Not enough genetic isolation. The Swedes?

  The phone rang.

  Judy closed her eyes, listening to it ring. Then she reached for the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Judy. It’s Robert.”

  “Hello, Robert.” She was a little surprised how calm she sounded.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called you sooner. It’s been … well, you’ve seen the papers. On malaria reading.”

  The old masculine excuse: press of work. But she could hear the nervousness in his voice.

  “Only now … well, something’s come up. I think … are you still there, Judy?”

  “Yes,” Judy said.

  “I couldn’t hear you breathing or anything. Judy, I think we both know this relationship hasn’t been going very well for quite a while now.”

  “Do we?”

  “Yes. I do. We do. You’re a wonderful person, but we just want different things, and that isn’t going to change. I mean it when I say you’re a wonderful person, but I don’t think we have a real future together; and somewhere down deep I think we both know that.”

  Judy listened to this bullshit, thinking I thought he was more original than that. She said nothing.

  “So what I’m saying, what I mean, is that I think I should move out. I’ll come for my stuff, or send somebody for it, on Saturday. I’ll … Judy, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry about this. I know it isn’t what you hoped for, but I think we’re both old enough to know that sometimes these things don’t—”

  She said, “Are you back with Marcy?”

  On the other end of the line, Robert drew a sharp breath. She could picture him, his eyes widened, his hand holding the receiver. No rings. He never wore rings. Nails cut short, neat and square. Palm square, too, and callused from the odd way he held his drawing pencils. He would answer her question, Judy knew. He was a total screwup with women, but he was honest. Judy had loved that about him, especially after Ben, who’d lied as easily as he dropped his pants.

  “Yes,” he said, very low. “I am. Judy, I’m so sorry. I never intended this to happen.”

  “It’s all right.”

  Long pause. “It is?”

  “Yes,” she said, clearly. “If you haven’t got the sense to appreciate me, then you don’t deserve me.”

  He was silent. Stunned, Judy hoped. Well, she was pretty stunned, too. That was why she sounded so calm; she was stunned, like an animal just hit between the eyes with a two-by-four. From experience with herself, she knew this calm wouldn’t last.

  “Well,” Robert said cautiously, “you’re probably right. You deserve better than me.”

  “Good-bye, Robert. I’ll mail you the papers to cancel the lease on the house.” She hung up.

  For a long time she sat staring at her screen saver. Then she went into the living room, found the purple sweater she’d been knitting for Robert and calmly pulled it apart, unraveled strand by unraveled strand.

  Interim

  The USS Bryant cut through the water of the Potomac River just before dawn. The executive officer, who was the only one on the bridge who knew what the mission was, gave the helmsman the order to steady up. Then for the next few minutes the orders flew thick. The ship came to a stop and dropped anchor.

  Light fog swirled over the river. Through it the exec could just make out the facilities of the Naval Surface Weapons Center on the Virginia shore. He stepped outside the glass-enclosed bridge onto the metal deck and raised his binoculars.

  “Mr. Horton, summon the ordnance officer and crew.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ensign Horton, junior officer of the deck, who was on his first sea duty after Annapolis. He saluted smartly, executed a perfect ninety-degree turn, and marched away. The exec, who had been in the navy for seventeen years, smiled to himself.

  In five minutes Mr. Horton was back. “Sir … there’s a … problem.”

  “A ‘problem’?”

  “Yes, sir. One of the ordnance crew. Stanners. He won’t come on deck.”

  “Do you mean ‘can’t,’ Mr. Horton? Is Stanners ill?”

  “No, sir. ‘Won’t.’”

  “Are you telling me that a crewman of this ship has chosen to disobey a direct order?”

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “He says it’s because of malaria reading, sir. Stanners says this is near where it started. He says he won’t risk the open air in the early morning hours when mosquitoes feed. Sir.”

  The two officers stared at each other. The exec was white; the ensign black. As was Stanners. The exec did not know the sickle-cell-trait status of every sailor on the Bryant. A complicated emotion filled him: irritation, distaste, guilt, reluctance to deal with the situation. He ignored all of these.

  “Mr. Horton, tell Stanners that he will be on deck in three minutes or face a court-martial. This is the United States Navy, and he is a sailor in that navy.”

  Something shifted behind Horton’s dark eyes. His thumb moved up under his palm to stroke the Annapolis ring. “Yes, sir.”

  Horton returned to belowdecks. The exec rested one hand on the bridge railing and renewed his scan of the Naval Surface Weapons Center. He had seen action in the Persian Gulf, where sailors had died. He firmly believed that every military man owed his life to his country. And he had read in the newspaper that the death rate from this so-called “malaria” was falling anyway. It was half of what it had been a month ago. And perhaps mosquitoes didn’t even venture offshore, even when the shore was this close. Stanners was a weak sister, all too typical of the kids who signed up now, wanting the GI Bill and the structure and the health benefits and the regular pay, but not wanting to take any risks in
between. As bad as the reserves. Cowards.

  And against all that, a sudden image of Stanners keeling over with a cerebral stroke, in what only the exec and the captain knew was a very minor naval test exercise. Dead at nineteen. At his order.

  The exec watched the rest of the ordnance crew assemble crisply in the cool dawn and waited to see if Stanners showed.

  Ten

  For extreme illnesses, extreme treatments are most fitting.

  —Hippocrates, Aphorisms, fourth century B.C.

  * * *

  Cavanaugh had never seen anything like it.

  Dr. Michael Sean Donohue lived in a modest, slightly peeling town house in College Park, six miles from D.C. The townhouse was an end unit, two stories high, with a one-car garage underneath. In the front a short walk led from the door to a large, curving, asphalt parking lot for the apartments opposite the townhouse that did not have garages. On the east side, Donohue’s garage opened to an equally short driveway connecting to the parking lot. In back, sliding glass doors opened to a shared lawn. Scattered over the weedy grass were a few dilapidated picnic benches and many toys. It was suburbia writ small.

  Sound trucks jammed the parking lot, their booms jutting over the horde of reporters waiting patiently on lawn chairs and camp stools and cars, AC running with the doors open. Pizza trucks came and went. Two enterprising teenagers sold coffee and Gatorade. Every once in a while a neighbor, or even a dog, would emerge and everyone would leap up and start frenziedly snapping pictures or rolling film. Reporters interviewed anyone who emerged from any door within a hundred yards. Between frenzies, everyone lapsed again into sweating torpor. Styrofoam cups and pizza boxes littered the ground, smelling strongly in the hot sun. A camera was permanently trained on the garage door.

  As the sun moved, the entire ménage shifted around the curving parking lot, following the shade.

  Even in this throng, the FBI surveillance team stood out, or at least part of it did. Two agents sat on the picnic bench in back, the only ones authorized to trespass past the parking lot. Another agent watched the front door, the bulge of his gun unmistakable under his light summer suit. Somewhere three additional unmarked FBI vehicles—“Bucars”—waited. Cavanaugh, in one of them, said to his surveillance partner, “Jesus J. Edgar Christ. Does Donohue go out at all?”

  “Oh, he goes out,” Arnett said. Slow-moving and laconic, he had the sleepy-eyed, dim look that Cavanaugh had once thought meant hidden strengths. Now he just thought that such men were laconic and dim. “Wait.”

  “They also serve who …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Arnett gave him a doubtful look.

  The trouble with waiting—a trouble with waiting—was that it let him dwell on the conversation with Judy. He’d gotten off very easy, he knew. No scene, no tears. She’d sounded pretty laconic herself, except for that one perceptive question about Marcy. Well, he’d hadn’t lied to her. And he hadn’t wanted to hurt Judy, although he knew he had. But he couldn’t help it. She—

  The crowd suddenly erupted. A white Mercedes sailed down the driveway toward Donohue’s garage.

  “Mr. Erickson! Mr. Erickson!” reporters screamed. Photographers leapt into position. The garage door slid up, the Mercedes entered, and the door slid down again.

  “Who’s Erickson?” Cavanaugh asked, since Arnett apparently wasn’t going to volunteer any information. He was the kind who liked to be asked.

  “Donohue’s lawyer.” Arnett turned the ignition key. The Bucar, which had been idling so the air-conditioning would work, came to life.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Tailing.”

  Cavanaugh didn’t point out that Donohue and his lawyer were closeted in the town house, or that it was difficult to “tail” inside 1,235 square feet (plus garage). Cavanaugh was the new kid on the block. He waited.

  After a few minutes, the garage door slid up again. The White Mercedes backed out. Erickson drove. Beside him Donohue smiled faintly, dressed in a pale gray suit. He never glanced at the reporters shouting and snapping and pounding on the car window, begging for a quote. Erickson clutched the wheel, but Donohue kept his faint smile, cool and unruffled.

  Cavanaugh said, “Is he always that cool?”

  “Yes.”

  Arnett was a better driver than conversationalist. His was the first car behind the Mercedes, and he kept the position effortlessly. The other Bucars would trail unseen. Behind Arnett most of the sound trucks and press cars boiled along, the messy tail of the comet. Cavanaugh watched the back of Donohue’s head. It told him nothing.

  They drove west into D.C., finally slowing at a nondescript building on Georgia Avenue. Erickson parked in a commercial lot and the entire entourage jammed in after him. The attendant, a middle-aged black man, evidently didn’t recognize Donohue; he looked perplexed and alarmed at the haphazard circus being made of his tidy rows of parked cars.

  “You go in with him,” Arnett said, startling Cavanaugh with his loquaciousness. “Stay close. Take notes. I stay with the car and watch the front entrances.”

  “Okay,” Cavanaugh said. Somehow they had switched verbal roles.

  Erickson and Donohue got out of the Mercedes. Erickson handed the keys to the attendant. Donohue strolled casually toward the building. Reporters shouted questions at him.

  “Dr. Donohue! What do you think of the heavy FBI surveillance that led the press to you?”

  “Dr. Donohue! What comment do you have on malaria reading?”

  “Hey! Mike! Did you kill all those people just for the fun of it?”

  Not even the last question made Donohue lose his faint, contemptuous smile, although the parking attendant’s eyes went wide. Donohue strolled into the building and waited for the elevator, still acting as if he were entirely alone. And yet Cavanaugh saw that he was very aware of the attention he generated. Phrases from the Quantico profile rose in his mind: “… imagines himself a powerful behind-the-scenes figure, manipulating entire bureaucracies—such as the FBI—into doing his bidding …”

  Twenty-two people crowded into the elevator. A sign inside said CAPACITY: SIXTEEN PERSONS. The reporters continued their fruitless yammering as the elevator groaned its way to the fifth floor, which the floor posting identified as:

  SELENE FASHIONS, EXECUTIVE OFFICE

  CATHAY AUCTION HOUSE

  JENSEN & JENSEN, ATTORNEYS AT LAW

  Cavanaugh assumed Donohue was adding to his legal team, but he was wrong. The noisy cavalcade was stopped by a polite doorman outside Cathay Auction House.

  “Do you have a bidding number, sir? Ma’am?” No one had a bidding number, which, it turned out, required advance reservation, but Cavanaugh had his FBI credentials. He was the only one allowed to follow Donohue inside.

  Cavanaugh had never been to an auction. He read the catalogue of Chinese and Tibetan antiques, one eye on Donohue, who sat two rows ahead with his arm stretched negligently along the back of an empty chair. Only a dozen people sat on the velvet chairs. It was very quiet.

  From the Sung period, a crane carved in jade, showing the characteristic …

  “Welcome to Cathay Auction House,” a dazzlingly groomed woman announced from the podium. “Please remember that smoking is forbidden.” She then went through the bidding rules and introduced the auctioneer, who appeared to be her male clone.

  Ceramic bowl from the T’ang period, 6¼ inches in diameter. The thick-walled, single-color porcelain illustrates well the superb …

  Donohue didn’t bid on anything until Lot 39. Cavanaugh read in the catalogue that this was a small, early-Ming painted vase, seven inches high, decorated with the elegance that had recently replaced simplicity in landscape painting. He paid close attention to the bidding. Donohue got the vase, for two thousand.

  “… because this individual considers himself a natural aristocrat, he will pride himself on his superior taste in at least one consumer area … earns between forty and sixty thousand …
in some area of aristocratic taste he will buy the best and will be supercilious about anything less …”

  But did Donohue fit the profile so well because the profilists knew their stuff? Or did he fit the profile so well because the Bureau had looked for a suspect who fit the profile, thereby justifying its existence in the first place? Criminal profiles were usually developed from evidence at the crime scene. But in this case, the crime scene was all of southern Maryland and part of Virginia, and the only “evidence” was several million insects doing the things insects naturally did: Breed. Feed. Bleed.

  So far Cavanaugh had seen nothing, been told nothing, read nothing about Michael Sean Donohue that convinced him this man had killed 597 people by means of an unelegant, untasteful, unaristocratic mosquito.

  The rest of the day produced nothing. Donohue went home, still acting as if two dozen reporters, eight tails, and a score of heckling citizens did not fall within his notice. Curtains stayed drawn at the College Park town house. An elaborate flower arrangement, roses and sweetpeas, arrived from a local florist. “Who’s sending him flowers?” Cavanaugh asked Arnett.

  “Networks.”

  Courting, of course. An exclusive interview with Michael Sean Donohue! A heavyset woman in a faded dress opened the door a slit and refused the flowers.

  “Donohue’s wife?” Cavanaugh asked. Arnett nodded, having used up the hour’s allotment of words.

  A sack of mail as large as a boulder and apparently as heavy was dropped on Donohue’s doorstep and ignored. Reporters salivated at it, but apparently weren’t quite up to violating federal postal statutes by opening the sack. Eventually the heavyset woman dragged it inside.

  A representative from the National Inquirer knocked on the door, probably to offer a story contract. Nobody answered. The media all took pictures of the guy knocking.

  By the time Cavanaugh’s shift ended, at 7:00 P.M., he was exhausted. How could he be so tired when he hadn’t done anything except sit? But he was.