Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  By the car’s dome light, he consulted his list. Next was the Alligator, farther from Fort Detrick than most, but maybe the drive would clear his head. Better switch to club soda, except that these bars weren’t the kind of place where you could order club soda and not be noticed.

  Cavanaugh hadn’t even reached a bar stool when he heard him.

  Not looking around, Cavanaugh sat at the nearest table. He ordered a vodka and tonic, then turned around to study the special sandwiches listed on a blackboard. The voice on Melanie’s tape sat with three other men. They all had a buzz on, but they weren’t drunk. Cavanaugh turned back and sipped his drink.

  “… so then Rollins says …”

  “Are you ready to order?” a waitress asked Cavanaugh.

  “No … yes … a, uh, a roast-beef sandwich, please.”

  “ … don’t even know how to …”

  “Would you like horseradish on that? Or mustard?”

  “No.”

  “… but not before Mitchell gets to them first, see. So then Rollins …”

  “How about lettuce and tomato?”

  “No!” Cavanaugh said, before she could absorb more sound waves with mayonnaise, ketchup, or hot sauce. She strode away, looking hurt.

  “… that’ll teach ’em not to screw up like that again!” All four men roared with laughter. Cavanaugh waited, but another man picked up the conversation, talking about a hot night with his new girlfriend. Cavanaugh went to the men’s room, closed a stall door, and activated the wire under his shirt.

  When he returned, he took the chair closest to his mark. The talk had turned to the NBA. Cavanaugh’s man championed Larry Byrd over Michael Jordan. Nothing said was explicitly racist, but it didn’t need to be. Cavanaugh recorded until the tape ran out. By then he had at least partial names for everybody: “Mike Goodman.” “Tom Somebody.” “Somebody Romellio.” Melanie’s baiter was “Ed Lewis.”

  Cavanaugh allowed himself to finish his vodka and tonic.

  Back at his motel, he sealed the tape into a sturdy mailer and addressed it to Dr. Jonathan Pritchard at the Psycholinguistics Center of Syracuse University. Next he wrote a letter, addressed to Felders’s residence, explaining what he’d found and asking Felders to check FBI records, plus his clandestine CIA sources, for “Ed Lewis.” Also “Mike Goodman” or “Somebody Romellio.” Cavanaugh didn’t know whether Felders would do this, but if he had to place a substantial bet, he’d guess yes. Before anything else, Felders was a good cop. He might not like the odor surrounding a genuine lead, but once he smelled it, he’d follow through.

  Cavanaugh lay back on his lumpy motel bed, staring into the un-airconditioned insect-humming darkness. He felt very, very good.

  The next day he ate a huge breakfast, signed the lease on an apartment in Leonardtown, arranged to have his furniture brought there from storage, had his car inspected, and generally acted like a man who knew what he was doing.

  But how much did he really know? That question needed concentrated thought. Cavanaugh sat on the bed in his soon-to-be-vacated motel room. At his feet Abigail chewed happily on a strip of molding she’d torn off the dresser. Housekeeping never had materialized. The room was a mess, although he had swept up all the nonuseful bugs and thrown them into the Dumpster. This act was witnessed by the motel clerk, who merely shrugged. Cavanaugh wondered what else that particular Dumpster had held over the years.

  Not his problem. His problem was malaria reading. Think it through.

  Evidence so far: Ed Lewis, with some undefined connection to Fort Detrick and/or the CIA, had made numerous hate calls to Melanie.

  Possible reason, judging by some of the content: To persuade her to return to Atlanta, which would remove a skilled and experienced expert from the malaria team. Alternate possible reason: The guy just liked making hate calls to attractive black women.

  Evidence so far: Somebody had deliberately engineered the malaria reading parasite. Even the CDC and the FBI had finally agreed on that. Reason: Unknown.

  Possible reason: To kill off as many blacks as this particular genetic feat would accomplish. Alternate possible reason: To test the parasite for possible use elsewhere. Alternate possible reason: The parasite had been inadvertently created in the lab and had inadvertently escaped. (Melanie had said that “inadvertently” creating a genetic mutation this complex, where three separate genes that worked together were the only ones altered, was impossible. Cavanaugh wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t a scientist, but he wasn’t a militant either. Let the possibility stand.)

  Evidence so far: Whoever had created malaria reading, it wasn’t Michael Sean Donohue. The grand jury had found that every item seized in Donohue’s apartment was “normal” to a microbiologist, even a dismissed microbiologist working on his own. That included the cage of live Anopheles. Donohue was merely professionally interested in the epidemic and so was examining the microbiology involved. Defense had apparently produced a dozen other respected microbiologists to say they were doing the same thing.

  Of course, grand jury proceedings were supposed to be secret, but reporters had literally camped on the courthouse steps and investigated, interviewed, and ingratiated themselves with every single person who went in and out. No secrets were left, including the fact that sixteen witnesses had testified that Seton’s “informant,” Curtis P. McGraw, was a liar and a cheat and ate babies for breakfast. Or whatever else it had taken to discredit his affidavit saying he had been confided in by the defendant. Seton, in the view of the FBI, had been misled by an artful con man. Seton, in Cavanaugh’s view, had collaborated in a very public false report.

  “Why would Seton do that? Seton wouldn’t, not just before his retirement. Not unless he’d been forced to agree to a false report. Forced how, why, and by whom? Unknown at this time. But the point was that the informant report, like the search warrant based on it, were both padded shamelessly. Which, in turn, led to the real point: Michael Sean Donohue didn’t do it. Period. Even though the Bureau had spent an awful lot of time and trouble trying to prove he had.

  Why? Unknown. Possible reason: The FBI had genuinely believed Donohue was guilty. Alternate possible reason: The FBI had believed it until a certain point in time, and then belief at the top had weakened; but by that time the Bureau was into Donohue so deeply and publicly, and under such pressure to arrest somebody, that they had gone ahead. It had happened before. It would happen again.

  Evidence so far: A lot of people had been removed, one way or another, from this case. Moreover, they had all been removed in the same short time span, as July turned into August. Cavanaugh himself suspended for a trivial offense. Melanie sent away for a “rest.” Farlow promoted to Geneva, three and a half thousand miles away. Dunbar promoted to Budapest, roughly ditto.

  Possible reason: Coincidence. People got suspended or promoted all the time. Alternate possible reason: Somebody very powerfully placed had been conducting a cover-up. This person, or agency, had brought into the conspiracy everyone who had to be told: Farlow and Dunbar, for two, and bought them off. No, that wasn’t right: Dunbar was a man of rigid honesty, and from what Cavanaugh had seen and heard, so was Farlow. So if they had agreed to a cover-up, and to be removed far from the place it was going on, they must have some other motivation.

  What?

  Who wanted something covered up, and what was that something? And how had a cover-up become necessary in the first place?

  The cheap motel mattress sagged so much under Cavanaugh’s weight that now his back ached. He moved from the bed to the chair, which turned out to be not much of an improvement. Abigail moved with him. He went on thinking.

  Okay, take a stab at putting it all together. Pick from all the possibles, combine them at will, and see what kind of scenario you get.

  Start with facts: Fort Detrick had once been the authorized center for army development of biological warfare weapons. The program had been located at Detrick since Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated bioweapon research in 1942.
Somehow the CIA had ended up with jurisdiction over bioweapons. In 1975, CIA director William Colby testified before Congress that all bioweapons had not been destroyed when they were supposed to be, even though the president and the secretary of state had both issued directives to destroy them all—oops, Congress, sorry about that. Instead, the CIA had maintained stocks of selected bioweapons, some at the fort itself, some with private pharmaceutical companies that Fort Detrick had worked with extensively. Only a few—a very few—people had known this. The list did not include the president, the secretary of state, the attorney general, or the director of the FBI. Colby had been ordered to dump whatever bioweapons remained and to stop developing new ones.

  These were facts. Facts a few decades old, yes, but still facts. Did anyone believe the CIA had complied with the second desist order when it had ignored the first? Or that the CIA was now perfectly open and honest with the president—especially a Democrat president?

  Cavanaugh did not believe these things.

  Okay, now build on the facts. Possible scenario: Fort Detrick was still experimenting with secret bioweapons and still restricting this knowledge to a handful of outsiders, probably CIA. Top elected and appointed officials, maybe including all of USAMRIID, did not necessarily know this. Secret research had developed malaria reading for use in, say, Africa, and had tested it in southern Maryland. …

  Cavanaugh’s mind stopped. He didn’t believe it. Yes, they might well be constructing bioweapons at Fort Detrick in the name of national security. But sub-Saharan Africa—mostly poor, mostly disorganized, mostly struggling—was simply not a threat to the United States. Or to anyone else in the world of smart missiles and satellite surveillance. For the United States, bioweapons against Africa just didn’t make national security sense, not even as a deterrent. And testing them on its own citizens—no. He just didn’t believe his government had, or would, do that. Yes, there were racist individuals who would do that—millions of them, maybe—but the CIA had nothing to gain and too much to lose by coming to public light in such a way. No, that wasn’t what had happened. Back up and start over.

  So say that Fort Detrick was developing the stuff, for unknown reasons, and it had escaped inadvertently somewhere near Newburg, Maryland. Fort Detrick, or one of its tenant organizations, knew it. They’d tried to stop the epidemic before it became public. They’d tried using elephant mosquitoes, T. rutilus, ordered off the usual bookkeeping from Fielding’s in Baltimore. That was “Project Birthday.” The elephant mosquito larvae were supposed to eat the Anopheles larvae and wipe out the parasite vector. But it hadn’t worked. Anopheles had flourished anyway, and the Plasmodium reading parasite had spread, and the epidemic had swung into full force. Meanwhile, Senator Malcolm Peter Reading had died, thrusting the whole problem into public light. Fort Detrick was in trouble.

  So then they’d tried an alternate plan: the old hide-in-plain-sight. They’d let the CDC call in USAMRIID, and as a patriotic duty, the U.S. Army had cooperated in wiping out the malaria that the CIA had created. Did USAMRIID know that the rescuer and the villain were both housed in Fort Detrick, side by side? Maybe not. USAMRIID, like other military operations, worked on a need-to-know basis. Colonels Colborne and Sanchez did not need to know where a biological threat originated in order to fight it. Possibly both officers had driven in and out of Fort Detrick every day, not knowing that one of its windowless, triply secure facilities housed the actual enemy.

  Cavanaugh shifted in his uncomfortable chair. Until Abigail barked, he didn’t even hear the knock on the door.

  So USAMRIID and the CDC, trying to keep turf wars to a minimum, had cleaned up the medical mess. But there were still problems for the CIA: the CDC on-site team and the FBI.

  The CDC team knew too much about the manufactured nature of this disease, and at least some team members were all-holy-hell bent on finding out who had done the genetic engineering. The scientific community was a close one, and geniuses in it, as everywhere else, were rare. There was a chance the CDC could trace the biological trail back to Fort Detrick.

  Meanwhile, the FBI was in hot pursuit, getting hotter as the press dumped fuel on the very public blaze. No one in the FBI knew about the bioweapons at the fort, but the FBI was damn good once it focused its full, all-resources-available attention. It was focusing now. There was a good chance the FBI might focus and focus and focus until they caught sight of the CIA. That, too, had happened before.

  So the CIA had made a decision.

  More knocks on the door, more barking from Abigail. “Mister? You in there?” called a female voice.

  “No,” Cavanaugh called back.

  Say that at that point the CIA, backed into a corner, decided to cut off both investigations at the source. They brought in the head of the CDC and the director of the FBI and told them what had happened (whatever it was). They explained that national security was at stake, that national security demanded public secrecy. National security, they said. National security, NATIONAL SECURITY, NATIONAL SECURITY. Director Broylin believed in the importance of national security; you weren’t picked to head the FBI otherwise. Cavanaugh didn’t know about the head of the CDC, a Dr. Saul Wentzel, but he did know the scientist had once been in the military. A soldier.

  “Open up, Mister! I know you’re in there!” A female voice.

  “Go away. I’m busy.”

  What next? Broylin and Wentzel had called in Farlow and Dunbar, who were leading the actual investigations. And told both of them why the investigations had to be stopped. Neither man had liked it—witness Dunbar’s uneasiness the day of Michael Donohue’s arrest, which he had known was a charade to pacify press and public. That’s why the arrest warrant had not evoked national security. That would mean express authorization by the attorney general, who didn’t know what the CIA was doing. And Dunbar had quieted his conscience—mostly—by telling himself that Donohue would be released by a grand jury anyway. There just wasn’t enough evidence.

  Then both Dunbar and Farlow had been promoted to Europe, where their uneasiness would not be connected to this case.

  A key turned in Cavanaugh’s lock.

  He sprang up and flung open the door. A massive woman in a dirty apron stood beside a cart with cleaning supplies. “Housekeeping, Mister.”

  “Now? You haven’t come all week!”

  “I got sick,” she said flatly. “I’m back now.”

  “Well, you’re too late. I’m checking out.” He closed the door, put on the chain, and returned to his chair.

  Dunbar and Farlow safely removed to another continent. And the two most unruly team members, himself and Melanie, likewise removed: Cavanaugh for a minor transgression; Melanie for caring so much, and so aggressively, that she lost self-control. The cover-up leaders must have been ecstatic when she’d slugged that cruel punk in Burger King. Before that, some renegade CIA member had tried to scare her off by using the vicious Ed Lewis, of the dirty-tricks section (or whatever they called it) to make hate calls. They thought the calls would make her leave town. They didn’t know Melanie Anderson.

  And that was it. All the evidence explained, the scenario complete. Except for two crucial details: Why was malaria reading created? How did it get loose? Without those answers, all Cavanaugh had was a lot of fancy conjecture.

  After all, there were other possible scenarios. Here was one: The epidemic had been created not by the CIA but by a foreign or domestic terrorist group, one with both money and malice. They didn’t need a logical reason because even at the best of times these groups weren’t very logical. They loosed the disease in southern Maryland, which was 25 percent black and poor enough that the malaria might get firmly established before it was really noticed. Poor blacks dying is not news. But a U.S. senator at an outdoor family party happened to get it. You can’t plan everything. The CDC and the army stopped the epidemic, the FBI made an honest mistake in arresting Donohue, and Farlow and Dunbar were promoted because they were valuable men. Dunbar was uneasy because
his wife was having an affair, or his kid was on drugs, or he had hemorrhoids. Ed Lewis had seen Melanie on TV, saw that she was a babe, and jerked off to making kinky tapes that, in his mind, degraded her. Cavanaugh was removed because he’d violated a legitimate rule, and Melanie was ordered to take a vacation because she clearly needed a vacation. And he, Cavanaugh, was an overly imaginative ass.

  He needed proof. Of anything at all.

  He picked up the phone. It had gone dead. He unlocked his door to head for the pay phone in the motel office, but the cleaning woman still stood blocking his path, smoking a cigarette, as immobile as a rooted thorny tree.

  She said, “Check-out time’s in twenty-two minutes.”

  “Right,” Cavanaugh said. Now she had become time conscious. Well, the office pay phone was too public anyway. So was his—or any—cell phone. Cavanaugh went back into his room and threw his increasingly disorganized belongings into his always disorganized car. Abigail squeezed on top of a pile of blankets, shirts, and a VCR. Cavanaugh left The Pines to find a working, private, non-cleaning-woman-haunted phone.

  “Officer Tess Muratore, please.”

  “Who do I say is calling?” The Maryland State Police dispatcher sounded bored. But apparently Tess was physically present, a break Cavanaugh hadn’t expected. He’d expected to leave a request for her to call him back, which she might not have done if she didn’t remember who he was. They’d only met at a few parties.

  “My name is Robert Cavanaugh.”

  After a few moments, which Cavanaugh spent reading the unoriginal graffiti in the phone booth, Tess spoke. “Yeah?”

  “Tess, this is Robert Cavanaugh. Judy’s friend.”

  “Not from what I hear.”

  She did remember him. What had Judy told her?

  “I’m with the FBI, and—”

  “Not at the moment, you’re not.”

  “You probably read in the Post that I’m on temporary suspension. It’s minor. What isn’t minor is malaria reading, and I’m trying to—”

  “I’m not interested in talking to you,” Tess said. “Bye.”