by Nancy Kress
“Wait! It’s important. Just meet me somewhere for five minutes, Tess. It’s about malaria reading. I really do have something!”
“Not if you had the Hope diamond.” She hung up.
Not a successful call.
Cavanaugh fished out another quarter and called Felders. Maybe Felders had found out something about the connection between Ed Lewis and Fort Detrick.
“This is the Felders residence. We’ll be away from the Washington area until August 23. You can leave a message here with or for Tom, the housesitter.”
Cavanaugh hung up. Felders didn’t want anyone to know his house was empty. There was no “Tom.” And there was no way to reach Felders until he returned from vacation.
Not a successful call.
“The Victorian Roses Bed and Breakfast. May I help you?”
“Melanie Anderson, please. She should have checked back in this morning.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Anderson is scheduled to return to us today, but she hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Thanks. I’ll try again later.”
Not a successful call.
“AT&T, Customer Service.” A female voice, lilting and perky. “May I help you?”
“Yes. This is Robert Cavanaugh. I’m calling to see if phone service has been turned on yet in my new apartment in Leonardtown, Maryland. The landlord was going to let your people in. My customer number is 4678K.”
“Let me look. Are you Mr. Cavanaugh?”
“Yes.”
“Robert Cavanaugh?”
“Yes!”
“There’s been a slight delay. The installation crew will reach your area next Tuesday.”
“Next Tuesday? You promised me it would be this week!”
“I’m sorry, sir, there have been unavoidable delays. Can I help you with anything else?”
“You can get me my phone!”
“We’re working on it, sir. Thank you for calling AT&T.”
He had his mobile phone, of course, but anybody with simple equipment could listen in on it.
The universe was not cooperating.
“And then what did he say?” Judy said.
“I already told you twice,” Tess answered.
“Tell me again.”
Tess rolled her eyes. The two women, Tess still in uniform, sat in Judy’s new living room, which she had declared to represent a brand-new start to her life. The apartment was as minimal and hard-edged as she could make it, while retaining most of her old furniture. The chintz sofa had been recovered in sleek white parachute nylon, accented with red Mylar throw pillows. The sofa shared an area rug in shades of red with two white, steel-framed director’s chairs. Judy’s old coffee table held two wineglasses, a gleaming bowl of red flowers, and an abstract white stone sculpture. The only other furnishings were plain white curtains, a poster of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and an enormous red-leaved plant in what appeared to be the chassis of a miniature UFO.
Tess said, “What I like about this apartment is that it’s so … airy.”
“Tess, forget the apartment. Tell me again what Robert said.”
“He said he ‘really had something’ about malaria reading. He said he wanted to meet with me for five minutes. He didn’t think I’d remember him. He described himself as ‘Judy’s friend.’ Jude, I don’t like how much you’re investing yourself in this totally dumb conversation. The man’s a jerk. Forget him.”
Judy said nothing.
“Only you can’t, can you? Judy?”
“No,” Judy said, very low. “It seems I can’t.”
“But you’re trying, right? You keep busy? You date other men? You see your girlfriends?”
“In the last two weeks I’ve had three dates with three different men. I also had two lunches with friends, two movies out, and dinner with my old college roommate. I wrote seventeen thousand words of science copy, some of it quite good, and mended clothes ripped four years ago. I also joined a gym, signed up to tutor inner-city kids on Wednesday afternoons in September, and started two avocado plants and a lemon tree from seed. Tess, don’t twist around so on that sofa!”
“It’s too slippery,” Tess complained. “I liked the old upholstering better.”
Both women fell silent, contemplating Judy’s sofa.
Finally, Tess said slowly, “You know what it is. By our age, most people are married, or they’ve decided they don’t want to be. If you’re a single woman and you want a serious relationship, you’re like someone walking through a potato field in November. You search over the potatoes that the harvest missed, but they’re mostly shriveled or wormy. So you wait in the middle of the empty field for some other woman to decide she doesn’t want the potato she picked after all and to throw it back. You’re just waiting for that, which is humiliating. And meanwhile, you’re developing a vitamin-C deficiency and getting scurvy.”
Judy just looked at her.
“Okay, you don’t like that theory. Here’s another. Women still don’t have equal say in this fucking world. We’re not the choosers; we have to wait to be chosen. We’re like merchandise on a shelf—say, glassware. And some are cheap plates and some are Wedgewood and some are chipped or whatever. And some—like you and me—are high-quality, oven-tempered, hand-painted casseroles. But hand-painted earthenware is a minority taste. It doesn’t appeal to everyone. It also needs the right handling and other care. So the chipped plates get taken and the flashy wineglasses. Rich guys buy the Wedgewood. And the hand-painted earthenware just sits there.”
“Let me get this straight,” Judy said. “You’re saying we’re casseroles with scurvy?”
Tess considered. “Yes.”
“Well, I’m not! And neither are you! We’re not begging for anybody else’s potato or sitting on a merchandise shelf. Tess, you don’t really believe all that.”
“Sometimes I do.”
“Well, don’t. I’ll bet nobody else wearing that uniform has ever come up with such pathetic theories.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
Judy laughed, then stared deeply into her empty wineglass. “Tess, I want you to see Robert.”
“Oh, Jude, it won’t help you with him. He—”
“I don’t expect it to help me. You don’t even have to mention me. In fact, I prefer you don’t. But Robert’s a good agent, even if he knows subzero about women. If he says he’s got something important on malaria reading, he does. If he says he needs some input from you, he does. See him.”
“You really want me to?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Tess said, reaching for the wine bottle. “But I won’t like it. He treated you really badly, Judy.”
“He’s still a good FBI agent.”
“And that matters to you. Still.”
“Yes,” Judy said. “So agree to see him, Tess.”
“All right,” Tess said. “I will.”
By Saturday, Melanie still hadn’t returned to Washington.
Where the hell was she, Cavanaugh worried. From a pay phone he called his FBI voice mail, the CDC, her mother’s house in Mississippi, Melanie’s apartment in Atlanta, and the airline she’d been booked on, to see if there’d been an accident. There hadn’t. Nobody had seen Melanie. Mississippi informed him that she was in Atlanta, and Atlanta informed him she had gone home to Mississippi.
Where was she? And doing what?
The FBI voice mail, to his great surprise, did have a message from Tess Muratore. He met her at a coffee shop near D.C., after spending his second night in a sleeping bag on the floor of his bare apartment. It was the first time he’d seen Tess in uniform. She looked much different than the attractive, midthirties party goer in bright dresses.
“Weekend shift?” he asked pleasantly, as he sat down opposite her.
“Look, Robert, I’m not here to make small talk. I’m only here because Judy asked me to, and only on business.”
“Judy asked you to?” His breath tangled around his tonsils.
Tess scowled. “I’
m not going to talk about Judy. Tell me what you want, or I’m out of here!”
“Okay.” He settled firmly in the booth, still surprised that the mention of Judy had affected him so strongly. “I’ve gone on investigating malaria reading. I think I’ve got something, but—”
“You ‘think’? On the phone you were sure.”
“—but I need some help. I need to know if there were any vehicle accidents near Newburg reported to the state or local police during the week that the CDC has established as the first seeding of the area with altered Anoph—”
“Shit, Cavanaugh, every reporter in the city has gone over and over the vehicular accident records,” Tess said, with disgust. “They’re open to the public. You mean the FBI doesn’t know that?”
“Of course the FBI knows that.” Cavanaugh kept a tight rein on his irritation. “We’ve checked out every police report within twenty-five miles. What I’m talking about is a vehicular accident that didn’t make it into the record.”
“If a cop shows up at the scene, a report is filed.”
“Not if it’s a military vehicle carrying top-secret classification.”
For the first time, Tess’s expression changed from contempt to something else. Cavanaugh didn’t know what it was, but it was definitely something else. She said, “A military vehicle? What type?”
“Unknown.”
“Regulation or unmarked?”
“Unknown.”
“From where?”
“Fort Detrick.”
“Registered to whom?”
“Could be anyone, but it would finally belong to the CIA.”
“Going where?”
“Unknown.”
Lines rucked Tess’s forehead. “Could happen. But if there was no report filed, there’s no report for me to find.”
“I know. But you can find out who in the state troopers or county sheriff or local police was on duty those nights—”
“For an entire week? Everybody was on duty.”
“All right. Narrow it to May 2 or 3. The CDC says those are the most likely seeding dates, judging from the resulting epidemiological curves. Once you find out who was on duty, you can discreetly talk to them, see if anything happened.”
“Don’t tell me to be ‘discreet,’ Cavanaugh. I don’t need tutoring from you. And why should anyone at the scene of a military vehicle accident talk to me? I don’t have jurisdiction, and I don’t know the locals. And in case you never noticed, a lot of southern law-enforcement types don’t like the whole idea of women troopers on principle—let alone ones who poke into their jurisdiction. And even if I found the right officer, he or she might have put together the malaria connection by now and be too scared to talk. Or maybe just be uninterested in talking to an FBI agent who arrested the wrong perp.”
Cavanaugh said, “I know it’s a long shot. I’m just trying every lead I can, looking for the one that will crack it. You know how that is, Tess.”
Her face said she did, although she resented his assumption of colleagueship. Cavanaugh held his breath.
Finally, she said, “I do have a second cousin in the Charles County Sheriff’s Office …”
“Yes. Please. That’s one reason I asked you. Cops always seem to be related to other cops. I appreciate your help a lot. And, Tess, while you’re here … how is Judy?”
Tess stood. She tossed fifty cents on the table, even though they hadn’t ordered yet.
“She’s doing terrifically. Dating a lot, very busy. If I get anything, I’ll call you. If you don’t hear from me, assume I came up with zip.”
“But about Judy—”
Tess didn’t even look back as she strode out the door.
“Doing terrifically … Dating a lot … Very busy …”
Well, that was good, wasn’t it? It sounded as if Judy was happy. Cavanaugh wanted her to be happy. She deserved to be happy. Even if he felt like—
“You ready to order?” the waiter asked him.
Cavanaugh raised his head. “No,” he said. “It’s way too late.”
Seventeen
Within the next five or ten years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective organism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organism.
—Charles Poor, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Development, testifying before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 1969
* * *
Melanie spent only seventeen minutes in the Baltimore-Washington airport. Running as fast as she dared with over a hundred insects sewn into her dress, she reached the gate barely in time to make her connecting flight to Atlanta. She’d booked the connection from midair, 35,000 feet above the ocean, on her way back from Kinshasa.
In Atlanta she took a cab directly to the CDC. It was Friday evening; practically no one was there except security staff and, waiting for her impatiently in a level-one lab, Joe Krovetz. That call, too, she’d made from the plane, saying as little as she could. Plane phones were not secure.
Melanie knew she was not a lab specialist. She could, of course, use the standard techniques, including the scanning tunneling microscope, to identify a microbe. But she could not identify minute changes in minute structures on minute parasites. Nor could she isolate genetic changes in DNA. That was very specialized microbiology, and Melanie had been trained as a physician, a general practitioner. At the CDC, she’d functioned as a top field investigator, not a research specialist. She needed someone who could examine at the subcellular level the specimens she’d brought back from Congo. Someone trained, careful, and good.
Gary Pershing would have been her first choice. He was among the best in the world at extracting, sorting, and analyzing DNA. But Pershing had never really liked Melanie or her wilder ideas. Was that because of her personality, because she was female, or because she was black? Also, despite his great talent, Pershing was basically a politician. He might very well be hoping to move up into Farlow’s vacated position. If so, he wouldn’t want to rock too many orthodox political boats.
That left Krovetz. He was young, but his training was recent, thorough, and in the right area. And no ideas were too wild for Joe Krovetz.
He was waiting for her in the lab. He’d started a beard, probably in an attempt to look older. It made him look like an underage Hollywood-style thug.
“Mel, you look like shit. When did you last sleep?”
“Doesn’t matter. I have samples we have to analyze, Joe. Right now. All weekend.”
“Samples? From where?”
“Africa. Kisangani Zone, Congo.”
Krovetz’s eyes brightened. “Tell me.”
She did, as she wriggled out of her loaded dress. Even though she’d finished the long explanations standing in sandals and a black slip, Krovetz didn’t ogle her. He listened intently, but his eyes and fingers were already busy cutting open the tiny pouches in the dress and carefully extracting the precious samples.
When she’d explained everything, and had handed him her genealogy charts from Yamdongi, Melanie left Krovetz working at the lab bench. She covered a cold lab table with a blanket from the supply closet and lay down. Within thirty seconds she was, finally, asleep.
Felders didn’t call Cavanaugh, didn’t mail him, didn’t leave a message with his landlord. Instead, Felders showed up.
Cavanaugh had been unpacking his possessions, which had finally arrived by truck from storage, in his Leonardtown apartment. This was a problem because there were more possessions than there was apartment. He’d already stuffed his allotted four-by-six basement storage cubicle so full that he’d had to ram his shoulder into the door to get it closed. He’d stored his grandmother’s dishes, which were too fragile to use and too family to discard, on the top shelf of the bathroom closet. In the tiny kitchen, frying pans, pot holders, and wineglasses surged over the minuscule countertop and frothed over onto the floor. Abigail, worn out from tearing apart a twenty-pound bag of d
og food, slept on Cavanaugh’s winter parka. When the doorbell rang, Cavanaugh felt relieved.
“Marty! I thought you were still on vacation.”
“I’m back.”
“Well, come on in.”
Felders prowled around the living room, stepping over spilled dog kibble. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
“The apartment doesn’t like me.”
“Already? Add it to the growing list. Isn’t your suspension pretty much over?”
“No,” Cavanaugh said. Felders would remember to the day how long the suspension lasted. Something was up.
“Listen,” Felders said, which meant the real conversation was ready to start. Also, the more important the topic, the more peripatetic he always became, and now he paced from window to bookcase to galley kitchen, crunching kibble underneath. “Listen, Bob—three things.”
“Shoot.”
“When Dunbar leaves for Budapest, I’m heading the Baltimore Field Office.”
Cavanaugh felt his smile almost break his jaw. Once again he’d report to Felders. Felders was the best agent Cavanaugh knew. Felders would drive the field office until it ran like a Corvette. Felders would get him out of southern Maryland. Felders would—
“You’re not supposed to know this second thing,” Felders said. “Hell, I’m not supposed to know it either. But the OPR has finished its report on your case and—”
“Finished?” Cavanaugh said. “That’s impossible.” It had only been three weeks. The OPR never finished in three weeks. There had to be interviews, follow-throughs, a preliminary report from the field to Headquarters, more follow-up, a final report written by the OPR investigators themselves … Three weeks was impossible. Not unless somebody very near the top was pushing very hard …
Felders said bluntly, “Loss-of-effectiveness transfer, to be implemented immediately. To the Resident Agency Singleton, North Dakota.”
Cavanaugh sank onto a chair. Singleton, North Dakota, J. Edgar Hoover used to banish agents to Butte, Montana, but this was much worse. At least Butte was a city. Singleton was a pockmark on the prairie.
