Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  “Third thing,” Felders said—he didn’t believe in sympathy—“about Ed Lewis. He’s not at Fort Detrick; he’s an equipment maintenance mechanic at a place that makes cardboard boxes. But he lives in Frederick, as close to the fort as a civilian can get. Was rejected for army service at eighteen due to severe lordosis. Born in Georgia, engineering degree from Georgia Tech. Until two years ago worked in Bangor, Maine, as a plant engineer for a textile factory. Not married, lives alone, spends a lot of time with Goodman or Romellio at bars or sports events.”

  “The profile that Pritchard drew,” Cavanaugh said. Singleton, North Dakota.

  “Your other two guys, Mike Goodman and Jack Romellio, do work at Detrick all right. Fort logs show them signing in and out daily. Goodman and Romellio are on the CIA payroll. Low level. They won’t know anything about anything. But the Payroll Division is interesting: ‘Special Projects.’ I couldn’t get any more on that. Heavily classified, and the CIA doesn’t much like sharing even unclassified knowledge with us.”

  An old story. But Felders’s ferret expression said there was more. Cavanaugh waited, watching his almost-again-boss grind dog food into powder on Cavanaugh’s new carpet. Felders jingled the change in his pocket as he paced, harmony to restless melody.

  “It gets better, Bob. Goodman and Romellio are clean, of course, but Lewis has a police record. He left Bangor because he was fired as plant engineer for harassing an employee. A black woman.”

  “Well, well,” Cavanaugh said, although he knew it came out a little hollow. Singleton, North Dakota.

  “Lewis has been arrested once, for stuffing hate propaganda into mailboxes. Suspended sentence. But the interesting thing is that he refused to say, even under oath, where the mail originated. For that he got an additional three months for contempt.”

  “You’re not suggesting—”

  “Of course not, Bob, stay real. The CIA’s on our side, remember? The hate mail was from a white supremacist group. What’s interesting is that Lewis served his whole sentence without spilling any beans, to anybody. A close-mouthed kind of guy, Lewis. Loyal in his own peculiar way, racist underemployed, loves the paramilitary. A perfect guy for a dirty-tricks section to use on outside jobs. Cash under the table, no paper trail to the fort, no random gossip.”

  “All conjecture,” Cavanaugh said.

  Felders shot him an amused look. “Of course it’s all conjecture. Do you think they’re going to send me a notarized affidavit that Fort Detrick hired Ed Lewis to scare off Melanie Anderson? Bob, Bob, Bob. I thought I’d taught you that cases got built brick by intermittently conjectural brick. And don’t look so gloomy. You’re not going to Singleton, North Dakota.”

  “I’m not?”

  “Not if you can turn conjecture into fact. You’ve got one more week.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Not really.” Abruptly, Felders stopped pacing and jingling. “Your career rides on this one; we both know that. But also a whole lot more. For the first time I think you’ve got something, although I still don’t know what. But there are just too goddamn many coincidences here.”

  Cavanaugh stood. “Felders, I need you to—”

  “You need me to get the Fort Detrick transport logs through eastern Charles County on the dates around the beginning of the epidemic. But I can’t, Bob. Not without a subpoena, which I doubt I could obtain. And even if I could, it would alert the CIA that we’re looking; and even real coincidences would be buried deeper than the Mariana Trench. I was hoping you had some sort of unofficial bread-crumb trail.”

  Cavanaugh said slowly, “I might.”

  Felders’s bright eyes turned brighter. “Aha. And from the look on your face, is this a bread crumb with lipstick?”

  “Two bread crumbs with lipsticks.”

  “Two? You never learn, do you? Well, follow your bread-crumb trails before the end of next week. And remember what happened to Hansel.”

  “Gretel saved him from the witch’s oven.”

  “Just barely,” Felders said. “And not before he got his balls singed. Be careful, Bob. And be quick.” Felders left.

  Be quick. Great. But how does one be quick with no phone calls from either Melanie or Tess? Until both women reported back to him, there was nothing Cavanaugh could do.

  Melanie woke stretched out on the metal lab table, still in her slip. All her bones ached; she was too old to be sleeping on lab tables. At the other end of the room Krovetz worked quietly. Light streamed in the window.

  “What … what time is it?” She struggled to sit up. Her joints groaned.

  Joe said, “Noon. Melanie, come look—”

  “Noon? On Saturday? Good Lord, I slept fourteen hours! Have you worked straight through?”

  “Pretty much. Come look at this, Mel.”

  With difficulty she slid off the table, keeping the blanket wrapped around her. Not that Krovetz would notice, or care if he did. The tone in his voice said something else gripped his mind, and Melanie felt an answering surge of adrenaline. Joe held out magnified microscope pictures.

  “Look, Mel. These are dead red blood cells from your dead mosquitoes and larva. The cells have been colonized by Falciparum reading, all right. Only the cells with Hb S.”

  “So it was malaria reading in Yamdongi.”

  “Of course it was. You already knew that. But look at this data.”

  More papers. Melanie studied them, blinking in the light from the window, her blanket slipping off one shoulder.

  “Joe, I’m not up on this end of things, but this seems to say—”

  “That this batch of Plasmodium reading has all the same DNA alterations as our old friend, the parasite carried by A. quadrimaculatus in Maryland and Virginia. The altered surface peptides bind only to sickled cells. The knobs adhere preferentially to vascular endothelium of brain tissue. The protein expression drops nitric acid levels. It’s the same genetically engineered mutant, all right, only this time in A. gambiae.

  “But look here, Mel, at this picture. It’s typical of the samples you brought home.”

  Melanie looked. The picture, like the others, was a magnified photo from the scanning tunneling microscope. It showed P. reading in the sporozoite stage, the way it lived in the salivary glands of anopholine mosquitoes. But instead of showing the familiar long, asexual threads, these sporozoites looked like they’d been through a violent war. Torn, burst fragments littered the slide. Those not torn apart were misshapen. Tiny specks dappled the background like spent shrapnel.

  “What is—”

  Joe thrust another picture at her. “Look at this version. I stained the sample.”

  As soon as she saw the second picture, with its various components stained in conventional colors, Melanie knew what she was looking at. “A virus! The parasite was killed by a virus!”

  “Yep. In the asexual sporozoite stage, in the salivary glands of the mosquito. Apparently the virus didn’t harm the mosquito at all, as far as I can see. Of course, all your samples are dead—”

  “Carbon tetrachloride,” Melanie said swiftly. “I gave the kids killing jars. Did you allow for that?”

  “Of course I did. I worked all night, Mel, testing your mosquitoes for Plasmodium reading and then concentrating on the ones that carried it. I figured that since adult female Anopheles feed on blood, anything we’re looking for that didn’t kill the mosquito outright would probably show up in the mouth area. That way it starts in the mosquito and goes into the victim, or starts in the victim and goes into the mosquito, or—most likely—goes both ways after the first transmission.

  “So far I’ve looked at eighty-six of your mosquitoes and tabulated them into three groups: those free of all Plasmodium parasites, those carrying the usual Plasmodium falciparum, and those carrying Plasmodium reading. Then I examined the last two groups. I looked not only for mangled Plasmodium, but also for fragments of RNA, protein markers—all the usual indicators of a viral presence. Next, I put some of the saliva through the centrif
uge, just to be sure the parasites and the viruses did indeed separate out at different densities. And they did. Here’s the tally.”

  He thrust a chart at her, hand drawn but very clear in Joe’s block letters:

  Saliva from Dead Anopheles Gambiae, Yamdongi Village,

  Kisangani Zone, Congo (S = 86)

  A. Gambiae

  free of

  Plasmodium

  A. Gambiae

  carrying

  P. Falciparum

  A. Gambiae

  carrying

  P. Reading

  Parasites intact in salivary glands

  NA

  26

  4

  Parasites destroyed in salivary glands, no virus fragments present

  NA

  0

  0

  Parasites destroyed in salivary glands, virus fragments present

  NA

  0

  56

  Melanie stared at the data for a long time.

  There it was.

  There it was. Proof that the epidemic of malaria reading in Yamdongi had not been stopped by normal mosquito-control methods. Nor by running its natural destructive course. Nor by Doctors Without Borders administering humanitarian aid. Proof that someone, or some group, had deliberately intervened with another genetically engineered organism, a virus that killed Plasmodium reading but not the mosquito carrying it. And it had worked. Somebody had come up with engineered biological control of malaria reading, and it had killed over 93 percent of the parasites. Furthermore, the cure had appeared within a few months of the disease, an impossibly short time to create a new organism on the DNA level if you were starting from scratch.

  Therefore, whoever had created the disease had also created the virus that cured it, in advance.

  She, Melanie, was not crazy. Malaria reading was a deliberate experiment in genocide. An experiment to see if black people could be killed at whim by releasing infected Anopheles, and then if black people could be saved by releasing the virus that killed the disease. The black victims, in the United States and in Congo, had been guinea pigs for a controlled experiment: guinea pigs for the disease; guinea pigs for the cure.

  And if Robert Cavanaugh was right, the trail for this monstrous act led to Fort Detrick.

  Blindly, she reached out and groped for Joe, and the next thing she knew, she lay numbly against his chest. Not sobbing, not crying, not moving. She felt paralyzed by the horror of what she’d just deduced, and she reached for the warmth of another human being—any human being—with no more volition than a frost-gripped plant trying to reach for sunlight.

  “Joe …”

  “I know,” he said, patting her back. “I know,” although of course he didn’t. Not really. He wasn’t at risk. He was white.

  “Mel, listen to me. There’s another piece here we haven’t gotten yet. The virus in Congo moved from the vector to the victim, or vice-versa, and once the mosquito bit someone else, the mosquito was no longer a vector. The virus saw to that. The mosquito would give the virus to the human, of course, but let’s presume that the virus is harmless to humans. That’s logical. The next mosquito who stings that human will get the virus. But only if it stings a human who’s already been stung once. That’s not an efficient enough way to spread the virus to ninety-three percent of the parasites. No, there’s got to be more here.”

  His logic calmed her a bit, focused her away from the horror and toward the logical problem.

  “So listen to this,” Joe went on. “I think the virus had to be put first into the human population of Yamdongi. But how? How do you infect an entire village with a blood-borne virus without attracting attention? You need a method that the villagers are already accepting, without question.”

  “The vaccine,” Melanie said slowly.

  “The vaccine, yes. The vaccine serum must have carried not only whatever chloroquine derivative they’re trying out now, but also the engineered virus. I’ll bet that now everybody in Yamdongi carries the virus in their bloodstream. Sick people, healthy people, everybody. And I’ll bet more: that the virus, when we take it apart, will carry a full battery of ways to elude the human immune system as long as possible, so it would stay in the villagers’ bloodstream long enough to infect a lot of other villagers. God, I wish we had blood samples from Yamdongi! Do you know where the vaccine serum came from?”

  “Brian Spencer said it was given to Doctors Without Borders by the World Health Organization.”

  “By WHO! Then it could have originated in any of the WHO signatory countries, and WHO must have records of—”

  Behind them, the lab door opened. “Oh! Excuse me …” A hasty slam.

  Melanie whirled around, too late to see who it had been. She’d still been leaning against Joe. Her blanket had slipped past her hips, exposing her in her black slip. Joe’s arms had been around her. Both their hair mussed, hers from sleep and his from the lack of it …

  “Who was it?”

  Joe said, “Suzanne Dreyfuss. A lab tech.”

  “Oh, God. And us standing here like … like … Does she gossip?”

  Joe shrugged. “They all gossip. Don’t worry about it.”

  “‘Don’t worry about it?’ Joe, do you have any idea at all how hard I’ve worked not to appear … shit, shit, shit!”

  By Monday this Suzanne Whosit would have it all over the CDC. And I walked right in on them, Saturday afternoon in Lab 6 and she was wearing only a … SHIT.

  Joe stared at her, his downy brow wrinkled. “Calm down, Mel. It’s no big deal.”

  He didn’t get it. He never would. And, come to think of it, that was one of the reasons she’d always felt comfortable with Joe: he didn’t “get” the usual social barriers and so walked right through them. It made things so much fairer. Melanie calmed down.

  “What I want to know now,” Joe said, “is the mechanism the virus uses to destroy Plasmodium. Maybe it jams the reproductive machinery or disrupts Plasmodium’s food-transport tubules. Stanford is producing some good work on that. Damn! We need live, infected P. reading, we need blood samples, we need—Mel? Are you listening?”

  No. I’m pondering the virtues of insensitivity. “Yes. Just take me over the data one more time.”

  He did, and she stood there in her slip, nodding as Joe took her deeper into his data, losing herself in the terrible and fascinating knowledge unlocked from the dead mosquitoes of Yamdongi village, Kisangani Zone, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  Interim

  The boy set the glass jar on the kitchen countertop. He rummaged in the cupboard, looking for peanut butter, jelly, and bread. When he found them, he began to make himself a sandwich, humming the tune from Star Wars. The jar buzzed.

  “Hey, Amy-Balamy. How ya doing?”

  Amy, not quite two, made no answer. She toddled to the table and reached for the jar with the interesting noise. The boy, his back to her, didn’t notice.

  “You want half a sandwich, Amy-Mamy? You want—oh, God, what you do? You little bitch! Oh, baby, don’t cry, you done cut yo’self …”

  He pulled the wailing baby back from the broken glass on the floor. Blood smeared her hand. Mosquitoes buzzed around the kitchen.

  The boy forced himself to think. What did Mama do when somebody got cut? Wash it. Yeah, wash it. He picked up Amy, carried her into the bathroom, and balanced her between his body and the sink, bending his knees a little to take her weight. This close to her, he could smell that she’d shit in her diaper again. As soon as she saw the cool water run from the tap, she stopped crying and started to splash. The cut wasn’t deep. The boy wrapped a clean sock around it and taped the sock to the baby’s hand.

  Now what? Clean up, yeah. And catch more bugs for his school project. But what else for Amy? What a pain in the ass she was. He scowled at his little sister, now sitting on the bathroom floor happily chewing on the sock.

  The boy went very still. That.

  Should he call Mama at work? No, the boss didn’t ne
ver like it when he did that. Mama said. But he couldn’t do nothing, this was serious.

  He dialed 911.

  “I got emergency! My sister—”

  “What’s your name, honey? Do you know your address?”

  The white ’ho thought he was a little kid! Fuck her. The boy said, making his voice as deep as he could, “My baby sister got herself bit by a mosquito. Send a ambulance in case she done got this new malaria!”

  The white voice changed. “She got bitten by a mosquito? Just now? Is she showing any allergic reactions? Trouble breathing, or anything like that?”

  The boy peered into the bathroom. Amy was stirring the water in the toilet with her bandaged hand.

  “No. She look okay.”

  “Then you have nothing to worry about, honey. Malaria reading has been over for several weeks. But if you give me your name and address, I’ll—”

  The boy slammed down the phone. He pulled Amy out of the toilet and smacked her, not hard. Now he would have to put a whole other sock on her hand, change her shitty diaper, clean up the broken glass, and collect a different batch of bugs. All before he dropped Amy off at the sitter on his way to school.

  But he didn’t got nothing to worry about. Nah. Nothing at all. The white lady done said so.

  Eighteen

  As we seek to reach the issue of accountability in a secret agency, we are left repeatedly with a record that is utterly beyond understanding.

  —Sen. Walter Mondale discussing the CIA, Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975

  * * *

  Cavanaugh finally bullied the phone company into installing his phone on Saturday morning. When the telephone installers left, grumbling, he blanketed Maryland and D.C. with brief messages giving out his new number. Two hours later, the phone rang for the first time. When Cavanaugh heard Judy’s voice, he both tensed and loosened. His neck tightened and his knees loosened, although it would have felt better the other way around.