Vector

by James Abel

  The doorman was a forty-year-old Dominican, nine years in the union. He lowered his voice, as if to reveal a secret. He was a tall man with a tough face and sensitive disposition. He wrote poetry lyrics late at night, and listened to biographies of singing stars on DVDs.

  “It happened again, sir.”

  Tom Fargo stiffened.

  “She came down to walk the dog. Her face, sir. It was black and blue. It’s not right.”

  Tom Fargo relaxed, because this wasn’t about the FBI. But he was angry. The doorman was hoping Tom would call the cops on his next-door neighbor, a big, loudmouthed architect who chaired the building co-op board and relished his nickname, “Captain,” and lived with his girlfriend. The doorman wouldn’t make the call, fearing that if he did, he’d lose his job.

  “Someone ought to stop it, sir.”

  Stay out of it, Tom Fargo told himself. What happens to Rebeca is none of your business.

  “You’re a good guy, Mauricio,” he said.

  Mauricio, disappointed, went back to watching the news.

  The elevator had a TV in the wall—Americans needed them like drugs—that showed CNN news, something about an explosion in Miami. Four stories up the door opened into a freshly painted semi-private foyer providing entry to only two apartments. There were framed lithographs of British jockeys and barristers on the wall, his neighbor’s idea of class. He slipped the key into his top lock, then the dead bolt. Inside, the polished concrete floor threw back moonlight flooding in through floor-to-ceiling windows. The view of the Brooklyn Bridge was close and magnificent. The lights of Manhattan—even from across the river—drenched exotic artwork on his walls: jaguar head Day of the Dead mask from southern Mexico; tropical hardwood crucifix inlaid with Spanish gold links, from Peru; lacquerware bowl, 1859, Guatemala; Chacala rosary necklace that Tom’s mother had picked up on a buying trip south, fifteen years ago, when she only owned one shop, not fourteen, scattered around the U.S., and an online shopping site, too.

  Just the art that a spoiled trust fund artist wannabe—as his neighbors believed him to be—might display.

  Forget Rebeca. Check the darkroom, he thought.

  The darkroom—ground zero—had been installed by the owner, a photographer who was in China on assignment, and who had sublet the place to Tom for cash. He’d installed extra locks. Tom stood in a red glow, excitement building. The room was hot and moist. He could almost feel the vibration coming off the terrariums on the shelves, from a thousand particles, as he thought of them. He’d learned about particles from Hobart Haines when he was a teenager, in the high mountains, under a clear blue sky.

  Bombs, but not bombs.

  There was also $30,000 in cash here, and two perfectly good credit cards in other names. There were pistols and explosives, a microscope, a laptop, medicines and Clorox wipes, and, in a rack on the wall, bulb-shaped glass containers clasped upside down, and, stretched across each top, a thin membrane of elastic covering.

  He was startled when his encrypted phone rang. It was not supposed to ring unless there was an emergency. His heart seized up. “Hi there,” he answered, casually.

  A half-drunken voice slurred, “Felix? Felix! It’s Marty, man! Marty Bolton!”

  “There’s no Felix here.”

  The caller hung up, and Tom Fargo—in shock—took the SIM card from the phone. He smashed the card and phone with a hammer. He tried to control his racing heart. His plan had just changed almost before it started. Felix—said twice—meant bad news. Bolton made it worse. Marty was a worst-case scenario. He understood instantly that the CNN report, the Miami explosion, meant that the other team here to carry out attacks was all dead.

  Shocked, he went back into the living room, with its view of the high-rises, power centers, and apartments across the river, filled with enemy. Enemy extending across a continent; 350 million of them. He had always dreamed of facing long odds. Now he faced the longest.

  The message had been: You are the last one left. They will kill you if they find you. Good luck.

  Back in the darkroom the red light seemed to come from inside him now, pulsing into the air to saturate the glass containers and water pans, plastic cassettes, steel tweezers, and glass pipettes. As if fission was produced by intent, and will answered a scientific question, will was a formula that Dr. Cardozo jotted on his blue board. Will = energy. Energy = destruction.

  Tom, filled with will, thought, I can do it. He was hot with rage but not fear. He’d lost that capacity some time ago. I can fool them. I will make them think there are many groups here. I will finish this thing even if I have to do it alone.

  TWO

  No one at the gold rush was interested in the missing American. They were too busy to care about my best friend. They were used to men being present one day, disappeared the next; dead from illness or murder, accidents or suicide. Miners died when rusty anchor cables snapped and their boats swept into jungle rapids. Rival crews cut cables on boats at 2 A.M., and turgid currents finished the job. Divers fought with knives in the darkness below the surface, sliced one another’s air hoses and died clutching rubber tubing. Some got dengue fever, or keeled over in the 110-degree heat. They killed one another over prostitutes and $4 beer tabs. One man liked samba on a jukebox. Another wanted heavy metal. In the end, a body floated on the Madeira. Caimans ate it.

  “The captain says that Dr. Nakamura was very sick,” the translator told me. “Your friend was shaking with malaria. He was advised to go to the hospital in town, and Senhor Edward said he would. This is what the police told us also. I am sorry. The police gave up the search.”

  “Eddie never reached the hospital or our hotel.”

  “This happens,” said Anasasio sadly.

  “If he was going to town someone must have taken him. If we find that person we’ll learn more,” I insisted.

  “Here, no one ever learns more.”

  Here was the Madeira River, forty miles from the Brazilian Amazon city of Porto Velho. From the deck of the mining boat I saw a ragged moonscape of bad possibilities: red mud that bred malarial mosquitoes, tin-roofed shanty bars where knives flashed at night, thick jungle. Rickety docks sagged in brown water. In mid channel were anchored two dozen mining boats, dragas, in calm areas between rapids. They were big as 1850s Mississippi riverboats, two-story-high herds of dumb animals belching smoke, pumps roaring, decks crawling with poor men come to seek their fortunes. They slept on hammocks on deck.

  “Dr. Nakamura is tough,” I said. “He would have found a way back.”

  The captain of the boat said something in Portuguese, and Anasasio nodded with sympathy. “Tough is nothing against illness. He says sick men can be robbed or killed. They are weak and cannot defend themselves. They have hallucinations and wander into the jungle. The police said this same thing, Joe.”

  “Let’s try the next boat.”

  “We’ve been here for seven hours.”

  “The police kept me in town for two days!”

  “They checked your story thoroughly.”

  “You mean they grilled me. Are you really a doctor? Are you involved in transporting drugs?”

  I’d told the Federal Police major, over and over, back in town, that we were here for pure research, science, a joint humanitarian project with their government and not any secret reason.

  Which was a lie.

  Eddie and I had been friends for over twenty years. We met in Marine Corps ROTC at UMass and went through boot camp together. I was best man at his wedding and godfather to his daughters. We served together in Iraq and shared more memories than a married couple. Now I was sick with apprehension. Eddie and I had split up three days ago for a day of studying new malarias. I’d stayed in town, interviewing sick people in slum areas. Eddie was supposed to take a translator with him to the gold rush, but had not told me that the translator was sick, so he’d gone alone, hoping
that his California Spanish might get him by, that he wouldn’t lose a day of work. He’d planned to go out in the morning and come back at night. He had a road map and a rented jeep, which he’d paid a man to watch as he went out to the dragas. The police had found the jeep onshore.

  “Where can I get a gun?” I asked Anasasio now.

  “You cannot have one. I explained this. You are a foreigner. It is against the law.”

  “You said no one around here obeys laws.”

  “If the police know I gave you a gun, I will be arrested,” he said stubbornly, in heavily nasal-accented English, reflecting the rough local Portuguese called língua geral. Anasasio looked like a cross between a thug and a dandy, tall and leanly muscled with a brush mustache—1950s Madison Avenue style—and gleaming slicked-back hair. His shirt was blue silk, open to a Saint Christopher medal. His pleated Italian trousers were creased, but he’d rolled them up past his hairy knees, making them shorts against the heat. Baby-blue hospital booties protected his loafers from mud, and a Beretta 9mm rode at his belt. He worked for the miners’ union, a local partner for our health project with Columbia University. I was liking him less and less by the hour.

  “We’ve visited ten boats already, Joe. Maybe Eddie fell out of a launch and drowned. On the highway are many accidents, not reported. Nothing here is reported. Give up.”

  But Eddie wouldn’t have given up on me. He would have torn this place apart. I leaned over the gunwale and waved to hail a small passing outboard. These one-man ferries carried miners from dragas to shore, to bars, or for supplies: potatoes, meat, bullets, medicines.

  Anasasio sighed, his ferret face shiny with sweat. “This is a tragedy.”

  “Not yet it isn’t.”

  Anasasio had been confident when we left this morning. “I am a human lie detector,” he’d bragged. “We will get to the bottom of things!”

  Now he mopped his brow with a soiled handkerchief and said, “This place eats men.”

  • • •

  My name is Joe Rush, and I grew up in the hamlet of Smith Falls, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Hills, where there was no gold rush or malaria or 110-degree heat, not ten miles south of the Vermont line. My problem then was lack of challenge. There was nothing to do for a restless kid.

  I was bored with our school board squabbles and Labor Day parades and hot dog cookouts. Bored even with my friends. I thrilled to commercials showing U.S. Marines storming ashore in foreign lands, saving lives, having adventures. So I left my girlfriend and parents and enrolled in Marine ROTC in college. I met Eddie Nakamura there. We competed—between us—to win best recruit, obstacle course, map use, range contest, until I edged him out and Eddie started calling us One and Two. As young lieutenants, in Iraq, we led our squads down a hidden tunnel and into a biolab where Saddam Hussein’s scientists were experimenting on monkeys, trying to weaponize disease.

  The experience changed our lives. The Corps paid for med school, and later we were seconded to a small, secret bioterror unit. Our records were sheep dipped, falsified so that even most high-level Marines never knew what we really did. The sections labeled EXPERT MARKSMAN and COMBAT EXPERIENCE and ABILITY TO RUN FIELD HOSPITALS remained; all true. But new parts, the killing of eight innocent Marines to save a thousand, the cooperation with an unfriendly intelligence service to murder a terrorist . . . were left out.

  Eddie and I were sworn to secrecy without understanding what that meant. I don’t think anyone understands the price of secrecy, even after you pay. I’m talking about more than the healed shotgun scars on my back, or my two amputated toes from a mission in northern Alaska. I’m talking about my wrecked marriage, and the way, a year later, my work led to the violent death of someone I loved very much.

  These days, looking back at age forty-three, I realize that I would have made the same decisions. Looking forward, I’ve resolved to never put another loved one in danger again.

  “How will you do that?” Eddie asked me on the plane that took us from New York to Brazil, three weeks ago.

  “George Washington said it. No foreign entanglements.”

  “You can’t spend your life alone.”

  “I’m not talking about forever. Just now.”

  Now Eddie lives in Boston with his wife and daughters. I live in the Berkshire Hills, back in Smith Falls, a tranquil place that I appreciate more than when I’d been growing up. Eddie and I have quit government employ and own a two-man biocure company, looking for microbes in the wild to help cure diseases. Good bacteria for a change, not bad. Little one-celled missiles to kill pancreatic cancers, or AIDS. We also work with the Columbia University Wilderness Medicine Program, heading down to New York on Amtrak two days a week to consult. And it was at Columbia, two months back, that I’d made the decision that led to Eddie disappearing now.

  “You don’t have to do what he wants,” our boss, Dr. Stuart Harris, had griped that morning, glancing at his unwanted guest. He’d moved us from Harvard to Columbia some months before.

  I pictured it as Anasasio and I rode a flying boat toward the last draga. I saw Stuart’s cramped office two stories above Broadway, three blocks from Columbia’s campus, where Wilderness Medicine shared a floor with researchers from NASA. The outer-space guys were addicted to popcorn, and the hallway smelled of butter. I saw the well-groomed, gray-suited man who occupied the steel chair by Stuart’s desk, eyeing me with a businesslike smile. Eddie stiffened at the sight of the man.

  “You know Ray Havlicek from the FBI,” Stuart said.

  Yes, I thought. Ray thinks his fiancée is in love with me, and her daughter told me he’s right.

  “Nice to see you, Joe,” the new FBI assistant director said. “You’re looking fit. Eddie, too.”

  “Whatever you need, the answer is no,” Eddie said. Stuart brightened at that, but Ray concentrated on me.

  “I understand you two are headed to Brazil to study frontier malaria,” Ray said, crossing his legs.

  Wilderness medicine means providing care to people in hard-to-reach corners of earth. Sometimes they are wealthy adventure seekers: shark divers in Ecuador, or bungee jumpers in Malawi. But more often they are the poor: impoverished settlers pushed from third-world cities into jungles where they have no experience with diseases, or natural disaster. Indonesian fishing villagers after a cyclone. Haitian cholera victims. Colombian peasants after an earthquake.

  And frontier malaria is a new, resistant variety exploding through Amazon settlements. The mosquitoes that carry the disease have evolved to survive pesticides. The parasite is growing hardier, which makes mosquitoes the most deadly animal on earth; a nuisance in the United States, a tragedy overseas. Worldwide, fifty thousand people a year die of snake bites. Twenty-five thousand die of rabies. Two hundred fourteen million people caught malaria last year, and five hundred thousand died. So it was good to be working on preventing disease, instead of on weapons.

  Ray said that day, “As long as you’re going anyway, how about doing your old friends a little favor?”

  I’d waited for more. Ray, Eddie, and I had served on a bio-attack task force a couple of years back. Ray was now promoted. And the bioterror world is small. The same people stay at the same hotel in Zurich, drink at the same bar in Port-au-Prince, run into one another at Defense Department conferences, birthday parties, or war games. Sometimes they fall in love. Ray was engaged to a woman we’d both worked with, and who had rejected him earlier. I had feelings for Chris Vekey but had never acted on them. Her daughter was my sixteen-year-old summer intern. I warned you that our world is incestuous. “Mom went back to Ray, on the rebound from you,” Aya Vekey had told me, two months back.

  “Nothing happened between your mom and me, so how could there be any rebound, Aya?”

  She’d answered with a teenager’s irritating mix of innocence and objectivity. “When nothing happens between two people who like each other, they
imagine the best. You only see bad stuff after you get to know someone.”

  “You’re too young to be a cynic.”

  “Why? You’re a cynic so it must be right. You should have tried with Mom. She gave up on love after you.”

  “There wasn’t any after, Aya.”

  Eddie didn’t trust Ray. I just felt sorry for him. It’s tough to be the one in a relationship who loves the other person more. It wears you down. That wasn’t my problem, though. It was Ray’s.

  But in Stuart’s office Ray had remained professional, on the surface at least, as he unrolled a map of Brazil, the diamond-shaped fifth-largest nation on earth, after China. Most of the country was solid-green Amazon, with the megalopolis cities Rio and São Paulo far to the east. Ray’s finger had poked down near the border with Bolivia . . . on the thin Madiera River in the west.

  “We don’t care about the malaria,” he said.

  “What do you care about, Ray?”

  “Al Qaeda, ISIS. New fringe groups active there. We’ve heard rumors that they’re planning something, possibly a run on a U.S. embassy in South America.”

  “Rumors? From who?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Then we can’t do it, Ray.”

  “Brazilian Federal Police,” Ray said smoothly, as if he’d not refused to answer seconds before, “recovered a laptop in a raid in Rio, while arresting gold smugglers. Hezbollah and Al Qaeda are not listed as terrorist organizations in Brazil, and they’re active in smuggling there. In the laptop was a file referring to a project in the Amazon, probably a training camp. Problem is, we can’t send people officially because Brazil is touchy about interference. They claim they’ll take care of it. But their Federal Police are riddled with corruption. Their own people in Brasília don’t trust the ones out west.”