Vector

by James Abel

  “No, but some are white, like you.”

  “Where did the old doctor come from?”

  A shrug. “My grandfather told me there was a big war in Europe and he came after that, under the water, in a boat.”

  Waiters offered more sausages, steak cuts, lamb. It was a meat paradise. There was a long salad bar in a corner and a finely stocked liquor bar and a line of people waiting for tables, the men wearing cowboy hats and boots and billowy shirts; women in tight jeans, Texas-style clothing. Elizabe was in a print dress and had a pile of sliced onions and red tomatoes on her plate. Cizinio was the only Indian present that I could see.

  “Cizinio, you said the old doctor used to ask many questions. About what?”

  “Malaria.”

  “Did he say why he was interested?”

  “He walked in the forest and collected mosquitoes, too.”

  “What questions did he ask about malaria?”

  Cizinio chewed, thought, looked impassive. “Oh, where the worst places were to catch it, which stretches of river were most dangerous.”

  “And now you say sick people are being kidnapped?”

  “I don’t say it. It is happening. Why don’t you people ever believe Indians?”

  Suddenly I felt a familiar sensation on the left side of my neck, as if an insect had landed there. Any Marine who has ever been on patrol knows the feeling. You are being watched. I turned and saw only diners at first, but then, at a far table, as a waiter passed, someone looked away. There sat a small woman with coppery wavy hair, and a larger man. They had a wine bottle before them, and plates. But their posture was not the easy kind employed by a relaxing couple, or the rigid kind when a couple is arguing. They stared into each other’s eyes. The posture was almost right. But almost isn’t right.

  “Are you listening to Cizinio?” Rooster said.

  “Say again, please.”

  Cizinio finished his sausage. A waiter was approaching with another platter. “The boats bringing sick people come in the night. One time I was fishing nearby and heard screaming. The guards shot into the water, chased me away.”

  “What kind of screaming? Like someone was angry? Or like someone was hurt?”

  “Hurt.”

  “Is there a way for me to get on the island?”

  Cizinio thought that was funny. “Yes. Get sick. And men will kidnap you.”

  “Can you take us there?”

  “No. I must get back to my draga,” Cizinio said. “And get more gold.”

  I started to protest that a man’s life could be at stake, but Rooster placed a restraining hand on my arm. “It is not what you think,” Rooster said. “His son is sick, at the hospital. He runs a terrible fever. He is only ten years old. Cizinio needs gold to pay doctors. He’s already lost one child to tuberculosis. The doctors work harder for gold.” Rooster rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal language for bribes.

  I’d been here long enough to know about local health care—public for slum dwellers, private for the rest. I asked, “Is his son at the poor people’s hospital or the rich one?”

  “You must pay even at the poor one if you want real care. You must pay nurses, too. This is not the law but the practice. The more you pay, the more the doctors work. Don’t doctors have the gold fever in your country?”

  “In a way.”

  Despite my fear for Eddie I felt a stab of guilt and regarded the Indian in a new light. I’d come to a foreign place and made assumptions. Rooster just wanted a nice dinner with his wife. Cizinio was torn with fear over a child. “Rooster, please tell Cizinio that I am a doctor and I will see his son if he wants. I don’t want gold for it. I don’t want information for it either.”

  This time when Rooster translated the chewing stopped and the face swung up, and the brown eyes regarded me like I was a person, not a wall. Cizinio’s thoughts moved beneath the surface like a fish swims out of sight. I knew that even in the early twenty-first century, there were more than fifty uncontacted tribes—spotted from the air—left in the Brazilian Amazon. The second they were contacted, they started falling sick.

  Cizinio put down the fork. He had a speck of red sausage on the corner of his lip. At last I saw emotion, just a spark, in the eyes. It was confusion.

  “Cizinio asks why you would do this?”

  “I know what it is to worry about someone you love.”

  “Cizinio says that the doctors at the hospital always ask for money. As soon as he gives it, they want more. Sometimes they say, like you, that they don’t want it, but when they get to his son, they change their mind.”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  “Cizinio says he cannot help you. You must understand this. Examining his son will get you no different answers.”

  “I understand. Let’s go to my hotel and get my medical bag, and then we will go to the hospital, now.”

  Cizinio sat back. Then he tilted his head so as to look over the balcony, and I followed his gaze and my pulse sped up. Below, Anasasio was standing on the path with three policemen. Anasasio was gesturing with urgency, and the policemen split up, one heading for the parking lot, one for the bowling alley, and one for the building in which we sat.

  I turned to glance across the balcony. The man and the woman who had been in the corner were gone. Then I saw them, below, walking toward Anasasio.

  Rooster said, reaching for his wallet, “Cizinio says you should not go back to your hotel tonight. He says that we should leave, now. He says he believes you. Otherwise those men would not be after you. He says that if they find you, maybe you will be next to disappear.”

  SEVEN

  Tom Fargo was sealing the fifth pipe bomb, as he thought of them, when the doorbell rang. He froze, standing in the red light of the darkroom. He expected no visitors, and the doorman was supposed to alert him if one showed up. He made sure that the cardboard tube was sealed, retrieved his loaded Sig P226 combat pistol from the overhead shelf, racked the slide, locked the door behind him, and walked quietly but swiftly into the sunlit loft, toward the front door, without getting in front of it. If it blew inward, he’d be on the side.

  If the FBI is here, they will have ordered the doorman not to call up. Combat vests on, they’d be prepping like the U.S. Marines who used to come into villages back home.

  Tom Fargo’s pulse raced.

  He told himself that God would not allow his efforts to fail just as he was to start a new attack. The first planting had occurred days ago, and results should hit the city as early as tonight. If so, by tomorrow, New York news announcers would be leading their programs with it. Later would come the national news and the world.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me! Rebeca!”

  He did not relax, because soldiers might be with her. They might have told her to knock and trick him into opening up. He peered into the spy hole, heart hammering as fast and hard as it had five years ago, in combat, when he crawled over boulders and through rocky wadis with brother fighters, face camouflaged with dirt, dun-colored rags blending in with thorn bushes, as he moved to ambush U.S. Rangers. The feeling was adrenaline, not fear . . . the same sensation that had preceded his shooting of the female American diplomat in Rio.

  Dr. Cardozo had told him after that, Your passport has been used innocently and regularly since you came to us. Anyone checking your movements will think you’ve been traveling in Europe for the past six years. A rich kid killing time. Your idea is sound. We want you to contact your mother. You will go to western Brazil for a few weeks, train, and return to the U.S.

  Tom leaned into the peephole and saw her smile, which looked hopeful. There was no guile in Rebeca, so the expression told him that he was, for the moment, safe. Relief came as a warm feeling in his knees and a throbbing at the base of his neck. Allah could protect you only so much. After that, you helped
yourself.

  She must have seen his eye in the hole. Voice muffled, she called out gayly, “We’re having a party tonight. Greg won a big commission! You have to come, Tom!”

  Magnified, her face was elongated as in a fun house mirror, but the smile was at odds with the busted blood vessels on the right cheek, a sullen patchwork of purple. It wasn’t love he felt for his neighbor’s girlfriend, or attraction. It was worse. Sympathy. She was smart and funny and had a good job as an engineer advisor on the new Panama Canal. He could not fathom why she stuck with Greg. Tom Fargo put the gun in a drawer by the door, swung it open, and kept his gaze off the bruise. But it was hard.

  “Can’t come, Rebeca. I’ll be out riding tonight.”

  “You live half your life on that bicycle,” she responded playfully, disappointment plain on her face. She was tiny, with a dancer’s taut body, blue-black hair in a bun, muscles toned from yoga and weekend 10K runs to raise money for wounded U.S. veterans. Her Battery Park firm paid her a good salary. She could have dated a thousand guys who desired her each day on the street. But she stuck with the jerk across the hall.

  “The city is peaceful from a bike,” he said. “Our club rides around all summer. Night rider. That’s me.”

  “Can’t you make an exception tonight?”

  “I’ll try to get back,” he said. But he had deposits to make.

  She probably knew he was lying, but didn’t make an issue of it. “Five questions, then,” she said, grinning.

  “I’m busy just now, Rebeca.”

  “Pshaw! Asking takes only sixty seconds!”

  He sighed. She was studying for her U.S. citizenship exam, and had asked him to help her prep. There was something perverted about it that he enjoyed, as he prepared to attack this place.

  He asked, “What is the supreme law of the United States?”

  “The Constitution! Ask something harder.”

  “If the President can no longer serve,” he said, considering that soon likely, “who takes over?”

  “The Vice President?”

  “What major event happened on September 11, 2001?”

  “Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center,” she said, the grin dying as she envisioned it. “All those poor people. It must have been awful.”

  As if his tongue moved by itself, he heard himself say, “What happened to your face?”

  The hand that rose to her cheek was small and dainty, and she wore a white gold ring on the mid finger and a thin silver watch and pearl necklace. She tended to dress in tight-fitting dark-colored business suits during work hours, black or gray, that made her look professional but sexy. Tom Fargo was not like many men with whom he’d fought in the Caliphate. He was not offended if women showed parts of their bodies in public. In summertime Rebeca often went barefoot and wore white shorts that showed her skinny legs. She usually smelled of coconut shampoo and lavender soap.

  “I fell while walking Cleon,” she said. “What a klutz.”

  “You should teach that dog to heel.”

  “I will! We’ll have a lot of food at the party. And live music. Greg knows the band. So try to come, okay?”

  He’d seen her around the building but never spoke to her for the first three months he lived here. Then he’d been out running one day on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, finishing a twenty-miler, and he’d looked down to see the tiny woman matching his gait, moving her twiggy legs faster to keep up, not panting, grinning, his cap reflected in her sunglasses, her round, cocoa-colored face flushed, her almond/black eyes merry beneath a red sweatband.

  “You live across from Greg. I’m Rebeca,” she said.

  After that, a word exchanged in an elevator. A chance brush in the fruit market on High Street. The week he got a terrible flu and the doorman must have told her because she started ringing the bell and leaving quarts of steamy specialty soups on his mat: Tuscan Beef with Polenta, Vietnamese Pho Rice Noodle with Beef. Then the night when she and Greg wandered into the shop he managed in Park Slope, during an opening of Nicaraguan art, and Greg pretended not to see him, while Rebeca made conversation.

  After that he’d started noticing her on the street more, in a bike shop, the shoe repair place, the seafood market. Had she always been there? Or had his antenna incorporated her into what he paid attention to?

  “There will be single women at the party, Tom. Maybe you’ll meet someone.”

  “I have a girlfriend in Ohio.” He’d never been there.

  He’d told her that he’d moved to New York to “give photography a try.” “That’s what I use the darkroom for.” That his trust fund came from wealthy parents, which was how he afforded to rent a loft on his shop salary. She knew nothing of the fallback apartment in Queens or the cash in the darkroom, or the Subaru. Or how none of it had come from a trust fund but from opium sales or gold smuggling.

  “Many rich, spoiled children, a whole society who never grow up, live in New York,” Dr. Cardozo had told him. “They pretend to be artists. They spend their nights in dissipation. Your background makes you perfect for this role.”

  Now the apartment door behind Rebeca opened and Greg the architect came into the foyer, smiling as if his party had already started; bulky guy, ex–rugby player at Penn, but these days more fat than muscle. Dark haired and handsome, he carried himself with confidence. His pink button-up shirt hung loose, shirttails over cargo shorts. His tanned, sockless feet were encased in Italian loafers. At thirty-eight, his hair was thick and wavy and his false bonhomie made him likable for the first nine minutes in any social setting. He was a self-made man who confused romance with control. In this society he had to keep up appearances with women to be respected, but he reminded Tom of the brutes in the villages who used religion to harass: hit women, rape them, or worse. Tom knew what he was seeing, and it was something primitive and dark that lived in all cultures, in different ways.

  “It’s the Cycle Man!” Greg put his arm around Rebeca’s shoulder and she flinched. Greg always called him Cycle Man. Like they were buddies. The architect dwarfed Rebeca, was four inches taller even than Tom, who was five eleven, but Greg would not have lasted three seconds in a fight. Greg said, “I told her you’d be out pedaling. What’s the deal, Cycle? Where do you go?”

  “All around.” Which was true. “The club pedals all night.” That part was not. He traveled alone. Sometimes on the bike. Sometimes in the subway. Sometimes on busses. Learning all the different routes for attack or escape.

  Greg didn’t care about the answer. He asked, “Did you see all the cops in the subway this morning?”

  Tom Fargo’s heartbeat went up, but he kept the tension off his face. “Cops?”

  “I’ve never seen so many down there. They’re opening packages right and left!” Without invitation, Greg brushed past Tom and strode into the apartment, past the hand that had risen fractionally toward his neck. A wall of windows overlooked the Brooklyn Bridge’s magnificent cathedral-style arches and latticework of cables and walk and bikeway running along the center span.

  Greg said, “I saw them shove a guy up on the wall this morning, some Muslim kid. What’s in the knapsack?”

  “How do you know he was Muslim?” Tom asked softly.

  “You know what I mean. I’m not prejudiced. Dark. Pakistani. I work with these guys. Hell, I drink with them, well, the nonobservant ones. Calm down, Cycle! I didn’t know you were so politically correct!”

  Greg put his arm around Rebeca and steered her away, and she glanced back, smiled . . . Greg’s awkward but he means well. The hand fluttered toward the bruise, then stopped.

  Tom went back to the darkroom. The air vibrated in here with need, blood, humidity, and there was a swampy smell from all the life. On the heavy worktable were plastic trays and liquids and special foods, reflected in the glass terrariums that he’d emptied for this attack. Temperature kept at eighty-one degrees
.

  There were seven packages and tubes of varying sizes on the table, wrapped and labeled. At least a thousand bombs, but not bombs—adults—in there.

  He needed to hurry.

  Cops in the subways . . . try a different route.

  • • •

  The first tube was addressed to a framing business on 5th Avenue. The six-by-six-inch box to a medical lab on 3rd. The fancier box—flowers?—was allegedly going to a condo penthouse on Park Avenue. But the labels were lies. Inside the packages, plastic lining contained wet rags to keep in moisture, and adults and larvae lived in double-walled plastic bags. Petri dishes were stuffed with wet paper toweling, and on the toweling, rafts of tiny eggs. You needed to leave eggs because the adults would spend their whole lives within a mile of where they hatched. If he wanted to infect various spots around the city, with regularity, he had to make a separate deposit in each one.

  The egg rafts he cleared from pans covered by plastic sheeting, filled with tap water. From other pans he took hatched larvae, swimming and wriggling.

  He fed his wards every third day, crumbling a small bit of food between two fingers for larvae. The adults got infected blood. Larvae grew in three stages, molting every few days, and then rising to the top and molting one last time, into pupae. Morphing into things that could kill. They swam by abdomen, moving in rapid jerks.

  After this attack I’ll need a new shipment. I’m using the last of what I have. But the supply should be here by next week.

  “I’ll hit them with what?” he’d asked Dr. Cardozo, frowning, when he’d learned of his full assignment. Before that he’d envisioned explosives. At first the truth made no sense. “That’s what all the fuss is about? Mosquitoes?”

  But Cardozo had seemed happy at his doubt, as if it confirmed his hypothesis that the Americans would react the same way at first, not seeing the danger.

  “You will spread a ramped-up disease that has destroyed empires and still kills millions around the world,” the biologist said. “Our Anopheles gambaie look identical to the ones that bite Americans every summer day. But yours have been changed. Two thousand people died in the World Trade Center, but you can kill many more. Each female lives for weeks. Eight hundred females to a package. One thousand eggs per hatching. You figure it out.”