Vector

by James Abel

  Tom Fargo caught sight of Joe Rush on TV while climbing from the subway, at 7th and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. His belly tightened with rage. The “hero of Brazil,” as reporters called him, was on a newsstand TV, being interviewed at Columbia University, where he led a special unit working with the ill, the adoring NBC correspondent said.

  If not for you, Washington would have no idea what is happening. My shipment wouldn’t be held up. But I am stuck here, unable to finish the job until the boxes arrive.

  “I’ll deliver them to your shop by two this afternoon,” his freight carrier, Singh, had promised.

  It was now one o’clock. Sixty minutes to go.

  Tom had gotten Singh’s phone call in his darkroom, as he stared at a road map on which he’d circled the next targets. Even Dr. Cardozo didn’t realize Tom’s true reasons for choosing them. Cardozo just cared about heightening panic. One target was as good as another to him.

  All Tom had to do was load up the Subaru and drive off, once the shipment came. Main roads were guarded, but small ones were carrying escapees out of New York. Thanks to the new GETOUT app on his iPhone, he could instantly access clear routes. In America everything was for sale under the notion of so-called personal freedom. Freedom to buy AK-47s. Or encrypt phones so the FBI could not listen in. Freedom to post the locations of unguarded roads.

  But I need those boxes! The adults can survive fifteen days in those containers, the larvae up to ten.

  His shipper had said, “Customs is going through everything from Brazil. Aircraft engines. Wood. Coffee. The warehouse is crawling with agents.”

  Four thousand more vectors. But if they sit in the warehouse much longer, they will perish.

  “Mr. Fargo, if we’re late, sit tight,” Singh had said.

  Is it a trick? Is he working with the FBI? Have they found something? Do they know it is me?

  Tom strolled along 7th Avenue, watching for anyone following, eyeing him from a window or parked car. His reflection in a locked leather goods shop window showed a calm man. He was not that at all.

  Still, all around him, success. The street was almost empty. Windows in apartments were locked or screened. Tom passed an elementary school, normally open for summer school, closed; the twenty-four-hour-a-day Greek diner, closed. A couple walking toward him wore mesh masks even during the day. A Humvee filled with National Guard rolled past the Duane Reade pharmacy, open, but signs in windows read: OUT OF ANTIMALARIAL MEDICINE. NO INSECT REPELLENT OR MOSQUITO COILS. TRY HARDWARE STORE! Beside that, graffiti in white paint: KILL MUSLIMS! NO IMMIGRANTS!

  It would only get worse, he knew.

  Forty minutes left.

  The White House has not disclosed my demand to the public. Maybe they’re considering it, just like that fool Hobart Haines taught me.

  He flashed to the old blowhard, bragging at the dinner table, bragging on drives in Colorado, in the house, or at a restaurant, a sixty-year-old mouth with legs, lecturing. People think making deals is dirty! But we got the hostages out! We gave Iran a few guns—so what? Pressure in the right place achieves what armies cannot do. When to negotiate! When to give in! That’s the question!

  Tom detoured into a fenced-in parking lot near 6th Avenue and 3rd Street. The Subaru occupied the last slot on the left. He waved at the guard booth and made sure the car started. The door panels were firmly closed, no hint of the hidden compartment beneath. In the trunk were camping supplies, disguises, a med kit, cash, golf clubs, dried food, and a clean, new MasterCard in another name.

  Hobart Haines, in Tom’s head, droned on. Presidents say they will not make deals with enemies, but they do. Kennedy faced down the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But behind the scenes he pulled U.S. missiles from Turkey. Nixon said he’d never talk to North Vietnam. He sent a rep there at the same time.

  Back on the street, Tom headed for the gallery. Every trip there was risky. The tiny shop was the vulnerable intersection point where shipments were delivered.

  Thirty minutes to go until Singh arrived.

  Walking, Tom saw with satisfaction that many parking spaces were open because residents had fled. Dog parks were empty. Subways ran on weekend schedules during the emergency, because many transit workers from other states refused to come in. Most pedestrians wore long-sleeved protective clothing. Tom’s ball cap dropped a cloth over the back of his neck to ward off insects. He’d smeared on DEET, to smell like other people. It was easy to tell who had access to medicines, because they moved with more New York assertiveness: fast and busy. Everyone else slinking around. Some people smelled of homemade mosquito repellents flourishing on the Internet. Lavender and vanilla mix. Witch hazel and ground apples. Alleged natural safeguards that were useless.

  Notices in shop windows read:

  —SORRY! ALL GRISTEDES SUPERMARKETS CLOSED.

  —KNOW YOUR MOSQUITOES. LEARN TO TELL HARMLESS ONES FROM DANGEROUS . . .

  —KEEP CHILDREN INSIDE AT DAWN AND DUSK.

  He arrived at the folk art shop to find no FBI here. So far, so good. If they come, I will take many of them with me, he thought, fishing for the key, unrolling the steel grate.

  • • •

  Two p.m. No shipper showed up.

  He called Singh, but got no answer. Probably the shipper was just running late. That was all.

  Tom sat and tried to stay calm behind the cash register, surrounded by pottery, blowguns, paintings; plundered art from poor people the world over that his mother had made a fortune selling over the years, in her chain of shops around the U.S. At his back, leering war masks, mahogany boxes carved with gods of sickness or fertility. Whole cultures for sale. History for $20. Gods and devils arrayed like candy.

  He turned on the TV, where Joe Rush was on television again, still at Columbia University, where his special unit was headquartered. The reporters never stopped going there. Like Rush was some sort of protective god.

  “How did it feel to destroy a terrorist lab?” the journalist asked.

  Everything had changed because of Rush. Only days ago there were thousands of insects awaiting transport from Brazil. Total ignorance in Washington. And then, because of Rush, one of those flukes happened upon which history can turn, as Hobart used to say. The Spanish Armada runs into a storm and thus ends an empire. The chauffeur driving Austrian Archduke Ferdinand makes a wrong turn, backs up to change direction, and stops in front of an assassin. World War One begins as a result.

  And now the accidental discovery of a lab in the jungle threatened Tom’s plan.

  Singh the shipper was ninety minutes late.

  Tom told himself that in New York, everything runs late even normally. The Verizon repairman doesn’t show up. The subway halts between stops. The Governor of New Jersey shuts down the George Washington Bridge to take vengeance on a rival. Tom looked up to see taunting news footage from the Amazon, another sickening replay showing the martyrs in New Extrema, bodies in the jungle, because of Rush.

  I’d like to just go up to 116th Street and wait for him to come out onto Broadway and kill him, he thought as his cellular rang and his heart leaped with hope that it would be Singh. But caller ID told him it was only Rebeca, trying to reach him for the second time in an hour.

  He didn’t answer.

  The reporter on TV asked Rush, “How did it feel to kill the terrorists?”

  I knew those men. I prayed with them. I ate with them and recited poetry with them.

  And then suddenly a voice called out, “Hello?” almost at the same time that the front buzzer sounded. A customer? Tom spun to see a stranger advancing into the shop. He realized with a sinking feeling that he’d seen the man twice over the last hour, passing outside, once going east, once west.

  “You’re in trouble, sir,” the man said, as his hand disappeared behind his back.

  • • •

  Tom
slid open the drawer behind the counter, hidden from the man’s sight. Inside lay a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol.

  “Trouble?” he asked as the man’s hand came back into view.

  The ID said NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. The man was slim, fit, young, clean-cut, like a gym rat or undercover agent. Military haircut. Shiny black shoes. Lightweight khaki jeans below a neat, tennis-style olive drab shirt. The clipboard meant nothing. The guy could be wired up. The soldiers could be outside, out back, on the roof.

  “You’re the only shop open on this block,” the man said, seemingly more as an observation than accusation.

  Tom shrugged good-naturedly. His Sig Sauer lay six inches from his hand. “Gotta make money.”

  “Not a lot of customers out.”

  “Tell me about it,” Tom groaned.

  The astringent smell of DEET rolled off the man. You needed to apply the repellent every eight hours for it to work. It blocked mosquito taste and smell receptors, confused insects, caused them to fly away, not feed.

  “Been in this location long?” The brown eyes flicked to a batch of blowguns jutting from a tall vase in a corner. They’d been stocked with insects a month ago, when the last shipment arrived.

  Tom’s heart seemed to be beating louder than the man’s voice. It’s an adrenaline problem, not a fear problem. Maybe he’s really who he says he is.

  Tom replied, “We leased the property twenty-five years ago. The neighborhood was worse then, rent low. Then it went sky-high. But we’re locked in for another year.”

  “Did you know that you left a flowerpot in the alley out back, collecting rainwater? Mosquitoes can breed there. Surely you’ve seen our advisories about that.”

  Tom felt air come back into the world. His hand moved back an inch in the drawer. “Sorry. I’ll empty it right away. Thanks,” Tom said.

  “That’s not all. Your rain gutters are full of leaves. Standing water, sir! You must have seen the notices!”

  “I’ll clean them right away,” Tom said.

  The man eyed him distastefully. Are you making fun of me? He looked annoyed, but that was good. If he was federal, annoyed wouldn’t be his telegraphed emotion. Tom watched the guy’s hands. He was not wearing an earbud. The man glanced outside, but the street looked empty.

  Why isn’t he writing a citation?

  The inspector, if that’s what he really was, began wandering around the shop, peering at displays. His right hand scratched his lower back, and came back, again empty. Tom knew the trick. Do it twice and the quarry relaxes. The third time, bring out the gun.

  “Venezuela, huh?” The guy held up a wooden death mask, to be worn at an Amazon funeral. A leering face.

  “Orinoco River area,” Tom said.

  “Go down there a lot? To Venezuela?”

  Tom nodded. “On buying trips.” He tried to sound casual. “I guess I’m lucky. I had a supply of malarial medicines already because I take them when I go south.”

  The man put back the mask and drifted to a large clay urn containing blowguns from Rondônia. The man raised a blowgun and peered inside. He sniffed it. Tom felt the steel of the Sig brush his fingers, in the drawer.

  “Ever shoot one of these?” the guy asked.

  “No.”

  “Go to Brazil a lot?” the inspector asked casually.

  “Beautiful country.” Tom nodded. “Hot.”

  “Do Indians really use these things? Still?”

  “They shoot darts coated with curare, anesthesia, which they extract from a fish. Get hit with one of those darts, it’d paralyze you,” Tom replied.

  “A fish?” the guy said, looking surprised, and suddenly innocent. “No kidding.”

  “All kinds of natural poisons down there,” Tom said. “Touch a certain frog, you stop breathing. Touch a caterpillar, your heart stops minutes later. Osmosis.”

  “Lots of malaria there, too,” the guy said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Ever get it? Malaria?”

  The man moved closer, and laid his clipboard on a shelf. Was he freeing up his hands? His eyes flicked outside, to the street. Microphones were so small now that they could be in a shirt button. Hell, a camera could be in a button. There was no way to know if the guy was alone.

  “I got the symptoms once,” Tom said, which was true. He’d been on that island learning how to keep the insects alive, feed them, pack larvae. He’d instructed the guards on what artwork to buy from Indians. Not baskets. They were too permeable. Ceramics. Anything with hard surfaces and space inside.

  Tom said, rubbing his intestines, “I got the stomach pain. Joint pain. But I never got really sick.” He shrugged. “I had the blood test but the doctors found no parasites. Probably I just had a cold.”

  The guy put down the blowgun. Then his eyes went up to the TV, muted now, still showing Joe Rush and the Asian guy, Nakamura. Watching them, the inspector oozed hope.

  “I remember those two on the news last year, when they ended the outbreak in Washington,” the inspector said.

  “Real American heroes,” Tom said.

  Suddenly the man slumped. “I just hope someone figures this thing out. I mean, all us inspectors got antimalarial medicine at the department. But my mom and sisters don’t have any. So I shared with them. There’s not enough for all of us.”

  Tom realized that there were no microphones here. No agents. This man was who he said he was.

  The guy sagged against a table holding cheap wooden boxes from Ecuador. “Midtown South almost had a riot two days ago at a drugstore on Broadway. A rumor spread that the pharmacist was selling his supply to friends.”

  “It’s bad all over,” Tom agreed. “I say bomb those ragheads back to the Stone Age.”

  “Well, I hope you sell some merchandise today,” the inspector said. “And clean your gutters. The forecast is for rain. I’m supposed to give you a citation. But let’s just call this visit a warning, okay? I’ll be back.”

  The buzzer sounded when the man left. Tom felt the ball in his chest ease. Rush was gone on the television.

  Singh is two hours late!

  • • •

  Someone was coming around the corner. A woman. Tom saw who it was and cursed. Not now, he thought as the door opened. He had to get rid of her, but then he saw the blood on her face and his equilibrium fell away. He had no idea why she had such an effect on him. He had no problem killing strangers, but a trickle of blood on her cheek put him into a paroxysm of rage. She doesn’t even wear long clothing against bites, like everyone else. She’s dressed normally. Her coffee-colored legs poked out from beneath white tennis shorts. Her sneakers were pink. She was a child wandering across a battlefield. Why isn’t she home like everyone else?

  Now Tom saw spots of blood on her leg.

  “There was a riot in the subway,” Rebeca said.

  • • •

  “I was on my way to the citizenship test study group.”

  “Hold still while I clean out this glass, Rebeca.”

  “We’re going over Civil War history,” she said. “Abraham Lincoln against Douglas debate. Slavery.”

  “This will hurt.”

  “The subway was half empty. Then it got stuck. The lights went off and we were sitting there. At first it was okay. But in the dark a girl started shouting, ‘Something bit me!’ Everyone went nuts!”

  Tom envisioned riders screaming and banging at the windows, piling up by the door linking cars. It was the sort of thing he wanted to happen. It was what he’d prayed would happen. He just didn’t want Rebeca there when it did.

  She said, “We were trying to push into the next car, but the people there kept us out. They were afraid that if we came in, so would mosquitoes. Then the train started moving again. The light came on. You know what? It turned out to be a horsefly in there! Not even a mosqui
to. And then I got to study group and it was canceled.”

  He looked at her face and tried to control himself. Another blood stain lay directly over the black-and-blue mark, still fading, left from last week. Clearly, she guessed his thoughts.

  In a tiny voice, she tried to lie. “It wasn’t Greg.”

  He watched her eyes brim.

  “I know you know,” she said.

  Tom said nothing. Stay out of this. She took his silence for condemnation, which it was, but not of her. He thought, A big American who hurts innocent people. Who thinks he can do anything he wants all over the world. A brute who destroys weaker women and children . . .

  She said, “He’s been under pressure. He has bills to pay but he’s lost clients. He had a few drinks that night. He’s kind and generous when you get to know him.”

  “It’s none of my business,” he said.

  “He supports kids in Haiti, sends checks every month.”

  What Tom should have said—he knew—was nothing. What he heard himself say was, “Rebeca, you’re smart and pretty. You’re kind. You could be with a thousand guys who would treat you better.”

  She clearly appreciated it, but shook her head, defending Greg. “You don’t understand. When I met him I was a cleaning girl at his office. I’d been in the U.S. for two months. I lived with six girls in a tenement. I slept in a bathtub. He talked to me. He was the only one who was nice. It was a long time before we were together. He only changed recently.”

  Because he liked you better when you had no money and slept in a bathtub. He wants to feel big, and if you achieve things he feels small. That’s who they are.

  “He stuck with me during my bad time, and now I have to stick with him in his,” she insisted, chin up, eyes down.

  “Yeah, I see that,” he said, looking out the window, watching for the damn delivery truck, but suspecting now that it was not going to come today. It had been delayed. Or stopped by the FBI.

  Rebeca was saying, as if from far off, “Sometimes I think he is irritated when I talk to you. He acts like you’re a threat to him, and I tell him you’re just the friendly guy across the hall.”