Vector

by James Abel

  Eddie said, “The hospital. And probably ten more tax forms to fill out. But maybe we’ll get lucky on the photo. I gotta tell you. This quiet. I hate it. Something more is coming very soon.”

  “I’ll check out that art shop,” said Izabel. “In the morning.”

  “I’m going to go back to the office,” said Eddie.

  “I’ll walk you home,” I told Izabel, and over my shoulder, as we left, saw Eddie’s approving smile.

  • • •

  Aya’s call came after midnight, jerking me out of one of the deepest sleeps I’d had in months. Izabel was up instantly, the moonlight on her sculpted shoulders, the sheet crumpled by her narrow waist.

  I saw the incoming number and shook my head with irritation and also admiration. The kid was perfect for our unit. She worked tirelessly and she stayed on problems long after others would have given up. She even had the evasiveness down, an instinctual feel for how to ignore instructions. It was hard to get mad at this, since half the time I did the same thing, I thought.

  “I did exactly what you said,” she started out, a clear indication that she had not, or she’d not bring it up.

  “Aya, do you know what time it is?”

  “Of course! But I need to tell you something! See, you told me not to call anyone and technically, I didn’t.”

  I sighed. Everyone I talked to seemed to be throwing the word around today. Technically.

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  “Well, me, Aya Vekey, I can’t make phone calls because you ordered me not to. Aya would never make a call. But Megan Luchs can.”

  “And who is Megan Luchs?” I asked. Izabel got out of bed and, mouth dry, I watched her sway toward the bathroom, and the light go on. The room smelled of musk and sweat, bedding and perfume.

  “Megan Luchs is a customer looking to buy Brazilian art for her mom’s new house. Her mom loves folk art.”

  “She’s you, in other words.”

  “Technically, you told me that I can’t call.”

  “Aya, just tell me what you did.”

  “Well! Megan called the shop in Brooklyn but kept getting a machine, so instead of leaving a message, she looked up the chain headquarters. Remember I said there were stores in different cities? There’s a website!”

  “So Megan looked up the chain.”

  “And it turns out that it was founded by an old woman: she’s like maybe fifty, her name is Johanna Fargo, and she lives in Denver. And there was a number on the website for headquarters. It’s there, too.”

  “Which Megan called.”

  “And I was surprised because Ms. Fargo herself answered! She was very nice and asked me, uh, she asked Megan questions about high school and what she likes to do, hobbies, what college Megan plans . . .”

  “Get to the point,” I said as the bathroom door opened and Izabel came back to bed. The moon gleamed on the muscles of her abdomen, the small breasts, the hollow in her throat, her small white teeth. She cocked her head. What’s up? Being with her here was not like sleeping with a wife, or a girlfriend. What we had was raw and exhausted, friendship and solace amid confusion, a few moments of forgetfulness grabbed when we were too tired to work anymore, in the middle of too short a night.

  Aya said, “Ms. Fargo said she knew who ran the Brooklyn shop, because it is her son Tom!”

  “Her son is Tom Fargo.”

  “She’s proud of Tom. She said he was away for three years, helping people overseas in the Peace Corps. And recently, he came back.”

  I started to feel a tingling in the back of my neck.

  “She said that Tom backpacked around in South America after that, but finally came home and took up her invitation to run a shop. She said he used to help her in the first shop, when he was a boy. So he knows the business. She said that the Brooklyn shop is probably closed during the emergency, but Tom is in New York because she just talked to him the other day.”

  “She spoke to him on the phone . . .”

  “His cell phone.”

  “Did you get the number?”

  “I didn’t ask, Joe. Sorry.”

  I sighed.

  Aya said, coyly, undoubtedly grinning at me in triumph, “But Megan got the number. And the address where the bills go, a private mail service.”

  “Damnit!”

  “I didn’t call the number, but I did look up the name Tom Fargo in New York, and guess what? I found three who have driver’s licenses. One is eighteen and the others are in their sixties. So it’s not him. Then I looked up property owners and found four, but one was a woman, Tomasina, and one was ninety, and the other two were the ones with driver’s licenses. Same in voting rolls. Not him. No other Tom Fargo paying electric or water bills. The New York City income tax people were so nasty and wouldn’t talk to me when I called! The lady said I sounded like a kid and was it a phony phone call!”

  “Imagine that.”

  “It’s not funny. How come this person has no records in New York?”

  “Did you or did Megan check the Peace Corps?”

  “Yes,” she said triumphantly. “Only one Tom Fargo was in the Peace Corps in the last four years, anywhere, and he came from Mobile, Alabama, and is sixty-one years old, a retired nurse. I was going to wait to tell you tomorrow. But what if it’s important?”

  “You did right. Aya, do you ever sleep?”

  She giggled. “I’m sixteen,” she said. “Not ancient like you. I don’t need that much sleep.”

  On the night table lay the photo that Kyle Utley had left with us. Of the bearded jihadist raising his fist at the sky.

  Aya gave me Tom Fargo’s cell phone number. By now Izabel was back in bed. She lay her hand on my thigh and snuggled close the way animals in the wild will sleep together. I had my arm beneath her neck, a human pillow. Her warmth made me drowsy. I held the slip of paper with the number in moonlight. The AC was on, the window down against insects. It was hot outside. By now, days after the initial spraying, any mosquitoes recently hatched would be out in the park.

  “He lied about the Peace Corps,” she said.

  “He has no address we can find?”

  “Nothing in New York. No phone bills. Or any bills. No address or voting registration or city ID. I’ll keep poking around.”

  I punched in the number for Ray Havlicek, and, at 1 A.M., got a voice message. I tried his assistant and got the same thing. I left detailed messages for them both. I thought a moment and then found the business card for Detective Jamal al-Azawi, our driver, and called his scrawled home number. He picked up after the second ring.

  “The commissioner told you to render every assistance?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” said the rapidly wakening voice.

  “Does that include tracking a phone number?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Can your guys tell me where a particular phone is at any given moment?”

  “That’s tech stuff, sir. I think it depends on the phone. New phones are harder. But I got guys I can call.”

  I gave Jamal the number, and he said he’d wake people up. No problem. Happy to help.

  There was nothing else to do until morning. Then I’d have Jamal drive us out to the Brooklyn folk art shop. But morning was hours away. Jamal was a good cop and I liked him. The locals seemed more cooperative than Ray Havlicek, or perhaps they were just more desperate. Maybe, I thought, dozing off, we’d get lucky. Maybe an answer would come from the conjunction of a visit from a burdened D.C. bureaucrat and a phone call from a teenage girl. My eyes began to close. My breathing was becoming more regular. Izabel Santo’s smooth muscled leg twitched and moved on top of mine as she slumbered. Maybe she was chasing a suspect in a dream. Maybe she was running for her life.

  What I suspected was that, at that moment, in Washington, men and women were getting ready t
o give a group of murderers whatever it was that they wanted, whatever goal they had been killing to get.

  TWENTY

  The driver carrying the shipment from Brazil was an Irish-born immigrant without papers named Sean Cross, a twenty-year-old high school graduate from Cork, who dreamed of someday being a doctor. He’d taken a vacation in the United States, fallen in love with a poet named Julia who he met in Washington Square, and stayed on for a year to woo her, and then another year, after she left. He was a bad driver, paid cash off the books, and was thinking, as he narrowly missed hitting a parked car in Park Slope, that he probably should not have come to work today, because his hangover was bad.

  He was certainly not thinking about his high school health class until he spotted the fat gray rat dragging a half-eaten pizza slice across 6th Avenue ahead, backing the meal toward an open sewer grate.

  “Fucking ugly rat!”

  He swerved violently to try to hit it. In back, as a result, a box in which Amazonian pottery was packed slid three inches to the right on a wobbling pile and almost toppled. Sean hated rats. Several lived in the walls in his East Harlem tenement. They were dirty and disgusting and they carried disease. Watching the pizza slice flop into the sewer in the side mirror, he recalled the voice of his old high school public-health-class teacher in Ireland. He had no idea that the process the voice was describing was—at that instant—happening in the back of Sean’s truck.

  “During the Middle Ages, a few tiny mutations in a bacteria,” said the voice, “killed two hundred million people, sixty percent of Europe. The equivalent number today would top a billion.”

  Sean saw in his head the map of the ancient world that his teacher, Mr. Colgan, had unrolled over the blackboard.

  “The year 1347,” Colgan said in his smoker’s rasp.

  At the bottom of the map, a dotted line extended over land from China to Turkey, and with a sketch of a wind-driven merchant sailing vessel below, another dotted line showing the sea route from Constantinople through the Bosporus, and Black Sea, and into the Mediterranean.

  “The rats on board carried fleas. And in the gut of those fleas lived a bacteria called Yersinia pestis.

  “If the fleas bit a sailor, the man became infected,” Colgan said. “Within days, victims sprouted buboes the size of peaches in their groins and armpits. Then came high fever and violent vomiting of black blood. Terrified mariners named the disease Black Death.

  “When the ship reached Genoa, the rats left, and with them, the fleas,” Mr. Colgan added in the hushed voice of a good Irish storyteller.

  “Within hours of docking, probably a merchant was bitten by a flea near the waterfront. Peasants in a quayside market were bitten; maybe the woman who sold fresh fish, or a cook buying supplies for a count’s dinner; a gypsy fortune-teller, a passing knight, at an inn that the rats invaded,” Mr. Colgan said.

  “A quarter of those infected began to die.”

  On the map, the dots left Genoa and, like rats, branched out across Europe. More dots went east.

  “In 1348, the disease reached Pisa, Italy. A year later, Marseille, Spain, Portugal. Germany by 1349. Russia in 1351,” Colgan said. “And then it got worse, because our little friend Y. pestis changed. And so did the flea.”

  “How?” Sean asked, from the front row.

  “Ah! A few tiny changes over time reconstituted the bacteria. Almost invisible alterations, so small you needed an electron microscope to get any idea that it was there at all. It’s funny. Ten million years can go by while something alters. But then one day the effect happens, and a year later thousands are dead!”

  “Tell us the change!”

  “Imagine the male flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, so fragile looking that it seems translucent when magnified. The microscope light shines through! And then, a few alterations and a common bug that lives in your gut morphs into one of the biggest mass murderers in history.”

  Sean looked at the GPS on his dashboard. He was now only one mile from the drop-off point, a folk art shop. Someone named Tom was supposed to meet him there.

  Mr. Colgan had been the one who inspired Sean—before he got distracted by love—to want to become a doctor. The ex-Jesuit spent summers volunteering in a TB ward in Manila before becoming a teacher. He kept the students on the edge of their seats with his tales. He’d said, “It was only in 2014 that Poinar discovered original plague bacteria in a twenty-million-year-old flea, trapped in amber. That ancestor of pestis is named Y. pseudotuberculosis, still around today. Catch it and you suffer thirty minutes of diarrhea, nothing worse. Pestis, on the other hand, kills in sixty hours.”

  “What changed pseudo into pestis?” Sean had asked.

  “Three small changes created a plague! One. Pseudotuberculosis in its original form killed fleas! Yes! Fleas could not carry it! So our first change was the elimination of a single protein, called urease, that kept fleas from carrying plague. A small genetic mutation stopped pestis from making that protein. With the protein gone, fleas became vectors. They could now carry the bacteria.”

  “And the second change?” Sean had asked.

  “Again a tiny mutation, this time to a gene that encodes a protein that dissolves blood clots. The gene is called pla.”

  “Pla? What do blood clots have to do with it?”

  “Before the change, even if a flea bit a human, even if it transmitted the bacteria, the body would clot blood by that bite, to stop the bleeding. This clotting trapped the bacteria, kept it from spreading. So although the flea carried disease, it could not damage a new host.”

  “The mutation stopped the clotting,” Sean guessed.

  “Good! With clotting gone, the bacteria could spread into the victim’s lymph nodes, and start multiplying. One bacteria became a hundred, a million. All a victim had to do was sneeze to pass it on.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sean had said, puzzled. “I thought you said the disease was transmitted by a bite. Now you’re saying a sneeze could transmit it?”

  “That’s the third change that happened; a last mutation changed one amino acid in pla, and made the bacterium contagious from coughing or sneezing. Much easier to transmit. The bubonic plague became the pneumatic plague, more virulent, ninety to one hundred percent death rate, fevers, headaches, pneumonia. Spread by aerosolized particles, it devastated a quarter of the world’s population.”

  Sean shuddered, remembering the rat he’d seen a few minutes ago, and he wondered whether the process that had been horrifyingly described to his class back in Cork could ever happen again. No, he reasoned. It couldn’t. Because in the modern world there was better medicine, equipment, and preparation, so something as small as the mutation of a single protein could not do the kind of massive damage that his old science teacher had riveted the class with, on a foggy day, years back, when the teacher told the tale.

  Sean had no idea that the opposite had occurred twelve feet behind where he was sitting. No idea that there were insects packed inside the cargo carried in his truck. No idea—as he brought the truck to a halt in front of a small folk art shop, and went to the back and caught sight of a box teetering on top of the pile—that inside it was something that could wipe out a quarter of the human population on earth, if it got out.

  Sean got into the truck fast, and stabilized the box.

  Inside were thousands of female anopheles mosquitoes and larvae that carried virulent malaria, the original kind that could be transmitted by the bite of a mosquito only.

  But one mosquito carried a genetic alteration in the malaria parasite. In her, just as in a flea/bacteria combination a thousand years ago, a tiny parasite could be transmitted by coughing, sneezing, or kissing. Even by an infected man breathing into your face on a subway, during evening rush hour.

  No mosquito necessary to transmit this variety. Which meant that the single insect carrying this new variety was capable of starting a chai
n reaction sweeping across earth. Even the men who had genetically altered the insects in the shipment were unaware of the existence of the mutated parasite inside one of them.

  The men who had created the disease that Tom Fargo was spreading had thought they could control it. But if the new variety got out, no one could control the spread.

  Like the pneumatic plague, this was aerosolized.

  Sean remembered the closing words of his biology teacher, as he watched the door to the Nizhoni Yee shop open, and the man who ran the shop come out, happy to see his shipment from the airport finally here.

  “Mutation is, by definition, always a surprise.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  We were stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, on our way to the art shop, crammed in the middle of a honking mass of delivery trucks, taxis, and autos. Nothing moving. Progress stopped dead.

  “There’s some kind of demonstration on the Brooklyn side,” our detective driver Jamal informed us. “Community groups claim that Manhattan got all the spray and medicine. That no one cares about them.”

  “That’s ridiculous! Spray supply just ran out!”

  Jamal shrugged. “To me, this traffic is normal.” He put on the siren. It helped us move two feet ahead.

  “This is normal?” Izabel shook her head. “I would not want to live in this insane place.”

  She held in her hand a fax from Brazil. The artist’s sketch of the man who had visited the jungle island.

  The day was broiling, and with no fresh attacks, some New Yorkers were going back to work. Some shops and offices were reopening. Wall Street brokers were back at the nexus of world finance, at our backs. Airports open. And a few more supermarkets.

  “How far to the shop, Jamal?”