Vector

by James Abel

  “All right. What did you see?”

  “Well, you know that story you told me about terrorists taking over that camp, during a riot, months ago?”

  Kyle Utley had told us that. “Yes.”

  “Well, the story I saw was that the riot had nothing to do with terrorists. It had to do with food.”

  “Food?” Stuart and Eddie repeated at the same time.

  “Donated food. From America. The bloggers said that America was trying to poison refugees.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Stuart burst out. He had many contacts in the humanitarian field, and Wilderness Medicine often worked with NGOs in refugee camps.

  “I’m just saying!” she said. “They said refugees died from eating food from America. That they ate canned hot dog chili sauce and got botulism! That’s what triggered the riot. The poisoning was covered up.”

  “There was nothing about botulism in the reports from the State Department on the riot?”

  “They blamed terrorists.”

  I asked, “Did you find any material supporting the blogs? Camp officials? Press reports? Anything?”

  Doubtfully, she said, “No. But remember, I’m frozen out of official stuff now, so how could I check? I saw photos. I know they can be doctored, but I saw them. One was the man from the satellite shot. Tom Fargo. In plain sight.”

  I realized that my flight was being called to board.

  Aya said, “In the photo, he held a dead child on his lap. He was screaming. And doctors were trying to calm people. And Turkish soldiers were there, too.”

  Travelers lined up at the gate showing boarding passes. The airline agent was trying to complete the process quickly, so that the plane could leave.

  I thought, Is it possible that we got reports of poisoning, and ignored them? Well, we had reports that Osama bin Laden was dangerous for years before we took them seriously. Reports that ISIS was a menace long before we paid attention. Yes, it’s possible. But did it happen?

  Stuart made a mocking sound in his throat. “American companies don’t go around poisoning people, Aya!”

  “Maybe it wasn’t on purpose,” Aya said. “Maybe it was an accident! If it was, those jihad killers would still say it was on purpose. It’s what they do.”

  “Hot dog chili sauce? Give me a break!”

  But the kind of food was not important. Eddie and I had worked out of aid relief camps in East Africa. I remembered huge tents there filled with donated material bound for South Sudan; mounds of bicycle parts, jerry cans for fuel use, candy bars, 110-pound bags of sorghum from Kansas, baked beans, thirdhand clothing from Minneapolis, vegetable stew donated by a company in California, boxes of useful items beside boxes that had found their way there for no better reason than that they enabled donors to get a tax write-off. Expired tetracycline beside brand-new penicillin shipments. Eyeglass lens cleaner beside rice to keep people alive; battery- or solar-powered radios beside math textbooks, old bathrobes, new sweaters, last year’s stylish shoes. Anything and everything had been donated. Useless junk and valuable commodities. Canned peas from Israel. Canned beef from Ireland. Boxed soy milk from the U.S. The truth was, certain companies wrote off tens of millions in tax payments annually by donating products overseas. It was no reach to imagine that an expired or dangerous product got in there, by accident or oversight.

  Why not hot dog chili sauce in the mix?

  “I’m sure the FBI checked this out already,” Stuart said. A good-hearted fellow, it was hard for him to conceive of an aid effort harming people.

  I said, as the gate area emptied of passengers, “It can’t hurt to check. As long as we’re looking at defense contractors, why not food companies, too? See if there’s a chili maker with facilities in cities where outbreaks occurred.”

  Stuart rolled his eyes. “You’re grabbing at straws.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Aya looked triumphant. “I looked up Mideastern food. People there like spicy. That chili sauce is spicy. Maybe they put it on rice or flatbread they eat.”

  Eddie piped up, thoughtfully. “A lot of these companies are actually part of bigger conglomerates. What are you thinking, Joe? That Haines educated Fargo about big organizations? Years later, he goes after the parts?”

  “I’m just saying check, that’s all.”

  Aya looked pleased with herself, especially after I told her I was proud of her.

  “Thanks, Joe.”

  Once my plane reached ten thousand feet, the captain got on the intercom and announced that passengers could use computers. I checked on defense contractors first, as Haines had suggested, tried to match up companies with infected cities. I tried “weapons manufacturers,” “military suppliers,” “defense industry,” “military bases.” It was a flawed approach because any classified stuff wouldn’t be available on Google. But a flawed approach was the best I could do right now.

  I found nothing. Maybe one of the other people on the team is having better luck.

  Next I tried to link affected cities to a specific military branch; a base; Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.

  Nothing.

  The flight attendant asked if I wanted a drink. I accepted a vodka. I typed in, “hot dog chili sauce,” to see what came up.

  Within seconds I was looking at a dozen brands of sauce, that came in jars, cans, even squeeze bottles. Up swam ads for sauce. And ratings in a national culinary magazine. Sauces had names like Uncle Ed’s and Terrific Value and Rochester’s Best. Sauce makers were spread across the country, from northern California to Texas, Wisconsin, New Jersey.

  I tried to match a manufacturer to all the infected cities.

  Nothing.

  Well, good try, I thought.

  I finished my drink, and the flight attendant was back with a lunch menu. I wasn’t hungry. Back at the keyboard, I dropped the city names and just called up chili makers, to read about them. Eddie had been right. Uncle Ed’s was a subsidiary of a larger Kansas City company called Great Foods International. Rochester’s Best had been bought, four years ago, by Fresh Unity Food and Beverage. Terrific Value, available in big-box stores, was owned by a French conglomerate based in Paris. Small companies had been consumed, so to speak, by bigger ones.

  Okay, then, try to match the conglomerates with cities that have been infected.

  It’s funny sometimes, because you can spend weeks on a problem, frustrated, trying to figure the answer. The problem seems like it will beat you. You don’t sleep. You can’t stop running over possibilities. You grope in the dark and tell yourself to give up. And then suddenly something, a person, a sentence, a photo, changes everything as if a floodlight has come on.

  A small ping told me that Aya was trying to reach me. I could see the first words of her message in capital letters. “I FOUND.” This time I went to her message right away. She and I had hit the same point simultaneously.

  “Fresh Unity Food and Beverage is one of the eight largest manufacturers and distributors of processed food products in the U.S., behind Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Kraft, and Smithfield, with sales topping $19 billion last year.”

  She’d forwarded a Forbes magazine article.

  “Fresh Unity grew from a small Arkansas poultry processing company in 1906, founded by the George Riverside family, which still controls a majority of stock. Fresh Unity’s mission statement, taken seriously by ‘employees who want to rise,’ CEO George Riverside IV has said, ‘is to give back to the world as much as we take.’

  “Fresh Unity is now headquartered in New York and annually donates an immense tonnage of food to trouble spots and needy people around the world.”

  I realized that the vibration that I had taken for the throb of engines was the accelerated beating of my heart. The flight attendant was passing with lunch. Aya had forwarded the “subsidiaries” list.

  It took a f
ew minutes of crisscrossing, but we found the connections together, on the online annual report, and they stunned me.

  “Aya, Fresh Unity’s chili sauce is manufactured in Pittsburgh, with beef processed in Memphis. The trucking company that transports the sauce is based in Philadelphia. The airport for mercy flights is Newark. Corporate headquarters, New York City.”

  Which links every infected city. Five out of five. That’s a 100 percent correlation.

  Reading, I felt my lips form the names of other cities in which the conglomerate owned businesses. “Galveston for fish processing. Saint Louis for beer. Soft drinks in Columbia, South Carolina. Pork from northern Florida. Processed chicken from Little Rock, Arkansas.”

  At least five cities here are within easy driving distance of Memphis, in all directions from it.

  As I read, my mind wandered to those immense supply tents that Eddie and I had seen in northern Kenya, and the chartered planes landing on that aid base daily to disgorge tons of supplies. Most were donated by public-spirited organizations. But some came from cynically minded people or groups taking advantage of tax write-off laws. It was not hard to conceive of someone in a company, or a policy itself, sending expired or unsalable food on a supply plane, instead of into the trash.

  I stared down at the map of company locations that Aya had forwarded. Tom Fargo could be in any of those cities. Or getting close to one.

  “This is it! Yayyyyyy!!!!!!!” Aya typed giddily.

  I agreed. It looked logical, hopefully solid.

  We were wrong, though. Quite wrong.

  THIRTY

  Half the streets seemed to have the same name in this ridiculous city. Tom Fargo drove along commercial Peachtree Street, passing Peachtree Lane, Peachtree shopping center, Peachtree apartments, and a Peachtree hotel. The least imaginative person on the planet must have come up with these names.

  From the highway, at dawn, Atlanta had loomed in the distance, its downtown towers jutting up, sparkling as the storm cleared. There was nothing gradual about the change from country to city. Not like up north. There, rural became suburb and suburb gritty outlying city. Roofs got higher, colors browner. Atlanta sprouted all at once, a mirage: Bank of America building, One Atlantic Center, Marriot Marquis Building.

  Oz of the Southeast. It seemed to epitomize all the brash overconfidence of the nation.

  Tom Fargo steered down Ponce de Leon Drive, made a right on Ponce de Leon Street near a Krispy Kreme shop, and entered suburban Druid Hills, near Emory University. After the escapes of the night he felt as if he floated forward in a capsule of inevitability. He was almost serene. The homes were quiet and well kept, the styles reflecting more lack of imagination; faux antebellum beside McMansion or Greek Revival. Lawns were extensive. The air smelled of magnolia and dogwood, knotty southern oaks, and the few old surviving pines that may have avoided Sherman’s fire.

  He smiled when he saw clouds of gnats flitting in morning mist. Good! Either insecticides sprayed here had lost potency, Atlantans did not think themselves in danger, or the pesticide supply was, as in other cities, used up.

  Airbnb, the terrorist’s best friend.

  The house he’d rented with the Seth Pryce credit card—bills sent to a Brooklyn PO box—looked out of place even in the patchwork neighborhood. Architect’s dream home, the ad had read. Set between a fake Cape Cod and mini-Tudor, the three-story tower looked like boxes piled atop one another, with a sharply slanted roof slathered with solar panels. The skinny tower reminded him of a rook in a chess set. There was a single aquarium-sized porthole-style window set into the cinder block front. He saw a circular metal staircase through the window, as if in a lighthouse. Lush flower beds surrounded the attached two-car garage, sitting there like a motorcycle sidecar.

  Three bedrooms. Quiet. Private. No smokers allowed.

  Between the heated lap pool in back and screened-in porch, he found the rock garden and “Druid cairn,” three flat stones atop one another. He’d arranged for the key and garage access to be beneath the top one. He’d paid for four nights and a stocked refrigerator. Inside, a note in feminine script—Eat hearty, friend!—along with foods he had requested: store-brand hummus, bread, deli turkey, olives, eggs, and milk. The air was cold and the house smelled of air freshener. Oregon Forest. There was a wide-screen TV and blowup photos of a family, dad, mom, and kids, touring ruins. The Parthenon. The Sphinx. A site in northern Syria he recognized, as Tom had helped dynamite that particular Roman temple. The family played Frisbee at Peru’s Machu Picchu. They were probably, at the moment, gamboling through ruins somewhere else.

  I’ll stay inside until tomorrow.

  Tom felt his tension draining into exhaustion. Check the mosquitoes. They looked sluggish. He’d fed them before leaving, and they were supposed to easily survive a couple of days without food. But he didn’t like the way they sat there. He got the last container to a top-floor master bathroom, set it on the granite sink, replaced the plastic cover with Parafilm and got out the blood meals. He didn’t want to feed the mosquitoes too much, as he needed them hungry. A dozen insects flew up and attached themselves to the film.

  Then he fed himself and sipped hot, sweet mint tea.

  He took a shower, prayed, and unloaded the car, inside the closed garage: suitcase, weapons, golf bag.

  Finally, he stretched out on the master bed.

  He would stay here, invisible, all day and night, until tomorrow morning.

  I can leave once I release the vectors, but this time I want to watch. I waited for this. Then I can get back to Brazil. Maybe Cardozo has made a new batch by now.

  He dreamed of Tol-e-Khomri as the sun rose, full and hot. Neighbors mowed lawns. Children passed on bikes, outside the porthole. Tom began to sweat and moan.

  • • •

  The bombardment signaled that the main attack would begin soon. Mortar rounds travel slower than sound, and the high-pitched whistle was caused by air rushing over the fins. The melon field began splitting apart. The fighters crouched in the ravine by the village shoved cotton in their ears. Animal parts—a sheep, a donkey—flew into the air and into the village well, which crumbled, the stone sides falling in.

  “Get your families out,” the commander ordered his men. “In the refugee camp they will be safe.”

  Tom’s brother fighters took turns hustling their loved ones away from the line, a mile back, to the Roman-era road that led north to the border. The land was arid here in a way that surpassed Colorado, with rugged mountains and wadis in the distance, but the angles were soft, blunted by time. Limestone outcrops protruded as if they were the calcified skull of the planet, worn smooth by rain, sandals, donkey hooves. He’d found an old Roman winepress once, a museum-quality wheel made of raw stone. His sneakers crunched over clay splinters from pottery fashioned a thousand years ago. A few weeks back the fighters had seen a lone sheep charging them but at wolf speed, which was impossible. Then they’d heard small boys laughing. The boys had tied a sheepskin over a dog as a joke. It had been funny.

  Now Tom told his wife, Sakina, as they reached the road, “I will come and get you after the fighting is over.”

  Sakina clutched their infant son, Ayman, to her breast.

  That this far-off place felt like home was a miracle. He’d not previously known that such a powerful sense of belonging could exist. It had certainly not existed in the U.S. He’d expected to find prayer and austerity here as he made his way overseas, following website instructions for incoming foreign fighters. He’d gotten what he expected. But he had not expected poetry readings, too, and fellowship. The sports events and arranged marriage. Or that on his wedding day, he would learn that Sakina had chosen him, not the other way around. She’d seen him from her house. I want him, she had told her dad, his commander, fifty-year-old Mohammed al Ricki, who wept with emotion at invocations, or while singing a cappella jihadist religious hymns, as the
use of instruments was illegal. Mohammed was called He Who Weeps. But he did not weep when they fought.

  Life here when there was no fighting was affectionate and playful. There was basketball and storytelling. Tom felt lucky because in other villages the commanders were brutal in the treatment of women. They encouraged rape; captive teenage girls married by Imams temporarily, so they could have sex with fighters under Sharia law. Birth control mandatory. Girls locked up all day, used at night.

  But Tom had come for justice, not sex. He’d made that plain when he volunteered to fight. He’d been questioned by three men . . . one from London . . . before being sent to this unit, which had a high percentage of foreign fighters. In photos released by the Caliphate on the Internet they looked terrifying in black balaclavas, raising their AK-47s into the air. But with balaclavas off they became individuals: fat Mahmoud al-Hamsi from Saudi Arabia, complaining about toenail fungus and telling his dreams each day; Amin Saedi, a Belgian nineteen-year-old butterfly collector, who carried a tooth-cleaning twig called a miswak, and wore nonalcoholic perfume; Abdel Regeni, the skinny philosophy professor from Macedonia, half blind in his left eye, who favored Pakistani gowns and flak jackets; Martin Blake, from Toronto, an ex–drug user convict who had gotten religion in prison, and boomed out Ahlam al-Nasr’s poetry at night.

  “Shake the throne of the cross,” he’d recite. “Extinguish the fire of the Zoroastrians. Strike down every adversity, and go reap those heads!”

  Now lines of civilians and disguised fighters headed north on the blasted-up highway, on foot, on a donkey, on a white horse. A parade of vehicles sent up steady exhaust.

  The Americans and their paid allies were coming. Tom had refused to fight Americans when he volunteered. “I’ll fight anyone else,” he had said. “If you don’t like that, I’ll leave. I came here for God. Not to kill Americans.”

  Up until today, he’d not hurt them.

  Tom watched his wife and baby climb into the dump truck. Normally it conveyed militia, but today all he saw were head scarves and frightened female faces. He had not conceived, when his marriage was arranged, that he would find love here. It had not occurred to him that his trip would bring him home.