Vector

by James Abel

  Tom drove his first shot straight and true, almost three hundred yards.

  “I knew it!” cried Jerry happily. “How about a little wager?”

  Three and a half hours later, on the eighteenth hole, he pretended to poke around in the dense juniper and bushy cleyera trees for a lost ball. He emptied the last container of nine hundred mosquitoes in a little standing pool of water, emerged from the trees, took a one-stroke penalty, and hit his next shot onto the fringe of the green.

  “Nice shot, Seth!”

  “Guess I’m just lucky today,” he said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Eddie started to shiver in the car. Malaria parasites can hide out in the liver, go dormant, and even after medical treatment sneak back into the blood years later. Until then, the patient thinks he’s beaten the illness. As Stuart drove us back toward LaGuardia Airport, to make an Atlanta flight, I saw Eddie’s clenched fists. He was fighting the fever, willing it away.

  “I’ll go alone,” I said. “Get to the hospital.”

  Eddie shook his head. “No.”

  “Eddie, I’m just going down for a few hours. It’s probably unrelated. A double check.”

  “I’ve had fevers before.”

  “Not like this. And you know it.”

  We reached the Delta terminal, and I climbed out and looked back at Stuart, who spoke to Eddie as if to a child. “Neither of you will get any work done if you’re sick on the plane. Check in with Joe from the hospital.”

  “Shit.” Eddie looked yellowish.

  In the air, I tried to keep my mind off Eddie and on the report on Tol-e-Khomri. It was thick, thorough, and made no mention of infected food. But reports are distilled observation. Even the best ones discard facts. Good reporters choose the right facts to eliminate. Mistakes happen if wrong ones get left out.

  “We conclude that at least a dozen jihadists hid amid refugees with the goal of creating havoc in the camp. No evidence points to company culpability or infected food.” Signed: Bob Welch and Christine Mahin.

  Back at Fresh Unity, as George Riverside sternly grilled Welch, I’d wondered if it was an act.

  “Is there anything you’re not telling us?” Riverside demanded.

  “Absolutely not, sir.”

  “If there is, you’ve got five minutes of amnesty. Onetime offer. If our product made people sick, even accidentally, even a possibility, I want to know.”

  “Sir, we shipped over four thousand cans and only thirty people got sick. There were no expired cans in the warehouse. No way to check one hundred percent because any food residue burned. What can I say? It’s impossible to reconstruct totally. Christine assured me, no link.”

  “Don’t let her know that Dr. Rush is coming.”

  “I promise. I won’t.”

  “Bob’s reliable,” Riverside assured us, after the man left. “The sweating? He picked up a bug a few years ago in Uzbekistan. Wreaks havoc with body temperature. He sweats all the time. He’s honest, that Bob.”

  Is he? I thought. Are you?

  • • •

  Stuart reported by e-mail that Eddie was vomiting by the time he checked into Columbia-Presbyterian. He was in the malaria ward. His relapse meant that this new malaria might be tougher than originally thought.

  Then Stuart’s news got worse. “There’s breaking news about Kyle Utley. A problem in Washington.”

  I turned on seat-back NBC, to see the correspondent who I’d ditched in New York. Washington whistle-blower accuses Administration of dealing with terrorists. With the reporter was Kyle Utley, in the studio, in suit and tie, looking unhappy. I’d liked the man, and was surprised at my anger at the word whistle-blower. After all, I was a whistle-blower, too. I’d released news about Tom Fargo to the world.

  Joe Rush, hypocrite. Go figure, I thought.

  NBC: You personally received a threat from Tom Fargo?

  UTLEY: Yes. Then he called my wife and made a second threat.

  NBC: The FBI knows this, you say?

  UTLEY: I told them immediately.

  NBC: And now you allege that the White House’s diversion of military funding was a capitulation to jihadists?

  UTLEY: That’s what they demanded.

  The reporter looked triumphant.

  NBC: But just to be straight, you have no proof that the diversion wasn’t planned anyway, as the White House insists. You say jihadists played the White House for fools, since attacks are still going on. They allege that you’re lying because you are about to be fired.

  Stuart e-mailed me as I watched Utley flailing around before cameras. The message read, “Havlicek is at Congress, to testify. The investigation’s stalled. I can’t get through to anyone. You’re on your own, Joe.”

  • • •

  Atlanta is one of the twenty worst cities in the country when it comes to mosquitoes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sixty-five varieties live there. The majority are not potential malaria carriers, but larger tiger and smaller culex mosquitoes. Tigers can carry Zika virus. Culex can carry West Nile, too.

  “Welcome to Atlanta,” the flight attendant announced.

  I studied photos of mosquitoes as we taxied. Christine Mahin was on maternity leave, Bob Welch had told us. She was probably at home, eight and a half months pregnant.

  It’s my custom when traveling in a potential outbreak area to ask people there if they’ve taken precautions to reduce the chance of getting sick. I did not like what I was hearing now. The flight attendant said that she did not need malaria pills because she “stayed inside during layovers.” My seatmate had taken Lariam when the outbreak began, but his pharmacy had run out. The cab driver explained on the way to Christine’s house that since the CDC was headquartered in Atlanta, he was confident that the disease would be kept away. And besides, the pills could cause bad dreams or hallucinations. His neighbor was taking herbal remedies, not pharmaceuticals. I would have thought that with so many medical experts here, there would be more medicine, more belief. Not less.

  Add in delays from a traffic pileup and I didn’t reach Christine’s driveway for another hour. The Buckhead neighborhood, Bob Welch had said, is the Beverly Hills of the South. It was beautiful in an antiseptic way, as if a child’s plastic toy set had gotten large enough to house people. Homes looked more like showrooms. The leafy trees had a sheen that, near dusk, made them seem artificial. At 6:20 P.M. the sun had another two hours until it sank away.

  Local mosquitoes would stir soon, if they were alive, but most of the urgency I felt was for Eddie. After all, there were no facilities in Atlanta operated by Christine’s old company. I just wanted to see her expression when we talked. But the bad part of using surprise as strategy is that the surprise happens to you if you can’t locate the person who you’re looking for.

  And nobody answered the door of the adobe-colored ranch house set beside a two-story French provincial. I saw an envelope taped to the door with a name, Ted, in black. The note inside, in feminine script, read: Ted, My neighbor has the key.

  I rang the neighbor’s bell, and a slim woman yanked the door open as if she’d been watching me from her window. Freezing air-conditioning washed out. The woman seemed to be in her early forties, friendly, and I heard a TV on inside, a cartoon children’s show. Lots of shooting, beeping, and trombone music. Roadrunners falling off cliffs.

  “Are you the architect?” she asked.

  She had a tanned face, green/blue eyes, and wore a gold sweater, white slacks, and matching sandals. Her dirty blond hair was feathered. She held a Paul Theroux novel. The Mosquito Coast. The title made me want to laugh, but not in a funny way.

  She said, “Christine said to tell you to check out the bedroom closets, and leave the drawings in the kitchen.”

  I heard more music, hip-hop now, over the kids’ show. The house was a madhouse of e
lectronics. I heard children running, the tromp of socked feet, a small girl screeching in delight and a boy yelling, in a Dracula accent, “I em Mosquito! I vill BITE you!!”

  Everywhere I go in outbreak zones, children incorporate death into play. “Ring Around the Rosie” was first sung by youngsters during the great London Plague, because victims had rings around their eyes. A pocket full of posies referred to flowers that warded off disease smells. Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down had those long-ago children imagining corpses burning as they held hands and danced.

  “Christine said she and Alan won’t be back until late, from the gala. She’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Gala? What gala?” I asked, returning the smile.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Dusk.

  The hungry female mosquito rose on a column of warm air from the pond on which she’d been deposited, along with hundreds of sisters. All were capable of feeding on many mammals that lived near the golf course: raccoons, possums, dogs, or cats. But she detected something more attractive nearby—perfume—with her spearlike maxillary palp, which jutted out between her antennae.

  Normally, dragonflies and bats lived in the country club woods and ate many times their body weight in mosquitoes each day. They were efficient insect control systems, but recent pesticide spraying had wiped most of them out, along with any mosquitoes that had lived here only weeks ago.

  Now the sweet smells drew her and her sisters toward the lit-up building like metal filings pulled to a magnet. Their compound eyes had tiny lenses, ommatidia, capable of detecting movement. Propelled by sheer wings, they adjusted steering with smaller ones, called halteres.

  She detected large forms ahead, outlined by bulky movement. The odors grew stronger as she closed the distance between woods and hot pools of electric light.

  She was different than even the lab-created sisters around her. She was—in fact—the only one of her kind in the world. She carried in her proboscis a parasite representing the seed of global medical conflagration.

  All she had to do for that to happen was feed, and pass the parasite on.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “I can’t let you inside, sir. Sorry.”

  My taxi had been stopped by the gate guard at the Druid Hills Country Club. He had orders to turn away anyone lacking an invitation, and did not look sorry at all. He shrugged off my claim that I needed to talk to someone inside, and he suggested in bored tones that I contact the lady tomorrow.

  “Please call the clubhouse and check,” I asked.

  “Can’t.” The guard shook his head, meaning, won’t.

  I had no ID attaching me to any official investigation. He glanced at my Wilderness Program card by flashlight, but it meant nothing to him. He accurately gauged the extent of my frustration, because he told me in a firmer tone that if I did not turn around, he’d call the police.

  “What if I buy a ticket to the gala?”

  “Now?” The guard looked resentful.

  “It’s a fund-raiser, right?” I said. “Why not?”

  “Tickets cost a lot.” He looked me over. Was I important? His eyes flicked to the shiny parked Mercedes, BMWs, and upscale cars in the lot, as if the ticket expense would be prohibitive for me.

  “It’s for a good cause,” I said.

  He found my suggestion irritating. But he went into the guard shack—keeping the traffic bar down—and made the call. I could not hear what he was saying but had a feeling that it was not that a friendly gentleman had shown up. I had a feeling he was saying that a pest was at the gate, trying to weasel in, possibly with a bogus credit card.

  The guard looked self-satisfied when he came out.

  “All tickets were sold days ago. No more spaces, sir.”

  It’s just a few more hours, I thought, disappointed, as the cab U-turned back toward Clifton Road. I came to see her face. I asked the driver if he knew of a motel nearby. I’d return to the Mahin house tomorrow, ring the bell, and try again.

  “There’s a Comfort Inn a few miles away, sir.”

  I told him to go there, but changed my mind. “Pull over, on the grass.” On one side of Clifton Road were lit-up houses, on the other, golf fairways beyond thick brush and trees and moonlight gleaming on a chain-link fence.

  “I’ll walk to the motel,” I said.

  “It’s far.”

  “For exercise.”

  “You’ll get lost.”

  I tipped the driver and thanked him. Shaking his head . . . some people . . . he drove off as I pushed into the brush. Five minutes later I’d managed to rip my jacket on a thorn bush, and get my shoes wet in a stream. A thorn tore at my face. I felt a cut open. I gripped the fence and climbed.

  • • •

  Tom Fargo should leave, he knew, but he could not help watching. Anonymous, he gazed at the gala around him. Until now the damage he inflicted was always distant. He deposited vectors and left. Later, on TV, he watched victims from a distance. But this time he wanted more visceral satisfaction. There was a grinding sense of justice in his belly, and anticipation was a coppery taste on the roof of his mouth.

  These people killed my family.

  His name card . . . Seth Pryce . . . seated him at a periphery table, by the patio and open French doors. He’d be eating with food company executives who had flown in from out of state. He introduced himself to a bright young lawyer on his right from the legal division, and his wife, and to the woman on his left, from the Saint Louis beer division. Neither, they said, had taken antimalarials before coming. “I don’t want to risk the side effects,” the woman told him. “Besides, we’re only here for one night.”

  People were going in and out of the doors, to the patio, to talk, to smoke, to look at the view.

  A small salad sat before him, lush greens wrapped in carrot skin, topped by crushed onions, tomatoes, fresh Tuscan dressing that was the brown color of the sauce that had killed Tom’s wife.

  On the dance floor, a smiling man in a tuxedo lifted a microphone. “Welcome to our annual gala to benefit Food For All. We are here to honor the doctors and workers who risk their lives overseas to feed the hungry. And to honor YOU, our donors, without whom there would be no FFA.”

  Tom had never told Dr. Cardozo that his choice of targets was personal. This morning he’d called the gala reservations number, reached an overconfident voice, and been assured that “there’s not been a single case of malaria in Atlanta, so part of the evening will be outside if the weather holds.”

  Tom had said, “I haven’t taken any medicines,” and the voice had assured him, “Many guests are also coming from uninfected areas. Besides, we saturated the grounds with pesticides a week ago. The only living thing out there will be a few last golfers at dusk.”

  That’s what you think, he’d thought.

  Now the MC said, “Throughout the evening, we will be showing slides of our work. Those tents you see are near Syria, set up to feed thousands displaced by fighting.”

  A live band played oldies, and couples got up to dance. A few stylishly dressed women—bored with husbands talking sports—gyrated with one another.

  “In this Sudanese aid camp, children are measured and given plastic bracelets. Blue means they are so underweight that they are fed twice a day. Red means once,” the MC said.

  At a table across the dance floor Tom spotted a face from Tol-e-Khomri. He stared with fascination.

  “Please welcome Dr. Ravi Agarwal from WHO, the World Health Organization.”

  Tom clapped and pretended to listen, but the hum of anticipation made words hard to hear. The concealed pistol was snug against his back. The speaker’s self-congratulatory whine grated like nails on a blackboard. Americans converted suffering into entertainment. They did not send gladiators into arenas like ancient Romans did but pretended to care while they sipped vodka tonics and watched skeletal children on screens.<
br />
  But where were the insects? Tom fretted. They should have been here. Had something happened to them? Had the vectors flown the wrong way? Tom turned this way and that, seeking movement in the air. Where are they?

  Tom spotted a tall man walking in through the French doors, from outside, wearing a sports jacket, but it looked disheveled. The man stopped in the light and scanned the crowd, his attitude forceful. The man wiped his cheek with the back of his palm. Tom saw smeared blood there. A bolt of acid surged into Tom’s belly. He resisted the urge to jump to his feet. That face had been on the news. It was the man who had destroyed the laboratory in Brazil, and announced to the world Tom’s name. There was no way Joe Rush could have traced Tom here. But he was not going away or turning into someone else.

  Tom glanced around the room but saw no police at exits, no men or women in dark suits, wearing earpieces. Only relaxation on all faces, except for Rush.

  Rush asked someone a question, and the person pointed toward the table at which the woman from Tol-e-Khomri sat. Rush started walking toward that table.

  At that moment, Tom saw the first mosquito wobble in from outside, through the bright gala light.

  • • •

  I made my way toward Christine Mahin as the band played the Earth, Wind & Fire oldie “Shining Star.” She was a large, moon-faced woman who looked ready to deliver her baby at any moment, swelled and sacklike in a maroon maternity dress. Her hair was up to keep her cool. A single strand of pearls lay around her neck. Tethered to her chair by pregnancy, she chatted with a man in a light blue sports jacket who held her hand. The husband. She looked up when she sensed my presence. The blue eyes were friendly, but they widened. Her hand went to her cheek. I must have a blood smear on my face. She took in my soiled jacket. She looked puzzled, but not alarmed.

  “Ms. Mahin. I’m Dr. Joe Rush. May I speak to you? It’s important.”

  Her confusion became recognition.