by James Abel
“Rush? You’re on the news. I don’t understand. I would have remembered your name on the guest list.”
“It isn’t there.”
“You’re affiliated with the charity?”
“Can we talk, ma’am?”
The husband was a thin man in white jeans, with banded green-and-pink socks, a shaggy haircut, artistic plastic glasses. Quirky guy, out of place. He wasn’t sure whether to be protective or curious. His eyes went from my face to hers. I said, “I got your name from Bob Welch. I need to talk to you about Tol-e-Khomri.”
Her mouth opened involuntarily and she started to rise but sank slowly back into her chair. The husband, alarmed, asked if she was all right. Christine nodded, but her eyes never left my face. The dance floor was clearing. Waiters were bringing chicken dinners. The MC tapped a finger against the mike. Time for more talk.
She’s afraid. But I can’t tell if she looks guilty.
She looked around to realize that others at her table were watching us. Between the chatter and clatter of dishes, if you wanted to be heard, you had to shout or lean into a listener’s ear. She did not want to shout. She grasped my wrist with a damp hand. “Can you help me up? Into the hall? Alan? Arghhhhhh,” she said, trying to rise.
This is why you always ask in person and never take a report for granted. You always watch the eyes.
Other than a face at a far table who I saw staring at us as we left the room, a man who quickly looked away, no one paid us any attention. Christine walked with difficulty, puffed and sweated and wiped her brow. In the hallway the noise instantly muted. It was cooler here, with glass cases filled with golf trophies, and old black-and-white mounted shots of past invitationals, even signed head shots of the greats: Palmer, Player, Woods.
“Was it us?” she asked, straight-out, a terrible urgency twisting her face. “Was our food responsible?”
“You’re asking me?”
“I need to sit. The chair. Thank you,” she said, sinking down, looking up. Tell me, her expression said.
“We think,” I said, using that we as if I was here officially, “that there’s a link between Tol-e-Khomri and the cities where black malaria has been introduced.”
Her eyes widened. “Link?”
I explained it. She did not know what to make of it. But it terrified her. The connections were obvious, yes, she said, “but nobody attacked the company. I don’t know if anyone who got sick even worked for the company. If you have a grudge against the company, why not hit it directly?”
“The grudge is bigger than one company,” I said, spreading my arms to include the club, city, state, nation. “The company? Maybe it’s just a way in. He could have picked anywhere. But I think he chose locations that had special meaning to him.”
She needed time to absorb it. Her husband tightly held her hand. She said, in a small voice, “But they told me it was jihadists. I didn’t even hear anything about food poisoning until later, when it showed up in jihad blogs.”
I waited.
“The UN people assured me, so did the head of the camp. And I checked! I tried to find out if our food sickened those people. It was impossible. The cans were burned up. The doctors said the deaths were from fighting. I went over our manifests. The expiration dates all looked okay.”
“Then why the expression on your face?”
“It was the worst day of my life,” she said, looking at her husband, who nodded at her, meaning, Tell him.
I pushed it. “Ms. Mahin, was the company taking tax write-offs on expired food?”
She looked down at the carpet. She looked back up, and this time I saw a glisten at the corner of her left eye.
“Not the company. One person in Memphis. One person was sending out expired stuff. I found other cans in the warehouse, ready to go. Damaged or expired. We fired him. He never admitted sending expired food to Tol-e-Khomri. I couldn’t prove it. He wasn’t making money off it. He just wanted a better balance sheet. He thought that expiration dates were stupid. Government overregulation. He’d shipped tons of expired stuff before that, without a problem.”
“That’s why you quit?”
“I was going to do that anyway.”
“The report you signed said there was no evidence of tainted food.”
She wrung her hands. “There wasn’t. Dr. Rush, Fresh Unity donates eighteen million dollars a year to feeding the hungry. Do you know how many people that keeps alive? Should I have put the program in jeopardy? Lawsuits? Headlines? Every year half the board—the lawyers—want to close the program because they’re afraid of this! Suits! What would you have done if you were me?” she asked. “No proof! Too late to stop whatever happened. In the end, I wrote the facts.”
“But not the truth.”
But the truth was, for all my cheap moralizing, I did not know what I would have done if I’d been in her shoes. She’d found the culprit. She’d gotten rid of him, and saved a program that fed thousands of people. A program that might have been shut down otherwise. Had she done wrong?
She must have anticipated my next thought, because she added, “Bob Welch had nothing to do with it. It was my decision. That’s what I told the FBI.”
“When did you tell them this?”
“The last time? Weeks ago. Don’t you know? But they didn’t tell me about any connection to malaria. They just showed up as if they’d been looking into it for a long time. I never connected all this until now.”
I said, regretting my harsh words a moment ago, “I don’t know what you should have done. The man spreading this disease is filled with hate. Nothing you could have done would have changed that. He would have gone after someone else if not that company. Believe me, his people didn’t develop this weapon just to use once.”
“Really?” She was like a five-year-old asking for assurance that I lacked power to bestow, but she wanted the illusion anyway.
Alan Mahin massaged her shoulders, tried to calm his wife. They seemed a caring couple, and I liked them. He reminded her that anything I said was just supposition, and told her to “do the breathing exercise.”
“There’s no proof of this, is there?” he asked me aggressively, defending her.
“You’re right, sir.”
“Your jacket is ripped. You’re not on the guest list. You snuck in here. You’re upsetting her.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“We waited a long time to have this baby. She’s had a bad time of it. I didn’t even want her to come tonight.”
“Alan, it’s all right,” she said. “Really. Maybe we can help him. Help people. Dr. Rush, is there anything else you need to know?”
That’s when I saw the mosquito land on her arm.
THIRTY-SIX
The mosquito must have flown in through the gash in the screen, in the hallway window. It crawled on the fleshy white of Christine’s bare wrist, above a bluish vein that rose into her lifeline. She didn’t see it and neither did Alan. She might never feel the bite.
I felt it squash beneath my thumb. She looked startled, but eyed the crushed insect. I’d killed it without thinking.
“Sorry,” I said. “Habit.”
There was no blood smear, so the mosquito had probably not started to feed, and no reason to think that the presence of a single mosquito meant anything alarming. Christine and Alan didn’t seem to think it troubling. After all, no one in Atlanta had gotten sick yet.
I didn’t see what kind of mosquito it was.
I thanked her for her time and excused myself and went back inside. She lingered, reluctant to go back to the party, upset by talk, memory, and pregnancy. The moment I opened the door the music grew deafening. The swirl of bodies on the dance floor was thick, and the patio doors were shut across the room, except for one, still open.
Everyone smiling. Dancing. The parade of grotesque image
s on-screen—our good work—remained off for now.
It was just one insect.
The bar area was packed, and conversation lively. No one here was paying attention to anything serious as my head swiveled this way and that, search-pattern style.
I don’t even know if it was an anopheles mosquito.
I walked the periphery of the room and tried to spot insects. A couple of dancers eyed me, maybe because of the rip in my jacket, or my rumpled appearance. There were millions of mosquitoes in the United States. There was no reason to assume that what I had seen was anything other than a natural phenomenon.
But then I saw another person across the room, doing the same thing I was, walking, solo, head swiveling toward the ceiling and corners, moving as I moved. Pause and look. From a distance he seemed to examine thin air. He was the man who had stared at Christine and me earlier. Suddenly his head swiveled sharply, as if he followed the zigzag route of an insect that was too far away for me to see. Then he turned and his eyes met mine and he froze for a fraction of a second. His gaze slid away, and he slipped sideways into the crowd, as a fish seeks concealment in a school. Hide among your own.
Could it be?
Now my search pattern changed. There had been something wrong with that man. This was the second time I’d noticed him. I recognized the quickening pulse in my throat as battle instinct. Always pay attention to the invisible soldier on your shoulder. Ignore him at your peril.
The hair was not Fargo’s. He wore glasses, unlike Fargo. The height was right but everything else wrong. The last place Fargo was seen is only a few hours from here. Is it possible? And if he did come here, why stay?
But then I thought, He’s been ahead of us since Brazil. The FBI isn’t here. They’re concentrating on other cities. No one thought to protect the people who ran that camp.
A woman on the dance floor several feet away from me suddenly jerked away from her partner, slapped her neck, and pulled her hand away. She went back to dancing.
A second woman—nearby—waved her hand violently before her face, as if shooing away an insect.
And then, with horror, I saw the small cloud of insects floating in from the patio, individual dots breaking off and zigzagging into the light. Outside, the shadow of a bat swooping. It might be the last survivor of the pesticide spraying, doing its job, using radar to accomplish what I’d been unable to do, track Tom Fargo’s damage.
Where the hell is he?
I felt an itch and saw that one of the creatures had landed there. I held up my hand, fascinated. And I knew.
I was looking at exactly what I’d seen in microscopes weeks before the outbreak, what Stuart had shown Eddie and me in photos and artists’ renderings and what we’d seen a thousand times in Brazil. Anopheles mosquitoes rest with abdomens up in the air, unlike other mosquitoes. I saw the maxillary palp jutting out between the two antennae. The perfume and carbon dioxide detector. I saw black-and-white scales on the wing.
The mosquito took off before I could slap it.
I have to get these people out without alerting him. If it’s Fargo, he’ll be armed. He murdered his neighbors in New York. There are more than two hundred guests here. And if I’m wrong and it’s not him, the worst that will happen is that I’ll make a fool of myself.
More insects flew in now. People became aware of them. Someone shut the door to the patio, too late.
Where is he?
As I rushed through the sea of celebrants the oddest fraction of a boyhood memory flicked to me. I was in row four at Horror Film Sunday at the Pittsfield Cinema. A rainy October afternoon. The Masque of the Red Death playing, an oldie based on Edgar Allan Poe’s tale. In the story, a plague ravaged a European country. But the wealthy and powerful believed they were immune. They isolated themselves in a castle, locked the gates, and held a masquerade ball. They giddily ate and drank. But one celebrant among them—masked as death—was not in costume. By the end, all those people were infected. It was a story about self-deception, possibly the worst disease.
Pull the fire alarm. No, that won’t work. All that will do is send the guests outside, have them milling around where mosquitoes are rampant. Think, damnit!
Suddenly I knew what to do.
• • •
Tom Fargo watched Rush from the bar area, through the crowd. Rush slapped one of his hands. There must have been an insect there, and maybe Rush had killed it. That left more than eight hundred other vectors here. Well, Tom thought, you’re probably vaccinated, unlike many people here.
He could leave, he knew. Just walk out of those patio doors and onto the fairway, slip across the greens and out of the golf course, return to the house and drive away and get back to Brazil. There were ways, and he knew them. A certain ship that left from Galveston, a certain plane that left from beside a Louisiana sugarcane field. There were toll road highways in the air, and you could rent space from a pilot or a gang to use them. Black travel was as systemized as buying a ticket online. It was harder to know where to go to do it, but once you knew, getting out of this country was as easy as getting in. You sit on a bundle of contraband. No security check. Just go.
Tom moved toward the patio door. But he stopped. He looked back and eyed Rush. What was the man doing?
Rush had gone up to a man, and was talking urgently to him. He’d not spoken to that man before. What was he saying? Tom had seen the second man outside on the patio earlier, smoking a cigarette. Rush was arguing with the man. Rush snatched something from the man’s hand. The man called angrily after Rush as he moved off.
What are you up to? You saw me. I know it. Why are you leaving?
Tom felt a surge of hatred. If it had not been for Rush, the lab in Brazil would have kept producing vectors. The FBI would never have identified Tom.
But then he felt something almost worse, and it was blame. He never could have found me if I’d picked random targets, like I told Cardozo I was going to do.
Rush pushed out of the room as if casually going to the bathroom. He did not look back.
And suddenly with a chill Tom realized what Rush was doing. He began pushing through the crowd toward the door through which Rush had disappeared. “Rude!” a voice protested. “Hey!” But Tom knew that Rush had recognized him, all right. They had recognized each other. It had been chemical. Like vectors following carbon dioxide. If Tom didn’t stop Rush, Rush would save a lot of people now.
Tom pushed through the door also. The hallway was empty. Tom listened for footsteps or voices. All he heard was the whoosh of air-conditioning. Tom reached for his Sig Sauer.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Christine and Alan Mahin looked up in shock as I rushed toward them in the hallway. They had not moved location since I’d left them, and I was grateful for that, at least. I called out that she needed to phone 911. She needed to get the police here immediately. I said Tom Fargo was in the ballroom, now, and an attack was beginning.
Alan, stupefied, did not take it in. “Don’t you have a phone, Colonel?”
“Where’s the fire alarm box?”
“Call the police?” Alan asked.
“Blond wig, cut curly and short. Dark-framed glasses. Dark jacket and gray slacks. He’ll be armed.”
As I hurried past, she was pulling a cell phone from her bag. But the couple was also walking the wrong way, back toward the ballroom, not out to the parking lot.
I stopped. “What are you doing?”
“Someone has to warn the others.”
“I did that,” I lied. “Get out! And don’t stand around outside! Go home!”
They turned and went in the right direction, as Christine punched in numbers on her phone, and I hurried up, searching . . . but not seeing what I needed. Down a flight of carpeted stairs to the lower level. The pro shop. The locker rooms . . . Where is it? Where the hell is . . . ?
And then I saw the sp
rinkler on the ceiling. It was too high up.
I needed a goddamn chair to reach the ceiling. There had to be a chair in this million-dollar place. Inside the glassed-in pro shop I saw golf clubs for sale. And more trophies, this time for winners in junior league play.
In my pocket was the lighter that I’d snatched from the smoker’s hand in the ballroom. If I could get the fire alarm and sprinklers going, guests upstairs would flee. Soaked, they’d head for their cars and homes, for dry clothes. They wouldn’t, I hoped, stand around and gape.
There was no chair here.
The trophy case looked as if it would shatter from the weight of a man standing on it. But maybe the metal frame would support me. I lifted myself and managed to wobble on the inch-wide metal strip of the case. It bent but held. Teetering, I heard pounding footsteps from the stairwell, coming in my direction. But then moving away.
I heard two quick snapping sounds upstairs, muted but unmistakable. Gunshots. Tom Fargo was up there. Christine and Alan should have left by now, but I feared they hadn’t.
Swaying, I reached for the sprinkler. The lighter made a clicking sound. It didn’t light. It might as well have been a piece of flint wielded by a caveman. But then it did light. I held it up to the sprinkler, praying that the system would work, as I tried to keep my balance on the case, one hand steadying me against the wall.
RINGGGGGGGGG!
The spigot above began spraying water over me as the alarm began to bray.
Upstairs, I hoped, guests were shrieking as water poured down on them, driving them from the ballroom in a sopping rush. Hopefully any insects up there would be pinned by the flood of water.
And then, climbing down from the case, I saw a man through the spray, standing at the far end of the hallway. His arms extended toward me in a V shape.
As he fired I threw myself sideways and down, falling through a spray of shards. My shoulder hit the ground. The shots kept coming, muffled by the clanging fire alarm.
Snap . . . snap . . .
The clanging was steady as I rose and zigzagged off at a crouch, through a swinging door into a stainless steel kitchen. The appliances and counters heightened the echoing alarm. I had no gun. He’d be coming after me. I had no idea whether Christine Mahin had reached 911, whether Tom Fargo had shot her, Alan, and their unborn child.
