Vector

by James Abel

  I threw open a freezer door and left it open as I passed, pulled open a walk-in closet door and kept going. The open doors might make him think I was inside, or might block shots. There was a fire door ahead. I shoved through and into another hallway, pummeled by water.

  Hide.

  There was a storage room here, locked, and a boiler room, locked, and supply closet and unmarked door, locked. I looked back and the swinging door was opening. A foot began to come through. Ahead, another fire door, an exit. I reached the bar and pushed. Something hit the steel . . . shots . . . but I was through, out of the building. The water stopped pummeling me. I stayed flat against the clubhouse wall, moving behind a row of bushes. If I ran out onto the fairway, I’d be visible when he appeared.

  Sure enough, he came crashing out.

  Sirens now. Coming closer. Lots of them.

  Fire department? Police? Did Christine get through?

  Tom Fargo’s silhouette stood frozen outside the building. I saw the outline of his pistol. His head was up, swiveling slowly. He heard the sirens but wanted me.

  But then Fargo began loping away, onto the golf course, out into the dark. In a minute he’d be absorbed by it.

  He was getting away.

  Fargo diminished into shadow, and the shadow headed off toward the seventeenth green, and the fence. The shadow disappeared and reappeared. He must have run in and out of a sand trap. The shadow was now seventy or eighty yards away, moving fast.

  I followed.

  • • •

  He had a gun and I had nothing. He was in good shape, younger than me by too many years. Politicians call terrorists cowards, but they are rarely that. They are brave. I despise them. But they’re not cowards. If you don’t understand your enemy, you make mistakes. Tom Fargo was running because he was smart.

  I was starting to falter. I’d never fully mastered sprinting with my missing toes, and speed and distance took a toll. But then the shadow stopped, whirled, and crouched, and I knew he had seen me. I hit the ground. But no shot came. I looked up and he was running again.

  He doesn’t want police to hear shots. If they do, they’ll move toward the sound.

  I got up, heaving, running again. He pulled away.

  The sprinkler system suddenly went on all over the golf course. Under the moon, arcing water created a Las Vegas–like display. Clear moon. Bright stars. A flood of water. I looked down and saw that although Tom was distancing himself, the wet grass was flattened where he ran over it. Even if he drew beyond my vision, for a little longer, I could track where he went.

  • • •

  Tom Fargo sped up and glanced back and saw the shadow that was Joe Rush falter. He was outdistancing the older man. The sirens were louder now, closer, and he saw red lights over the silhouetted clubhouse roof, and more above the treetops. Before shooting the pregnant woman and her husband, he’d heard her telling police over the phone to get to the country club.

  Tom had been heading for the fence but turned away now, tried a new direction. If he could escape the grounds he could slow down, walk, get the car.

  But he had to get off the golf course first. He ran through sprinklers, into a sand trap, and out and over a bunker and, hunched over, across a slanted green. Something moved to his left. He jerked the gun in that direction. He was astounded to see a doglike figure loping by the rough and tree line. The coyote was playing, watching. The fucking police were here and this stupid animal wanted to have fun.

  Water ran into his eyes. He kicked his shoes off, stripped off his socks. Barefoot was easier. Otherwise he might slip on the wet. If he made it out of the golf course, he’d be conspicuous, he knew, running through the streets in bare feet, clothing sopping. But he’d deal with that later. Now he just needed to get out.

  He plunged into the grassy rough abutting a fairway. Beyond trees and bushes he saw the glint of chain link. But then he saw a red flashing light approaching. More cops.

  Tom turned around and tried a new direction.

  Running, he thought, It’s not the end. It’s a setback. People will get sick here. I will get back to Brazil. Cardozo will come up with a new batch sooner or later.

  The red lights looked farther away now. The golf course was large, so there had to be a way out. He glimpsed a new area of fence, but before he got clear of the bushes he heard the snap-snap of bolt cutters ahead.

  Police, coming through the fence.

  A possum hissed at him and hurried off with a humpbacked gait. He saw an owl staring down at him from a tree branch. Wildlife, Atlanta style.

  But Rush? Rush was gone, left behind, at least.

  • • •

  Tom Fargo stopped, out of breath, in a corner of the golf course where two fence lines converged, beside a private home and backyard. He saw no red lights. But flashlights bobbed far behind him, hundreds of yards away, on a fairway. They were searching the grounds.

  The clubhouse was no longer visible. Tom Fargo looked beyond the fence, into a mowed backyard of a lit-up colonial home. He saw a swimming pool and a trampoline, and there were slides and swings and toy guns in the grass. Plastic M4s. The kids who lived here probably shot at each other ten times a week.

  Tom reached and felt chain link against his fingers. He fitted his toes into the fence. The top of the fence grew closer. There were no red lights or sirens anymore. He was safe. He was going to get out.

  Made it.

  Which is when the person behind him hit him, and pulled him down, hard.

  I should have killed you, he thought as they began to roll, and fight.

  • • •

  Tom Fargo fell on top of me when I pulled him off the fence. I lost my breath as my back hit the ground. I must have struck a sharp protruding root. I felt it go in, like a spear. My back exploded in pain.

  “You!” he cried.

  He was a skilled fighter, and strong. I was winded but flooded with adrenaline. His weight drove that root in farther. I tried to buck him off. His gun was on the ground, out of reach. He went for my eyes and I parried, sideswiped his wrist, aimed at his Adam’s apple, but it was not there when my three-finger strike arrived.

  With a burst of strength I rolled left and felt the root tear out of my body. But he rode me, still on top. I could hear sprinklers hissing on the fairways. Tomorrow golfers would hit balls into these woods. Maybe, searching for a lost ball, they’d find something else.

  I had delayed him and harassed him. I had followed but not stopped him. And now against his fury I felt my strength begin to diminish. I went for his eyes. His face was so close that I smelled onions he’d eaten tonight. A floodlight on the house went on, showed his shadow-banded, frenzied face above me, left eye brown, right eye blue, like a malamute dog’s. A contact lens had fallen out.

  His knee slammed into my solar plexus. I heard air rush out as pain flooded in. My left arm was paralyzed. Maybe if I’d been younger, this would have gone better. I heard shouting. Other voices. Coming closer fast. Fargo leaned back and saw that he would not get out of the golf course. He still had a choice. And seconds to make it. Without hesitation he reached for his gun. In the moonlight his eyes were terrible and focused, but no longer on me.

  “Police!” a voice cried.

  Tom Fargo’s lips were moving.

  “Put it down. PUT IT DOWN!”

  Tom Fargo smiled bitterly. He reversed the pistol.

  “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

  His head jerked back and sideways when he fired.

  • • •

  At the end I’d seen bitter triumph in his eyes. That he’d denied us answers. And kept himself from the windowless rooms. That he’d managed to hold on to secrets.

  I hoped, as the police reached me, and voices told me to lie still, he’s bleeding, get a doctor . . . I hoped, looking up at strangers’ faces, that there was not mo
re to come.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  She was still alive, hungry, and smelling the wonderful odors of carbon dioxide and cologne. They made her wings beat almost involuntarily, to try to reach them. All around her, big shadows were moving. Food!

  But she couldn’t fly because the water had come suddenly, as she was lighting on an ankle. Her proboscis had touched warm skin just as heavy drops swept her down, pushed her off, pinned her to the floor. Feeble, she struggled to rise.

  Inside her, the mutated parasite—only one of its kind in the world—remained in the probiscis. It had had no chance to get out. And it had no more awareness of this than a mindless cell in a stalk of celery.

  There were voices all around her.

  “Who pulled the alarm? There’s no fire!”

  “The gala is ruined!”

  She had no sense of a boot heel descending on her, or that the person above her did not even know she was there. And then she had no awareness at all.

  • • •

  The fireman kept walking through the country club. He knew that the police were chasing someone who had run onto the golf course. He hoped they caught the guy. He assumed the man who’d pulled the alarm was the police quarry.

  The fireman hated people who pulled false alarms.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The new batch of mosquitoes was ready!

  Dr. Nader Cardozo, thirty-eight, stood with pride and excitement in the glass-walled terminal of Porto Velho’s Governador Jorge Teixeira de Oliveira International Airport, watching an Azul Airlines Boeing 737 board. Flight 34 was the daily milk run plane that circled Brazil’s hinterland, its Amazon cities, terminating in São Paulo, from where international flights left the country.

  Passengers jogged through misty rain to hurry up the mobile stairway. They included locals, gold miners heading for the duty-free city of Manaus, cattle ranchers going to their main residences in São Paulo, a couple of forest police—charged with protecting Brazil nut trees from being cut down—and, thanks to the martyr Tom Fargo, five newly trained ops from Europe and North America: a female hospital worker from Florida, a baker’s assistant from London, a former lieutenant in the French paratroops, a Turkish sailor, and a Moscow cab driver. They would release vectors in Orlando and Tampa, Marseille, Moscow, London, and Istanbul. Inshallah!

  Nader’s eyes went to the mobile baggage cart by the plane. He watched suitcases glide up the conveyer belt. A pet carrier. Then seven square wooden boxes marked FRAGILE.

  I did it. I figured out how to make another batch.

  It was eight months since Fargo’s death, and the success of the martyr’s mission: terror in the U.S., the defeat of a presidential candidate, the money transfer, and more gridlock in Congress, not to mention the stupendous profit realized by jihadists who’d invested in pharmaceuticals. Cardozo thought, The money was a side benefit, but the whole thing even made the Caliphate money! And now, soon, more threats, more power, more panic everywhere.

  The doors to the 737 closed. Airport workers rolled away the staircase. The terminal vibrated as the jet rolled down the runway, diminished into a speck in the sky, and was eaten by clouds.

  Cardozo felt the muscles relax in his neck as he turned to Yasmine Riquera, the sexy lab receptionist, who he had brought along today. She was dressed in one of her usual fetching outfits, tight sleeveless V-necked aquamarine top, showing off toned arms and firm-looking breasts, and a hint of delicious cleavage. Tight-fitting white jeans, formfitting her fantastic legs. Well-defined ass, jutting up because of the cork-heeled sandals. Fingernails and toenails a matching peach color. And the whole mouthwatering package topped by dyed chestnut hair that accentuated her slutty aspect. His own wife was a Russian Brazilian, blond and sexy, theoretically, but after ten years of marriage, familiar.

  “Dr. Cardozo, it was so kind of you to invite me to see the plane leave with our young scientists on it.”

  “Well, not just watch,” he told Yasmine. “We’re also going to lunch, aren’t we?”

  Yasmine giggled. They both knew what “lunch” meant.

  “You are a hero fighting illness,” Yasmine said.

  “I wanted to spend my life helping people.”

  He put his hand on her rump as they made their way outside, to a privately hired Toyota Land Cruiser. Cardozo told the driver to go to the main dock on the Madeira, and “the floating restaurants.” In the backseat he allowed his hand to fall over Yasmine’s shoulder. She moved closer, smelling of citrus shampoo.

  “The mosquitoes you make will end much malaria,” she said in the semi-worshipful tone he adored.

  True, up to a point. In his official, legal job, Cardozo ran the Amazon labs for Allard-Foss Pharmaceuticals, the French multinational. The two million male insects they had genetically engineered back at Colonel Rondon Industrial Park would do exactly what Yasmine said. The males were sterile. By breeding with wild females, they’d eliminate the possibility of offspring. Allard-Foss vans in two Brazilian jungle states were even today releasing mosquitoes. Company stock was soaring. Journalists visited regularly, and interviewed Cardozo, took his photo, lauded his public work.

  To create the other secret 10 percent of his crop, Cardozo had labored long and hard, alone at 3 A.M., working from sketchy notes he’d made in talks with Dr. Umar, and notes made at Dachau death camp almost eighty years before by Cardozo’s great-great-grandfather, a Lebanese-born SS doctor who hated the British and was a follower of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler’s Arab ally. Cardozo’s ancestor had escaped Germany on a U-boat at the end of the war, set up shop in Brazil, and restarted his research, first for a Nazi group. Later—when the Nazis were gone—for liberation groups in the Mideast.

  Tom Fargo thought I didn’t know that he chose his targets for personal reasons. But as long as he created panic, I didn’t care which targets he chose. And now the new people will carry on his work.

  This thought excited him so much that he allowed his hand to brush Yasmine’s breast. They had reached the waterfront. Mostly it looked seedy, a mud landing area for old riverboats, but there was also a new dock, and a half dozen small motorized craft, their drivers ready to ferry tourists or picnickers out for an afternoon pleasure ride.

  Cardozo chose a larger boat with a private room. It was a mobile motel. As they chugged into the river Yasmine and Cardozo examined the cabin. She seemed to think the red walls, crisply made double bed, lit candles, and stocked wine rack classy. He’d probably fire her in a couple of weeks. You never wanted to keep them around too long. Otherwise gratitude turned to expectation, hero worship to something more human. Cardozo got enough human treatment from his wife at home.

  “Are you hungry, Yasmine?”

  They chugged around a bend, and Porto Velho disappeared. They were in a wider section of river, with three or four other floating motels out here, probably hosting businessmen and girlfriends, ranchers and girlfriends, politicians and girlfriends, tourists and bar girls. Sex in the heat.

  “We will dine on deck. Bring wine,” Cardozo told the captain.

  They ate at the little round table on the fantail. He saw a spider monkey staring at him from the branches of a tree; probably the last such creature alive within miles. Yasmine ate in small bites, tearing at her beefsteak like an animal. White teeth flashed against smooth, coppery skin.

  “Yasmine is an Arabic name,” he observed.

  “My grandparents came from Gaza.”

  “Do you keep in contact with family there? I have no people there,” he lied.

  Mideasterners could carry grudges in DNA. Your ancestor hit mine with a rock, in a cave. Your ancestor stole my ancestor’s sheep when Jesus was alive. Someday we will return and take back our land. Our home. Our water.

  Lunch over, he took her hand and led her down two stairs into the cabin. She smiled when he locked the door. His head pounded with anticipation. He f
elt himself stirring beneath his waist. Her blouse came off. She wore no bra. She looked eager, and the sight of her bare breasts drew his hands forward, as if by themselves.

  “You are so very beautiful,” he said.

  “You murdered Sublieutenant Salazar.”

  Dr. Cardozo blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Vai te foder, Doctor! The boxes you loaded are not filled with vectors. I killed all the vectors last night. You shipped normal mosquitoes, which will be removed from the plane at the next stop. Along with your murderers.”

  This can’t be happening, Cardozo thought as she moved toward him. Why was she smiling?

  The first blow rammed into his solar plexus, doubling him over, dropping him to the deck. He couldn’t breathe. She kicked him and yanked his hands behind his back, and suddenly he was handcuffed. He called out to the captain, for help, even knowing that none was coming. The door opened and the driver of the boat stood there, staring down at him but not moving. Cardozo told the man to get this crazy bitch off him. To overpower her.

  “You mean her?” the man said, as if he could not understand what he was seeing right before his eyes.

  “I’ll pay you! A lot!”

  “My name is Rooster Alves,” the man said. “My brother was Alfonso Alves. Do you know that name?”

  “What are you talking about? Who is Alfonso?”

  Rooster shook his head sadly. “You didn’t even know his name.” Rooster walked back out.

  • • •

  The world was upside down. One minute Cardozo had been sipping wine and now he gasped for breath. The perfume smell had changed to a moldy/wood odor, a whiff of gasoline and fish and a trace of citrus on her ankles.

  Yasmine said, “I am Captain Izabel Santo of the Brazilian Federal Police.”