by James Abel
Cardozo saw a ray of hope. “You work for Major Lupo?” Lupo, he knew, could be paid to do things. Smuggle. Send patrols elsewhere. Jail a certain man.
“Major Lupo has been arrested.”
“General Figerola?”
“Arrested also.”
“Look, I have gold. A lot.” She seemed to be paying attention to this and considering. He felt a twinge of hope. Gold usually worked. But Cardozo realized that the boat had turned in the wrong direction. “This isn’t the way to Porto Velho,” he said.
“It isn’t?”
“What do you want?” he said.
She bent over him. Her eyes had changed color from vibrant green to a dead color of the sea, fathoms deep. She wiped her lipstick off with the back of her wrist. She squatted down beside him and where did pliers come from rammed the twin handles of the instrument into his mouth, breaking teeth, making him scream.
“What I want,” she said, “is names.”
• • •
The boat slowed hours later, and out the porthole the bleeding, groaning doctor saw that they had reached the gold rush. He had told her what she wanted to know. She had broken his teeth as easily as if smashing a glass vase. Now all he wanted was for the pain to stop. Cardozo had identified routes of insect and gold shipments, named middlemen and police who received payments, even in Brasília, and a woman in Zurich, who worked in investments.
Captain Santo’s clothes were streaked with his blood and vomit. She did not seem to mind.
Now, from the port window, he saw a half dozen mining dragas up close, huge, like a scattered herd of brontosauruses grazing in the middle of the river. The air roared from the nearby rapids and the industrial violence. He did not understand why they had come here. The little boat pulled up beside a draga. He heard many footsteps on deck. When the door opened it was not Rooster this time, but three tough-looking miners who dragged him from the cabin and hooked ropes beneath his arms. He was hauled—like a box of cargo—up onto the deck of the mining boat.
There, a grungy tribunal. Too many men for all of them to be from only this one draga. In front stood a man who was not dressed as a miner, but in well-worn khaki fatigues ringed with sweat marks at the chest and armpits. This man wore a khaki ball cap, with a SCIENCE logo over the green brim.
There was something familiar about the man. Cardozo stared through waves of pain. The nightmare kept getting worse. He knew this face from television.
“Help me,” Cardozo whispered, eyes flickering to Captain Santo.
Joe Rush stepped forward. His face hovered, inches away. Rush, up close, looked exactly as he did on television. “I promise,” Rush said. “You don’t need to worry about Izabel anymore.”
Dr. Cardozo began to weep. “Thank you.”
Rush said, stepping back, nodding to the miners, “No problem at all.”
• • •
Through his tears of pain Cardozo realized that the men had formed into a line, single file: a fat, oily man behind a skinny malarial one; a potbellied, wormy one behind a red-haired one; a pitted face behind a man whose skin showed burn marks. They were poor men who had come here to make their fortunes, who lived with malaria, fear of murder, and distance from their families. Most miners were decent men.
“My son was Paulo Ninevah,” the first man said, walking up, turning away. It made no sense. Cardozo thought, Who? The second man approached now.
“My wife’s brother was Antonio Sul.” He joined the first man at the rail.
—“Your people took my twin brother! His name was Lucca Barboza. He had six children and you killed him.”
—“Alvares!”
—“Leitao!”
—“I am Magano!”
Now Cardozo understood and was terrified. When the names had all been uttered, the men stood there, looking, and in their eyes was a uniform finality.
Someone was throwing chum into the water, great bloody chunks of fish or eels. Dr. Cardozo heard meat hitting the river. Then a violent thrashing sound, which would be caimans or predator fish drawn to blood and easy food.
Joe Rush came close and looked long into the face of Dr. Cardozo. “I’m just a guest here.” He shrugged. “They decided. But I voted, too. We all did.”
Rush held up a stuffed manila envelope, already wilting in the Amazon humidity. “In here are the names of all the Americans you killed. Over five thousand people. And one name of someone you couldn’t kill, my friend Eddie Nakamura. Eddie would have said to bring you back, and put you on trial. Eddie is that way. That’s why he isn’t here and I am. Eddie actually tried to save you. So I came alone.”
Cardozo screamed when the miners lifted him off the deck. He was hoisted up by many hands in the way that a victorious soccer player is carried triumphantly around a field. It could not end like this. Cardozo screamed for anyone to save him. And then he was falling. And the water closed over his head. He surfaced. He was bleeding. He could feel the creatures converging on him even before they hit and bit.
And then he was dragged down.
The last thing he saw was Joe Rush and Izabel Santo, standing beside each other like a couple, then moving apart like strangers, Izabel watching, lips back like a wolf’s. Rush, through an inch film of water, walking off by himself, as if Cardozo, Izabel, and this place itself were already a memory to him, and nothing more. Nothing at all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the following people for their help in the researching, planning, and writing of Vector.
To my good friends and excellent writers, Jim Grady, Phil Gerard, and Charles Salzberg, huge thanks.
Thanks to Lizzy Hanson, for the advice. And to my dad, Jerome Reiss. Both of you are great at putting yourselves in other people’s shoes, imagining their behavior.
On mosquito traits and behavior, thanks to malaria experts Dr. Jane Carlton of NYU and Dr. Photini Sinnis at Johns Hopkins University. Also to Dr. Gloria Coruzzi at NYU, for the contacts. Any science mistakes are mine.
To Jeff Stein, thanks for letting me crash at your home in Washington, D.C., during the research of this book. And Max Protetch, my dear old friend, was kind to let me stay at his home in Santa Fe.
As always to my neighbors Ken and Ann Smith, in the Berkshires, thanks for being there during the writing of one more book in the woods. And to Dr. Robert Prezant at Montclair State University, thanks once again for an intellectual home.
In Atlanta, the stealth guerrilla researchers, Christine Mahin and Eric Englert, did a fantastic job.
Thanks to my agent, Esther Newberg. And to my terrific editor, Tom Colgan. And the team at Berkley.
Dr. Stuart Harris (the real one) heads up Harvard’s Wilderness Medicine program and has consistently been willing to take calls and questions regarding different diseases in remote areas around the world. I’ve named a character in this book after Stuart, in his honor. The Stuart in the book is fictional, and at Columbia, not Harvard. Both Stuarts are great guys.
Wendy, once again, with love, thanks.
Malaria has been mostly eradicated in developed countries, but millions around the world fall victim to this terrible disease every year. The events depicted in this book have not happened, but mutations are always possible. At present, new, dangerous forms of the disease are showing resistance to pesticides once considered effective.
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