Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  A new scene appeared with a jolt of the camera—a close-up of a pudgy man with an enormous gut and a yellow hard hat. He was barking out orders in a tongue so foreign it made Julia’s head hurt. From behind came the sound of motors, raised voices, and the staccato rhythm of construction. After a moment, the camera swung to an area where a small group of men were slamming axes into trees. The camera zoomed in on the one in the center—Julia’s star.

  “The countdown,” Stephen whispered.

  It read -00:13:58. Julia’s stomach tightened. A car horn from the laptop’s tiny speakers drew her back to the video. The horn blasted for about five seconds. In that time, the star looked up, dropped his ax, and started meandering toward the camera, head hung as his left hand massaged his right bicep. The camera pulled back and hobbled away, taking a position some forty feet from the army-style truck. Again men converged on it, each with the day’s physical agony showing on their bodies: filthy clothes, hair hued tan with sawdust and forested with spiky wood chips, grimacing faces, joints so stiff Julia could almost hear them creak. Shadows pooled at their feet, betraying a midday sun.

  Each leaned into the back of the truck and emerged with a sack or box. They moved to the shade at the edge of a dense forest and sat. They pulled unwrapped clumps of a doughy substance from their containers, then worked vigorously to transfer it to their stomachs. The star ate quietly, perfectly centered in the camera’s eye. The camera jiggled occasionally but otherwise remained stationary.

  “Anyone got a fix on the location?” Julia asked without turning away from the screen.

  “Haven’t seen enough of the landscape,” answered Allen. “I’d guess the language is an African dialect—a form of Swahili, maybe.”

  “So, Africa?”

  “Just a guess. The town was pretty impoverished, and that foliage appears equatorial. Africa, South America, Southeast Asia. Our best clue—”

  Julia stopped him with a raised hand, palm out.

  The countdown had reached -00:00:55, and heads began turning skyward, apparently hearing something not yet detectable to the camera’s microphone. Their eyes scanned aimlessly, then focused on something up and to the left of the screen. Over their apparent words of curiosity came the escalating drone of an airplane motor, like the hum of an approaching giant. Someone pointed, and one by one the men stood.

  At this point the camera swung away from them, catching a white flash of sunlight before finding blue skies over the leafy tips of trees. A black dot grew quickly into a single-engine plane, coming in low over the forest. In an instant it swooped down, blurring hugely in the monitor. As the camera followed, it spewed a fine mist from its undercarriage.

  “Crop duster,” Allen remarked, stating the obvious out of sheer befuddlement.

  The plane banked right, leaped over the trees, and disappeared.

  Angry words poured from the speakers as the camera panned to the men speaking them: “Wadika!” “Unakwenda wapi!” “Salop!”

  “That was French!” Stephen said. “I heard salop. That’s French for … Well, it’s not a nice word.”

  “Nimekasirika!” “Espece de pauvre con!”

  “French again. Con means idiot.”

  As the mist blanketed them, the workers closed their eyes to it, coughed, and shook their fists at the spot where the plane had disappeared. Brushing off a flourlike dust, they spoke in sharp tones to one another and spat at the ground.

  “Wait a sec,” Julia said, moving a finger to the keyboard and causing the image to freeze. “The countdown’s at plus twenty-two seconds now.” She moved the cursor on the screen to the rewind button and tapped her finger. In reverse, the workers appeared to powder themselves with dust that magically floated off their bodies and sailed into

  the air. Julia froze the image again. “Negative five seconds.” She started clicking a button. “Four … three … two …”

  “The mist from the plane is just coming into view at the top of the screen,” Allen pointed out. Despite Bonsai’s predictions about the converted file’s poor quality, the resolution was perfect.

  “One.”

  The mist was just hitting the tops of their heads.

  “Zero.”

  The star’s head was only a vague shadow behind the layer of dropping mist.

  “That’s it,” Julia said. “The countdown was to this point.”

  “When whatever was in that mist hit their lungs,” Allen said.

  Dead silence filled the van like smoke as the three gazed at the image on the screen. After a few moments, Julia clicked a button to reactivate the video in real time. They had already seen this part: the men hurling insults at the sky, dusting themselves off, checking their food for residue …

  “So what African countries speak French?” Julia asked, turning to Stephen and shifting in the big chair to tuck a leg under herself. She kept flicking her eyes toward the screen, waiting for something new. Despite being with two civilians, mentally she had donned her investigator’s hat and was getting into the rhythm of corporate deductive reasoning.

  “Zaire,” Allen said. He whipped a crumpled pack of Camels out of his breast pocket and shook one out. After tossing it into his lips, he said, “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Ebola? Zaire?” He replaced the pack and removed a bright red Bic lighter from the same pocket; instead of lighting up, he rolled it between his fingers and raised his eyebrows at her. “The two are practically synonymous.”

  “It adds up,” Stephen agreed.

  Julia nodded and turned back to the screen. She wasn’t really sure why it mattered at this point, but Donnelley had taught her that every fact, no matter how seemingly insignificant, played a part—sometimes a crucial part—in unraveling the mystery at hand.

  “Okay, Zaire,” she said quietly and watched as the camera

  panned slowly over the faces of the complaining men, lingering a moment on each one as if to record their identities.

  “I don’t like where this is heading,” Allen said.

  She brushed her bangs away from her forehead. Without turning away from the screen, she said, “If we really are dealing with Ebola, I think we just witnessed the intentional infection of these people.”

  “What bothers me more is that Ebola spreads through body fluids, blood usually.” Allen shifted, agitated.

  Julia paused the display as the camera was pulling back to frame the entire group again.

  Allen’s unlit cigarette wagged like an accusatory finger when he spoke. “As far as we know, no one has ever been infected by an airborne strain. Monkeys, yes; never a human. Big difference. If the vector to transmit the disease was in that dust, it’s a strain more dangerous than any we’ve ever seen. And it’s gone unreported.”

  “Maybe nobody knows,” Stephen whispered.

  “Look at the date,” Allen said, indicating the screen. “Whoever’s controlling it has had over a year to perfect the delivery system. A crop duster when this video was made—what now, a breeze?”

  Julia stared at him a long time, lost in thought. At last she punched the button that continued the video.

  fifty-seven

  The video flicked to a new scene.

  The doorway set in a whitewashed wall again—the skinny black man’s home. The date and time set the moment at the fifth morning after the crop duster’s visit to the man’s work site. The man’s friend approached the door, knocked. A woman answered, worry as plain on her face as the bright red housedress on her body. She shook her head and closed the door.

  Blackness.

  The scream pierced through the speaker even before the shadows swam into recognizable objects on the screen. The man—Julia’s star—bellowed in agony from a battered cot in a small, dark room. Naked to the waist, he was curled in a fetal position, clutching at his stomach, rubbing his chest. Perspiration sluiced in thick streams from every inch of exposed flesh. With savage effort, the man hooked his head over the cot’s edge and vomited into the black hole of a rusty pail.

&nbs
p; “Lord, have mercy,” Stephen whispered.

  Positioned somewhere above the cot, the camera perfectly framed the convulsing figure. The woman who had answered the door glided into view and began wiping the man’s head and neck with a drenched cloth, comforting him with soft cooing.

  With a bolt of quick static, the day passed. The man still lay in a knot, wet, miserable, accepting water from a rag pressed to his fever-blistered lips; only the time on the display had changed. Another flash of static and the man was blistered and bleeding, flailing on the bed, splashing ribbons of blood across the walls and curtains. His mouth stretched in a silent scream. His eyes, solid red, searched blindly for help.

  Julia’s palm covered her mouth.

  A man in a blood-drenched smock, a stethoscope slung around his neck, tried to hold down the dying man. A woman in a white-and-blue dress—a nurse, Julia thought—covered her mouth much the way Julia did and backed away from the bed and out of frame. A geyser of blackish blood erupted. The doctor staggered back, arms raised against the horror before him.

  The body convulsed, then was still.

  Soft chanting now; the mournful throb of a single drum. A corpse, wrapped from head to toe in white linen, lay like a ghost on a chest-high bier. Weeping softly, the woman who’d comforted Julia’s star, his wife perhaps, dipped a flambeau into the kindling under the body. Within seconds, flames had completely engulfed the corpse.

  “The medical staff didn’t report the cause of death,” Allen said, shaking his head. “Health officials never would have released the body.”

  The camera panned over the faces of the mourners, many of them recognizable from the work site scene when the crop duster had vomited its obscene cargo over them. As smoke darkened the sky, the scene faded to black.

  The next act opened at the work site, familiar men laboring under a scorching sun.

  “Not again,” Julia lamented. The date display had jumped ahead two months.

  But the crop duster did not return. In fact, nothing dramatic occurred in the two minutes the camera lingered there, zooming in on individual faces in calm order. Each went about his duties, seeming to have forgotten the death of his friend. The scene played out like an epilogue, as if to say, Life goes on. If Kafka or Tolstoy had directed the video, this was the way he would have ended it.

  Another slow fade. All that was missing, Julia thought, was the word Fini in scripted letters.

  After several flashes of static, another video sequence started— this one far different in quality. The image, grainy from low light levels, filled the monitor. Gone was the column of numbers that had recorded the time, date, and other bits of cryptic information. Where the first video had all the markings of a professional recording, made for evidence or analysis, this one more closely resembled a home movie. As covert as the preceding footage obviously was, this current stock seemed more so: most of the time something like a flap of cloth blocked a portion of the lens; the angle was from about knee-high, as if the operator had held the camera like a briefcase—or in a briefcase, thought Julia—and nothing was framed quite right. Most disturbing, visually and viscerally, was the image’s constant vibration.

  “Why is it doing that, that shaking?” Stephen asked.

  “Bad tape in the camera, maybe?” offered Allen.

  “Fear,” Julia said. “Over the past decade, the Bureau has taken to wiring informants and undercover agents not only for sound but also for visuals with miniature cameras. We see that shaking a lot. The guy’s scared stiff.”

  Under a slate sky, the camera panned over a collection of rusty Quonset huts. They rose like the humps of a sea monster from a field cleared of all foliage except for wisps of dry prairie grass. Here and there, the camera caught men with guns standing or strolling, paying no particular attention to the camera operator. In the distance was a tall chain-link fence, double coils of gleaming concertina wire balancing on top. Beyond that a dense jungle grew. Directly in front of the hangars was a long patch of ground, level and clear of foliage.

  “That’s a landing strip,” Allen said.

  “So it’s an air base?” Julia asked.

  “Except for the armed men, it looks abandoned.”

  Stephen stroked his beard in thought. “Don’t drug cartels operate out of abandoned airstrips?”

  “Yeah, and look how green and lush that jungle looks,” Allen said. “More Amazonian or Asian than African.”

  Julia said, “I don’t think this is about drugs.”

  The scene changed, and the camera was moving through a dim corridor. It approached a door, then went through it into a brightly lit, refurbished corridor. Windows were set in the walls on each side, lighted from within. The camera approached a window. Reflected in it was a ghostly image that quickly sharpened.

  Julia froze the frame. Caught in the glass, a man held a briefcase under his arm.

  “Look,” Julia said, pointing to a black circle in the side of the briefcase, facing the glass. “Wanna bet that’s an opening for the camera lens?”

  The man recording his own reflection appeared Hispanic, with tight curly hair and heavy features.

  “He matches the description of Vero from the bartender at the place where he and Goody were killed,” she said. She studied the face a moment, then restarted the playback.

  The reflection faded off the glass as the camera focused on what lay beyond—a room lined with beds. On every one lay a man or woman, some tossing in anguish, others still. Machines monitored their vital signs. IVs snaked into most of the arms.

  “Some sort of sick ward,” Stephen said.

  Turning from the window, the image blurred. When it refocused, a man was walking toward it. At first Julia thought he wore a mask of a skull. His eyes were big black holes, his skin bone-white and gaunt. As he approached, she saw it was no mask. Sunglasses covered his eyes, but the rest of the visible head was disturbing: wispy white hair clung in patches to the scalp, and the face was more than gaunt; it was as though someone had stretched cheesecloth over a skull. A lipless mouth stretched into a wide grin, showing canted and missing teeth.

  Julia’s heart leaped, and the camera flicked off.

  fifty-eight

  When the screen had been black for a good fifteen seconds, Allen exhaled loudly and said, “I didn’t see anything that proves Ebola is man-made, or that these guys did it. At best, it showed that there’s an airborne strain of Ebola.”

  “And that someone’s intentionally infecting people,” Stephen said.

  “There were two video clips,” Julia said, thinking. “One appeared to be of a man in Africa being infected with Ebola. I’m making lots of assumptions, I know. The second was not action-oriented and was in a different setting. There’s nothing that obviously connects the two, but they must be related somehow.”

  “Somehow,” Allen repeated. He leaned back in the passenger’s seat, fishing a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. He examined the package, saw it was empty, and tossed it over his shoulder onto the dash.

  Julia’s eyebrows furled together. If Vero had intended to expose the true, malicious origin of Ebola, why wasn’t the evidence on the memory chip? What had he set out to prove?

  She had been staring at the computer, without really seeing it, when two white-lettered words appeared on the dark screen:

  ERSTE ANGRIFF

  “Who’s that?” Stephen asked.

  Allen said, “I don’t think it’s a who. Erste is German for ‘first.’” He scrunched up his face. “I’m not sure about angriff. Something like ‘battle’ or ‘fight.’”

  “First battle,” Stephen whispered.

  They waited for more …

  Then it dawned on her. The self-starting video sequences had fooled her into regarding Vero’s memory chip as a DVD, which would naturally unravel linearly to the end. But it wasn’t. It was a computer data chip with files that had to be opened. The video clips were nothing more than digital multimedia files, like word processing docum
ents and spreadsheets. Whatever this was, it wasn’t self-opening.

  Julia moved the cursor over the words, and the little arrow turned into a pointing hand. “It’s hypertext,” she said. “It’s linked to some other file.”

  She clicked on the words. Instantly a list of names began scrolling past, lightning fast. She tapped a key, and the list froze.

  “Anthony Petucci,” she said, pointing. “The actor?”

  Stephen bent near to read aloud. “Howard Melton. Isn’t he a senator? Janet Plenum, governor of Oregon.”

  “Lew Darabont,” Allen said. “I love his movies.”

  Julia said, “Hasn’t he directed something like four or five of the top ten films of all time?”

  She moved the cursor over one of the names. Again it turned into a pointing hand. “They’re linked too.” She tapped the cursor button.

  New words filled the screen:

  Richard Kennedy

  SSN: 987-65-4320 b. 04/21/55

  Occupation: CEO, Nanotech Software, Inc.

  Home Address:

  1910 Whitehorn Drive

  San Francisco, CA 94120

 

  Appendectomy, 11/02/92

  Mount Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles

  Control Code: 469878884-L

  “He’s one of the richest men in America,” Allen said.

  “Appendectomy?” Stephen said. “What kind of database is this?”

  “A big one,” Julia said, bringing the screen back to the list of names. She scrolled down a few screens. Tapped on a name, closed it … then another … and another …

  “There’s an odd assortment of the famous and the average,” she said after a while. “Politicians, celebrities, business leaders, an auto mechanic, housewives—look at this …”

  Hunter, Baby Boy

  SSN: N/A B. 09/15/06

  Occupation: N/A

  Home Address:

  4250 Michigan Avenue, Apt. 312

  Chicago, IL 60611

 

  PKU, 09/17/06

  Memorial Hospital, Chicago

  Control Code: 842074654-M

  Stephen shook his head. “A baby. Didn’t even have a name when this information was collected.”