Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  The man smiled. “You look battle-worn, my friend.” His voice was gruff and laced with Teutonic sharpness. When Allen did not respond, he rapped an object against the bars; it made the sound that had awakened him.

  Allen saw it was the gauntlet Julia had given him to deliver. His stomach tumbled at the thought of the tracking device wedged into one of the fingers. Would rescuers be able to find him if it were destroyed or turned off? Would his captors punish him for bringing it? He didn’t know the answers and didn’t want to find out. He glared into the man’s piercing eyes.

  The man laughed, which became a cough, a phlegmy, painful sound. “I have found that when people are caged, either they fight and scream and lunge at the bars, or like you they become sullen.”

  “Would fighting get me out of here?” Allen asked, more quietly than he had intended. His parched throat was uncooperative.

  “Not at all, but it does provide some entertainment.”

  The man balanced the gauntlet on his lap and pulled a PDA from a holster on his belt, similar to the Palm Pilot Allen used. He tapped the screen a couple of times with a fingertip. “Now let’s see …”

  He looked around, up at the sky. “Slight breeze, wouldn’t you say? Not much, though.” Tap, tap, tap. “Okay. And I’ll just put we spoke for two minutes, but I think it was less.” More taps.

  He replaced the device, positioned the gauntlet under one arm, and stood. He sniffed and used the back of his hand to wipe his nose.

  “What’s your name?” Allen asked. He didn’t know why it mattered, but it did. Maybe it was something human he could connect to.

  The man gazed down at him. He rummaged through a pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He extracted one and stuck it in the corner of his mouth and lit it with a lighter he had pulled from another pocket. “Gregor,” he answered. The word came out in a plume of smoke.

  “Care to share?” Allen indicated the pack of cigarettes.

  “They’re German. Perhaps not to your taste.”

  “I’ll take anything right now.”

  Gregor shook one out and handed it to Allen, who put it in his mouth and brought his face close to the bars. Gregor lit the cigarette. It smelled like burning manure.

  Allen filled his lungs with the bitter, biting smoke. He coughed it out raggedly. “You’re right,” he hacked. “This is wretched stuff.” He took another drag, wiping a tear from his eye.

  Gregor nodded at something. Allen followed his gaze to the Cessna at the far end of the runway.

  “He is quite extraordinary, yes?” Gregor sucked on the cigarette and let the smoke drift lazily out of his mouth and nostrils. “He said he needed sleep, but we talked for ten minutes. Fascinating man.”

  “One in a million.”

  Gregor looked down with a mild expression of surprise, as though he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone. “Soon we will get you out of this sun and into your own bed. If you are fortunate, we may find you a private room.” He shrugged. “But no matter, the ward can be pleasant at times. We do try to keep our patients comfortable.”

  “Why patch me up? What do you care?” Allen gently touched his swollen eye.

  Gregor grunted. “Your injuries do not concern us.”

  “Then what makes me a ‘patient’? I’m … not sick.” Something in his chest shifted. He noted the snot crusting around Gregor’s nostrils and suspected his own health had just taken a turn for the worse.

  Gregor looked over the compound’s seemingly abandoned fields and buildings. He pulled on the cigarette and shot a stream of smoke into the air, then coughed. “We think you are, Dr. Parker. If you are not, then our scientists have failed to do their jobs, and I will suffer this congestion for nothing.” He squatted again and squinted at Allen. “And anyway, we promised Atropos a bonus for bringing you here.”

  “Bonus?”

  Gregor waved a hand at him and made a face as though the details were beneath him. “Karl will cover all that with you. After you get settled.” He tossed away his cigarette and held the gauntlet in both hands, appraising it.

  “This, my friend, is legendary,” he said. “The Atropos gauntlet.” He turned it to appreciate it from different angles.

  “I suppose you vacation at Auschwitz.”

  Gregor rapped the gauntlet hard against the bars.

  Allen watched the tracking device fall from its armhole. It took every bit of self-control he could muster not to follow its trajectory to the ground. Instead, he locked his eyes on Gregor’s face.

  The German had not noticed. Yet.

  Julia woke to find Stephen’s yeti-like mug filling her vision. He was shaking her lightly and whispering.

  “What?” she said, reaching for her pistol.

  “It’s beeping. The laptop.”

  She propped herself up with an elbow and saw she was in the van’s rear bed. “How’d I get back here?” Her voice was thick with sleep. She remembered getting into the passenger’s seat—and that was all.

  “You fell asleep. I moved you.”

  Without waking her? She must have been exhausted. And he must have been very gentle. Still, it bothered her to know she could be manhandled without her knowledge. She was glad it was Stephen who had observed this weakness in her and not someone else. Like Allen. Behind him, the driver’s seat was again flattened into a narrow bed.

  “What time is it?” She raised her head to catch a glimpse out the window. She felt every muscle, every tendon. They were in the parking lot of what appeared to be a luxury hotel. Behind its tall facade, the sky was lightening. The laptop, programmed to continuously monitor the SATD transmitter, sat in the captain’s chair behind the front passenger seat. And sure enough, it was beeping.

  “5:38.”

  “Oh, man.” She dropped back onto the bare mattress, closed her eyes. But the laptop’s alarm was going off … She had to check into it … She had to …

  Stephen was shaking her again.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, swinging her legs off the bed and sitting. She moved forward and knelt in front of the laptop as if at an altar. She supposed some people would think it an appropriate analogy, considering her dependence on the fool piece of technology. She forced her eyes to focus on the screen.

  “The transmitter has stopped,” she said.

  “Stopped working?”

  “No, I mean they aren’t moving anymore. They’ve reached their destination.”

  “Where?”

  She willed her sluggish fingers to type, instructing the SATD program to fine-tune its calculations, to triangulate the signal with area Global Positioning satellites, to cross-reference the information with every map held in its databases. The entire process took roughly fifteen seconds. She was pleasantly surprised by the SATD’s precision, given her lack of detailed international maps.

  “They appear to be … just northwest of… Pedro Juan Caballero, Paraguay.”

  “Paraguay? What’s in Paraguay?”

  “Apparently, Allen is. Does what you know about Paraguay jibe with anything we saw on the videos?”

  “I have no idea. I suppose eastern Paraguay could be subtropical. Is that where this Pedro Juan town is?”

  She checked the computer map. “Right on the Brazilian border.”

  “That abandoned base on the video had airstrips.”

  “There’s a town here, almost touching Pedro Juan Caballero, on the Brazilian side …” She spoke slowly, leaning close to the screen.

  “Yeah?”

  “Ponta Pora. Allen said Goody mentioned something with ‘pora’ at the end of it. He said he thought maybe it was … something that had to do with internal bleeding, a rash …”

  “Purpora.”

  “What if Goody had learned about Ponta Pora from Vero, and that’s what he was trying to tell Allen?” She nodded and crawled back onto the mattress. “We’re not due back at Sweaty’s for a couple hours. Go back to sleep.” When she opened an eye a minute later, Stephen was sitting on the driver’
s folded-down seat back, staring at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Isn’t there something else we can do?”

  She thought for a moment. “Call the airport. Find out which flight will get us closest to that town. Use a pay phone up the street, not in the hotel.”

  “Pedro Juan …?”

  “Caballero,” she said, rolling over, pulling herself into a ball. “Wake me at eight.”

  seventy-three

  Stephen woke her precisely at eight, anxious to do

  something—anything—that brought them closer to their goal of getting Allen back. By 8:20, they were sitting in the restaurant of the hotel in whose parking lot they’d spent the night. They’d washed up in the restrooms off the lobby, and now Julia used a cloth napkin to finish drying the nape of her neck and behind her ears. She’d ordered a breakfast similar to the one she’d had nine hours earlier in Chattanooga. This time Stephen had also ordered a substantial meal.

  “It’s a long way from here to there,” he said, unfolding a map of the Western Hemisphere he had purchased in the gift shop while Julia was catching a few extra winks. He arranged the map so the eastern seaboard down through South America was centered on the table, and tapped the tip of his forefinger on Atlanta. “We have to be at the airport at 11:50 this morning.”

  “That’s cutting it close.” She’d woken with the skeleton of a plan rattling around in her head. They’d have to move quickly to get everything done in time.

  “That’s the last flight of the day for any airline.” He ran his finger south to Sao Paulo, Brazil. “As it is, we don’t get in till after midnight.

  Tomorrow morning, we catch a commuter flight into Pedro Juan Caballero. Be there ‘bout noon. Then we’ll have to travel to wherever it is they took Allen.” He shook his head, discouraged. “That’s a long time for them to have him. According to the SATD, Atropos’s plane made it in under ten hours. If it takes us half a day to find him, he’ll have been there almost two days.”

  Julia frowned. “Half a day to find him may be optimistic.”

  “But you said—”

  “We’ll find him. It just won’t be easy.” She examined the map. It really was a long way. Farther, even, than Europe, though she’d always thought of South America as a near neighbor.

  The waitress came and left, leaving their breakfast plates scattered across the Caribbean and Venezuela.

  “How about chartering a jet?” Stephen suggested.

  “The passports Sweaty’s getting us will look great. They’ll get us past busy airline clerks who are really checking for the destination country, but charter companies are very careful. They have to be, with pirates out there wanting to take their planes and terrorists looking to bypass airport security. I don’t think our passports will work with them, and then we’d really be up the creek.”

  He nodded, solemn. “We’re not going to miss that flight,” he said firmly. He scooped an entire fried egg into his mouth and still had room to say, “So what’s your plan?”

  Allen lay on his side, his knees pulled to his chest, his arms hugging his legs. A metal crossbar pushed up through the green canvas of his cot, making his ribs ache. It was the least of his problems. A long time ago—hours? days?—when the sun had been high and hot, the guards who’d thrown him in the cage returned. They’d dragged him out, hauled him into a Quonset hut and down several flights of stairs, through dingy corridors to this room, this cell. Eight feet by eight feet, at best. The cot was bolted to the floor. A plastic wash bucket was his toilet. Wire mesh protected fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. There was no light switch; the tubes had burned bright white since his arrival.

  The guards had stripped off his soiled clothes and left a khaki jumpsuit. People had peered through the window in the door and occasionally brought in water or a plate of inedible slop.

  The first unattributable pain he noticed was in his eyes. They felt swollen, the eyeballs themselves stretching and pushing against the ocular sockets. The headache came next, a throbbing that picked up pace until it became a never-ending pressure. His vision blurred. His bowels cramped. His muscles arched. His fingernails hurt.

  When two guards had pulled him from the cage, they might as well have worked a knife blade into his shoulder socket, the pain had been so great. Regardless, he had writhed around as if in the throes of a panicked escape attempt. Unable to break free, he had lunged for the ground, pulling his escorts with him. His face had struck the dirt. He found the tracking device with his lips and pulled it into his mouth. As the soldiers had forced him up, he swallowed.

  It was still inside him, and he wondered if it was working. Certainly, the thing wasn’t designed for such abuse. He had thought about what to do later and decided he couldn’t risk being separated from it. He would have to swallow it again.

  He thought about Stephen. He’d be hounding Julia to find him. He hoped she had understood his message and followed through with sending the data to Kendrick Reynolds. They would need all the help they could get to rescue him.

  If it isn’t too late.

  Nix that. Think of something else. Julia. He did like the way she looked. He liked that she was tough too. And smart. Somebody he could get to know.

  He thought of all the women he’d known, the ones he could remember. One by one, he counted through them, tried to recall how they’d met, what they’d done on their first date, their names.

  He entertained any thought that entered his mind, anything but the most pressing, the most insistent. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to know—

  Why am I feeling these pains? What have they done to me?

  —Angelina. Pretty blonde. Senior prom. No, he’d taken Robin. Brunette. So how had he known Angelina? Homecoming?

  The dead bolt rattled, thunked. The door cracked open. A face peered in, then bent low. A water bottle rolled in. The door shut, the lock thunked.

  He was thirsty. He willed himself up to get the bottle. Didn’t move. He watched the bottle, on its side, unmoving.

  Reminded him of Patty. She loved water, wouldn’t drink anything else. Drove him nuts, that girl.

  When he returned to the comic shop, Stephen paid Sweaty

  Dave the balance owed by purchasing a cellophane-sealed comic book with a thick stack of hundreds. The book itself was a new issue of an unpopular comic, worth a few bucks at best. The documents it hid, however, were invaluable.

  Back in the van, he and Julia inspected the bogus identifications, stunned by their perfection. The passports possessed stamps from other countries, dating back half a dozen years. Some of the pages were dog-eared, and Stephen’s had a coffee-cup circle stained into the front cover. The driver’s licenses also showed signs of wear, but not to the extent that the numbers were illegible or the pictures hard to see. Sweaty or one of his cohorts had digitally removed his beard but left him with a mustache, so it appeared that it had been taken at a different time from the passport photo. Their new birth certificates appeared to be yellowing and slightly brittle from age. Julia said that the effect was achieved by immersing the paper in weak tea, then warming it in an oven at low temperature. As a final touch, Sweaty Dave had given each of them several major credit cards, complete with a few hundred dollars of available credit. Julia got a Sears card embossed with her new name.

  “You have to shave,” she told him, “or at least take a trimmer to it.”

  “I won’t look like my photo.”

  “That’s okay,” she assured him. “People who check IDs expect appearances to change. They get suspicious when you look too much like your photo. They’re trained to compare the nose, eyes, size of the ears, shape of the face, things that don’t change. They’ll know it’s you, don’t worry.”

  seventy-four

  Gregor burst from the Quonset hut door, pistol drawn. Making his way toward the airstrip, he grimaced at the sky. Guards, two with rifles, two with Uzis, were already there, looking off toward the distant Amambay mesas to th
e south. The jet seemed to rise up from the treetops. It sailed overhead, low and loud.

  At the end of the runway, the parked Cessna’s door opened, and Atropos came out, stopping on the steps. He glared up, blocking the sun with his hand.

  Gregor ran all out for him.

  Atropos saw Gregor and pulled his gun.

  Gregor stopped. He realized Atropos was responding to his own drawn weapon. He holstered it and jogged the rest of the distance.

  Atropos’s big pistol remained in his hand, pointed at the runway. His thick black hair was even messier than it had been when he arrived. His clothes were wrinkled, as though he’d slept in them.

  “Another plane!” Gregor called. “One of yours?” He knew it had to be. It was the same model as the one Atropos flew.

  “Have you taken care of Parker?” He saw Gregor’s confusion and said, “Allen Parker. When can I take him?”

  “Soon. We just want to make sure—do you know anything about that plane?”

  Atropos stepped onto the packed-dirt airstrip. He strode past Gregor, heading for the four guards. Karl Litt appeared from behind the Quonsets. He scanned the sky as he moved slowly toward the guards.

  “Atropos,” Gregor pleaded. “I need to know—”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “You weren’t supposed to tell others. I invited only you.”

  “I know.”

  They were almost within earshot of Karl. His scowl was already visible.

  “This is a problem,” Gregor said. “I told Karl you were coming alone.”

  Karl stepped toward them. “What’s going on?” he asked loudly.

  Gregor trotted ahead of Atropos, holding his palms up. “I was told—”

  The jet roared up from the east, over the trees, and dropped down onto the runway. Its engines whined as its reverse thrusters kicked in. It taxied past the men at more than a hundred miles per hour. Slowing quickly, the sound ramped down. The plane reached the end of the airstrip, near the other Cessna, turned around, and approached them at a slow clip.