by Nancy Kress
Jess pulled out his cell phone. He'd keyed in most of DiBella's number when he saw the dog.
It lay about thirty feet away, partially covered by drifting snow, as dead as its mistress. A King Charles spaniel, not really a hiking dog at all. Jess squatted beside him and stared into the dog’s open eyes. No milky white film. The spaniel’s body wasn’t mauled, but the head lay at a strange angle, as if the dog’s neck had been broken. The girl might have landed a lucky kick, but Jess doubted that’s what had happened. This spaniel had been a victim, not an attacker.
Cell reception was bad up here in the mountains, and non-existent back at his truck. Jess had to tramp over half the field before he got a staticky, intermittent call through.
“DiBella here.”
“Don, I’ve—”
“What? What? I can’t hear you!”
“It’s Jess!” he shouted, as if shouting would help. He moved to another, higher section of the field. His boot prints made a mess of the pristine snow. “I got something. Dead hiker alone in a field, female, throat torn out. Maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure. Also dead is a dog, King Charles spaniel, not mauled. I think I should—”
“Wait a minute,” DiBella said, in a voice not his own. “I’m standing here with Mr. Lurie and Dr. Latkin. Let me…wait a minute.”
Jess waited, gazing across the snow at the body. It looked very small and very alone.
Finally DiBella said something garbled by static.
“What?”
“I said, what’s your position?”
Jess gave the GPS coordinates memorized in his truck.
“Okay, that’s Bonchester jurisdiction. Call the sheriff’s office there and report the…no, just a minute, Mr. Lurie wants to talk to you.”
It was the first time Jess had had a direct conversation with the FEMA chief. He said with a belligerency that Jess didn’t like, “Who’d you tell about this, Langstrom?”
“Nobody. I only just found—”
“What? Who’d you tell?”
“Nobody! ”
“Who’s with you?”
“No one.”
“You touch anything?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, don’t,” Lurie said. “We’ll have people there in an hour. Stay with the body. Don’t call anyone, and…what is it?…just a minute, Langstrom.”
A long minute, filled with static. Jess fought with his temper. Like all weak men, Lurie thought that strength consisted of treating everyone else like idiots. But the next voice was Dr. Latkin’s.
“Jess, Joe Latkin. Listen, I’d like you to bring the dog here in your own truck, separate from whatever they do with the hiker. The dog—”
“It doesn’t have the milky white stuff in its eyes, doctor.”
“No. But that dissolves right after death, when the proteins are no longer being produced. That dog could be infected but not aggressive, at least if you’re sure it wasn’t what killed the hiker.”
“I’m sure.” Then what Latkin had said hit Jess: The milky film in infected dogs went away right after death. They knew that because they’d killed some dogs already.
“Can you get the dog into your truck right away, before the FBI arrives?”
The FBI. Scott Lurie was going to bypass local authorities. “I’m breaking West Virginia law if I don’t report the death, aren’t I?”
Silence. Then Lurie again, brusquely, “Don’t worry about that, Langstrom. We’ll take care of it. Just don’t talk to anyone and bring Latkin the dog.”
Jess said curtly, “Right.” Suddenly a loud noise came, clear and hard, over the phone. “What was that? It sounded like an explosion!”
The connection was dead.
An explosion. In Tyler? Jess must have been mistaken.
He carried the spaniel, a stiff mass of frozen bloody tissue, to his trunk and put him in back, covered by a tarp. Then he went back to wait beside the body of the girl who had died so horribly on a walk with her dog. It was cold in the field but Jess couldn’t leave her there, alone. She’d died alone; that was bad enough.
The first victim to die of canine plague outside of Tyler, Maryland. She and her pet. From nowhere his mind pulled up an old Will Rogers quote: “If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die I want to go where they are.”
Jess hoped they were both there now.
» 47
By the miracle of modern flight, Tessa had left London at 6:10 on Monday and arrived in Toronto before 9:00 P.M., flying steadily backwards through the time zones. No one in Toronto paid her any attention. She changed the very generous stack of bills Ruzbihan had given her into American dollars, waited out her lay-over, and flew to Pittsburgh, landing at two in the morning. Someday, she thought wearily, it would be nice to arrive in some city when it wasn’t the middle of the night.
The problem was transportation. Ruzbihan had provided “Jane Caldwell” with a passport but not a driver’s license, so she could not rent a car. She spent the rest of the night sleeping upright in a plastic chair at the airport. Tuesday morning she took a cab, choosing the driver carefully. She passed him fifty dollars and asked for “a place where I can buy a used car, even if the place doesn’t have such a good reputation.” They sparred a little, but Tessa knew the right words. He dropped her at a chop shop where the dealer/owner hadn’t shaved, leered at her, and tried to show her a car whose engine had been badly camouflaged after a major wreck. Perfect.
She didn’t buy that one. Her dead father had, long ago, tried to teach both Tessa and Ellen about cars. Ellen hadn’t been interested. Tessa had learned. Now she bought a fifteen-year-old Toyota with 103,000 miles, paying twice what the criminal asked in exchange for his asking nothing else. They came to this agreement without either openly acknowledging it was happening, and she felt a certain tired, grudging admiration for his underhanded skill.
With stolen plates still on the Toyota, she drove to the public library.When she’d accessed the Internet at Heathrow, there had been no email from Ebenfield, which surprised her. Nor had there been any when she’d checked at the airport in Toronto. Maddox, however, had emailed her:
Stop this immediately, Tessa. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Wherever you went in London after you eluded our agents, it isn’t worth it. Come in, and stop being such a goddamn fool.
We can protect you. CALL ME.
Tessa snorted. She typed back to Maddox:
I will call you on your cell at noon today, Tuesday. Be ready.
Tessa left the library. At a nearby convenience store she bought five prepaid phone cards, and at a Verizon store she bought a cell phone in her own name, using her own American Express card and driver’s license. She made sure the phone was turned off and left Pittsburgh, driving north. At a gas station in a small town she didn’t catch the name of, she found an outside phone kiosk out of earshot of anyone pumping gas. Tessa loitered inside, drinking coffee, until noon. Then she called Maddox. He answered on the first ring.
“It’s Tessa, John.”
“Where are you?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He’d have the cell-phone registration traced soon enough. “I have some things to tell you, so listen carefully. Someone tried to kill me in London after I lost your agents. Two people, failed drive-by. Another group rescued me. That second group of three included a blue-eyed male with a British accent, Liverpool or Manchester by my best guesstimate. Maybe five-nine, a hundred and seventy pounds. Not much to go on, but if they were ours or the Brits’, you at least have something to recognize. The—”
“Goddammit, Tessa, what the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re not even an agent anymore, and you were never undercover! Do you—”
“Shut up and listen to me, John! Have you found Richard Ebenfield? Have you?”
“After you’ve—”
“Fine, don’t tell me. But if you haven’t found him, keep looking. I still think he’s connected somehow to this dog plague, although I don’t know how. But I do kno
w he was in Mogumbutuno two years ago. He’d had a loose affiliation for years with a Catholic missionary organization, les Frères de l’Espoir céleste. Check with Bernini on our intelligence presence in Mogumbutuno and run Ebenfield’s name by them. Although he might have been using an alias. He might be using one now, if you haven’t found him. Have you checked everyone in Tyler itself? It wouldn’t be unknown for principals to hang around to observe the effects of their operations.”
“Don’t tell me how—”
“Shit, John, it took us five years to find Eric Rudolph and eighteen years to find Ted Kaczynski! Look inside the cordon around Tyler! I don’t have any more information for you, but I do have a question. When I escaped your agents in London, was that staged? Did you let me get away so you could follow me and see where I led you? Do you actually know where I went, and is this whole thing an elaborate charade? John, are you using me?”
Silence. But was it guilt, or shock at Tessa’s paranoia? Finally Maddox said, “Come on in, Tessa. Now."
“I can’t.”
“We can protect you.”
“Oh, sure. You can protect me in a nice safe jail cell, right? Evading arrest, traveling on a false passport, maybe even obstructing justice, just for good measure.”
He said evenly, “What do you want? A deal?”
“Eventually, but I’ll make one with a good lawyer sitting right next to me. Someone a lot better at ass-covering than I am. Meanwhile, I’m giving you information for free.”
“We can gather information better than you can.”
“Really? You haven’t so far. And the last time I saw figures, John, the Bureau had over 120,000 hours of untranslated surveillance tapes in Arabic. You know and I know that you just don’t have the manpower to keep up. What’s on those tapes that might have tipped you off about this whole situation—other than my name and Salah’s, I mean. I can do this better alone."
“Do what better?” he snapped, and she hung up.
She got back in the car. Maddox would know soon enough where she’d been, but he didn’t know what she was driving. The big danger was the car’s being stopped due to the stolen plates. A chance she’d have to take.
Was she being paranoid about the FBI?
Since last week, it paid to be paranoid about everything.
After an hour she exited the expressway at another small town, found the library, and accessed her email. Still nothing from Ebenfield. That surprised her a little. Usually fanatics, especially amateurs, loved to explain their demented “causes,” and Ebenfield had a secure means to do so. She sent him another email:
Richard—
I still want to hear from you. And I want to talk to you. Send me a pay-phone number and a time to call, and I’ll phone you.
After a moment’s hesitation she added a proverb common throughout the Mideast, one Salah had been fond of. She had to guess at the phonetic spelling, but, then, Ebenfield was no Arabic scholar. Maybe he’d recognize the syllables, or be intrigued enough to find a translation on the Web, or even be pushed to phone her. Carefully she typed: “Kul kahlb beiji youmo.”
Every dog must have its day.
She got back in the car and pointed it toward Maryland.
» 48
On the way back to Tyler with the dead King Charles spaniel in his truck, Jess was stopped twice before he even reached the edge of town. At the state line, Maryland troopers waved him on after a cursory look at his FEMA pass and driver’s license. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds and looked to Jess like a routine stop-and-scrutinize, a net to catch whatever violations happened to turn up.
By the second stop, he knew better.
Just beyond the sign proclaiming WELCOME TO TYLER TOWNSHIP, traffic backed up nearly a quarter mile. Vehicles were being turned away. Jess studied the drivers’ angry faces as they headed back along the highway. When his turn came, a soldier in full battle gear demanded his authorization. More unsmiling soldiers—Army, not Maryland Guard—stood beside a concrete barricade that spanned most of the road.
“Jess Langstrom, Tyler Animal Control Officer, this is my FEMA pass.”
“Wait here.”
In the near distance, troops lounged behind sand-bag fortifications. Jess, incredulous, spotted a sniper prone on a tree platform. Since this morning, Tyler had changed from a quarantine site to a city under martial law.
The soldier returned with Jess’s pass. “Proceed into Tyler at no more than twenty miles per hour, Mr. Langstrom, and report directly to Dr. Latkin.”
“Yes.” It had almost come out Yes, sir.
Half a mile beyond the checkpoint, Jess saw the burned building. He stopped the truck—the soldier hadn’t said he couldn’t proceed at less than twenty miles per hour—and stared. What had been the Stop 'n' Shop, owned by Mayor Hafner’s son Carl, was now blackened timber and twisted metal. Debris lay, as if hurled, fifty feet away from the ruins. No ordinary fire did that. Yellow police tape circled the scene. A cop strode forward, sunlight glinting off his mirror shades.
“Please leave this area immed—oh, hi, Jess.”
“Eric. Was it a bomb?”
“Yeah.” Eric Lavida took off his shades. Beneath the brim of his hat, his sunburned young face was grim. “You been out of town?”
“For DiBella.”
“Find anything?”
“No. Anybody hurt here?”
“No. They phoned in a warning, gave the clerk plenty of time to get out. Janie Wilcox, Mike’s girl. She was the only one in the store.”
“Any suspects?”
“Not yet. But the caller said, ‘Mr. Mayor, return all uninfected dogs to their owners within the next twenty-four hours, or this will happen again.’”
Jess stared at the burned Stop ’n’ Shop. Things like this didn’t happen in his hometown, which had suddenly become a place he didn’t know.
“Later,” Eric said, and the word was more than a casual leave-taking.
Getting into critical-incident headquarters meant another cordon of troops, another showing of his flimsy FEMA pass. Finally Jess was allowed to pull into the parking lot of the Cedar Springs Motel and deliver the hiker’s dead spaniel to Dr. Latkin, whose face was gray with exhaustion.
“Doctor,” Jess asked as he passed the little tarp-covered body to Latkin, “will this really help?”
“We don’t know what will help!” Latkin snapped. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Sorry, Jess. Pretty tense around here. This dog might or might not give us new information about mutations, immunities, branching, or brain effects. We won’t know until we do the procedures. Meanwhile, FEMA—” He broke off, shaking his head.
Jess said, “When did Tyler get all these troops?”
“This morning, after the explosion. Scott Lurie’s hell-bent on nobody’s saying FEMA isn’t doing a total job on his watch. He’s over-compensating, if you ask me, for all of the agency’s past screw-ups. Trying so hard to keep the epidemic contained in Tyler that he’s bound to create a backlash. When he heard about the West Virginia Doberman, he went ballistic.”
“Joe, what do you think will—”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Latkin said, pulling his hands over the gray skin on his face as if to force some life into it. “I’ve seen Ebola in Africa and Marburg in the Philippines and cholera in South America and we got them all under control, but none of them involved eradicating people’s pets. People just aren’t rational about their pets!”
Jess had been an animal control officer for twenty years. He didn’t need a CDC doctor with a lot of advanced degrees to tell him that. And since Joe Latkin didn’t seem able to tell him anything else, he got back in his truck and headed for West Virginia and the fruitless search for the home of the escaped Doberman that, Jess increasingly suspected, they were not going to be able to find.
» 49
Tessa checked into a Maryland motel a few miles south of the Pennsylvania state line. That was as close as she could get to Tyler because every other place
displayed NO VACANCY signs, full of reporters and gawkers and Tyler citizens exiled from their town for the duration of the quarantine. The motel featured bullet-proof plastic between the desk clerk and his patrons, accepted cash, and didn’t question her story that she had no car. Bars shielded the windows. The sink ran a trickle of rust-colored water. The phone allowed only local calls.
She showered, a much overdue necessity, retrieved her car from the supermarket parking lot down the road, and found the local library. She was getting tired of rural libraries.
One of its two Internet terminals was down. Tessa waited while three teenage girls noisily used the other one, emailing somebody named Zach that somebody else named Emily was secretly in love with him. Finally the librarian chased them away. Tessa accessed her email.
My dear Tessa,
You asked about my “cause.” How laughably naïve you are. First, to think that I don’t know what you’re doing. You think the more you know about me the easier it will be to find me. You are mistaken. Second, you are naïve to think that I have a single “cause,” as if there is only one thing wrong with the world.
You, and all like you, will soon learn otherwise. The decline of the United States has many causes, but all come back to one thing: we have become soft. Don’t you read the newspapers, my Tessa? Men no longer stand up, take command, do whatever proves necessary to bring about a righteous society. Soft men—even women—take office and then can’t even hold their own positions, let alone bring forward those who truly deserve to hold power. Our politicians cannot rule. Our soldiers cannot fight. Our children cannot compete. Softness has nearly destroyed us. I have seen the world, and I see how we are despised by those that we should despise.
