The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  ‘The media are screaming terrorists. Worst attack since the Twin Towers, they say. Me? I have no idea. None. But I’m going to give you a number, a username, a password and the name of a database. Download it and keep it. I need you to do this for me. I have to know that I’m not the only person who knows about it. And don’t tell me it’s not your problem. And I need another sandwich, damnit. Come on, you don’t have to believe me. Just feed me. Huh?’

  More washed dollar bills went into the vending machine. Quack wolfed down this second sandwich as eagerly as he had the first. ‘Now why don’t you tell me why you’re here.’

  ‘We’ve just been talking about it.’

  ‘You could have come about that weeks ago. Instead you wait until you’ve got road blocks in the way. What’s worrying you? Tell me. I want to know.’

  David glanced down at his shoes, glanced up. ‘Workmen,’ he said.

  If it had been anybody else, Quack would have laughed. ‘What about workmen?’ he said.

  David described the construction site at Otto’s Autos in Springfield where he’d failed so badly to manage his crew. ‘I thought maybe you could give me some business administration advice. Otherwise, I’m going to have to turn the project over to a construction company.’

  ‘That would be bad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You enjoy the work, don’t you?’

  ‘I like taking one pattern and turning it into another. I just don’t like people much.’

  Not far from Quack and David, a father in work clothes sat opposite his multiply pierced son, ears, nose, eyebrows, all pierced and ringed, crude piercings, crude rings, all prison gear, an advertisement for HIV infection. Tears ran down the older man’s face; the two hadn’t exchanged a word in all this time, not even a glance.

  Quack frowned. ‘The problem isn’t people, Richard. It’s men. You’re overly fond of scaring them, beating them up, killing them. They can sense it. And they have no trouble sensing that you’re good at it.’ Quack frowned again. ‘The solution is simple. Hire women.’

  David wasn’t easily taken aback. ‘What for?’

  ‘They’re no fun to beat up. Not for you. Too easy. Besides, you really like women. Women might not have the muscle power, but they have greater endurance than men. There are lots of carpenters, electricians, all kinds of trades. They’re patient and they tend to be neater and cheaper. What about your own construction company? Maybe insist on a rota so one woman – on full pay – looks after the others’ children during working hours. Of course, not all of them will have children. You’ll get a fair share of lesbians.’

  David nodded. ‘They’d probably be strongest. Best for construction.’

  ‘Now why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?’

  David got up without a word, fetched a third sandwich from the vending machine, sat down again, handed over the sandwich. ‘I want you to tell me what’s wrong with somebody,’ he said.

  Quack stared at him. ‘You’re here for a medical opinion?’

  ‘You going to hear me out or what?’

  ‘Is this guy in hiding?’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  Quack nodded. ‘Okay. He’s somebody you know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Think it could be related to this new disease?’

  David looked abruptly away. ‘You’re the doctor. Not me.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Of course. I’m so sorry. There’s diarrhoea?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know something like that?’

  ‘Fever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about nausea? Vomiting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Quack studied his friend. He’d learned a lot about David in their years as cellmates; he’d even learned to anticipate some of the mercurial changes of temperament, but he’d never known David to show an interest – much less concern – about anybody’s health.

  ‘How about . irritability?’ Quack suggested, watching David carefully.

  ‘Rollercoaster. One end of the spectrum to the other.’

  Quack paused, then took the plunge. ‘I’ll lay you a bet Helen is pregnant,’ he said gently. ‘There might be odd cravings too. Marinated artichokes. Raw carrots. Chocolate prunes. That kind of thing.’

  David didn’t speak.

  ‘She does know you’re here, doesn’t she?’ Quack asked.

  ‘She washed the dollar bills so you could have all these sandwiches.’

  Quack smiled. ‘Thank her for me, will you? And keep her away from the water. You too. It’s waterborne, this new disease. I’m sure of it. I don’t know much about it, but I’m certain it’s water-borne, and I feel fairly sure it has a single life cycle.’ He took the last bite of his sandwich, savoured it. ‘I was very devout when I got sent to prison,’ he said then. David nodded. The sight of Quack on his knees had been a constant irritant for most of the first decade they’d been cellmates. ‘I loved God,’ Quack went on. ‘I loved His anger and His wisdom and especially His sense of justice. I lost my faith in here.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ David remembered his relief when the kneeling had stopped.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t what you think. It wasn’t violence or sex or HIV, and it wasn’t bearing witness to lots of other guys going through the same thing. I figured I deserved that – all of it, even the witnessing – for the sin I’d committed against God’s justice. “Honour thy mother and father.” “Thou shalt not kill.” Doesn’t quite fit gassing your parents, does it? No, no, it’s your fault. You’re the person responsible.’

  There was a pause. ‘That does surprise me.’

  ‘Those medical books you helped me get? I studied so hard that I had nightmares about vomiting up human parts and human diseases. I’d had no idea there were so many in either category. I began to see it as a battle: me against disease. At last I was going to glorify God in His justice. Eight years, three months, twelve days of studying those books, watching the sick who came to me, worrying over them day and night, straining to help them with everything I had in my—’

  Quack broke off, put down his sandwich wrapper, picked it up again, crumpled it in his hands. ‘I realized God didn’t care which side won. Me or the bacterium. It’s all the same to Him.’

  42

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: Later that day

  Freyl money certainly simplified things. David had bought everything he needed in Galesburg before he visited Quack. The Honda may have been stolen, but he drove it straight to the Hilton at O’Hare. An hour later, he emerged into the airport itself – showered, shaved, formally dressed – to blend not all that badly with rich businessmen in a first-class lounge, where he spent another hour surfing the Net.

  Quack had told him how feverish the reports about Springfield were, but he hadn’t said anything about how strongly divided people were between the Scaremongers and the Deniers, as the opposing sides called each other.

  The Scaremongers were the hot and bothered lot that Quack had described. Terrorism was a given. But which terrorists? Al-Qaeda? Neo-Nazis? Islamic Jihad? A crazy loner? Scuffles broke out in bars. Lynch mobs formed in Alabama and Mississippi. ‘Inside information’ told them that the bioweapon inflicted on Springfield was cholera. Or mutant swine flu. Or a new hospital bug gone mad. Or the Andromeda Strain. The living had to step over the dead in the streets. The whole US was in danger. We were all going to die.

  The Deniers were calm, rational, dismissive. Springfield had suffered a terrible storm, terrible floods, contaminated water, no electricity. Rioting was par for the course. So was looting. The medical complications of exposure to raw sewage are often underestimated. They can be varied, widespread, dangerous. But rarely lethal. The only deaths so far had been a couple of old people trampled during the rioting, an unrelated case of food poisoning and two children swept away in the flood. As for the army, it was there to help, and qualified volunteers – especially medical personnel – would be welcome to join in.

  Sub
ject to the army’s discretion of course.

  The balance of the argument was painfully clear. The wild-haired hysteria of the Scaremongers ensured that the Deniers and the official media remained comfortably in the ascendant.

  It’s true that Freyl money simplified things for David, but it made him feel all the more alien. He didn’t belong in South Hams any more – that was clear – but he didn’t belong in a first-class lounge either. He’d have felt less of an impostor if he’d stolen the money to get into it. Besides, O’Hare Airport is where Hugh Freyl had gone blind. He’d just been sitting there and gone blind. Nobody ever found out why. David had been through the place several times; it made him uneasy every time. Frantic bustle and total aimlessness, vast empty spaces and sporadic knots of people: it looked too much like the furniture inside his own head. A couple of hours later he landed in Boston’s Logan Airport, which was more of the same. A chauffeur greeted him – very deferential – ushered him to a limo and began a tortured trip into a city at night.

  David didn’t care for cities any more than airports. He’d seen London. He’d seen New York. He’d seen others too after he got out of prison, but only New York and London on Freyl money. Now Boston of course. As for Springfield, he knew it like the back of his hand – except that he was never sure what the back of his hand looked like. Boston seemed a mishmash of leftovers from the rest, warmed up in a microwave. More water though. And bridges that looked like iron scaffolds for teepees.

  So this is good old Boston,

  The home of the bean and the cod,

  Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots.

  And the Cabots talk only to God.

  So?

  So he was a Freyl, and abruptly – wholly without warning – that was a pleasure. Not just a pleasure either. Much, much more.

  The chauffeur’s deference at the airport had irritated him. He’d resisted it, scorned it, another of the great unwashed bowing and scraping to a social rank for ever out of reach, this guy so eager that he didn’t know an impostor when he saw one. But there are revelations and revelations. David’s first had come when he realized Hugh Freyl really was going to have him transferred from Marion Federal Penitentiary to South Hams State Prison. This second?

  It had started this afternoon with Quack when David had felt an outsider at South Hams. And now, Boston’s night lights through the limo’s tinted windows – a split-second pattern identical to the floodlights of South Hams’ yard at night – showed him how the chauffeur’s bowing and scraping fit into a new scheme of things.

  He’d arrived in South Hams planning to beat a man to death, saw off his balls and deliver them to a gang leader. The choice that Hugh had forced on him was stark: do something as dramatic as that or face what Quack and Andy and thousands of others faced. David had been mad as hell all his life, ever since he could remember, but a killer? No. The deaths that sent him to prison had been pure fury: cornered by two guys in an oil pit beneath a car, no idea how the blood and brains that got splattered turned out to be theirs, not his. All he’d intended with his South Hams plan was to make other prisoners keep their distance. And yet the moment he made the decision to kill, he sensed that he’d mastered the language of prison. This was a society he could control.

  He’d carried out his plan and not been surprised to find grown men bowing and scraping to a mere boy because of it. He’d enjoyed the deference, grown used to it, killed to maintain the power it brought him. He rose fast in the prison hierarchy until he sat at the right hand of the Insiders’ General – a social rank well beyond the aspirations of the vast majority of prisoners – and knew he was the heir apparent.

  Yet not until now, not until this ride in a Boston limo, did he realize that Freyl money was buying for him outside bars what killing had bought for him behind them. Money was his ticket into another way of life, another society whose language he could master, another he could control.

  Two revelations: both of them down to Hugh Freyl.

  It was nearly nine, very dark except for Boston’s night brilliance, when the chauffeur pulled up at a kerb in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. Trees behind, a tree in front of an old building made of carved stone, a flight of steps up to an arched door. A man in a better suit than David’s Galesburg purchase led him into the main dining floor – a suite of rooms, large tables, well spaced, every one filled with diners – to an old elevator with sliding metal doors, along a wood-panelled corridor and into a room. The lighting was softer here, three walls book-lined, the fourth a Chinese cityscape in brocade, the space easily big enough for eight, but easily intimate enough for two. The woman who rose to greet David was a redhead, hair close-cropped, short upper lip, almond eyes, no make-up, dressed for business, not pleasure.

  ‘Why are your suits always new when I see you?’ she asked. She wasn’t flirting with him. She was just curious. Nor was humour her strong point. ‘I don’t like this one.’

  ‘I rented the last one,’ he said.

  ‘You know, I half thought you were going to kiss me.’

  ‘I thought so too.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ Again, just curiosity.

  ‘You scare me.’

  ‘What an excellent basis for dialogue.’

  This was Christina Haggarty, CEO of Galleas International. She was just about the Slad twins’ age – younger than David – and like them she was already a legend in the financial world: an icy clarity of mind and a royal contempt for received wisdom. David had met her in New York when he was looking for somebody to pin Hugh’s murder on. Their discussion had concerned Hugh’s involvement with UCAI and Galleas; the Freyl firm still dealt with both.

  In those days, Galleas International was little known to the public; financial reporters hinted at connections with crime lords and unsavoury dictators. Now, the corporation appeared regularly in the media while remaining the most secretive of the vast multinationals. Not even its total sales were known although pundits claimed it wielded an economy as big as Exxon’s, which is to say it was smaller than UCAI and Kuwait, but bigger than New Zealand and Mitsubishi. This formidable competitor had forced UCAI out of the uranium game only a year or so before, and economists liked to tell their students that the two were officially at war. Not just metaphor either. Both maintained international private security firms, large, full-scale mercenary armies just like the ones helping to occupy Springfield. There’d been rumours of skirmishes, death tolls, civilian casualties: those uranium mines, oil pipelines in the Middle East, water sources and distribution routes. These days rumours also hinted at a hostile takeover, sometimes with Galleas as aggressor, sometimes as victim.

  ‘So what’s going on in that town of yours?’ Christina asked David as the attendant in the elegant suit seated her.

  ‘Lot of damage. That much water makes a mess. Rats everywhere. Army too.’

  ‘What about your plague?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘No bodies in the streets?’

  ‘If they’re there, I haven’t seen any.’

  ‘Terrorists?’

  ‘I haven’t seen any of those either.’

  The attendant pulled out a chair and seated David too.

  ‘What does Mrs Freyl want in exchange for her information?’ Christina asked then. She never agreed to meetings without a detailed brief.

  ‘Springfield.’

  ‘The town itself?’

  ‘Nothing less.’

  Becky had explained to David that Galleas was a minority shareholder in the Grand canal and that from what she’d read Christina intended to be not just a major player in the water game but the major player. David hadn’t needed her to tell him that the crisis in Springfield, especially combined with the loss of the referendum, had cemented UCAI’s position and was quickly cementing Jimmy’s. Becky and Galleas were already allied in spirit. All she needed was a formal acknowledgement.

  ‘Ambassador David Marion, eh?’ Christina said.

  ‘Something like that.’
/>
  ‘I hope you come bearing gifts.’

  ‘We have a start. Not strong, but a start.’

  Back before the Council vote, when it looked as though Morris Kline was the key to ousting Jimmy, Becky had served Morris coffee and brownies in her study so she could record their conversation. David had a digital copy with him: Kline’s evidence of a cover-up of the contamination episode in the town, something that called for far more power than a mayor could wield. There was also bribery of council aldermen to swing the vote in favour of privatization and gagging the press to hide the massive public reaction against it. As David handed the recording over to Christina, he told her that Becky thought there had to be a way to tie UCAI into all of it.

  A sommelier arrived with champagne and a ceremonial opening of the bottle. Two attendants arrived with bread in several baskets.

  Christina tasted the wine, approved it but shook her head at David. ‘UCAI and the Mayor could be linked at the hip, and they’d happily set him up for the fall if that’s what they need.’

  ‘The old lady talks about trade agreements.’

  ‘NAFTA?’

  ‘Among others.’

  The first David had heard of the acronym was when Becky briefed him for this meeting. She’d said that the letters stand for the North American Free Trade Agreement, set up to regulate just such international deals as the shipment of Canadian water to the United States. If a NAFTA tribunal were to find UCAI guilty of an illegal act like the sabotage that Becky was certain she could prove, the Slads would lose their right to the water from Canada’s James Bay. Galleas would be able to take over.

  ‘Forget it, Mr Marion,’ Christina said. ‘NAFTA’s rules are squishy enough to take on any shape UCAI might like them to. We have to have something dirty, something public and shameful, something to make Sebastian and Francis Slad hobble away in disgrace along with UCAI. Unless the corporation’s executive branch goes down, we’ve lost. I’m not denying that there’s potential in Mrs Freyl’s information, but on its own it’s not anywhere near—’ She broke off, studied David a minute. ‘You do know that Aloysia Gonzaga has a role to play in all this.’