Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  Trey just looked at him, and after a moment Jack sighed. “I argue with you,” he said, “because it feels so good when I stop.”

  Sitting down at his computer with a thud, he muttered, “Sheila Connelly, huh. There must be a ton of people with that name out there.”

  He tapped at the keys. “No. I was wrong. Most of them use a second o instead of an e. At least we’re not looking for a single ant in a hill.”

  A moment later, he said, “This one? Tanzania Sheila? The one whose mother died?”

  “I think so.”

  Jack swung around to look up at him. “You searched this yourself, didn’t you? Before you came in?”

  Trey nodded.

  “And?”

  “I didn’t find anything that meant a thing to me.” Trey hesitated. “I thought you might have better luck.”

  “Because I live in this century? Or just because I’m awesome?”

  Trey didn’t bother to say anything. Grinning, Jack went back to the computer. “Still, don’t expect too much. I think it’s a snipe hunt.”

  Trey said, “Just look.”

  * * *

  MEGAN CONNELLY’S DEATH had received a burst of attention in Tanzania’s tabloids, mostly because it involved an American who’d been living in the country for decades. The death of an American anywhere on earth also seemed to warrant a few lines in the wire services, which had meant a bit of international newspaper and cable news website coverage as well.

  Long or short, though, the articles all said basically the same thing, and it wasn’t enough.

  Connelly, who had come to western Tanzania as a missionary, had—along with two Tanzanians—died in a suspicious fire that consumed her house in Ujiji. Her daughter, Sheila, a physician working for the nongovernmental organization Les Voyageurs, had been hospitalized due to distress. And also (several of the articles hinted) because officials suspected that she might have had something to do with the fire.

  “When did this all take place?” Trey asked.

  Jack looked. “The fire, five days ago. The most recent article is dated yesterday.”

  “And Sheila is still hospitalized?”

  “As far as we know.”

  Trey said, “For ‘distress.’”

  “Yeah. Sounds more like detention than treatment to me.” Jack gave a sympathetic grunt. “Though I’d be distressed, too, if my mother had just died and I was being held in a Tanzanian hospital.”

  He shrugged. “But I still don’t see anything here about wasps.”

  “Keep looking,” Trey said.

  * * *

  NOTHING. JUST THE same few details regurgitated again and again.

  Damn. Trey hated when he couldn’t find what he was searching for. When he couldn’t see.

  “Told ya,” Jack said. “Snipe hunt.”

  “No.” Trey found that his hands were clenched. “We’re missing something.”

  Jack shrugged. “We’ve read every word of every story.”

  “Then why did Mariama point me here?”

  Jack opened his mouth, then closed it again. Maybe she didn’t, he’d begun to say. Maybe it wasn’t even her.

  Trey said, “Could there have been a story up when Mariama looked, but that’s gone now?”

  Jack went still for a second. Then he said, “Sure.”

  “Can it be retrieved?”

  Again a pause. Then, “Maybe.”

  Jack went to Google, typed, clicked. A page of results unfurled. The first four led back to articles they’d already read, but the fifth took them to a page that, under the heading of a newspaper called the Kigoma Dart, said, “Error 404: The article you are looking for no longer exists.”

  “Huh,” Jack said.

  “We need more than a dead link,” Trey said.

  “Yeah, I know. Let me see if this article’s been cached.” A few more clicks. “Damn. No.”

  He sat back in his chair and pulled at his beard. Then he leaned forward again. “Let’s try the Wayback Machine.”

  The name awoke vague memories of cartoons Trey’s father had shown him on DVD when he was young. A dog and a boy who traveled back in time to famous historical events.

  “The what?” he said.

  “The Wayback Machine.” Jack was tapping at the keyboard as he spoke. “This site that stores deleted Web pages.” He laughed. “Everything on the Internet lives forever, if you know where to look. Just ask any politician.”

  Ten seconds later he said, “Bingo.” And there the article was, as if it had never been taken down, under the title “New Details in Tragic Ujiji House Fire.”

  Trey scanned it, finding nothing unexpected until the next-to-last paragraph. There, directly beneath the subhead “Daughter Speaks” were the only words from Sheila Connelly he’d seen in any of the articles he’d read.

  Even these were not direct quotes, just a paragraph written as if the reporter had actually talked to Sheila. “Miss Connelly claims to have no knowledge of the fire,” the passage said. “She claims that her mother was ill from a tumbu fly larva, which she extracted. During the minor operation, her mother died, she believes of an allergic reaction. The body of Mrs. Connelly was too badly burned to confirm her daughter’s statements. Police hope to question Miss Connelly further as she recovers.”

  “Claims this,” Jack said. “Claims that. They’ve as good as convicted her of arson and murder.”

  Trey said, “Sure. But that’s not what’s important.”

  “Yeah.” Jack pulled at his beard, which by this time of the night stuck out in wiry tufts. “But her story doesn’t add up, either. No one’s ever died of an anaphylactic reaction to a tumbu larva.”

  Trey was quiet. It was late, and Jack’s mind wasn’t working as quickly as it usually did.

  He’d get there eventually, though.

  Trey watched it happen. First, Jack closed his eyes. Then he said, “Wait a second. Wait.”

  Then his whole body grew still. His intense concentration made him resemble a statue, a monument. A figure from Easter Island, flesh captured in stone, but not flesh itself. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

  As commanded, Trey waited. In the silence, he heard a car honk down on the street. He glanced over at the bee clock hanging on the wall. Four thirty. Already traffic was beginning to build toward rush hour. The freedom, the wildness, of the New York City night was retreating. Soon the city would be filled with human voices once again, sounds as meaningless to Trey as the gabble of flamingos.

  Jack opened his eyes. They were dark with comprehension. “That colobus monkey you saw,” he said. “You don’t think it got stung because it was threatening the colony. You don’t think it was there by chance. You think it was . . . a host.”

  “I saw the swelling, but thought it was a tumor.”

  “And that man in the clinic, the one who was shot in the stomach. You think he was, too. A host.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sheila’s mother as well.”

  Trey let him work it out.

  “You’re saying that your wasps are parasitic. That they use primate hosts to hatch their young.” Only Jack’s mouth moved. The rest still seemed rooted to his chair, to the earth.

  “And not just lower primates,” he said. “Homo sapiens as well.”

  “We need to know what Sheila Connelly saw,” Trey said. “We need to know what that larva looked like.”

  Jack stared at him, unblinking. Then, drawing in a huge breath, he shook his shoulders like a bear or a dog. In that moment, he was flesh again.

  He turned back to his computer. Within a few seconds he’d called up a website for booking airline reservations.

  “Today or tomorrow?” he asked.

  Trey stood, stretched, walked over to the window. The predawn light made the leaves on the trees acros
s the way look like fog, like smoke. It reminded him of mountain forests he’d visited, the clouds wafting through, the deepest of mysteries made briefly tangible.

  A familiar feeling pierced him, stabbing like a blade. The thrill of the hunt.

  You are what you are, his brother had said to him. Meaning: You’ll never change.

  Trey might never know whether it was a curse or a blessing, or both.

  “Today,” he told Jack. “Now.”

  ELEVEN

  Kigoma, Tanzania

  TREY HAD NEVER worked in Tanzania. The reason: The country was too well trodden. With the exception of a vanishing patch of forest here, a remote mountain range there, all the wild areas had been extensively studied by scientists before he was even born.

  For Trey, that was a deal breaker. Nothing was more boring than walking in somebody else’s footsteps.

  He’d visited, though. Just once, with his parents and Christopher when he was fourteen. In and around the tuberculosis conference Thomas and Katherine were attending, the four of them had followed vast herds of wildebeests in the Serengeti, witnessed lions bringing down a zebra in Ngorongoro Crater, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.

  It was this last that Trey remembered most vividly. Even now, he could bring back the breathless thrill of standing amid ice fields at nineteen thousand feet on the summit at dawn, all of Africa at his feet, the fading stars above close enough to touch, brilliant meteors tracing across the purple sky.

  He remembered his parents flanking him, his mother’s arm around his waist, his father’s draped across his shoulders.

  * * *

  TREY WALKED DOWN the stairs and onto the tarmac at Kigoma Airport a little after noon two days after his departure from New York. The atmosphere was noticeably wetter, more tropical, than in the savannas to the east. Clouds piled up on the horizon, replete with moisture picked up over the Congo rain forests to the west.

  To the first European explorers, Africa had been an unimaginably vast continent. More than a single place, it was a thousand that didn’t even overlap or intersect. Trackless swamps, endless forests, sourceless rivers. Going in, you knew you were going to get lost.

  You could disappear for years, or forever. As David Livingstone did before being found by Henry Morton Stanley in Ujiji, only a few miles from where Trey was standing right now.

  But that was then. Nothing was far enough apart anymore. You could move from desert to forest, from mountain to savanna, in just a few hours. The mystery was all but gone, the teeming plains little more than gigantic zoos filled with semidomesticated animals, idling minibuses, and clicking tourist cameras.

  The taxi stand outside the terminal building was starved for business. Trey chose a canny-eyed young man from among the dozen importuning drivers and climbed into the backseat of his 1970s-era Peugeot. It had once been red, most likely, but the sun and rain had turned it a grayish brown.

  The driver glanced at Trey in the mirror. “Yes?”

  “Nyerere Hospital.”

  Without a blink, the driver pulled away from the curb. If he had some idea why Trey was here—and Trey thought he did—he didn’t show it.

  The hospital was located on the outskirts of town. It was a relatively new building, rectangular, made of whitish stone and steel. The polished sandstone floor of the lobby had ammonite fossils in it.

  As he walked in, Trey saw a squarish young white man in a gray suit, blue tie, and sunglasses sitting in the waiting area. Instead of going to the reception desk, he walked over to the man, who looked up at him (or at least in his general direction) without taking the sunglasses off.

  Trey had seen a thousand just like him in a hundred countries. It didn’t matter to them if they were walking clichés: Embassy men, CIA officials, and (increasingly) private contractors almost always dressed like this.

  Trey read this one as embassy.

  “You’re making sure that Sheila Connelly gets out of here with no fuss,” Trey said to him, not phrasing it as a question.

  Embassy was a little softer than Trey had expected, with a round face behind the dark glasses. His sandy hair was thinning on top, even though his smooth cheeks marked him as no more than thirty.

  Trey guessed he was unhappy to have been posted here, and Trey couldn’t blame him. Since the end of the cold war, East Africa’s global importance had dwindled. Tanzania was far from being prime territory.

  Finally Embassy shifted in his seat. “You a friend of hers?” His voice, too, was unexpectedly soft, the accent showing South Carolina origins.

  Trey said, “Hope to be.”

  He introduced himself, then sat down opposite and said, “Didn’t think she’d need protecting by you guys.”

  Embassy’s sunglasses were trained on him. Trey waited, giving the man the chance to decide how much he was willing to say.

  CIA agents were never worth talking to. They were always looking to dump you in some secret prison and forget about you. Nor did embassy men open up when their mission was dangerous or high profile.

  But this kind of mind-numbing assignment? Babysitting a hospital waiting room? There was a chance.

  Eventually Embassy shifted a little in his seat and said, “Well. There’s been some rumblings from the families of the other people who died.” He paused. “We’re just making sure she gets on her way safely.”

  He licked his dry lips. His forehead gleamed with sweat. The lobby wasn’t air-conditioned, and it must have been hot inside that suit.

  Trey got to his feet. “I’m getting myself something to eat and drink,” he said. “Want anything?”

  “Not allowed to eat while I’m on duty,” Embassy said darkly.

  Trey waited.

  “Cafeteria here is under renovation.”

  Trey smiled. “I’ll figure something out.”

  * * *

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, he was back from a market down the street, carrying Cokes, coffee, sandwiches, and a paper bag full of passion fruit. Keeping a chicken sandwich, coffee, and the passion fruit for himself, he handed the rest of it over.

  Embassy dug into a sandwich, then said through a mouthful, “Nice try. But I still can’t tell you anything.”

  Trey said, “’Course not.”

  The man took another bite, followed by a gulp of soda. His sunglasses were a little fogged up. “Real good,” he said.

  Trey said, “No one really believes that Sheila burned down her mother’s place, do they?”

  Embassy lowered his sandwich and looked across at Trey. “People who set fires go to jail,” he said.

  “And?”

  “We’re putting your friend on an airplane today and waving ’bye. Then everyone’s happy and I can go back to my place in Dar.”

  Trey said, “What killed Sheila’s mother?”

  It was worth a shot. But the sunglasses were as blank as blacked-out windows. Trey knew he wasn’t going to get any more.

  He stood. Embassy looked up at him and said, “She gets no visitors. Sandwiches won’t get you through the door.”

  “I know.” Trey hesitated. “She goes home today, you said.”

  Embassy nodded.

  “Can you tell me about what time?”

  Trey watched him think about it before saying, “The last flight back to Dar.”

  Trey said, “Thank you.”

  Looking down again at the remains of the food Trey had brought, Embassy added, “And the first flight tomorrow to Rome, and then New York.”

  At the door Trey turned and said, “You going to be here when I get back?”

  Embassy sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “But they won’t let you talk to her then, either.”

  * * *

  TREY CLIMBED INTO the taxi and handed over a passion fruit, which the driver accepted without comment. Getting a
knife out of the glove compartment, he sliced off one end of the purple fruit’s tough skin. Then he handed the knife to Trey, who did the same with one of his own.

  The driver slurped up some of the seeds and pulpy fruit, then said, “Yes?”

  Trey said, “Ujiji. The house that burned.”

  The man shook his head. “Nothing left there.”

  Trey took a moment to eat some of his passion fruit, sour enough to make his eyes half close.

  “The house,” he said. “Please.”

  The driver seemed to be considering whether to say no. But it was a quiet day, Trey had hired him for hours—and was paying well—so eventually he sighed, finished sucking out the innards of his fruit, engaged the gears, and pulled away from the curb.

  * * *

  THE FIRE HAD done a thorough job. Where the house had stood, all that remained was sodden rubble. Even the nearby trees had been scorched.

  But it didn’t really matter. Trey knew what had happened here, or at least most of it.

  He stood in the midst of the rubble and breathed in deeply through his nose. Nothing but the odor of smoke and wet wood.

  He turned and walked past the scorched trees to the edge of the clearing. Breathed in again, but smelled only the forest itself.

  Somewhere in the distance, a trumpeter hornbill let loose with its raucous call.

  He went back to the waiting taxi. Climbed inside, slamming the door behind him. Before he was even settled in his seat, the car had pulled out and was leaving the ruin behind.

  “Ujiji Market,” Trey said.

  The driver grunted.

  * * *

  THEY PASSED BENEATH an avenue of mango trees lining the road. People were clustered in the shade, eating lunch or sleeping or just sitting in twos or threes, talking. Some of them looked up at the passing taxi, but without much interest.

  “It’s not a market day,” the driver said. “No ferries today.”

  Trey didn’t reply. In silence they headed past the mango trees and toward the market, the docks, and the shore of Lake Tanganyika, its surface ridged with whitecaps under a looming sky.

  * * *

  AS THE DRIVER had said, the market was quiet. But not deserted. Many of the stalls and tables were open, selling piles of bananas, stacks of brightly colored textiles, or wooden sculptures of elephants and giraffes.