Mind Virus

by Charles Kowalski

  “I’ll ask you again: Where is the next target?”

  “I’d tell you…to go to hell…” Oldman said between his gasps, “except there isn’t one, is there?”

  Fox pushed him under again. Twenty seconds this time.

  “One more time,” he said when Oldman resurfaced. “Where is the next target?”

  “If I were you…I’d be more worried…about that lady friend of yours.”

  Fox pushed him under again. Oldman’s free hand reached desperately for his own neck, but he was unable to break out of Fox’s lock.

  Ten…twenty…thirty.

  As Fox pulled Oldman up, he saw that the grab at his throat had not been an attempt to escape. He wore a chain around his neck, part of which now rested in his mouth. He spit it out, along with the broken, bloody remains of a glass capsule.

  Fox’s grip slackened. An involuntary “Oh, God!” escaped him.

  Oldman grinned. “There is no God,” he said. “So he can’t…say…”

  Before the Portsmouth Poisoner could finish his sentence, his own medicine claimed him.

  ...

  Fox sat on a sofa in the American consulate in Jerusalem. The wide window offered a fine view of the courtyard, but he could only stare dully at the coffee table.

  Every time he blinked, he saw flames pouring out the window of the church, and frantic pilgrims squeezing the breath out of one another as they converged on the single narrow exit. All his intelligence-gathering work had done nothing to prevent it.

  And when he thought of the incident at the cistern, he wanted to throw up and then take a scalding shower. He had been assured that the cistern had not been contaminated, but when he remembered what he did to Oldman, he felt the way he imagined a woman might if she woke up in the bed of a man she hated, or a recovering alcoholic might if, after ten years of sobriety, he woke up with a hangover and no memory of the previous night. It was as though all the distance he had tried to put between himself and Iraq, all the amends he had tried to make for his role in that giant war crime, had been erased at one stroke—without even a single piece of useful intelligence to show for it.

  Adler and Birnbaum, grim-faced, sat down across the table from Fox. “Seven killed in the blast at the Holy Sepulchre,” Adler reported, “and five more trampled to death in the rush to escape. The burn units of all the local hospitals are completely overwhelmed. The only silver lining is that the propane ignited before it built up enough to do even more damage.”

  “Propane?”

  Adler nodded. “Colorless, heavier than air, and one of the most volatile gases you can get. And no need to worry about smuggling it into the country, there are plenty of domestic sources for it. Since roofers often use it to heat their materials, there might even have been a tank all ready for him right there at the construction site. All he had to do was find a way to introduce it into the church, where there would always be candles burning …and run.” He heaved a sigh. “Well, Robin, if it’s any consolation, you were right about the time and place after all.”

  Fox shook his head sadly. “I can’t even claim that. This was a diversion.”

  “What?”

  “He made a flash and a bang…”

  Birnbaum interrupted. “A dozen dead and hundreds more burned. You call that ‘a flash and a bang’?”

  “Those aren’t the kind of stakes Chris plays for. A dramatic explosion, some deaths, some injuries…and there it stops. His weapon of choice is more insidious: a virus that keeps on perpetuating itself. And you remember what TJ said about church buildings. If he and Chris are on the same page, he’s not interested in destroying them. What he wants is to make people so afraid of an invisible threat that they won’t set foot in one. I’m starting to think our Portsmouth Poisoner might have been improvising.”

  Adler gave him an incredulous look. “The holiest site in Christendom, the day before Easter, with the Israeli security forces on high alert…and you’re saying it was a target of opportunity?”

  “Whatever it was, it wasn’t Chris’s style.”

  Adler was silent for a moment. “If you’re right, and this was a diversion, what was it a diversion from?”

  Fox thought back to the verse marked in the Bible. “Therefore we are buried with him through baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. Chapter 6 of the Letter of Paul to the…”

  He drew in a sharp breath.

  “Romans.”

  Adler and Birnbaum exchanged a glance. “The Vatican?”

  Fox nodded. “Tonight is the Great Vigil of Easter. The day for baptisms. Baptism, death, and resurrection.”

  “You’re sure he means today?” Adler asked. “Not tomorrow? Not Easter Sunday?”

  Fox nodded. “The Vigil may not be as big a production as Easter Sunday, but it’s indoors. A higher concentration of the virus in the air, and a better chance of getting the Pope and the College of Cardinals within reach. If I were planning an attack on the Vatican, it would be my choice.”

  Adler looked at his watch. “Well, we’d better get a move on, then.”

  Fox glanced at his own watch. “What do you mean? There’s no way we can get there in time.”

  Adler took out his cell phone and keyed in a number. “Oh, ye of little faith.”

  ...

  An hour later, they were in a car heading west on Route 1 to Tel Aviv, with Birnbaum in the back seat keeping watch over the handcuffed Shira. After another hour on the road, they arrived at the smaller of Tel Aviv’s airports, which Fox knew as Sde Dov, although the sign at the gate identified it as Dov Hoz. Few places in Israel, it seemed, had only one name.

  Among the jumble of helicopters and small private jets on the tarmac, a Gulfstream V was waiting for them. Adler and Birnbaum ushered Shira aboard, with Fox following behind.

  Despite the warmth of the sun, a cold sweat broke out on Fox’s palms. His heart beat faster and his breath came in gasps. He hesitated at the bottom of the air stairs, and leaned on the handrail.

  Adler glanced back from the door, then descended the stairs to where Fox stood. “I never pegged you as a nervous flier.”

  Fox shook his head. “This is a rendition plane, isn’t it?”

  “It was once, yeah.” Seeing Fox’s reaction, he continued: “What’s the matter? Do you have some kind of conscientious objection to flying on it? If so, just say the word and we’ll run a search for available seats on Expedia. You can catch up with us in Rome when it’s all over. Or Washington. Up to you.”

  Drawing a deep breath, Fox took a tighter grip on the handrail, and pulled himself up onto the first step.

  The Gulfstream, at first glance, fit the Hollywood image of a top-of-the-line business jet, albeit one getting on in years: leather-upholstered reclining seats, glossy faux-wood-paneled galley and tables, paisley-patterned carpeting. But the passengers it had carried during its years of service, Fox knew, had not been corporate executives. They had been captives, for whom the luxurious flight would be a surreal interlude, like an extravagant last meal for the condemned, before they arrived at their secret destinations to meet their secret fate. No matter how many times the cabin air passed through the environmental control system, it would still be heavy with the smell of fear.

  Birnbaum cuffed Shira to the seat farthest to the rear, next to the lavatory, then joined Adler in the front of the cabin. Fox, who had been given no seat assignment, hesitated for a moment, then sat down across the aisle from Shira.

  The plane took off. Fox waited until it reached cruising altitude, then went forward to where Adler and Birnbaum were having a conversation in spook-speak, full of crypts and acronyms so obscure to an outsider that it might as well have been a secret code. “Excuse me for interrupting, but does the prisoner really need to be cuffed?”

  “That’s the protocol.”

  “I don’t think there’s much she can do up here. If you’re worried, can’t y
ou cuff her again before we land?”

  Adler thought a moment, then nodded to Birnbaum. With a sigh, she got up to unlock Shira’s cuffs. Fox took the aft-facing seat opposite her.

  “You were talking earlier,” he said, “about someone who suffered worse than you.”

  She paused for a moment, then spoke. “His name was Nabil. From Edward Said Conservatory.”

  “Someone you played music with?”

  She nodded, and looked out the window at a distant memory. “How can I describe what it was like to hear him play? He could take an instrument that had only ever known how to march, and teach it to dance.”

  “You knew him well?”

  She nodded. “We were duet partners. He was from Marda, and I’m from Ariel. That tells you something right there, doesn’t it? We were practically next door, but if it hadn’t been for the Divan, we would never have met.”

  “Ariel.” Fox tried to conjure a mental map of the West Bank. Ariel was a settlement built deep in Palestinian territory, connected to the Green Line by an isthmus of restricted land that cut off Marda and other nearby villages from the county seat of Salfit. The whole enclave was often called “the Ariel Finger,” which seemed a perfect description of what Israel was giving the Palestinians.

  “I didn’t build it.” A defensive edge crept into her voice, as though Fox had unwittingly transmitted his thoughts when he said the name. “I was born there. It was the only home I ever knew.”

  “Go on. You were telling me about Nabil.”

  “In those forty days with him, I learned more than in all my life until then—not just about music, but about his life. How he had to leave before dawn every morning to get to his classes, and sometimes have to wait so long at the checkpoint that he only made it in time for the last hour. How he would practice while standing in line, and became a local celebrity. How some of his friends and family told him he was wasting his time: ‘Our struggle for freedom comes first, then we can make music.’ But he would answer them: ‘Do you think the world will support our struggle for freedom, if they don’t know we can make music now?’”

  He and Leila would get along well, Fox thought, then mentally edited his tense. This story, he was sure, would not have a happy ending.

  “When our tour was over and we had to say goodbye, I couldn’t stop crying. I’ll never forget his parting words to me: ‘I’ll see you again when the wall comes down, habibti. In the meantime, keep making music, with all your heart. The world needs to hear something beautiful from our part of it, for a change.’”

  “Kind of him to say ‘our.’”

  “Too kind. When I came back, I couldn’t call it ‘mine’ anymore. There was no place in Ariel I could look without wondering whose land had been stolen for it. I couldn’t even bear to walk by the waterfall in the park. Just the sound of it was like a perpetual ‘sod you’ to our neighbors down the hill who had to ration their water. I had always believed what they told me in school, that Ariel had been built on a pile of bare rocks. But now I felt that it had been built on a pile of bare-faced lies.”

  “Home wasn’t home anymore.”

  She nodded, and swallowed hard. “And then I heard the news. A couple of my classmates had taken a hike outside the settlement, and some Palestinian boys threw rocks at them. For that, some settlers went down into Marda and killed the first six people they saw.” Her free hand shook with anger. “The news report didn’t even give the victims’ names. But I made it my business to find out.”

  There was a moment of silence. Fox broke it by saying, “The world lost a great treasure.”

  She looked out the window and blinked back tears. “He could have been Palestine’s answer to Itzhak Perlman. If there were any justice in the universe, he would be on stage at the Royal Albert Hall right now with a Stradivarius in his hands. But they didn’t know, and they wouldn’t have cared. To them, he was just one more Arab. Or one less. Just part of the…price tag.”

  She wiped away the tears that had defied her efforts to suppress them. “The day I found out, it would have to be Yom ha-Atzmaut, Independence Day. Everyone else was happily hoisting their flags and firing up their barbecue grills, and the very sight of them made me sick. And to make matters worse, my parents always insisted on reciting the Hallel on that day, ‘to thank Hashem for the gift of the Land of Israel.’ As soon as they said the first words, I felt as though a noose were tightening around my neck. I couldn’t even open my mouth to join in. Of course they wanted to know why. And when I told them, my father backhanded me and knocked me to the floor. ‘For this we let you go to Europe? So you could become a traitor to Israel?’ After that, I couldn’t bear to stay there for even one more day.”

  “So you left for England?”

  “Yes.”

  “And eventually made it into Oxford. And met Chris, TJ, Peg, and Aidan.”

  She nodded.

  “You didn’t mention Kenneth Oldman. Was he part of your group?”

  Shira shook her head.

  “But you knew him?”

  “I only met him once, through our prison outreach.”

  “Prison outreach?”

  “That program has been around for a couple of years now. We visit prisons, distribute books, set up pen-pal exchanges. Our president once said, ‘The infected have always known that in prisons, they have a captive audience in every possible sense. Inmates get the Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita shoved down their throats day in and day out. Her Majesty’s Prison Service will become one giant petri dish for the God virus unless we’re in there providing some vaccination.’”

  Fox recalled his ill-starred debate, where Professor Dickinson had boasted at great length about the disproportionately low number of atheists in prisons. Apparently, OAF had decided it was time to change that.

  “Oldman started to say something rather odd, before he was…interrupted,” Fox said. “ ‘There is no God, so he can’t say…’ and that was as far as he got. Do you have any idea what he meant?

  Shira shrugged and shook her head.

  “Where did the rest of you do your training? Your preparations?”

  “Chris was the only one who knew. The rest of us rode with him blindfolded.”

  “Did you see what kind of car it was?”

  “A BMW. Red.”

  Fox made a note. “How long did the trip take, from Oxford?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Were you driving through the city, or the countryside?”

  “The city.”

  “What happened when you reached your destination? Like, did you park on the street, or in a garage? Did you hear much noise from outside? Go up or down any steps? Were there any windows that you could see out of?”

  She shook her head. “No windows, they were all boarded up. We parked in a garage, went up a flight of stairs, and only took off our blindfolds when we got to the room above. That’s all I ever saw.”

  Fox finished taking down the information. “What were you studying at Oxford?”

  “Microbiology.”

  “I assume that when you matriculated, you had a goal in mind besides biological warfare?”

  She shot him a look. “I wanted to become a doctor. I thought that maybe, if I changed my citizenship, I might someday be able to go back and work in the West Bank or Gaza.”

  “So what happened to that dream?”

  “I met Chris,” she replied, as if it were the obvious answer. “When I told him about it, he said, ‘A noble goal indeed. Now, how would you like to be part of the ultimate global vaccination campaign?’ I didn’t know what he meant at first, but as I got to know him better, he let me in on more of his plan. ‘You’ve seen firsthand the harm the God virus does. You come from a country created solely as an incubator for it. How would you like to help eradicate it once and for all?’”

  “So religion is the whole problem,” Fox summed up caustically. “And Chris offered the final solution.”

  She winced, then glared at him. “Te
ll me this. The Hashem who supposedly told us that the only way to usher in the new era of redemption is to reconquer all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. The Allah who promises seventy virgins in Paradise to any Muslim who dies fighting us. And the Prince of Peace that you worship on Sunday before shipping guns to Israel on Monday. Are they, in fact, all the same? Or is one more real than the others? Or are they all imaginary, and it’s only the guns and bombs going off in their names that are real? Tell me, which is it?”

  Fox took a deep breath. He had dealt with questions like this in his classes so often, he would have thought he had his talking points as well in hand as a White House press secretary. But none of his practiced, polished answers felt remotely adequate now. Even the most loyal of press secretaries, he thought, must have moments when he wanted to grab the President by the lapels and demand, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “When I was a boy,” he said, “there was a cat on my grandfather’s farm. One day, she pounced on a little bird and brought it to me, still alive, but just barely. I suppose she thought I would be pleased. She had no way of knowing that I loved allanimals. She could only see me as a giant cat, and offer me the only gift she knew how to give. I tried to tell her I wasn’t happy with gifts like that, but we didn’t have much in the way of a common language, and I’m not sure how well the message got through.”

  “That’s a lovely parable,” Shira replied. “But did you create cats? Did you give them claws and teeth and a taste for meat? Because if you did, and then turned round and claimed that you never wanted them to be hunters, the word for that would be hypocrisy.”

  Fox examined his hand. “Well, I don’t see any claws,” he said. “What we have instead are human brains. The ultimate dual-use technology. Unlimited power for good or evil, and free will to choose either one. For us to believe in God is a leap of faith, no question. But if you accept the possibility that God exists, you have to wonder how much more of a leap of faith it takes for God to believe in us. To put power like that into the hands of us humans, with no guarantee at all that we would use it for good? It was a gamble on the order of giving a little boy a sword, trusting that he would eventually learn on his own to beat it into a ploughshare.”