Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “But not in Norway.”

  “Well, over there, it’s a different law,” she said. “If they patented a discovery, it stands.”

  “Which is why your school made a deal with a Norwegian school, instead of doing the work yourself. They make the discovery. You share profits.”

  I heard Dr. Liz Willoughby sigh. “Legally it’s a gray area. Even if you give the Norwegians the stuff, the problem is the natural substance still lies in the U.S., banned from patent. The Norwegians have their program going anyway. It costs them nothing to do a few tests. If they find something, maybe they’ll pay for a legal challenge.

  “Colonel, we do it because we’re scientists. Basic research. If you ask me, if you want to make money up there, stick to oil, minerals, natural gas. Is anyone looking for those things where you are?”

  • • •

  VALLEY GIRL ANSWERED ON THE SECOND RING. I KNEW SHE WAS RELAXED and back to normal because each sentence came out as a question again. She was back to being irritating.

  “They let me go?” she said. “Thanks to you?”

  I told Valley Girl to double-check everything that Dr. Liz Willoughby had just told me. I asked her to try to dig up any business arrangements between Prezant College and the University of the Arctic, in Norway. I asked her to check both Dr. Harmons’ buying habits, credit rating, debt situation, savings, and to see if they’d stocked away any money to pay for Kelley’s college education.

  I asked her also to get hold of Ted Harmon’s grant application and cross-check which exact Arctic lakes—there were ten thousand of them on the North Slope—he was supposed to visit with any other applications for mines, pipelines, or business endeavors planned for the same spots. Who exactly owned the land the Harmons were visiting? The feds? The state? The Iñupiats? The borough?

  “I can do this fast? I don’t have any plans tonight? Thanks again for taking care of me,” said Valley Girl.

  Yeah, I take care of strangers. I couldn’t protect the person I love, I thought.

  • • •

  NO CARS WERE ON THE ROADS EXCEPT A POLICE DEPARTMENT EXPLORER. No people walking. Shops were closed. Why visit a relative, when there might be sickness waiting? Why go out when you could lock your door and watch my Ford rattle by on the way to the base? Barrow was a ghost town filled with people. Barrow was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. The only thing moving were the sled dogs, restlessly, as I passed the yard where Karen and I had hooked them up just a few days ago.

  I made a left turn off the coast road and passed the Ilisagvik College sign and entered the Quonset hut area. Dusk was falling and the world looked gray: gray clouds, gray light, gray earth. Lights glowed in huts and off-duty troops were returning from the dining hall. I punched in the four-digit combination to the door of my hut.

  The officers who’d moved in while I was out had made themselves comfortable. Two exhausted-looking lieutenants in stocking feet lounged in the living room, staring at the TV, which got no reception, since the sat jamming killed that. I heard snoring from a bedroom. A captain came out of the bathroom, saluted, and said, “Sir!”

  “Get out,” I barked. “All of you.”

  “Excuse me? The security staff and docs finished up here. They said we could move in, sir.”

  His gaze followed mine into the bedroom I’d shared with Karen. Our single beds, pushed together last night, had been moved to opposite walls. A stranger’s knapsack lay on her bed, and thonged slippers sat on the floor beside it. There was a paperback copy of The Things They Carried on the crisply made bed. It had been rumpled when I left. The smell was sweat and canvas, leather and testosterone. I saw a man’s wallet on the dresser, and packs of spearmint gum.

  “Didn’t you hear me, Captain?”

  “But where should we go, sir?”

  They’d wiped away all trace of her. They’d eliminated her essence. They’d smoothed out marks that her body would have made on cushions, blankets, a pillow, on a towel she folded in the bathroom.

  “I don’t care where you go. Wake the others. Get out!”

  “Sir, you’re shaking.”

  “I am not shaking.”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  They trudged off grudgingly, glancing back, exhausted from their flight here, from the cold, from wondering whether the vaccinations they had been given would protect them. I was authority, but not one of their officers. Maybe I didn’t have the power to kick them out. But they were reluctant to challenge me. Sullen, they left. The wind gasped, receiving them.

  I stood in the Quonset hut, wondering if someone, someone outside, or in another hut, had just overheard everything I’d said, or would the jamming kill transmissions? I’d told the general: Karen and I talked about my theory this morning. I made sure any exposed computer screen in the hut was covered to mask any remote camera. To create the sound of a tantrum I kicked a chair over. I lifted the small table, and threw it into the couch. Anyone listening would be hearing me screaming, kicking things around. Joe lost it.

  They probably can’t be listening anyway, because the jamming is blocking any mikes, if there are any.

  Quietly as possible, I started taking the place apart, looking for bugs.

  • • •

  DID YOU EVER SEE THOSE OLD MICROPHONES IN BLACK-AND-WHITE MOVIES? The ones as big as ice cream cones? That radio singers crooned into? Mikes so big they required a stand? Eddie and I once watched that kind in an old Marine film about listening devices. The audience broke out laughing, trying to envision a spy taping those big fat mothers under a chair. Anyone assigned to units like ours trained in eavesdropping techniques. Strategies. Equipment. Finesse.

  So now I unscrewed the backs of kitchenette chairs and peered at the screws. Were they equally shiny? Were they the same size? Was one gone, something else in it’s hole?

  Nope.

  I stood on a chair and unscrewed lightbulbs, and fixture parts. I figured that in a Quonset hut, if you wanted to place a mike, you’d go for the most-used spaces, living room or kitchen, or the most intimate area, bedroom.

  If someone got in when we were out, it could be anywhere. But if someone did it during a party, then the living or bedroom is logical. It will be freestanding or adhesive. No time for screws.

  I knew that there were pencil mikes and pen mikes and mikes that looked like fixtures. There were mikes the size of contact lenses. Mikes you stuck under coffee tables, under phones, in curtain rods, under any piece of houseware with a raised bottom. God only knew the latest mikes. The Chinese had them in kitchen equipment. The Koreans wired up cars. The Russians had a false-tooth mike and the Cubans had a false fingernail. That one, when I’d seen it in Washington, had blown me away.

  I found a furniture tack that looked shinier than the rest in a row of brass pieces running across the top of the faux leather sitting chair. I took it off and used a hammer on it. It was just a tack. I tore off felt pads beneath a laptop, and tried a scissor on them.

  They were just felt.

  “One? What are you doing?”

  I whirled and held up both hands in a stop gesture. I shook my head violently, meaning, Shut up! Eddie stood in the doorway, dressed for the field. His expression was a mix of horror, at the news about Karen, and bafflement. But I saw quick understanding appear on his face.

  I snapped out, “What do you think I’m doing? Having a drink, that’s what.”

  He began to move toward me, in sympathy. I stepped back and shook my head and let him see my rage. I shoved my hands into the air, Keep away. Don’t touch me. He halted, getting it, but not liking it. His shoulders slumped. His eyes said, She was my friend, too. I let him see what I needed. It was not sympathy just now. I shifted my head to the right, then left, scanning. We communicated by glances.

  —You’re looking for bugs, One?

  —I think someone’s been
listening to us.

  —Okay, let’s get to it then.

  I understood the effort required on his part not to speak of Karen. As he bent beneath the sink cabinet, where the hut toolbox was stored, I started talking again, just in case someone listened in. “Want a drink, Eddie?”

  “I got back as fast as possible.”

  “They cut her throat. They cut . . .” My voice really did fail me at that point. “Her throat.”

  We took the place apart together, babbling. Me trying to sound broken. It wasn’t hard. Eddie trying to pep me up. Eddie in the bathroom, with a Phillips-head screwdriver, removing, one by one, screws on vanity doors, the knob on the toilet, screws on the overhead light fixture.

  “You were right, One. It was rabies.”

  “Being right is shit.”

  Eddie peering at a screw that looked duller than the rest.

  I need to sound useless.

  “Eddie, I can’t stop seeing her, lying on the floor.”

  Eddie laid the screw down, inside a towel and folded the towel over it and raised a hammer and coughed loudly when he smashed down. He unfolded the towel.

  We saw a normal, half-bent screw, with a chipped top.

  Together, talking memories, we tipped the couch on its back. We went around front and looked past a sea of dust balls at tacks affixing the fabric in place.

  “I wanted to go to Costa Rica for the honeymoon. She wanted Sweden,” I said.

  Hmm. I reached out and unpeeled a small brown dot off the false leather. It looked like faux leather, but it was a lighter shade, and had adhesive underneath. It seemed to have no purpose. I said, “So I told her, okay. Sweden.” I saw no other similar stick-on dots under the chair. I took the dot to the kitchen table. I tried to cut through it with a scissor. The blade would not penetrate. It did not seem to be encountering fabric. My head was pounding. Eddie pulled out his Leatherman. The serrated blade sawed halfway through.

  It was fabric. Thick. But no mike.

  I said, sick of chatter, “I want music.” I switched on a disc already in the CD player. Cajun. Her favorite. Loud. I turned it louder.

  We continued looking, kept it up, changed places, in case one of us missed something. I tilted over a kitchenette chair which I’d already looked at. A screw fell out. So did fresh wood shavings. I stared at the shavings, retrieved the screw and bounced it up and down in my hand. It looked brand-new. The thread felt prickly. It seemed to emanate purpose. It had been shoved into the hole because the wood there was worn away, stripped of grooves.

  Eddie came over and examined the screw with me like a jeweler staring through a loupe. We put our heads together. We whispered over the raging music.

  “It’s just a screw, One.”

  “Someone got in here and replaced the old one with this.”

  “No, it’s just a hole. How could anyone get in?”

  “How? It’s a stupid four-digit code on the door. Anyone could have seen one of us punch it in. Or at a dinner. The quarantine started. No one was here. They knew we might look for bugs and they got in fast and took it out.”

  Eddie sighed, and said with exaggerated softness, “It’s a screw. A goddamn screw. That’s what screws do. They fall out after a while.”

  I hated the sympathy in his face. Poor Joe, grasping at straws. I felt a red film in my head replace the glow from the fluorescent light. My legs were trembling. The urge to hit something surged into my shoulders. A cold sensation spread up from my belly, and became a hard beat in my head, as if the Arctic was inside, not just out.

  “Yeah,” I hissed. “And there’s no rabies. And it can’t be contagious. And there are no fucking microphones because that’s just crazy and—”

  I stopped. “Shit, Eddie. You’re the best friend I have.”

  He was white. “Just tell me what you want to do.”

  “Let’s go over to Longhorn, have a drink,” I said.

  “They told me at the airport, security is looking for you. Someone named Hess.”

  Outside, we crunched over toward the oil company hut.

  “I’m going to be part of it,” he said. “Whatever it is.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  His face floated inches from mine. “Don’t worry? We’re Uno and Dos. We’re the team. If you don’t tell me, I’ll be there anyway and probably screw it up. You’ll tell me eventually. So tell me now.”

  Eddie’s face close. Eddie’s force and rage and love an unqualified lifetime offer. You won’t stop? Then why would I ever stop, whether or not I think you’re right?

  I told him what Homza had okayed for us. He didn’t like it. But he did not protest.

  “Do you have a better idea, Eddie?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” he said.

  We knocked and did not wait for an answer and just walked into the hut, as we’d been doing all summer. They were all there. My neighbors. My friends. Karen’s new buddies, turning to me, consoling me, pouring drinks for me. The fly lights on the shiny web, moves his wings, thinks he’s free, unaware that the trap already has him.

  Which one of you did it? Listened to us? Killed her? Went after the Harmons? Introduced the disease?

  Come on in, any old time, Dave Lillienthal always said.

  Said the spider to the fly.

  FIFTEEN

  “More Tito, Dave! Man’s best friend.”

  I gazed up drunkenly at the Longhorn North Oil exec, who stood over me as I sprawled in his massive corner chair. I held out my glass. He shook his head. He said, “You’ll make yourself sick, Joe, if you don’t slow down, man. Have some coffee.”

  “Dave, why keep all this goddamned liquor here if you won’t give people any? All you do is offer drinks, and when I ask for one, you say no.”

  Dave Lillienthal grew hazy through the bottom of the olive-green plastic tumbler. He walked off and Deborah replaced him, looking down at me; wan, small, and horrified. Stiff as a petrified stick. She kept her voice down, as if she did not want others nearby to hear.

  “I’m so sorry about Karen. She was a terrific person.”

  Was it you, Deborah? Was it your brother? Who was it?

  “You don’t look so good yourself,” I slurred.

  “Oh, Joe! I bonded with her right away. What she was, she was kind, Joe. A rare quality to find in someone so accomplished. This all must be awful for you. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Anything Dave and I can do, just say it. Um, do you mind if I ask a question?”

  “Deb, whenever someone asks if you mind a question, it means you won’t like it. Just ask.”

  “Theoretically, I’m curious, I mean, if someone slept with a person who has rabies, and got vaccinated after, how much time has to pass before that person knows the vaccine works? You know, that they’re safe?”

  “Who did you sleep with, Deborah?”

  She spoke in a low, embarrassed voice, hard to hear over people crowded into the hut, party central usually, wake central tonight. The chair was new, overstuffed, Haitian cotton. The window looked out on my hut, where lights glowed, as the soldiers had come back.

  “Joe, I told you, theoretical question.”

  “Are you afraid you gave it to someone? Or afraid someone gave it to you?”

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Forget it. I know you loved her a lot. She was so happy with you.”

  I shrugged. I drank. I slumped down further and said, “Now I’ll ask you one. Karen and I wondered, how much would Longhorn lose if your pipeline doesn’t go through next year, if drilling gets blocked?”

  “Don’t even think that.”

  “How much? And what would happen to you and Dave?”

  “We’d have to close the Anchorage office.” She moved off. Dave was back to refill my glass. He seemed, despite his protests, to keep me supplied. I ga
gged, rose, and lurched to the bathroom, making sure to lock the door. There I groaned loudly, patted vodka onto my face, like aftershave, washed out my mouth with it, and spilled some on a sleeve. The rest went down the sink. I urinated into the toilet but made sure to drip a bit, stain the crotch of my pants.

  I refilled the tumbler with cold water, made sure to keep the ice and the fresh lime. I swayed slightly on the way back to the chair, my grieving man’s throne. Don’t overdo it.

  “Joe, you okay?”

  Calvin DeRochers, the diamond hunter, stood there now. He’d discarded his usual jeans and U Arkansas sweatshirt for something more formal, for the impromptu wake. White button-up shirt, collar crisply jutting from his homemade knit sweater. Creased beige cords and newer Columbia boots. For here, he was dressed up.

  I mimicked him. “Am I okay? I’m great. I’m the greatest I’ve ever been. You guys,” I said, morosely, switching mood, sweeping my free hand to encompass all: the three McDougals, Eddie, Merlin and his wife, and Deputy Oz, Bruce, a few members of the Barrow Iñupiat Dancers, “are the greatest pals a guy could want. I love you all. Karen loved you, too.”

  “Joe, maybe you shouldn’t go back to your hut tonight . . . where you . . . well, you know, memories. Why not sleep in my hut? I’ve got an extra bed in my room. Soldiers in the rest, but it’s comfortable. Eddie can come, too. Both of you. Better to be with friends instead of strangers.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Calvin. Friends!”

  “And maybe a little cutting down on the booze.”

  “Hey! What booze? This isn’t booze.” I grinned. “It’s water.” I broke up laughing.

  “I’m serious. Vodka won’t help. Talking helps. You want to talk about anything, I’m here. Calvin,” he said, speaking of himself in the third person, as usual, “is here for you.”

  “Thank him if you see him. Hey, Calvin! I’m the one who’s sorry for you. Another summer over. No diamonds.”

  I watched his face. I saw no guile or regret, no guilt or anger or even disappointment. I saw patience. But that meant nothing if he was a pro. He shrugged. “Calvin will be back next year. The diamonds are here. Waiting. They’re here!”