The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  “And now in the US, we’re losing both.”

  She nodded. “Humans. We are interesting beasts.”

  “It’s all about control.” I’d already come to that conclusion.

  She nodded again. “Is all about control.”

  Whether she heard my growling stomach or had a kind heart, I don’t know. But she ordered up a bottle of vodka and a sturdy assortment of appetizers. Without negotiating, we came up with an acceptable division of responsibilities: she managed the vodka, and I the caviar, salmon and cucumber canapés, and the pickled mushrooms. She was a determined woman, though, because a bottle of fruity dry wine for me arrived with the next course, a beet borscht that sang, and garlic-saturated rolls. Still later, another bottle of wine accompanied the trip up the stairs to complement plates of moist, fork-tender chicken Kiev, lumpy mashed potatoes, and a vinegary cucumber salad. By then, she was fast friends with me and was far beyond caring that I lagged indecently behind her in all the toasts—every single one, by the way, to unfairly lost love, which could have taken us all the way back to junior high.

  Throughout the evening, Anna cycled multiple times through tears, confidential whispers, and giggles. By the time a lavish chocolate torte arrived, she had cycled back to whispers. At the moment, we were suffering from the alcohol’s compounding impact on Anna’s deteriorating vocabulary and accent and my ability to decipher. So when she leaned into her forkful of chocolate layers and told me she had the secret ingredient, I was pretty sure that meant vodka laced even the dessert.

  Those Russians.

  “No, no, no, no, no, Maggie.”

  “No vodka in the torte?”

  She unleashed a spasm of giggles and wagged her finger at me. “No, no, no. I haf secret ingredient for the security.” She snapped her fingers repeatedly as if trying to summon the word out of the air. “For the homeland security.”

  “The secret ingredient?”

  She nodded and rose. Either she tilted slightly, or the room listed. It could have been both. Gingerly, she navigated around our chairs to a cluttered desk behind me, hanging on to anything firmly planted along the way and muttering in soft, buzzy Russian sounds. She reached the desk without a 9-1-1 incident and then fumbled with a loaded key chain to unlock a lower drawer. That accomplished, she pulled out a locked metal box, and again, the keys jangled in her hands until she found the right one. Whatever the secret ingredient was, she’d kept it under lock and key, lock and key. It wouldn’t have stopped Homeland Security, but all the noise the keys made would have kept an intrusion from staying covert.

  “Six weeks. Six weeks! And now I give up.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered it in my direction. I shook my head. It didn’t seem like much of a secret ingredient.

  “Och, you Americans.” She knocked one out of the pack and struck a shiny gold lighter, eventually connecting the flame with the end of the cigarette. “You have give up all the good vices.” She sucked in heavily and closed her eyes. I was afraid she’d topple over, but she stayed standing.

  Nervously, I eyed the lit end of her cigarette as she groped her way back to her chair. We both sighed as she sat. She took another long, loving drag on her cigarette.

  “This is your secret ingredient?”

  She tilted her head slightly, no doubt translating through the multiple languages of vodka, cigarette smoke, and English. “Och!” She slapped her forehead and waved her cigarette. “Desperation make me forget.”

  Actually, I was pretty sure it was the vodka.

  She picked up her phone receiver and had a short conspiratorial conversation. A few minutes later, the hostess appeared with a restaurant menu.

  I don’t think it was just the vodka and wine, but I needed hope, not even more food.

  The hostess handed Anna the menu and then, even though I understood zero Russian, clearly chastised her for the smoking. Anna let her pick the cigarette out of her hand, getting a soft kiss on her forehead as a reward. And then we were alone again. Anna opened the menu and pulled out a business envelope that had been tucked behind the sheet of entrees.

  “The ingredient secret.” She handed me the envelope.

  For nearly a week, I’d been chasing something without knowing what it could be. Even now, I didn’t know what I held in my hands, but I understood the moment. Reverently, I removed the handwritten pages, the first in Russian, the rest, although not exactly in English, very familiar to anyone who recognized JavaScript, the programming language of Zaan.

  Anna’s eyes brimmed with tears. “He call it a ‘back door.’ He say it will take you inside the software to fix the problem.”

  The problem. Such a benign way to describe life as we’d come to know it.

  We toasted each other one last time and kissed cheeks in a Russian farewell. I tucked my copy of the gold inside my purse and left out the restaurant’s back door, stumbling slightly through the alleys until I found my car again.

  Thank goodness I had a panic button on the key chain.

  CHAPTER

  41

  I ADMIT IT: I WAS BAD. I drove myself back to the hotel instead of taking a cab. I did a pretty good job of staying between the mostly stationary lines and hit my exit (not literally, of course, although I could have since I’ve done that more than once when I was stone-cold sober) the first time. So, all in all, I was quite pleased with myself.

  Even better, I had a starting point. I had a way for someone to hack into the software and do something. What, I didn’t know. But it was a significantly better point than I’d been at even six hours earlier. The entire drive, I desperately wanted to call someone—Eddy, mostly—but I would have gladly settled for Jola or Michael or even Sanjeev if I wouldn’t have gotten him deported. I knew better, though. I might as well have called Mario Seneca.

  The week’s emotional roller coaster of fear, anger, and euphoria—and now alcohol—had sapped my last brain cell. The combination could have been lethal. By the time I reached the top floor at the hotel, it was all I could do to stay vertical.

  The elevator doors opened into an intimate lounge where the hotel hosted their nightly happy hour and morning continental breakfast for their most frequent guests. At one in the morning, it should have been empty. Instead, a slightly disheveled man dozed uncomfortably on the leather sofa. He had that traveling look, like he’d just crossed the country and couldn’t even make it to his room without flopping on the first couch he saw for a nap. Maybe he, too, had a vodka story to tell.

  I should have been wary.

  As I stepped out of the elevator, he jerked awake and was on his feet almost at the same moment. His blue eyes, frazzled from the sudden waking, connected with mine. “Maggie Rider?” he said.

  My heart stopped. I’m sure I glanced at my purse—a dead giveaway that I had something valuable to protect. I froze in my spot, which was the only thing I could think of given my own alcohol fog. The elevator door closed behind me, cutting off a fast escape.

  “You’re Maggie Rider. I know you are.” The tall, sinewy man looked to be in his early fifties, but it was hard to tell with the gray stubble on his face and his thinning hair. He had a fine, aristocratic nose, and a cleft in his chin. With a shave and a good night’s rest, he would have been handsome.

  Finally, a few brain cells shook loose from their stupor. “Who are you?” I kept my eyes on his face so I wouldn’t look at my purse again.

  “I’m Phil Generett. I’m with—I was with the Department of Homeland Security.” He edged a step closer and raised his hands slightly toward me, palms out, as if trying to approach a wild animal for capture.

  My heart started beating again, faster and heavier. I hastily glanced around the sitting room for an escape route, knowing in advance that I only had two ways to go: the hallway on the other side of this man and the closed elevator behind me. “What do you want? Why are you here?” I wished I’d sounded meaner. I hated these people.

  “I need to talk to you.” His voice stayed soft and
he took another step towards me.

  “Don’t come a step closer, or I’ll scream loud enough to wake people three floors below.” This was assuming, of course, that I didn’t burst into tears first, but I didn’t tell him that part.

  “I need to talk to your husband, to Eddy.”

  “Never. Never in a thousand years. Why would I lead you to him? So you can give him smallpox like you gave Daniel Pogodov? So you can take him away like you did Tina Bastante?”

  He didn’t move except to motion a little with his open hands to quiet me. “I know you’ve been through a terrible ordeal. I’ve seen your file. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been through my own horrible, horrible—” he stopped as his voice caught. I swear he was on the verge of crying, but he halted a moment before.

  “Leave me alone. Just leave me alone,” I said. “I don’t know how you found me or what you want or what you think you can get from me, but I’ll never take you to Eddy.”

  He took a deep, slow breath and started again. “I’ve been through my own horrendous time, which is why I’ve come so far to talk to you.”

  “There’s nothing I have to say to Homeland Security. I won’t talk to you. I won’t talk to anyone from there. Now leave me alone.”

  “No, no, no. I’m not with the DHS anymore. That’s why I came looking for you.”

  I snorted. “Why should I believe you? I’ve heard it all from your Mario Seneca.”

  “Mario.” He shook his head.

  I couldn’t read what he meant.

  “Look. I just have to show you something so you’ll believe me.” He lifted his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled out a worn, folded newspaper clipping. “Here. If you read this, maybe you’ll believe me.” He handed the clipping to me, but I refused to take it. It was a trick and I wasn’t going to be stupid enough to fall for it.

  His hand shook slightly. His eyes begged me. But I still didn’t touch it.

  Finally, he opened it and held it out for me. It was an obituary from the Washington Post, dated three days earlier. The striking young woman had the same fine nose and cleft chin as the man in front of me. I took the clipping from his hand and read the saga of this brilliant, engaging young woman whose list of early achievements filled half the column. Her unexpected exposure to smallpox and subsequent agonizing death occurred in her junior year at Columbia, just after she left for a semester of study in Paris. Her mother, grandparents, and an infant brother had preceded her in death. Survivors included only her father.

  Phil wearily sat down on the couch. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse with defeat. He spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. “My job at the DHS was to chase the terrorists who started this grisly epidemic. My job became difficult when I realized it was us—the DHS—that I was chasing. I made the mistake of telling my supervisor that I was going to the press to expose the whole sordid mess.” He laughed a dry, humorless laugh. “They said I wouldn’t want to do that since I might be surprised about who else would get exposed. I didn’t get it. I thought they meant it would go up the chain and this mess would taint the DHS director or even the president, which was exactly what I wanted. Instead, they meant the real kind of exposure. The kind that kills the one you love most.” He buried his face in his hands and sobbed broken, jagged fistfuls of air.

  It was déjà vu. First Anna, and now this man, the latter’s story a shadow of the other’s. If he was acting, if this was a DHS trick, it was an unmatched performance. He could have moved a stone to tears. Being more of the dripping sponge sort myself, I let go, too. Since I was already too spent before I even began, in a moment, I’d collapsed into the chair across from him, digging for tissues in my purse and vaguely wondering how I’d fallen so far from grace in such a short time.

  I gritted my teeth while I tried to stop my tears. He was still the enemy, no matter what story he invented.

  “She never got on the plane for Paris. Instead, they held her at security in the airport and then transported her to a holding area outside DC. That’s how it’s done. They don’t want to accidentally start a real epidemic.” He choked on a laugh. “What an irony.” He stopped to blow his nose and wipe his eyes. “They told me that if I talked to anyone, ever, about my suspicions, they’d expose her.”

  “What were they going to do? Hold her forever?”

  He sighed. “I made the mistake of asking the same thing.”

  “And they said?”

  “They said they would if they had to.” His voice caught again. “You don’t have children—” His eyes drooped, and he twisted his hands together in a strangely apologetic look. “I’m sorry. I’ve seen your file.”

  I was too weary to even be offended, much less surprised.

  “You don’t have children,” he began again, “but it sounds like you and Eddy are still passionate about each other after all these years, so maybe you can understand what it feels like to have lost the only thing you ever truly cared about in life.”

  I could. I did. Every minute of the past week.

  “It made me crazy. I promised everything and signed my name in blood. I even turned over the document that I was writing up for the The Washington Post reporter. That was my mistake. They saw how serious I was—that I’d already written something. And they realized I understood players and details.” He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and looked at me. “So they went ahead and exposed her.” He said something else, but it was so garbled from his tears that I could only guess. His body shook in silent sobs.

  I waited, my own tears slower and softer.

  “I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye. Once they took her, that was it.” He took a series of slow, deep breaths before he could finish. “Is there anything more cruel?”

  Neither of us spoke. It was the ultimate rhetorical question.

  Finally, when his emotions had seemed to settle back below the surface again, he blew his nose one more time. “They’ve been watching me. Ever since they told me she’d been exposed, they watched to see what I’d do. But here’s another irony for you. I’ve spent all my time chasing down terrorists. I’ve learned a few tricks of my own.” The humorless laugh returned. “The funeral is on Monday, but I left town. No one expected that. I bought a cheap car and drove west. I had your file. I knew Eddy had disappeared, but I knew where I could find you. I want him to post my story on his website. I don’t even trust the press anymore.”

  I believed him. I really did. But I couldn’t let go of my mistrust that easily. Besides, it was a moot point since I didn’t know where Eddy was. “Phil, even if I knew where he was, I wouldn’t take you to him. You have to understand that.”

  He nodded and twisted his hands again. “I do. But I don’t have any other place to go. Eddy’s website is the one everyone in DHS is most afraid of. If he posts my story, it’ll get the national attention we need to stop this thing in its tracks.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “You have any other ideas for stopping this?”

  It was a dangerous question, one I wasn’t going to answer.

  He reached under the couch and pulled out a thin manila envelope. “Take it. Read it. If you believe me, I’ll give you the rest of what I have. Leave a message for me at the Starbucks on Powell Street. Tell them the message is for Frank.”

  I took the envelope. Once again, my heart pounded.

  “You should know, Maggie, that you don’t have much longer to produce Eddy. Twenty-four hours? Two days max from when they first contacted you. They want him bad. If he doesn’t surface, they’ll use you as bait. Live or die, either way you lose.”

  It wasn’t an idle threat. It was the truth. My head tightened: I was well past the twenty-four-hour mark. “They find him, though, and they’ll kill him.”

  “Which is why you need to disappear. Don’t wait.”

  I knew he was right. I was drained of everything, though.

  “Why are they doing this, Phil? Why does the government want to be able to tra
ck everyone in the country?”

  He grunted softly. “They have knowledge, they gain control. They get control, they have the ultimate power. No more political dissent. No more crime. No more street gangs. No more unwanted immigrants. No more whatever the hot issue du jour is. You jaywalk? They’ll know. They’ll take corrective action. You jaywalk again? They’ll know. The second time, it won’t be corrective action. It’ll be a solution.”

  “All under the guise of stopping terrorism.

  “Or a smallpox epidemic.”

  “Or a national propensity to jaywalk.”

  “You got it.” He leaned toward me. “And the pièce de résistance? The folks running the country? They’ll never lose power because they control everything. Including you.”

  He stood, finally ready to leave. “One more thing? Check the hems of your clothes. Ten to one says our friend Mario has slipped in a few RFIDs. The active kind. He’ll find and follow you one way or another.”

  “Mr. Seneca is an artful sort of guy.”

  Phil Generett tilted his head slightly and nodded. And then he was out the emergency stair exit, his footsteps echoing on the metal stairs until the door closed firmly behind him.

  CHAPTER

  42

  AN RFID TAG. DUH.

  I scrambled to check the hems and seams of each article of clothing: underwear, jackets, slacks, everything. If he added an RFID, he would have had a hard time camouflaging it unless he had a knack for sewing. Sure enough. The hem of the right leg on my khaki silk slacks had a couple of stitches missing. I carefully felt the fabric and thought I detected something stiff. I dug around in my makeup bag for my tweezers, then gingerly poked into the hem until I retrieved a spidery wafer the size of a dime.