The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  Phil Generett had been right: I’d been tagged.

  I felt every centimeter of every single item I owned and found three more devices, which I flushed down the toilet.

  Track that, you bastards.

  Even with those successes, I didn’t know if I could trust that I’d caught all of the RFIDs. If he’d planted one—or several—in my suitcase, they could be too easily lost in the folds and stiff seams.

  I stared at my possessions, a sad, sick feeling in my stomach. My computer first, and now my clothes and suitcase had become my enemy, betraying my moves as easily as my cell phone.

  They were just things.

  So I was mad at myself for crying about saying goodbye to my Hugo Boss suit and Santorelli tweed jacket, the sweet little Ann Taylor cashmere sweater, and even the nameless bargain rack black lace skirt that went on every trip since it was fun enough to fit every single occasion. Except work.

  I kept my shoes and jewelry but not the cosmetics. He could have pried off a top and dropped an RFID into a lotion or conditioner. It was painful, but when I weighed the things versus life, I knew. I had to dump them. The few possessions that seemed clean went into a hotel laundry bag. The rest stayed in my suitcase. I’d take a short nap and risk that there’d be no midnight knock on my door. Then I’d leave my contaminated suitcase with the hotel night clerk for safekeeping. Some day I’d be back for it.

  There are so many ways to delude oneself.

  I finally crawled into bed at 3:00 a.m. in an RFID-free nightgown. Moments before I swirled away into a netherworld of pox-filled nightmares, I remembered Jola and Anna. Had I led the DHS to them?

  And then I remembered the manila envelope.

  A high-pitched, relentless pounding yanked me to the surface of my dreams.

  They’d come for me in the night after all. In a panicked frenzy, I fumbled in the dark for my bag and stumbled to the door, then to the balcony, then to the phone to call for help, never quite grasping what I could do to save myself. I had no plan. I couldn’t think.

  The screeching sound rhythmically persisted for a full minute before all that adrenaline finally spread from my limbs into my brain and woke me up.

  I turned off the alarm.

  The angry noise stayed in my ears, though, as the blood kept right on rushing through my system until I could calm my heart. If I needed prodding to get out of there, I’d just gotten it. I quickly showered and dressed, sorting, sorting, sorting through my few options as I got ready. Whatever I did, I had to figure out how to give myself as much lead-time as possible.

  I made a quick stop at the front desk. Lucky me, my friend Tony stood a sleepy guard over the early checkouts. I left my suitcase with him and asked for a late checkout, which he generously made for four o’clock. I also left my rental car keys with him and asked him to call Hertz late afternoon to come pick it up. The two things combined would make them think I was returning to my hotel room. It gave me more than a ten-hour lead. Never mind that I still didn’t have any idea where I was going to go, especially at this hour of the morning.

  If Tony thought I looked exceptionally frazzled, he politely ignored it.

  The things they must teach them in hotel management.

  I caught the shuttle to the airport so I could take BART some place. The bus station stuck in my mind, but I didn’t know where I’d go or even where the bus station was. The ideas rattled around and around as I rode a nearly empty BART toward the city. The others in the car had that bed-head, bleary-eyed early morning flight look, so I was pretty sure no one had caught up with me. Just in case, though, I got off at the first station. No one else did.

  A good sign. A very good sign.

  I sat on a bench outside the station and watched the morning colors creep along the horizon and the tree silhouettes delineate into branches, leaves, and bark. The coffee out of the machine was surprisingly good: dark and complex. If I hadn’t been on the run, it might have been a cozy morning. As it was, anyone who passed by could have mistaken me for a bag lady, maybe an upscale one since my bag was from the Sheraton, complete with a laptop. God knows why I didn’t leave it since I couldn’t use it without being tracked.

  I sipped and thought. I didn’t know where Eddy was. I had a limited amount of cash. I had the JavaScript from Daniel and the unread web exposé from Phil Generett. If I got on a bus, I would be heading away from anyone I knew who had the skills to use Daniel’s silver bullet. Or I might be one step closer to Eddy posting Phil’s revelation on smallpoxscare.com for millions to read, assuming—of course—that it was anything worth reading. I retrieved the manila envelope from my Sheraton bag and skimmed the dozen pages. The first several pages began with a methodical accounting of who had made what decisions in what meetings. Since I didn’t recognize names, the bone-chilling decisions next to their names meant little to me. It would take a real Washington insider to determine the value of the information. I couldn’t help but be disappointed. Where was the smoking gun?

  The next few pages listed all events up to the president’s announcement on Friday that everyone entering the country would need proof of vaccination. The existing timeline was helpful in that it provided more detail than Eddy had on his site. All of this information was out there already, just uncollected. Eddy would have called it a lot of freestanding trees. Collected, it became a forest.

  The timeline also included anticipated DHS mandates through May first. If true, the list would ultimately incorporate every segment of society: all food handlers—from farm workers through McDonald’s dishwashers—by February fifteenth; all newborns, preschoolers, school children, and college students by March first; all travelers, including bus, train, and intercity systems, by April first; anyone part of a public gathering—defined as loosely as shopping in a mall or attending a Little League baseball game—by May first. The projected timeline was certainly chilling but, without seeing the backup documentation, hardly the stuff to trigger holding a daughter hostage and then exposing her to smallpox. If Eddy posted this to his website, he could quickly be made to look like the ultimate nut, particularly since this administration seemed especially gifted in the art of changing the conversation by focusing on someone else’s single misstep.

  I began to worry that all this useless information meant Phil Generett’s midnight visit was really something else. And then I reached the second-to-last page, which was an Excel spreadsheet, rows 3259-3284. A series of columns listed names, dates, triggers, status, locations, and notes. This particular page had been sorted by date, beginning on Monday of this past week. Phil had highlighted row 3272:

  Name: Bastante, Dr. Tina.

  Date: 17-JAN

  Trigger: Removed vaccinations without authorization

  Status: Detained

  Location: La Vista Correctional Facility, Pueblo, CO

  Notes: Decision to deport or expose: 22-JAN

  Yesterday. They were going to decide her fate yesterday. The papers shook in my hands. Somehow, Tina—detainee number 3,272—had bought a few extra days. My stomach tightened and my eyes blurred as I thought about the horror of her past week. I pressed my back against the wall behind me and squeezed my eyes shut as I tried to maintain my balance. This casual row in a list of thousands was my friend, a real person, identified only by a date, a trigger, a status, a location, and a detached notation.

  The names above and below her hadn’t all been allowed a grace period. A few still had the status of “Detained, undetermined,” but the rest were listed as either exposed or deported. The notes themselves revealed little. Cryptic comments, void of judgment, followed each name: Deported to Syria, Refused to cooperate, Guantanamo, Brother to Aaron Swartzendruber, Member of Philadelphia Center for Peace and Justice.

  If I understood the list, over three thousand people had been detained, deported, or deliberately exposed to smallpox. If this list was real, it was more than a smoking gun. It was a napalm bomb.

  And what an irony. There were, in fact, real victims. J
ust not the kind the government wanted us to know about.

  My heart weighed so much I nearly forgot to look at the final page. The truth? I’m sorry I did. It detailed the lives of Edward and Margaret Rider, as well as their crimes against humanity. Eddy had taunted the myth. I had dared to be married to him.

  I don’t truly think it was wasted time, but I sat there for at least another fifteen minutes separating out my choices. At one point, I rummaged around in my purse for change to call Jola from the pay phone at the station. Instead of finding a wayward quarter, though, I felt an odd bump under the fabric lining. Even though the device was nearly paper thin, it could still only mean one thing. A blue moment later, my fingers found the gap in a seam of the lining and worked the RFID to the surface. It looked different from the ones in my clothes, but it still had distinctive, coppery tendrils wound in a tight, large spiral. I dumped the rest of my purse contents onto a newspaper and sorted through it piece by piece. Nothing else surfaced, but that didn’t tell me whether I could trust my fingers and eyes.

  I only had the number for Anna’s restaurant. No one would be there at this hour anyway, so I couldn’t call her to warn her. I finally scrounged up enough change to call Jola. It was a mistake: in spite of the ungodly early hour, the phone only rang and rang and rang. I added it to my list of things to obsess about. Worry and guilt are a bad mix.

  I was frozen to the spot, tired of being the rodent in this dangerous cat and mouse game. Yet I knew I had to do something. I didn’t know how quickly they could track me to this spot, but I knew I’d better assume minutes, not hours.

  “Excuse me, Miss.”

  I looked up, half expecting to see a DHS badge flipped open. Instead, a gray, slightly shrunken woman paused in front of me. “Yes?”

  “Do you have any change for a twenty? I thought I had another five, but I can’t find it.” The purse slung over her arm looked warehouse size. If it had been full, she would have listed from the weight. It was a beautiful thing to see. She’d never spot the added fraction of an ounce from the RFID.

  I dug around in my own wallet and unearthed a bill. “I don’t have change, but I do have a five.” As I handed her the money, I casually dropped the tracking device into her gaping bag.

  “Oh, you don’t have to give me the money, dear.”

  “No, no. Really, it’s fine.” I’d just bought a cheap and wonderful ticket for my RFID to hitch a ride into the city. She owed me much more than I owed her. I just hoped I wasn’t leading DHS straight to her Iranian son-in-law. I’d have to bury that guilt before I let it grow.

  BART arrived and I helped the woman into a car, thankful that this small diversion could help.

  Slightly less weighed-down, I called Michael, even though he’d abandoned me when I needed to connect with Sanjeev. I knew his cell phone number by heart, and in spite of everything, I trusted him.

  A drowsy voice answered. “Hello?”

  “Michael?”

  There was a very long pause. “Maggie?”

  “I know it’s early, but I need your help.”

  Another long pause. “Did the sun wake you, Maggie?”

  “I’m sorry. Really I am. But I’m desperate.”

  “Well. It’s, uh, not terribly convenient right now.”

  “Can I come stay at your place for a few days?”

  The pause grew longer. Maybe I’d made a terrible mistake. “You want to stay at my place? You do know it’s seven in the morning on a Sunday?”

  “I know. I’m really sorry. I’ll sleep on the couch. I’ll sleep in a closet. I just have to get out of my hotel. This whole thing has gotten way out of hand.”

  He didn’t talk for a minute, but I could hear him sighing, not just breathing, on the other end.

  “So here’s the, uh, deal.” Another pause with more sighing. “I’m not exactly at my place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the thing with Kai? The dinner, the dancing, it, uh, turned into ... uh, more.”

  More. How discreet.

  I blushed. How stupid of me to forget the date I’d set up for him. Life had gone marching on. “Right. Sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  We had an awkward pause. I heard some distant conversation on his end. “But you could come to Kai’s place. She says she’ll fix breakfast.”

  “No. No, no. I don’t want to intrude.” I’ll just hang on by my fingernails another fifteen minutes. Don’t worry about me.

  More distant conversation. Then, “No problem, really. We’ll figure out something.”

  He gave me the address, a ten-dollar cab ride away.

  I did my sighing after we hung up. Mostly they were ones of temporary relief.

  CHAPTER

  43

  KAI LIVED ON A WINDING, BOUGAINVILLEA-LINED HILL within walking distance of the Tiger Lily. Her third-floor apartment faced in the direction of the bay, and by standing on tiptoes on her balcony, you could actually glimpse a tiny sliver of blue water through the forest of other apartments.

  Everyone loves a water view.

  By the time I got there, Kai already had coffee made and had Michael chopping vegetables for omelets while she threw stuff together for some kind of coffeecake. He looked sleepy and in a little disarray, but otherwise happy. Maybe I shouldn’t have since I knew as much about Kai as she could see of the bay, but I poured out my story anyway, at least the part about Sanjeev’s threat and the DHS hit list. I even pulled out the page with the detainees listed and the final page that marked Eddy and me.

  Michael didn’t interrupt, but he kept shaking his head while he chopped.

  Kai was more wide-eyed. “So what will you do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t even know where Eddy is. But I have to find him before they do.”

  “And at the same time, you have to stay hidden.” Kai threw some of the vegetables into sizzling oil. The pungent scent of garlic immediately filled the tiny space. She shook her head.

  “I can’t believe this is happening here. I can’t believe it. This is why my family came to America, to escape government tyranny. And now—” She gave a quick stir to the vegetables. “—now, look at this. I just can’t believe it.” But even as she said it, it was clear she absolutely did believe it.

  Michael groaned softly. He’d finished his chopping and now leaned against the counter, a cup of coffee in his hand. “I still don’t know why you didn’t just stay under the radar. After everything you knew, why did Eddy think he should keep that website up?”

  I stared at him. “So you think we should have just saved our skins? That that’s the first priority?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” He ran his fingers through his wayward hair and looked to Kai for help, which she didn’t look like she was going to give. You can only get so much from a fourteen-hour date.

  “What I mean is that ... I mean, what can you do? You’re tilting at windmills. You’ll end up dying—or worse, and you won’t have changed anything.”

  “So who will stop this mess?”

  “She’s right,” Kai said impatiently. “Someone has to have courage here.”

  I liked her. I was still a little irritated with Michael, but our friendship would survive that. He had an honest heart even if he didn’t have much nerve.

  “But how do you fight Homeland Security?” he asked. “Not in the courts. They’ve proven that one over and over.”

  “Information. The more people know about what DHS is doing, the more vulnerable they are.”

  “I don’t want to point out the obvious here, Maggie, but all of Eddy’s information hasn’t exactly been even a speed bump for DHS. They’re all paranoid about it and want to put Eddy in front of a firing squad, but they’re still able to scare people into getting vaccinated.”

  “Then you find the chink in their armor,” Kai said. She poured beaten eggs into a couple of omelet pans and swirled them around.

  “How are you going to do that?” Mic
hael asked. “They spent a hundred and twenty million on the Zaan share alone.”

  Kai waved her spatula at him. “What do you mean? It’s just software. You guys wrote the code. How tough can that be?”

  “Don’t get me started.” Michael rolled his eyes.

  “Exactly,” Kai said. “Look at how many bodies you’ve thrown at the shipping application to get it to start working. How tough can it be to get the software to stop working?”

  “It is just software,” I said. “People hack into systems all the time. They plant a little stick of dynamite, let the virus run its course, and never pause.”

  Michael shook his head. “It’s one thing to hack into Microsoft. They’re notorious for having so many vulnerable spots. Zaan is bulletproof, though. It’s what we’re known for in the industry.”

  “It’s bulletproof unless—” I hesitated. I still didn’t truly know Kai.

  “Unless—?” Michael asked

  “Unless you have a back door—”

  “—into the software?” he finished my sentence

  I nodded.

  “Do you?” Kai asked.

  I paused, then nodded. “I think I do. Daniel Pogodov, the Zaan developer who died from smallpox, sent some JavaScript to his girlfriend. He said it would get us into the software.”

  Michael and Kai looked at each other. I wasn’t quite sure what passed between them.

  “What do you have?” Michael finally said.

  I picked up my Sheraton laundry bag and retrieved the pages Anna had given me. Michael spread them out on the counter and studied them.

  “Does it look like Zaan programming?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It could be. I don’t truly know. I only see some of the programming stuff, but I never have to actually touch it.” He studied the pages a little longer. “It’s definitely written in Java.”