The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  “Maybe he’s doing it for both. Challenge and money.”

  “Maybe.”

  We split a humongous California-style sandwich loaded with veggies.

  “So Stepan is our most likely setup?”

  “Unless the instructions themselves are the setup.”

  “So we don’t know anything more than we did twenty-four hours ago.”

  I shook my head. “If we just knew who had the most to gain.”

  We left our oasis, me by cab and Eddy on foot. He’d picked up two cheap disposable phones so we could call each other. Even though we were pretty sure the numbers were untraceable to us, Eddy was still very strict with instructions: we were to use code names, keep the messages short, and leave the phone on for no more than five minutes at a time. That was the magic number that it took to triangulate a cell phone signal and find the location of the person with the phone.

  Sheesh. The things I had to do to get a cell phone into Eddy’s hand.

  Happy hour was rocking and rolling at the W hotel bar. Green Extreme convention-goers jammed the place, talking and laughing over the music enough to raise the decibel level to just above the equivalent of a jet engine. If they were waiting for me, I’d never spot them in the jumble of people. But then, they’d never be able to spirit me away because I could get help by wrapping myself around a few dozen legs on the way out. It was the perfect place to work.

  I retrieved the flash drive from the front desk and managed to find the corner of a couch to sit on. Unfortunately, the corner happened to be next to some guy who had been at happy hour since the day before.

  “Well, this is a nice shurprise.” He patted my knee.

  I gave him my best touch-my-knee-again-and-I’ll-break-your-fingers look, which eventually seeped into his brain. He turned his back to me, wobbling a bit on the couch.

  I’ve been to conventions before.

  I booted up the computer, plugged in the flash drive, and held my breath. The computer found the device.

  So far so good.

  I opened the drive. Over a hundred files filled the screen. If the USB stick was a tracking device, it was in addition to what looked like an information bonanza. I clicked on a few files and opened them, skimming them for anything obvious. They were definitely about the smallpox epidemic, but I couldn’t tell whether they were in anticipation of or a response to it. I sorted the files by type and found the Excel spreadsheet that I’d seen with Tina’s information. Surely, this alone could bring down a government.

  I finally breathed again.

  I downloaded the files, removed the USB stick, and closed down the computer. I was tempted to drop the device in the pocket of the knee-toucher next to me, but I returned it to the hotel safe instead.

  Back in a cab once again, I phoned Eddy. When his voicemail picked up, I simply said, “Done. It worked like it was supposed to.”

  The cab dropped me off six blocks away from the coffee shop, where I dropped the computer off for Eddy to pick up. To get back to Kai’s, I took a cab and then BART. At the station closest to Kai’s, I walked up the hill to her place. It took me nearly an hour, but it also cleared my brain. On the half hour, as planned, I turned on the phone. A single message showed. It could only be from Eddy.

  “Got it. By the way, I also figured out how to get the items we need. I’ll explain when I see you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER

  48

  MICHAEL AND KAI WERE HAVING A GLASS OF WINE and a plate of shrimp lettuce wraps on the balcony when I got there. I joined them, mesmerized by the city lights that sprinkled out around us to the edges of the world.

  “You’re home early,” I said to Michael. I didn’t ask if he’d moved in since that would be begging the obvious.

  He squeezed the back of Kai’s neck affectionately. “Software implementations aren’t quite as exciting these days.”

  She smiled shyly at him, and they both giggled a little. If it had been anyone but Michael, I would have rolled my eyes.

  “Did Phil Generett show up?” Kai asked.

  “He did.” I had my story ready since I still didn’t want to tip my hand that Eddy was in town. Just in case.

  “And?”

  “And he had a flash drive with his files. We attached it to a computer at one of the booths and opened up the drive. It was loaded.” It was only a small stretch of the story.

  “Yes!” Kai shook her fists in the air and laughed. “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

  “I left it at a place for safekeeping with instructions for what to do if I don’t claim it.”

  “Still no word from Eddy?” Michael asked.

  I was a terrible liar, but it was dark, so I had a better chance. “Nothing. But I know in my heart he has to be okay.” I took a sip of wine. “I just have to believe it.”

  Kai nodded. “You know these things.”

  “Did Stepan come to work today?” I asked.

  “He did. I was just telling Michael about it when you got here.”

  “Was he able to make any headway?”

  “He was up all night working on it. He got into the software and made his changes.”

  This didn’t sound good. He was into the software way too early. “He’s not worried about them finding the changes?”

  Kai shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what I asked him, but he said he only set up the trigger. He didn’t change anything that would be a red flag.”

  Still, it made me edgy.

  “He wanted to know if we came up with any ideas for how to get the health cards.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m working on some angles.” I sounded too hesitant. “When does he need them?”

  “He’s ready whenever we can get the cards to him.”

  “I’ll know something tomorrow.”

  “And then we’ll still need ten people to go through security with the cards,” Michael said. “There are only three of us, four if Stepan will use a card, too.”

  “The two of you will do this? You’ll risk getting caught and ... and whatever might happen as a result?”

  They looked at each other.

  “We will. We’ve talked through the consequences, and we believe it’s worth it,” Michael said softly. “This isn’t the America we thought we were coming to.”

  Michael and Kai slept with each other that night. I slept with guilt for even being suspicious about their motives and loyalty.

  Every time I woke up, which was too often, I counted the people who might be willing to take this risk with the infected health cards. Michael, Kai, Eddy, and me. Stepan maybe. Anna possibly, if she hadn’t been swallowed up by DHS after I led them to her.

  The rock in my stomach grew larger.

  Phil Generett surely would do it. If I could find him again.

  That took me to seven. And too many of them were maybes, too many ifs.

  Jola was another possibility. Another rock joined the first one in my stomach. This one was bigger. I should have checked my Gmail account to see if she’d tried to contact me. Another layer of guilt settled over me even though today of all days I’d had a good excuse for being distracted.

  If we could contact Pete, I was sure he’d leap at the chance. The logistics would be complicated—would we send the card to him or would he leave Colorado and Tina’s ghost to come to California?

  Even if he did, we’d only be at nine.

  We had to have ten.

  Michael was long gone to Baja Breeze by the time Kai and I were up and having coffee on the balcony. Far away at the crease between earth and sky, the bay sparkled, a sapphire in a nest of trees and concrete.

  “Are you worried about where this will lead?” I asked her.

  She didn’t answer at first but let the coffee steam swirl up against her cheeks. “Yes,” she finally said. She looked at me. “How can we not be?”

  “Can we do this any other way?”

  “I don’t know what it would be. Even if you can get the flash drive to Eddy
to post the information, it’s not enough. There’s plenty of information out there already and not just on Eddy’s site.” She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug and held it close to her face but didn’t drink. “Ever since 9/11, people have been so afraid to stand up and point out the obvious. No. Not just afraid—they’ve been intimidated, threatened, and even punished for going against the official version. The media is worthless. Reporters don’t investigate, and they never challenge because they’re so worried about what might happen to them.”

  She got up and stretched. Her dark hair swung over her face, and for a moment, she looked like a cat. “I’ve got to get ready for work.” She looked at me and sighed. “If we don’t grab this chance now, Maggie, what will life be like in a week or a month?” She raised her eyebrows. “Think what it could be like in a year.”

  For Eddy and me? We’d never be able to run for a year. Forget any noble ideas about doing this for the country. We had to do this for us.

  Once Kai left, I used her computer to check my Gmail account and then kicked myself for not checking it on Sunday. Jola had sent a message on Saturday evening that she had to leave town suddenly for an aunt’s funeral. She’d return to San Francisco on Wednesday.

  It might have been the same kind of sudden “emergency” that took Daniel Pogodov away. I had no way of knowing. Nevertheless, I sent her a new email and composed it as carefully as I could:

  J,

  Tag. You’re it. Home will never be the same again. Dinner soon?

  mzm

  Eddy would have understood it all. If Jola checked her email, I hoped she would at least be wary and respond before heading home.

  I went into my account settings and changed the account name and email address to MariaZiewojackMagda@gmail.com, the signal we’d agreed on for bad news. If anyone tried to reply to the email, they’d get an error. Anyone with a little email sophistication could still trace the email back to MZM@gmail.com, but I hoped that if anyone was tracking Jola’s Hotmail account, the false email would send them scrambling in a different direction for awhile.

  It was Tuesday, so I met Eddy at the main library on Larkin Street in the 900 numbers, the travel section. He was casually paging through a Fodor’s guide to Honduras, a country I’d never exactly thought of as a tourist destination. I hoped it didn’t portend the future. Beside him was a paper shopping bag with handles.

  “Hey,” he whispered and furtively kissed me.

  “Hey back.”

  He picked up the shopping bag and tilted his head for me to follow him. He headed to a back staircase where we went up several flights of stairs and ended up in the historical section. A scattering of maybe a dozen people sat at the heavy walnut tables that lined the center of the room. None of them looked up from what they were doing. Eddy wound his way through clumps of stacks to a small conference room. The single window in it had an easel and flipchart angled in front of it, which prevented anyone from seeing in the room but kept it also from looking like we were hiding.

  “Lunch?” He smiled and unloaded a small deli feast, including a half bottle of champagne and two plastic champagne flutes. Some librarian would be wagging a finger if she could see us now.

  “I take it Phil Generett’s documents were the real thing.”

  “Actually, we’re celebrating two things.”

  “It’s about time. I can’t remember the last time we celebrated one thing.”

  “A toast,” he said and raised his champagne. “Unless Phil Generett et al have been frantically manufacturing emails and memos to set us up for this moment—”

  “Which, we have to remember, is absolutely a possibility.”

  “A confusing possibility since I can’t figure out what they’d gain given what I’ve seen, but yes, it’s absolutely a possibility.” He continued to hold his champagne up in a toast. “Unless we’ve been scammed,” he began again, “this is not just the smoking gun. This is the gun itself being fired in slow motion. It’s the fingerprints. It’s the face of the triggermen.”

  I got goose bumps. “Who’s behind it all?”

  “It doesn’t stop until you get to the very top.”

  “The president?”

  “And all his men.

  “And the proof is there?”

  Eddy sighed sadly. “Unequivocally. Meeting minutes, decisions made, and at least three emails from the man himself approving plans.”

  We clinked, or rather clunked, plastic glasses together. For the record, no matter how sweet the moment, champagne should always be drunk out of glass flutes.

  “What cocky bastards. They used email and didn’t even worry about it being traced some day? Were they planning to stay in office forever?”

  Eddy shrugged. “If no one stops them, in a matter of weeks it’ll be a moot point. They’ll be able to track everyone in the country, including their political enemies. Here’s the really clever thing. They won’t ever even need to require it. The strategy is to make it so you can’t go anywhere in public unless you have the health card and vaccination. According to the timeline, for all practical purposes, you’ll need a health card and vaccination if you step outside your house to water the lawn.” He half smiled. “And the system they built for this? They simply type in a name and the health card number pops up. A few more keystrokes, and a GPS—a global positioning satellite—tells them where that person is to an accuracy of a few feet. Anywhere in the world.”

  “God help us.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Eddy tilted his champagne glass and the last drop trickled out. “According to the memos, the system will be running by February first. A week from now.”

  “And the country volunteered for it.”

  Eddy smiled. “It’s all about clean data. You were the one who told me that.”

  I downed my own champagne and wished for some of Anna’s vodka. I finally understood why the Russians drank at nine in the morning.

  “You said we were toasting two things.”

  “Ah yes. The second thing,” Eddy said and poured another round. “We’ll have ten health cards and ten vaccination capsules by ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  He clunked his flute against mine and tossed down the champagne again. My glass stayed frozen in midair.

  “You’re kidding! How in the world could you have pulled that off?”

  “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”

  “Don’t tease me, Eddio. How did you do it?”

  He lowered his voice to a whisper even though only a wiretap could have heard us. “I got hold of Pete.”

  “Tina’s Pete?”

  “We know another Pete?”

  “But how could he get the cards?”

  “From Tina’s office. Tina had duplicate keys for everything, and he knew the alarm code. He was able to get them last night and overnight them to us this morning.”

  “Unbelievable.” It truly was.

  “I know. He sent them to Baja Breeze to your attention. They’re guaranteed to be delivered no later than ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Absolutely unbelievable.”

  We devoured lunch, drained the last drop of champagne, and plotted out our next steps. Eddy updated me on what he’d accomplished in the hours we’d been apart. He’d managed to print off all the documentation and was slowly, very slowly, scanning it into his old laptop for posting it to his website.

  “What are you going to post first?”

  “I thought the Excel spreadsheet with the list of names of people who’d been arrested would raise the temperature out there.”

  “When are you going to post it?”

  His eyes shifted back and forth. “Uh. It’s out there already.”

  I took a quick breath. “Are you sure you shouldn’t have waited? I mean even another twenty-four hours would give us a little more time to get organized.”

  “I thought about it.” He studied the table for a long moment. “But if something happens to us—” Now he looked me in
the eye. “If the worst happens, I wanted to set at least a piece of it in motion. This seemed like a good one to start with because it touches so many people personally and was so obvious to understand.” He reached across the table and took my hands. “Do you really think they’ll look any harder for us?”

  One could only imagine.

  As I discovered within fifteen minutes of leaving the library, we’d been lacking in imagination.

  I’d taken a streetcar to the BART station where I was waiting for the next train. Compulsive reader that I am, I perused the information posted on the kiosk. You can find—and forget—a lot of useless information with that kind of reading. Today, it kept me from thinking about what the next twenty-four hours might bring. Unfortunately, the moment I saw Eddy’s and my picture in the “SUSPECTED TERRORISTS” section behind the locked glass window, I realized I should have been more productive with my time.

  I tried my hardest not to pass out since fainting in front of my own WANTED! poster would be too efficient for DHS. I stumbled up the stairs and back out onto the street to catch the streetcar someplace else. While I waited for the next streetcar, I put on my sunglasses and worried that those would draw attention on such a gloomy day. I left a message for Eddy. “You’re famous. Now’s the time for that surfer dude look you’ve always wanted.” If he hadn’t already seen the pictures, he would know.

  I rode for ten minutes before I spotted a beauty shop. An hour and a half later, I emerged with chopped, perky blond spikes. I never knew I looked like Meg Ryan until I left all those loose auburn curls on the floor behind me.

  It was just hair.

  I told myself that twenty times as I rode BART to the end of the line where more Eddy and Maggie posters bloomed. I would not let myself think about how long it had taken me to grow my hair out, how it had become a signature of sorts, how it had turned heads.

  From the BART station, I took a cab to Palo Alto to see if Anna’s restaurant was permanently boarded up or if her answering machine message about being closed for a funeral was true. Fortunately, there’s very little to read in a cab, so I thought about what I was doing. If the DHS were smart, I’d be walking into a perfect trap. I had the cab cruise past the restaurant first. Even though it was on the early side for happy hour, a few people sat at tables by the window. Anya’s was open.