Code Orange (9 page)

As to rogue states, it seemed to Mitty that scientists there would sell their knowledge—or virus—to the highest bidder. That guy in Pakistan just last week admitted he'd been selling nuclear weapons knowledge all over the globe. And what did their president, Musharraf, say? Don't worry about it. What's a little top-secret info between friends? Or even enemies?

If a government could shrug like that about nuclear weapons, they'd shrug about missing smallpox virus, because it was a disease nobody remembered anyway and thought was just a skin problem.

That morning, the librarian had been lying in wait for Mitty, holding out yet another book,
Smallpox As a Biological Weapon
, and several weeks' worth of
U.S. News & World Report
. Cornered, Mitty had read enough for the current events section of his paper.

Mitty certainly had no problem extinguishing the creature that was smallpox.

He dug out his DVD to watch
Spider-Man
.

His father found him sound asleep under a pile of books and papers, his laptop having put itself to sleep too, the remains of a snack spilling gently off a tilted plate while Spider-Man leaped across burning rafters.

Mitty's father turned off the DVD and tucked a blanket around his sleeping son.

It had now been four days since Mitchell John Blake had inhaled the particles of a smallpox scab.

T
hat night Mitty had smallpox dreams.

He woke up sweating and shivering, unable to catch his breath or slow his heartbeat. He was lying on the bare floor of his bedroom, like a prisoner in a cell. Of course, it was a really well-furnished cell with great electronics.

In the entire world, he thought, I am the only person dreaming of smallpox.

The apartment was always hot; the Blakes rarely turned on the heat, even on the coldest days, because the building was so warm from all the apartments that did have their heat on. But even in bed, under blankets, Mitty could not get warm. He lay staring wide-eyed at the ceiling as if he had lockjaw of the eyelids.

Facts and fears slammed into him like so many tennis balls lobbed into his face.

He was still awake at three a.m.

“Mitty Blake!” screamed his mother. “It's nine-forty-four!”

Mitty dragged himself out of sleep. He hoped it was a Saturday.

“The school just called! Mitty, you promised you would never cut school again!”

He huddled under the blankets. “I'm not actually cutting, Mom, I just didn't wake up.” Smallpox, he thought. I had smallpox. Mom had it, Dad had it.

“Mitty!” she cried. A major rant about his shortcomings was about to begin.

“Now, Kathleen,” yelled his father from the other end of the apartment,“it wasn't intentional. Mitty didn't—”

Mitty had to be careful of events like this. His parents had radically different ideas about how to treat Mitty's failures and might battle each other instead of him, so Mitty said quickly, “I was a jerk, Mom. I forgot to set my alarm. I can get dressed in a second and be at school in ten minutes, okay?”

“Is this going to happen again?” his mother demanded, as if Mitty had chosen strip-mining national parks for a career.

“It happened once last fall, Mom,” he said, “and once now. Therefore my failure-to-wake-up rate is actually one morning per semester. So, yeah, it might well happen again. Possibly as early as May, probably not till next September.”

She didn't laugh as she left his room. Mitty slid down from the top bunk and landed on an annoying assortment
of books and papers. He put only his laptop into his backpack.

“Orange juice!” shouted his mother from the other end of the apartment. “Socks!”

Mitty surrendered on both fronts. “Love you, Mom,” he said, kissing her good-bye. She melted. She always did. He hugged her again for good measure and tore out of the apartment.

He was halfway to school when he realized he had not said good-bye to his father.

He felt an odd tearing at his heart. He paused at the corner of Broadway and Seventy-fourth and half turned to catch his dad before he left for the office—then shook his head to clear it and bought a bagel from a street vendor.

“
Beowulf
really spoke to you, Mitty!” cried Mrs. Abrams joyfully. “As a topic for your paper for me, I suggest monsters in literature, to capitalize on that brilliant thinking.”

Mitty debated saying “Huh? What?”or “I'm not sufficiently acquainted with literature to find the requisite number of monsters for a fair analysis.” He went with “Huh?”

“Mr. Lynch tells me you're off and running on an outstanding report on smallpox,” said Mrs. Abrams. “Supposing you were to compare Grendel and the other monsters in
Beowulf
to the monsters of infectious disease?” Mrs. Abrams clapped her hands with excitement. “Smallpox!” she clarified.“Typhoid! Plague!”

Mitty was horrified. He couldn't imagine the work such a paper would take. He wanted a topic that required no work. Most of all he wanted a topic with no fatal diseases.

“Good,” said Mrs. Abrams.“That's settled.”

Olivia IM'd. She was going to the girls' basketball game after school. Julianna was point guard. Zorah might be a starter. Did Mitty want to go?

Mitty was not a big fan of girls' high school basketball. He wasn't a big fan of Julianna and Zorah either. He would have to think about this. “Tell you at lunch,” he wrote back.

He didn't actually want to have lunch with anybody. He felt as if he had a new companion now, a very thoroughly lodged companion that would be with him until death. Variola major.

At lunch, he was cornered by Derek, who would not shut up. Derek had decided it was not a crazy individual who had murdered poor old Ottilie Lundgren before she could finish reading her mystery novel, but a crazy country. “There's North Korea,” Derek began.“Talk about insanity.”

There were whole continents that didn't interest Mitty, and North Korea was in one of them. Derek moved on to the Middle East, where the list of potential anthrax lovers was long: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. He named groups and causes, leaders and fanatics. Then he forged into Africa, where Sudan and Ethiopia were filled with crazed persons with appalling histories, where funding might come from diamonds in Sierra Leone, and where mercenaries were available from anyplace where there'd been a recent civil war, which was every place.

Olivia began discussing how AIDS had invaded many African countries.

Derek was annoyed. “I'm into terrorism, not sexually transmitted disease. My theory is that a rogue country is endlessly surfing the Net, looking for opportunities. Like investors endlessly researching profitable companies. The terrorists wouldn't specifically care what they found, any
more than you care whether your stock is in farm tractors or casinos—you just want to earn money. The terrorists don't care if they find anthrax or smallpox—they just want to kill people. So they get their anthrax or whatever, pick a place like Grand Central Station, send a million commuters into such a panic they never take a train into New York again, and that destroys the economy and brings down a mayor and a governor and a president, and of course you'd have plenty of Americans who'll be glad to see that mayor, governor and president brought down, so even though you're a terrorist and you're killing people, you'll have people on your side.”

“No, you won't,” said Olivia sharply. “No matter how much people don't like the party in office—”

“Your outfit will have operational security,” said Derek, raising his voice to drown Olivia out. “The guy in charge isn't going to scatter the anthrax. He's going to be a million miles away in the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan or Uzbekistan.”

“The mountains of Afghanistan,” said Olivia predictably, “are not a million miles away.”

Derek was now speaking exclusively to Mitty “The mastermind sends his instructions online. He's supervising his minions electronically, and if the minions die of anthrax, who cares? They were always expendable. Anyway, if you're terrorizing people, the more victims the better.”

Mitty tried to swallow.

Nothing happened. His throat refused to obey him.

Mr. Lynch took them to the library again. Derek muttered that it was sure easy to be a teacher if all you did was escort people into the library. Everybody explained
to Derek it was sure easy to be a student if your teachers just escorted you into the library so shut up.