Dogs (18 page)

“Mr. Langstrom! Mr. Langstrom!”

“Jesus Christ,” Billy said. From the expression on the Guardsman's face, Jess could tell that he'd heard the story—or some version of the story—about Victor Balonov. But the soldier waved him through when Jess said, “I have to talk to Dr. Latkin. In an official capacity.” For half a second he considered Tessa's formula—
By order of the president of the United States
—but thought better of this.

Jess parked beside the Cedar Springs Motel lot. In the fields around it had sprung up, overnight, an entire city of large Army-issue tents. Billy ambled off toward the dog shelter and Jess knocked on the CDC mobile van. A girl in a white lab coat went to fetch Joe Latkin. When the scientist appeared, Jess said without preamble, “I saw something. I think it was a dog with symptoms of infection but no aggression.”

Latkin stared at him. Finally he said, “There's coffee in the mess tent. This way.”

After Jess told Latkin about the shit-brown terrier mix with milky eyes but no aggression, Latkin made five cell-phone calls. Jess said as mildly as possible, “I want to be part of this search, Joe,” and Latkin nodded absently. Jess took that as authorization and went to search for Don DiBella. Scott Lurie, the FEMA incident chief, would be officially in charge of the search for the terrier, but he knew neither the landscape nor the men who did. Sheriff DiBella would make any decisions that counted.

DiBella was already busy summoning people. Evidently he had not heard about Tessa's flight, although he had heard about the rest of it. “Hey, Jess, we need you to organize a search for some dog that Dr. Latkin has identified. He says it could be important. Are you still working with that FBI agent who shot Balonov?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, let me describe this dog to you and tell you what we're looking for and why. Then we'll meet at the north checkpoint in an hour and form teams. You better get breakfast first, if you haven't already—going to be a long day. Mess tent is over there.”

“Okay,” Jess said. That was the third person today to tell him things he already knew, if you counted Billy.

Billy, of course, was not waiting in the car as he'd promised. Jess found him in the dog tent, which was significantly colder than yesterday. Rows and rows of dog crates, ranging from the size of a laundry basket to that of a small bathroom, sat on the grass. Dogs snarled or barked or slept or whimpered. The noise was terrifying, as was the smell. Volunteers hosed down cages with warm water without removing the dangerous dogs. More volunteers poured in kibble through chutes that kept them a foot away from the bars. It was a canine version of hell.

But a much smaller hell than it should have been. There were still a lot of loose dogs out there.

Billy was pushing bits of a cookie through the cage bars of a feebly snapping, ancient-looking, clearly arthritic collie. Jess said sharply, “Don't do that, Billy.”

“Don't do no harm.” He crooned at the dog, “She's a good ol' girl, aren't you, pretty Belle?”

“I have to take you home, then come back here for duty. We need to find that terrier mix.”

“Just give me another minute with Belle. I gotta report on her to Cami.”

Jess walked the rows of cages. He found Minette in a far section against the tent wall, with a wide swath of withered grass between these cages and the rest. He said to a man inspecting the dogs, “Why are these dogs separate?”

“Who are you?” the man said, voice raised to be heard over all the dogs. The shouting made the question sound belligerent.

“Tyler Township Senior Animal Control Officer.”

“Oh. Well, these animals aren't infected yet. We need to see if the virus is airborne, and if so, what the range is.” He moved on.

So Minette was a guinea pig. The toy poodle wagged her tail at him, pushing against the bars of her cage. Her eyes were clear. On the label giving Minette's particulars, Jess noticed a red stick-on dot with the number “2.” Other cages in this section bore yellow or blue dots. He found the inspector again.

“What does the system of dots mean?”

The man didn't look up as he shouted his answer. “Red has had the shortest airborne exposure in the tent here, blue next, yellow longest. Numbers mean order of sacrifice for dissection, if we need to do that.”

“Thanks.”

Jess went back to Minette. He wished he'd brought a cookie, like Billy had. Minette barked hopefully, tail going like a pendulum on speed. Jess inspected all the other red-dotted cages. Then he carefully peeled off Minette's red dot with the number “2” and exchanged it for another dot on another cage with the number “8,” the highest he could find.

She was still wagging her tail when he left.

Tessa waited until an hour before British Air flight 0043 was due to take off for London. That was as long as she dared delay. Earlier she'd phoned the ticket counter from a pay phone and discovered that seats were available, but she would need time to make it over to International Departures. It was going to be close.

In the meantime, she took Salah's laptop into a pay-to-use data booth and accessed her email account on the Web. Her throat spasmed. Two new emails: Ebenfield and Maddox.

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

SUBJECT: You

Tessa—Where are you now? Where are any of us in this rotten world? Thousand-year Reichs fall, civilizations crumble, everyone dies. In the end, it all means nothing, and yet still we strive to right the balance. Email me back, Tessa.

Cheap and lunatic philosophical maundering.
This
idiot was somehow connected with a deadly plague?

TO: [email protected]

FROM: [email protected]

SUBJECT Contact

Tessa—Where are you? Things are growing critical.

Contact me now.

Maddox

For a lunatic moment the similarity between the two emails made a rising bubble of hysteria in Tessa. She fought it down. At least this time Ebenfield had spared her any more Biblical references. On a translation site she looked up each Arabic word of Ebenfield's new sign-off, remembering that Arabic was read right to left. She got “dog” and “first.” Dogs first?

Before she left the booth, Tessa also Googled Ebenfield's previous citation, 1 Kings 21:23:

“The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.”

Beautiful.

She stayed in the booth another fifteen minutes, researching. Then she made herself eat a tasteless and overpriced hamburger. In a stall in the ladies' room, she wrapped her Smith & Wesson in the take-out food bag, padded with half a dispenser's worth of paper towels. Regretfully she shoved the gun into the trash. For the second time this morning, she dialed the British Air ticket counter, pitching her voice high and flustered. “Hello? Hello?”

“Yes, ma'am, how may I help you?” One of those cool English voices that said
I'm unflappable and you're not.

“It's my daughter! She's on the way to the airport—she has to go to London—her husband is British and his mother is ill well not ill exactly she fell down a flight of stairs and broke every bone in her body practically the doctor says—”

“Ma'am? How may I help you?”

“My daughter has to go to London! I want to buy her ticket over the phone on your next flight—she just called on the cell phone she's parking the car I thought it might save time if I—”

“One ticket on British Air flight 0043. The passenger's name, please?”

“Ellen Blakely. But the ticket will go on my credit card, that's a different name she—”

“Yes, ma'am. Please spell the passenger's last name.”

Tessa did, then held her breath. She wasn't sure where the no-fly list was actually checked, at ticket purchase or at the gate.

The clipped English voice said, “And the name on the credit card, please?”

“Tessa Sanderson. S-A-N-D-E-R-S-O-N.”

“And the number?”

The card cleared. Five minutes later Tessa walked to the ticket counter, produced Ellen's passport, and claimed the ticket.

“Luggage to check?”

“No. Just a carry-on.”

“International Departures are from—”

“I know. Thank you.”

She cleared Security, her breath tangled in her throat, her face displaying nothing, and was the last passenger aboard the plane. It was half-empty; most people preferred overnight flights to Europe. Salah always had. Tessa sank into a window seat, leaned her head against the cold glass of the window, and tried to organize her thoughts for London.

She might get no farther than Heathrow. Maddox might have her picked up at the gate. Or he might have her followed, hoping she would lead agents to something even more interesting. Or Maddox might conclude that he had had it wrong and that the Bureau had made a massive, humiliating mistake with her.

Certainly it had happened before. Aldrich Ames had sold out the CIA to the Russians, and Robert Hanssen had done the same to the FBI. Tessa, Maddox might figure, had been lured into suspect activities through love of her husband, and Salah Mahjoub had indeed been a very clever, until-now undetected terrorist.

And there lay the heart of the question.

The American public thought that either you were a terrorist or you were not. But in reality, it was never that simple. A terrorist organization, large or small, is still an organization. Like any other organization, it needs supplying from the outside. Is the man who sells arms to a terrorist group, knowing its purpose, a terrorist himself? Yes. But what of the humble man who sells it blankets, or fish, or stone to build a hut in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria? Is he, too, a terrorist?

And what of the man who supplies information?

The Mideast was rich in information brokers. All kinds of brokers, all kinds of information. If you sold information about an oil refinery to what you thought was simply the refinery's business competitor, and later a terrorist group blew up that same refinery, did that make you, too, a terrorist? What if you were merely the person who'd sold the information to the person who sold the information?

Ruzbihan al-Ashan's family dealt in copper. They had powerful international business connections, including in Africa. A lot of copper came from West Africa. And a lot of copper was, presumably, sold in North Africa, and not only in Ruzbihan's native Tunis. Also in Rabat, in Algiers, in Cairo.

What did Ruzbihan know? Did his firm deal with the World Bank, where Salah had worked? And what—oh, God, she hated herself for even thinking this question!—had Ruzbihan been able to convince Salah to do?

“Please fasten your seat belts and return your tray tables to their upright positions,” said a dazzlingly handsome young flight attendant. “We'll be taking off in just a few moments. We thank you for flying British Air, and we hope your trip is a pleasant one.”

Ed Dormund got the call right after he and Cora had another fight. There was no bread for sandwiches and Cora was too chicken to go out and buy some. “There's dangerous dogs out there!” she said. “You go!”

“Like I don't already do everything around here while you sit on your fat ass and cry,” Ed snarled. Christ, being cooped up with her like this was driving him nuts. He couldn't go to work because if he left Tyler the fascist government wouldn't let him back in, and then where would he go? It wasn't like he had money for luxuries like motels. Cora spent all his money on her so-called therapy and her depression drugs and her stupid crafts.

“Hey, Ed,” Dennis Riley said on the phone, “they get your dogs?”

“No. I set them free.”

“Good for you,” Dennis said, and Ed felt a flush of pleasure. It
had
been ingenious, the way he'd figured out how to lift the gate latch without leaving the house. He'd duct-taped together the broom handle, mop handle, and vacuum-cleaner extension and had thrust the whole thing through an open window. Jake and Petey and Rex had rushed right out. Now at least they had a fighting chance. Dennis's praise helped push down the thought that he should have just shot the animal control goons demanding his dogs, but then the authorities would have arrested Ed
and
his Samoyeds, and what good would that do?