Dogs (9 page)

Tessa stood brushing her teeth in the living room, grimacing around the toothbrush at the stupidity on the TV. Jess Langstrom wasn't going to pick her up until 7:00 A.M. and it was only 6:00, but she couldn't sleep. Last night it had taken the local cops two solid hours to clear her credentials, and by that time an exhausted Langstrom had gone home to sleep, which apparently he hadn't been doing too much of. The delay in a critical situation was enough to make Tessa drastically lower her opinion of locals—not that the FBI hadn't done the same thing too many times, God knows. In fact, the only people acting decisively seemed to be FEMA, who were erring in the other direction, for once. That idiot Scott Lurie had actually called Tyler “a possible act of terrorism.” Terrorism! Give me a break. There was no evidence of that, none whatsoever, and of the newscasts Tessa had scanned so far, only Janet Belville of CNN seemed to acknowledge and recognize that fact.

FEMA, of course, was simply exploiting this mutated virus, or whatever it was, to counterbalance their dismal performance in last year's California earthquake. But Tessa had been watching TV for an hour and had heard no contradictions from the FBI. CIA, Homeland Security, or the White House. Bernini and Maddox must be tearing their eyes out at being muffled like this.

The problem with working counter-terrorism, Tessa had long since learned, was the tendency to see anything that happened in terrorist terms. An Amtrak train hits a cow and derails—was it a “deliberate disruption of transport”? Was that top adviser's suicide actually an assassination? She knew of CT agents who suspected that levees breached by a hurricane were the work of al-Qaeda.

“What do you think, Minette?” Tessa asked the toy poodle, who stared at her disdainfully and walked to the front door to be let out. Tessa scooped her up and carried her, protesting, to the back door. They slipped outside, where Minette piddled and shit before immediately being carried back in.

Tessa had no fear of Minette's being infected. Since coming to Tyler three weeks ago, Minette had had zero interaction with any other dogs, not even so much as a friendly butt sniff. Unless this thing were airborne, of course, in which case the entire country was in deep trouble indeed. But nothing Tessa had seen, read, or pried out of Jess Langstrom indicated that.

She still had nearly an hour until he showed up. Tessa meditated briefly and unsatisfactorily, then checked her email. Still no reply from Salah's second, unknown correspondent. Maybe she could have his or her original email translated from Arabic. She printed it out, finishing just as Jess's truck pulled up. Tessa shoved the paper into her jeans pocket and ran outside.

“Morning,” Jess said grimly. He looked a little better than last night, but not much. Weariness shadowed his eyes and deepened the lines from nose to chin. He hadn't shaved and his beard, darker than the thick salt-and-pepper hair on his head, gave him the disreputable look of a parka-clad pirate. He had a nice voice, though, deep and calm even when he sounded grim.

“Good morning,” Tessa said. “What's on the agenda?”

“FEMA's here, setting up a quarantine around the whole town.”

“So I saw on CNN. Why do you look so disapproving? I thought it was your idea.”

“It was. But I wasn't envisioning this kind of circus.” He started the truck. “It's like they're deliberately fanning the panic.”

“They are,” Tessa said. “It's a political opportunity.” He didn't know that? “FEMA consistently comes under fire for focusing on terrorism at the expense of natural disasters. Lurie will try to change that perception by playing this dog thing for all it's worth.”

Jess shrugged. “If you say so. Today I have new orders. We're not just answering calls anymore, we're picking up every single dog in Tyler township and bringing them in. That's 1,402 dogs, according to the dog licenses issued last year. Here, take the list of addresses, courtesy of our town clerk.”

“People are just going to hand over their pet dogs?”

“Some are, some aren't.”

“Who else is going to help collect all those dogs? And where are you going to put them all?”

Jess waved at a passing cop car. “This Scott Lurie has brought in teams of dog handlers, animal control officers, vets, and qualified temporary deputies. We start by taking all the animals to the motel, and then they get them ferried to wherever after that.”

“You have 1,402 crates?”

“Well, not on me,” Jess said, but he didn't smile. “FEMA's getting them, I guess. They're getting whatever they want. And now they're jawing about this being a terrorist attack.” He glanced sideways, as if to see the effect of this on her.

“I know,” Tessa said.

“You don't miss much, do you?”

She said quietly, “I was an FBI agent.”

Maybe he picked up her tone—
Don't ask me any questions—
because he said nothing until they turned down a long driveway bordered by trees. Then he changed the subject. “Dr. Latkin told me this morning that there's a new symptom. The infected dogs are developing a sort of milky film over both eyes. He thinks it means the pathogen might be affecting the endocrine system that affects the tear-duct system, or something like that. I didn't quite get it all, but we're supposed to watch out for milky eye films even if the dogs act normally.”

“Okay,” Tessa said. “Are the dogs actually going blind?”

“I don't know. Anyway, the strategy is for the pick-up teams to start at the edges of town and work inward, to keep animals from escaping.”

The house at the end of the long driveway was impressive: stone and brick, three stories, covered with dormant ivy. Jess said, “Mr. and Mrs. James Gorman. A male Lab and a female Irish setter.”

Tessa said, “I'll bet they're named Brandy and Whiskey. Rich people like to give their dogs alcoholic names.” Jess laughed reluctantly.

Mr. and Mrs. Gorman were both home and neither was happy. “Are you here about this ridiculous rule that if I go to my office I can't return to Tyler tonight?” James Gorman demanded. He wore a business suit and carried a briefcase, standing in his black-and-white-marble foyer as if already in his office.

“No, sir, we're from Animal Control,” Jess said. “We're required to take temporary custody of your two dogs until further notice. The animals will be well cared for, unharmed, and returned to you as soon as it's safe.”

The Gormans exchanged stupefied looks. Tessa wondered what they'd thought the two wire cages sitting on the porch were for. Mrs. Gorman, a carefully groomed blonde still in her housecoat, said, “Take Schnapps and Applejack?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Jess said.

“Now, see here—” Mr. Gorman began, but Tessa interrupted him.

“By order of the president of the United States, Mr. Gorman.”

He stopped protesting, glared at her, and stomped off. Jess shot her an admiring glance:
Where did you learn to do that?
She said again, “I was an FBI agent,” behind the Gormans' retreating backs.

Mrs. Gorman said over her shoulder, “Come this way, please.” Her tone had faded from outraged to distant, as if Jess and Tessa were two more routine workmen, plumbers or refrigerator repairmen.

The dogs were in a guest room on the first floor. Jess went in with padded gloves and face mask, but neither animal seemed infected. They wagged their well-groomed tails at Jess, and dog biscuits lured them easily into the wire crates. Jess tagged the cages and carried them to the truck while Tessa filled out the paperwork. She would have bet her Smith & Wesson that someone at FEMA had invented this form overnight and run off a few thousand copies on a photocopier someplace. Emergency situations tended to generate paper, like a bonfire throwing off sparks.

“That was easy enough,” she said to Jess as the truck pulled away, Schnapps and Applejack content in the back.

“They won't all be,” he said, his face grim. “You can assist at the next stop but not at the one after that. You stay in the truck on that one, Tessa.”

In a pig's eye
. She wasn't here to sit in a truck.

So why was she here, other than the purely patriotic desire to help out her country in a time of natural disaster, yadda yadda and so forth?

“Jess, do you happen to read Arabic?”

He shot her an incredulous look. “
Arabic?
No. Why would you ask that?”

“No reason,” she said.

Allen was good at sneaking into rooms and listening to his parents before they realized he was there. It was the only way he ever learned some important things. Like, when his Aunt Nicole died at college from a drug overdose, Allen's mother didn't even tell him for two days and then she said Aunt Nicole was hit by a car. You couldn't trust grown-ups to tell you the truth about anything.

So now he stood in the kitchen in his pajamas, hand on the refrigerator door so he could say he just came downstairs for a glass of milk, and listened to his parents in the dining room.

“Don't go, Peter,” his mother said. “The office can do without you for one day! If you leave, they won't let you back into Tyler, and Allen and I will be here all alone!”