Invasive Species (8 page)

She felt cold. While she sat here, events were spinning on—and out of control—without her.

She took in a long breath to calm herself. Then leaned forward over the keyboard and began to compose a message of her own.

Manhattan

TREY COULD BLAME
his relentless yen to travel on his parents.

His father, Thomas, was a specialist in respiratory diseases, but unlike most doctors he'd never chosen a sedentary life at a hospital, HMO, or university. Instead, as if something were chasing him, he stayed on the move, spending a few months here, a year there.

He'd had a willing conspirator in Trey's mother, Katherine. She was a writer, and her ongoing series of columns for
Adventure Travel
magazine, detailing life on the run with a husband and two young sons, had proven very popular.

By the time he was fifteen, Trey had visited more than thirty countries. If his family never stayed put long enough for him to make friends, to learn what it was like to live in human society instead of just skim over it, he didn't mind. He was sure that the trade-off was worth it.

His brother, Christopher, disagreed. “You just don't know any different,” he told Trey when they were teenagers. “You've never learned how satisfying it is to grow roots.”

“You haven't, either,” Trey pointed out.

“That's true.” Christopher thought about it. “But there's a difference. As soon as I can, I'm going to. Deep roots.”

And then Christopher went out and did it. Grew roots. When he reached the age of eighteen, he went back to Australia, always his favorite among the places they'd visited, got a job, and settled down in Port Douglas, Queensland. Eventually he fell in love with a woman there and got married.

Just like normal people did.

Christopher and Margie still lived in Port Douglas and had produced two children. Twin girls, whom Trey had seen only a handful of times over the years.

On his most recent visit, three years earlier, he found himself driven to explain himself to his brother. They were sitting on the porch of Christopher's house at dusk, drinking Fourex Gold and watching a steady stream of flying foxes winging past, dark silhouettes against a celadon sky.

In halting words, he tried to describe why he couldn't stay still. How the world seemed like such a fragile place, and that by going where it was most fragile, most endangered, he might be able to make a difference.

Christopher smiled at him over his beer. “Dad used to use exactly the same excuse when he dragged us around.”

Trey was struck silent.

“But that's okay.” Christopher leaned his head back and looked up at the darkening sky. “He was who he was, and you are what you are.” He laughed. “At least you're not inflicting your compulsions on your own kids.”

Right then, the twins came home from a play date, and Christopher's face lit up. He looked happy in a way that made Trey feel ashamed of himself.

But not for long. The next morning he was off again, spinning round the world, just as his father had.

*   *   *

WOULD THOMAS AND
Katherine have been proud of him? He liked to believe so, but he'd never know for sure.

Early in his career, Thomas had seen the field of respiratory medicine morph into something almost unrecognizable. Every year seemed to see the emergence of a new or resurgent respiratory disease. AIDS-associated pneumonias. Legionnaires' disease. SARS. Bird flu. Even tuberculosis, once considered nearly eradicated, came roaring back, more deadly than ever.

Not all the diseases sprouting like vile mushrooms all over the world had names. Some unidentified ones were so ferocious—and so little understood—that the physicians hurrying to study and treat them knew that doing so might be suicidal.

When Trey was in his second year of college, Thomas Gilliard was summoned to Guangdong Province in China to investigate one such newly hatched disease. Katherine went along, as she always did.

Three days after seeing his first patient, Thomas fell ill. His lungs filled with fluid, then with blood, and less than forty-eight hours later he was dead.

Katherine had been warned to stay away from him, but ignored this advice. Even before Thomas died, she'd begun to experience the same symptoms. Her death came three days after his.

And Trey, world traveler, just nineteen, found himself accompanying his parents' bodies back to the United States.

Back home. As if they'd ever truly had a home.

*   *   *

“YOU LOOK LIKE
a poster for Reading Is Fundamental,” Jack said.

Trey looked up. The open books before him bore titles like
A Young Man's Grand Adventures in Afrique Ouest Français
(Colonel Fitzwilliam Wallis, First Bengal Lancers, Ret., 1878) and
Into the Jungles of the Camerouns with Gun and Knitting Needles
(Lady Mary Maurice Smith, Women's Goodwill Society, 1904). Books that were mirrors of a time when the world was an empty map, where grand adventures were still possible.

“Found nothing, huh?” Jack said.

Trey shook his head. No mention of monkey-killing wasps in the rain forests of Senegal or anywhere else the peripatetic Victorian authors had traveled.

He lifted the book by Lady Mary and watched as fragments of the deteriorating, yellow-orange pages drifted down onto his lap. Books like these were another thing in the process of vanishing, unnoticed and unmourned. When they were gone—and libraries were relentlessly clearing shelf space to make room for computer terminals—they'd be gone forever.

If something wasn't at the tip of your keyboarding fingers, it wouldn't exist.

Jack, who considered Trey sentimental about such things, moved easily back and forth between the two worlds. Entirely comfortable in the wilderness, chasing after new species on mountaintops, in swamps and forests, he was equally content traveling across time and space on the Internet.

He saw Trey looking at the paper dandruff on his lap and said, “Get used to it. Scientists can't survive without technology.”

“Then I guess it's lucky,” Trey said, “that I'm no scientist.”

“Lucky for us, at least.” Jack's gaze moved to his computer. “Come here.”

When Trey stood behind him, he gestured at the screen.

“Here's what I've done,” he said. “Should I send it out?”

He'd created a kind of garish advertisement, like something that might have touted an old-time Coney Island sideshow. At its center was Jack's drawing of the wasp. Above the illustration were the words “Have You Seen This Bug?” in big red-and-white letters, and the space below contained a description of the wasp's size and where Trey had seen it, a smaller sketch of one of the colony's mounds with a wasp perched on top of it, contact information, and a warning (“Dangerous! Do not approach.”) that Trey was sure would be ignored.

“Who will receive this?” he asked.

“Well.” Jack took a second to think about it. “I'll send it to every bug hunter I know, for starters. Every entomology department in every university, of course. Nature-travel and bird-tour companies. I'll also be posting it on my bug blog, Facebook and Twitter of course, my Tumblr and Pinterest—”

He grinned at Trey's expression. “Social-media sites where not only scientists, but real people, will see it. That's the key, I think. I want someone I'll never meet to tell someone else I'll never meet, ‘Hey, doesn't this look like the wasp you stepped on when we were playing tennis at Club Med this spring?'”

Trey was silent.

“Gotta look for help,” Jack said. “Way of the world.”

After a moment, Trey nodded. You couldn't always do everything yourself. He understood that.

Hated, but understood.

“Send it,” he said.

*   *   *

SOON AFTERWARD, HE
headed back to his apartment in Brooklyn's upscale Park Slope neighborhood. His parents had bought it once he and Christopher grown, a place on the ground floor of a four-story yellow-brick building just a few blocks from Prospect Park. Worth a fortune these days because of the neighborhood, but it was nothing glamorous: one bedroom, one bath, a foldout couch in the living/dining room, separated by a counter from the tiny kitchen.

More a place for stopping off to do laundry between trips than a real home.

After they'd died, Trey and Christopher had inherited it jointly. Christopher, just twenty-two but already settled in Australia, had wanted nothing to do with it, even refusing Trey's offer to buy out his half.

“You sell it, give me my share,” he'd said. “Till then, feel free to live there.”

So that was what Trey did, as much as he lived anywhere.

*   *   *

HE SAT AT
the little table in the dining area and powered up his laptop. Despite Jack's jibes, he knew his way around the Internet.

He had no choice. The ability to use a computer was nearly as essential to his (tenuous) relationship with his employers as his skill at returning from the wilderness with data no one else could obtain.

He got no pleasure from computer literacy. But all Jack's talk about social media had reminded him that days had passed since he'd been online. With a sigh, he logged on.

And then, right away, almost deleted the most important e-mail of his life because it looked like spam.

It had come from a travel company in the Canary Islands. Unsurprisingly, Trey had ended up on countless travel e-mail lists, and at first he assumed this one was just another advertisement.

Except for the subject heading. It didn't advertise cheap vacations in Majorca, time shares on Grand Canary, easy hops to Casablanca.

It just said: “This time . . .”

Trey looked at it and thought,
What does
that
mean?

So instead of deleting the e-mail unread, he opened it.

It contained three short lines of text. The first said, “. . . you don't have to flee.”

The second: “Sheila Connelly.”

And the third: “Find her.”

Trey sat looking at the screen. Thinking.

Then he reached for his phone and called Jack.

DESPITE THE HOUR,
Jack was still in his office. No surprise to Trey, who knew that Jack frequently stayed at work long after the museum closed, even through the night.

This had always been true, but even more so since his divorce had eliminated his main reason for setting foot outside.

Not that he was ever alone in the vast building. Jack was far from the only museum scientist at work during the dead of night, when the streets outside were quiet but for an occasional bus or taxi, and even Central Park itself seemed to sleep. You could concentrate better, they believed. Gain perspective that was impossible in the glaring light and endless noise of the city day.

Trey didn't need convincing. It was his favorite time at the museum as well. With only scattered emergency bulbs casting a feeble glow, the tigers and gorillas in their darkened dioramas, the shadowy dinosaur skeletons, the great blue whale dominating its ocean room, all managed to capture some of the magic—some of the awe—of the living creatures they evoked.

Plus, when he visited at night, the place was deserted. That was always a good thing.

*   *   *

ONLY THE COMPUTER
screen and a bumblebee-shaped child's night-light illuminated the office. Jack had opened a window, and Trey felt the night's cold, damp exhalation as a prickle on his skin. Taking a breath and holding it, he could detect, at the very edge of his hearing, a series of staccato, high-pitched cries: the contact calls of a flock of birds—he heard orioles, tanagers, and grosbeaks—migrating north over the city.

Trey had forwarded the e-mail to Jack. Now they stood looking at it again, though they'd both long since memorized the brief message.

“It's Mariama,” Trey said.

Jack frowned. He'd been frowning since Trey arrived. “And you're sure of this how, Sherlock?”

“The word ‘flee,'” Trey said.

Jack's frown deepened into a scowl. “But why go through”—he gestured at the screen—“this gobbledygook? Why use someone else's account? Why not just say, ‘Hey, Trey. It's Mariama. How ya doin'?”

Trey said, “I don't know. Maybe she's protecting herself . . . or someone else.”

“And maybe you're grasping at straws, Scarecrow.”

Trey just looked at him, and after a moment Jack sighed. “I argue with you,” he said, “because it feels so good when I stop.”

Sitting down at his computer with a thud, he muttered, “Sheila Connelly, huh. There must be a ton of people with that name out there.”

He tapped at the keys. “No. I was wrong. Most of them use a second
o
instead of an
e
. At least we're not looking for a single ant in a hill.”

A moment later, he said, “This one? Tanzania Sheila? The one whose mother died?”

“I think so.”

Jack swung around to look up at him. “You searched this yourself, didn't you? Before you came in?”

Trey nodded.

“And?”

“I didn't find anything that meant a thing to me.” Trey hesitated. “I thought you might have better luck.”

“Because I live in this century? Or just because I'm awesome?”

Trey didn't bother to say anything. Grinning, Jack went back to the computer. “Still, don't expect too much. I think it's a snipe hunt.”

Trey said, “Just look.”

*   *   *

MEGAN CONNELLY'S DEATH
had received a burst of attention in Tanzania's tabloids, mostly because it involved an American who'd been living in the country for decades. The death of an American anywhere on earth also seemed to warrant a few lines in the wire services, which had meant a bit of international newspaper and cable news website coverage as well.

Long or short, though, the articles all said basically the same thing, and it wasn't enough.

Connelly, who had come to western Tanzania as a missionary, had—along with two Tanzanians—died in a suspicious fire that consumed her house in Ujiji. Her daughter, Sheila, a physician working for the nongovernmental organization Les Voyageurs, had been hospitalized due to distress. And also (several of the articles hinted) because officials suspected that she might have had something to do with the fire.

“When did this all take place?” Trey asked.

Jack looked. “The fire, five days ago. The most recent article is dated yesterday.”

“And Sheila is still hospitalized?”

“As far as we know.”

Trey said, “For ‘distress.'”

“Yeah. Sounds more like detention than treatment to me.” Jack gave a sympathetic grunt. “Though I'd be distressed, too, if my mother had just died and I was being held in a Tanzanian hospital.”

He shrugged. “But I still don't see anything here about wasps.”

“Keep looking,” Trey said.

*   *   *

NOTHING. JUST THE
same few details regurgitated again and again.

Damn.
Trey hated when he couldn't find what he was searching for. When he couldn't
see.

“Told ya,” Jack said. “Snipe hunt.”

“No.” Trey found that his hands were clenched. “We're missing something.”

Jack shrugged. “We've read every word of every story.”

“Then why did Mariama point me here?”

Jack opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Maybe she didn't,
he'd begun to say.
Maybe it wasn't even her.

Trey said, “Could there have been a story up when Mariama looked, but that's gone now?”

Jack went still for a second. Then he said, “Sure.”

“Can it be retrieved?”

Again a pause. Then, “Maybe.”

Jack went to Google, typed, clicked. A page of results unfurled. The first four led back to articles they'd already read, but the fifth took them to a page that, under the heading of a newspaper called the
Kigoma Dart
, said, “Error 404: The article you are looking for no longer exists.”

“Huh,” Jack said.

“We need more than a dead link,” Trey said.

“Yeah, I know. Let me see if this article's been cached.” A few more clicks. “Damn. No.”

He sat back in his chair and pulled at his beard. Then he leaned forward again. “Let's try the Wayback Machine.”

The name awoke vague memories of cartoons Trey's father had shown him on DVD when he was young. A dog and a boy who traveled back in time to famous historical events.

“The what?” he said.

“The Wayback Machine.” Jack was tapping at the keyboard as he spoke. “This site that stores deleted Web pages.” He laughed. “Everything on the Internet lives forever, if you know where to look. Just ask any politician.”

Ten seconds later he said, “Bingo.” And there the article was, as if it had never been taken down, under the title “New Details in Tragic Ujiji House Fire.”

Trey scanned it, finding nothing unexpected until the next-to-last paragraph. There, directly beneath the subhead “Daughter Speaks” were the only words from Sheila Connelly he'd seen in any of the articles he'd read.

Even these were not direct quotes, just a paragraph written as if the reporter had actually talked to Sheila. “Miss Connelly claims to have no knowledge of the fire,” the passage said. “She claims that her mother was ill from a tumbu fly larva, which she extracted. During the minor operation, her mother died, she believes of an allergic reaction. The body of Mrs. Connelly was too badly burned to confirm her daughter's statements. Police hope to question Miss Connelly further as she recovers.”

“Claims this,” Jack said. “Claims that. They've as good as convicted her of arson and murder.”

Trey said, “Sure. But that's not what's important.”

“Yeah.” Jack pulled at his beard, which by this time of the night stuck out in wiry tufts. “But her story doesn't add up, either. No one's ever died of an anaphylactic reaction to a tumbu larva.”

Trey was quiet. It was late, and Jack's mind wasn't working as quickly as it usually did.

He'd get there eventually, though.

Trey watched it happen. First, Jack closed his eyes. Then he said, “Wait a second. Wait.”

Then his whole body grew still. His intense concentration made him resemble a statue, a monument. A figure from Easter Island, flesh captured in stone, but not flesh itself. He didn't seem to be breathing.

As commanded, Trey waited. In the silence, he heard a car honk down on the street. He glanced over at the bee clock hanging on the wall. Four thirty. Already traffic was beginning to build toward rush hour. The freedom, the wildness, of the New York City night was retreating. Soon the city would be filled with human voices once again, sounds as meaningless to Trey as the gabble of flamingos.

Jack opened his eyes. They were dark with comprehension. “That colobus monkey you saw,” he said. “You don't think it got stung because it was threatening the colony. You don't think it was there by chance. You think it was . . . a host.”

“I saw the swelling, but thought it was a tumor.”

“And that man in the clinic, the one who was shot in the stomach. You think he was, too. A host.”

“Yes.”

“And Sheila's mother as well.”

Trey let him work it out.

“You're saying that your wasps are parasitic. That they use primate hosts to hatch their young.” Only Jack's mouth moved. The rest still seemed rooted to his chair, to the earth.

“And not just lower primates,” he said. “
Homo sapiens
as well.”

“We need to know what Sheila Connelly saw,” Trey said. “We need to know what that larva looked like.”

Jack stared at him, unblinking. Then, drawing in a huge breath, he shook his shoulders like a bear or a dog. In that moment, he was flesh again.

He turned back to his computer. Within a few seconds he'd called up a website for booking airline reservations.

“Today or tomorrow?” he asked.

Trey stood, stretched, walked over to the window. The predawn light made the leaves on the trees across the way look like fog, like smoke. It reminded him of mountain forests he'd visited, the clouds wafting through, the deepest of mysteries made briefly tangible.

A familiar feeling pierced him, stabbing like a blade. The thrill of the hunt.

You are what you are,
his brother had said to him. Meaning:
You'll never change
.

Trey might never know whether it was a curse or a blessing, or both.

“Today,” he told Jack. “Now.”