Streams of Babel (32 page)

The
kind
came out in a hateful whisper, and I felt the tubes in my arm giving way, but I couldn't tell if it was a pinch or a jab or just a movement ... it didn't matter. My heart banging was sending me dizzily back into dreamland.

But loud noises came close—an argument.

"You
said
it was her dad! You didn't tell me you've never seen the guy before—"

I didn't recognize the voice, but I did recognize Scott Eberman, who flew under some tall man's arm. I thought he had jumped on my chest. My brain screeched as tubes went flying through the air, from my arms, my neck, my abdomen. He yanked the long snake out of my throat and a stream of something acidy followed into my nostrils and out. I choked endlessly but could hardly hear myself because of Scott hollering.

"What the hell did you just give her, you freak!"

A blond man slammed the other man into the wall. I would swear he had a gun to the man's head. This was not my father, the impression was strong. My head fell on Scott Eberman's shoulder, but he gripped my chin in his hand, staring insanely.

"Cora! Did he inject you with something?"

All I could do with my throat was gasp for air. Scott yelled down at the ground. "...empty ... syringe is empty!"

He fainted. He slid off my bed onto the floor, and I only remember going back to sleep in some nurse's chest.

SHAHZAD HAMDANI
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
2:00
P.M.

I EXIT THE police building, and the weather has turned foggy. Tyler Ping is not ten feet from me when I realize he has emerged from between two parked trucks.

"Congratulations on getting fired"

"I have nothing to say to you." I try to keep my dignity since all else is gone.

But he walks along beside me. "Yeah, I guess I'd be pissed, too. But now maybe you can really get something done. Right?"

"I go home to Pakistan, that is what I do," I mutter, more to the fog than to Tyler. "I go back to
my
land of the free. My land do not stop me from my life."

A flash of Uncle's face shoots through my mind, and I realize how angry he will be. He will now not get his forty-thousand-dollar "cost-of-intelligence" fee for my services. Perhaps he will be so angry, he will not take me back.

"Aw, fuck 'em all." Ping makes a grin about his dirty word,
which I have heard more often in a day of school than in all my years of exposure to English-speaking foreigners at home. For all the study of poetry that is forced upon them, American students seem not very poetic.

"If you want to work for free, you don't have to go all the way to Pakistan to do that. We can fuck up Catalyst's life right from here. They're not tailing us," he says, looking over his shoulder for the second time. "I don't think they will, given that their Colony One problems are starting to hit the fan"

With that mysterious statement in the air, I cannot help but keep walking with him. I am a hopeless addict for intelligence.

"What do you know about Colony One?" I ask.

"Okay. There's a town in New Jersey—maybe three-plus hours from here—where two women recently died of brain aneurysms within twenty-four hours of each other. One got a huge write-up in the obituaries. Her name is Eberman. The other, I can't remember. I found the obits in their online newspaper. After that, around nine o'clock this morning, I found out that one of their kids was admitted to the local hospital Friday for observation of strange flu symptoms or something"

He glances over his shoulder again almost reflexively before going on. "It's a little town called Trinity Falls. What a mess that's gonna be."

"You are
sure
this is Colony One?" I ask. "You have confirmation from a reliable source? Did you hack into the CDC?"

"Let's say I can't remember." He giggles as evasively as he had in the police station. "But there's a handful of other people in Trinity Falls who have the same symptoms as the dead women. They're mostly relatives, mostly young, like, our age. They're in and out of a hospital near there. The town is lousy
with USIC agents, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone but USIC, and probably the CDC." Tyler nods in satisfaction. "Trinity Falls, New Jersey, just a hundred-mile trek down the Garden State Parkway after the Lincoln Tunnel. It's not a big city. But a big city would probably be outside terrorist capabilities, and it's within three hours of New York, within driving distance of Catalyst and friends. It makes perfect sense"

"Who else was admitted to the hospital? Somebody else now, too?" I ask, his "in and out of a hospital" comment still echoing in the air.

"If you can believe this—are you sitting down?"

Obviously, I am not. I wait for him to stop cuckooing with his strained laughter. "One other hospitalized person is the daughter of the new USIC supervisor in South Jersey."

I stop dead, staring. He continues laughing.

"The South Jersey USIC supervisor lives in Trinity Falls. Both deceased victims live on his street. Do you
still
think Colony One is somewhere else on the globe?"

I walk along, trying not to burn too thoroughly over certain issues, like Tyler knowing more things than I do. Also, I don't like that Hodji and Roger are avoiding me to "appear respectful to my new squad," as Hodji had confirmed in the plane would be their stance. I cannot be the one to deliver the news that Colony One is in America, and Home Base is New York, just like my instincts had said. I have suspected that perhaps Roger believed more of what I said than he was letting on. He would have said he was trying to protect me, but I am owed some congratulations, at least. Instead, I am fired.

"How did you find this out?" I persist. "I must know."

"Various hacking adventures. But I've got something even
better than that. Do you know how to hack into a
phone
conversation?" he asks.

I figure it is probably as easy as hacking online, but confess, "I've never done that."

His laugh turns full of disgust. "You'll fit right in here in America, dude. Everybody's a goddamn specialist. I hacked into a phone line today that could turn out to be a really special phone line."

Uh-oh. "A USIC agent?" I guess.

He laughs more. "I would definitely do jail time for that, and I might end up doing it for this. Yesterday, I made myself a deal that I could find your friend Omar. Well ... I got a cell phone number and a bunch of phone chatter with a guy named Omar Hokiem. The last four digits of the phone number are 0-3-2-4."

It takes me moments to believe him, because he is laughing so hysterically at what face I must be making. I am all of awed, disbelieving, and horrified.

"Why you not tell of this to USIC? They would value this more than your programs."

"When was I supposed to tell them? Before or after they told me to go fuck myself? I want to get this guy on the line so you can hear him."

This is big trouble if I am caught. But how can I resist?

He says, "I didn't tell them because, for one, I've got my little streaks of pride. I gave them programs that I'm sure will work. I don't want to give them tapes of Omar McFoogle-Dee-Doo talking about the weather in Ireland in Gaelic. I can hear him talking, but he's talking in some other language. Before I decide anything, I want to make sure I've got the right guy."

I finally break out of my freeze, tugging him along with me by the elbow, despite that we are going to his house and not mine, and I don't know the direction. I only perceive that he is right, and USIC is not tailing us yet, and I am not surprised. They have major challenges and think they have time to catch up with us later.

"I can only get live conversation," he warns me. "God forbid if he's taking a long nap..."

As I am not going to work tonight, I do not perceive this as a problem.

TYLER PING
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
2:20
P.M.

HAMDANI AMUSED ME at my house. I tried to bust on him while we were waiting for Omar to make a call, but there were two problems. First, the guy did not understand sarcasm.

When we first got into my room: "Hamdani, you gonna fire up that extra terminal or stand there all day with your dick in your hand?"

"My how?"

"Your dick. You know? Your schlong, your paddle, your parachute, penis, poetic loveliness..."

He quickly checked his pants to make sure the barn door was shut.

Second, he didn't do drugs. I laid a Xanax next to his keypad. "Here, this is for your headache."

"Thank you, I feel much very good." He gave it back.

He's got a language barrier as a built-in sobriety factor. Still, I was glad I brought him, despite that if his USIC squad decided to show up here, they'd have fodder to deport him to Syria if they were in a foul mood.

He wondered aloud at one point if he would get a paycheck for his three days' work at Trinitron. I asked how much they were paying him and almost shit my pants. For less than three hundred smackers, USIC had gotten
a lot
of translations on
great
intelligence—especially if you want to throw my three programs into the ballyhoo that Hamdani calls TNTs. All he wanted to discuss was the pair of Gap jeans he wanted to buy. I hated to burst his bubble, but I had to.

"Hamdani, USIC is probably not going to give you a dime if you were hired under false pretenses," I told him. "And not only that: If you ever do that much work for three hundred bucks ever again, I will personally have to poison your water, you Hindu moron."

He informed me very quickly that he was Muslim. The guy has zero humor, and somehow, I don't think he understands money very well, either. It's hard to know what in hell he's thinking. Some of my acquaintances from the Middle East are not known for rubbery faces, and I had not seen him happy since he was in the food line, eating bagels and introducing himself to the Jewish persuasion. I didn't understand the guy, but I had to love him for being polite the whole afternoon to the likes of me.

Still, it was a long two hours before my home-baked program CellScan finally chirped. How it finds and records a cell convo is my little secret, but I could sell it for twenty million if I felt like it. I don't feel like it. Omar0324's phone number showed up.

"
Bingo?
" Hamdani asked with emphasis on the
go,
which tickled me. I take it that's an intelligence term fudged by an Indian accent.

"It's him." I put on the speaker phone and started to record.

I recognized this Omar's voice, but again he went off in some foreign tongue, all "
Blah blah blee blee blee blay blow blu blah blee...
"

"Is it King Germ?" I whispered, but Hamdani held up a warning finger, and his eyes were utterly bulging.

"With somebody named Manuel," he finally whispered, and I wanted to dance a jig on the roof of the house. I figured Manuel could be PiousKnight, the guy Catalyst had been talking to last night when I broke into Hamdani's terminal at Trinitron. Or he could be somebody new to follow.

"
Blee blee blee blay blow blu...
"on and on.

Quickly Hamdani pulled up to my keypad and started to type. Just a huge mess of alphabet appeared on the screen. I started to tell him his fingers were on the wrong bloody keys, but he opened his eyes for a moment, saw his alphabet soup, and still didn't switch. This Manuel cut off Omar.

"Blee blee blee blay blo blo blu blu..."

Hamdani continued to type with his eyes closed, whispering, "This much very big
bingo.
Tyler, you make
very
big
bingo.
"

After twenty minutes of me silently pissing myself, I heard the good-bye clicks. Hamdani just stared, first at the screen and then at me.

It was the first time I had seen him where he didn't look at least slightly confused and out of sorts—despite that his screen looked like ABC stew.

He asked, "Tyler, how much do you love America?"

Don't ask me serious questions, okay?
"Uh ... I love my computer more, my teddy bear more, my favorite jeans less. What the fuck is up?"

"I am wondering if you love America enough that you would risk going to jail for serving your country. The agents need these words I type. Except maybe they will be too angry for the law breaking..."

I got the point despite the broken English. How many times had I said to myself lately that jail would be a better address than this one?

Which doesn't mean I could up and tell Hamdani yes, like some sapsucker. But maybe there is a God: At just that moment, my mom's Korean floated under the door ... from under
her
door. I couldn't decipher any words, just a tone and a notion. She was still on her goddamn cell, fucking up my school life, my goddamn country, my whole universe, actually. It might not be
her
country, but if you come here at the age of eleven, it's
your
country. She was horrendous.

"Yeah, I'll go to jail. What do I care?"

He turned his eyes back to the screen, still stone-faced, and he pasted all his mishmash of letters that made no sense into an e-mail. He put at the top in English:

"Uncle, I care not if Hodji is in Karachi or Washington or somewhere on Long Island still. Make sure he gets this immediately." He hit
SEND.

I watched him until the suspense barreled up my throat, and I laughed at the top of my lungs. A bang from the other room was followed by my mother shouting in Korean, "Keep your noise down!" And in English, "For Pete's sake!"

She had thrown a shoe or something at the door. I had a
feeling lately that her intelligence vat was in a state of drought. She couldn't take the slightest noise.

"That was my pet Saint Bernard," I told Hamdani. "The breed barks multilingually. What the hell did you just send your uncle that looked like alphabet soup?"

Hamdani went online to a site called BabylonDoo. It had a bunch of keypad icons. Apparently, its programs could make your keypad work in any number of alphabets and languages, and after a minute it showed an Arabic keypad on Shahzad's screen. I realized he had just used the English keypad to hand-script that conversation of Omar's as if it were an Arabic keypad, just by memory. After a minute, his jumbled English text appeared in Arabic. I know the alphabet but not much else.