The Messenger (12 page)

Sam Watterman makes himself available to the FBI, which amounts to giving his Biological Warfare 101 speech to any agents who ask. It must be good, because they keep asking. The rest of the time he hovers over shoulders and puts in his opinion if he thinks it might do some good. The response, so far as he can see, seems to be basically on track; biohazard manuals have been brought out and dusted off, the Marine Corps’s Chemical Biological Incident Response Force has been contacted, elite decontamination teams are en route. The finding of spores at the university’s Biology Department spurs a search for a disgruntled student or faculty member, and that’s where the local detectives begin to focus their investigation. Across the city, buildings where the suspicious powder has been found have been quarantined, and employees are being rounded up, questioned, vaccinated, and started on an intense course of antibiotics.

He should feel shocked, but he’s not. He should feel energized or angry, but he’s not. He doesn’t know what he feels. Not detached. No, not detached at all.

In search of what’s bothering him, he paces. Past the windows, staring out into the night. It’s late and there’s hardly any traffic on the foggy highway. Walking. Down the field office corridors, through the aisles separating the cubicles; restless, aware that … 
something is wrong
. None of it looks quite right, even though it all matches scenarios he and his teams built and ran back in the Dark Ages before the turn of the century.

And it is while he is pacing, fretting and mulling things over, that he happens to be standing next to Lansing’s desk when the call comes in.

“Roger that …” Lansing says. He is writing as he talks and does not even notice Watterman standing there.

“… in Washington …”

Watterman takes a huge breath, almost a gasp. He knew it. He’d suppressed it, but all night he’s been subconsciously waiting for this moment. Really, for years he’s been anticipating it. Years. And now it’s here.

“And when did they arrest him?”

He moves into the cubicle. Lansing looks up at him. He shakes his head dazedly, a dark expression creasing his tired young face.

“And … how many targets?”

And a moment later, “Unconfirmed. Roger …” Looking at Sam as he says it. “Okay. Testing now … roger …”

Sam feels the prickles of sweat standing out on his forehead.

“No, he’s right here. He’s right beside me,” Lansing says and looks over to him.

“Yes, I’ve got it …” Lansing says, and begins writing again. “Library of Congress … Washington Monument … Smithsonian … National Cathedral …”

And for Sam there is nothing to say, because he already knows what’s happened.

S
ince Mr. Creighton (she guesses) says leave in the morning, she leaves. Early. She makes excuses to linger in the lobby, but there’s no one waiting. No one in the restaurant, no one in the bars. She drops the keycard at the front desk and heads for the street.

Out front—nobody.

Thinking, All right, what now? No direction. No planning, no advice. No backup. Nothing in her email. Just meaningless telephone calls. She looks around for fit young men with close-cropped hair talking into their collars. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

She’s angry now. Angry and a little scared, a little thrown off, but, yes, it’s better to be out of the hotel. She feels like she’s free.

Free … looking up at the gigantic buildings … the park. The absurd rectangular park. Like a memory of nature, so big that there is an illusion of freedom while walking through it. Walled off by a city that stretches forever, distant horizons barely glimpsed beyond the infinite grid of streets. Anyone can get lost there; no one really can fully understand such a place.

The important thing is to keep playing her part. Whatever message is being implied via Creighton’s calls, it can’t be good. Someone informed the front desk she was checking out. Okay. Now, if anyone
is watching, they’ll get what they wanted. If they’re not going to come up and introduce themselves, they’ll follow the cab if they can, or at least trace her movements. Maybe they haven’t arrested her because they think she is part of a team and are waiting for her to lead them to the others? If so, the game has changed.

With luggage and a laptop, she needs to give the cabbie a plausible destination, so she tells him to take her to LaGuardia. Spends the ride chatting with the man about what she should expect on her Mexican holiday. He has to reach for an opinion, since he’s never been there himself, but has heard it can be dangerous. He is originally from Fiji. On the dashboard there is a plastic saint. Around her base he has twisted a pink lei.

“Is that the Virgin?” she asks.

“No, no, that’s Santa Clara,” the man says. “She’s the patron saint of television.”

“Really?”

“Yes. My wife is on the television. She does the weather.”

Cash, a big smile, and a twenty-dollar tip to help him remember her.
“Adios,”
she says just to put a button on it.

She ducks inside the departures lounge and follows the signs, dodging the long waggling trains of luggage carts, goes back outside and takes a shuttle to the arrivals lounge, pops out just in time to catch another shuttle to a Budget car rental agency. When she gets there, it is manned by one hefty-looking black woman and a tall young man with acne.

She tries to rent a Mustang, but they don’t have any and she has to settle for a Dodge. She asks if it is fast enough, because she is going to be on the highway a lot.

When they ask where she wants to drop off, she says at the airport in Miami, Florida. An extra charge? No problem. She doesn’t need any insurance, but she buys a tank of gas so she can bring it back empty.

She puts everything on her own card, slams on her sunglasses, heads for their lot, and is led to the car by a guy they’ve got working there. He is on a cell phone and makes her wait, finishing the call
before he starts processing her rental. She stands there for a full minute and then digs out her perfume. When he finally gets done with his call, they walk around checking the car for scratches and dings.

“How long does it take to get to Boston?” she asks him.

“Depends on the time of day—sometimes four hours, sometimes a long time.”

“If there’s a lot of traffic?”

“That’s right.”

The two of them have made little dashes and circles wherever they have found a flaw. She makes her initials on the diagram of the exploded car. Now he’s noticed her and tries to show what a gentleman he is by putting her bag in the trunk, and then opens the door for her.

She shakes his hand and kills him one more time, just for the cell phone delay if nothing else.

Outside, the streets leading away from LaGuardia are crowded. She has no idea where she is going, and follows any sign that takes her back to Manhattan. Eventually she comes out on Columbus Avenue, recognizing it from the endless cab rides she’s been on over the last few days. She turns and heads uptown until she finds a parking lot. The traffic is clogged, and horns are blaring when she attempts to change lanes. Three lots later she finds one where they sell parking by the week. She buys two weeks on her card, dumps the Dodge, entrusts the keys to the man in the kiosk, and rolls her bag down to the corner, where she waits a long two minutes before she can pick up another cab.

She gets dropped off at Penn Station, finds her way to the ticketing area, and tries to puzzle out the routes. There are trains running all the time. Short commuter trips that won’t require her to show identification.

She lines up and asks if it’s possible to purchase tickets in her mother’s name. “Or perhaps a book of passes? If I were using it every few days … she lives in Atlantic City,” she explains.

“Yes, ma’am, you want a multiple ticket pass. You and your
mother can go back and forth from here to Philadelphia and continue on to Atlantic City. That’s the cheapest and most flexible way to go.…”

Daria buys her multiple passes, walks until she finds a coffee bar where she can get an espresso, and then parks herself and thinks about the whole thing for a while. She could wait there in semi-anonymity forever. She scans her end of the lobby. There are policemen and private security guards and she pretends to check the pictures on her camera so that she won’t make eye contact.

No one knows where she is.

Maybe she has attained freedom? Unless there’s some sort of tracking device in her luggage, which would be easy enough. Mossad could have come into the hotel room a dozen times and bugged her bag. They probably have GPS devices smaller than a pinhead.

Ali. Ali, Ali, Ali.

And then she starts thinking that maybe a major railway station is not the best place to be lurking …

Back at ticketing she lays down a false trail by buying a ticket to Niagara Falls that will be leaving at three forty-five that afternoon. That gives her almost an hour and a half where she can grab a commuter train to somewhere else, anywhere. There’s the Acela Express, advertised as the green, progressive future of rail travel in America. It will get her to Philadelphia in one hour, Baltimore in two.

And … why not continue on from there? Why not? It’s easy to go right into Washington. Why not? The virus that she poured over herself in Berlin can’t be effective for much longer. The perfume is half gone and soon she will be too sick to travel. So she should go. Go now … go to D.C., visit Congress, take in all the coffee shops around Langley.

In the washroom she changes into her most nondescript outfit. The last thing she wants now are the Burkes of the world ogling her. There are jeans, just tight enough to be attractive, the kind of thing that any young woman with a shred of vanity would wear, the hoodie to shelter her face. She rubs off all her makeup, pushes her hair around. Different, or different enough? She stands there in the
washroom doing a complete makeover. Other women come and go. No one notices her or cares.

She eyes her rolling luggage and decides that she’ll pick up something else down the railroad line. A backpack. Something that a university student might use. She delays before ditching the
Klic!
cards, trying to decide if she’ll only be leaving them more clues in the garbage. Does she need a new identity? It’s cold in the cavernous restroom.

“The face of death is scared now, isn’t she,” she says to the mirror.

Staring at herself for a long moment. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

“No …” she says to her image. “No, I’m not. I’m not scared at all.” She almost believes it.

She checks the suitcase into a short-term baggage locker, walks around and down, takes the tunnel to the subway, gets on a 1 train and heads uptown. The car is only half full and her cell phone works just fine.

“Hello, Mr. Creighton?” she says when they pick up.

“Whom may I say is calling?”
A different voice this time.

“Ms. Vermiglio. I’m in a hurry.”

“One moment, please.”

“I’m in a
hurry
,” she says. Waits. Waits again like last time. “Hello?” she says. There is no answer. Something is wrong. They know she’s already tried. They should be right there, waiting. Ready to go. Assholes …

Still nothing.

She snaps the cell phone shut and sits there while the train roars along under the city. There is a newspaper folded up on the seat, but someone will eventually unfold and read it. Having no better idea, she cleans her fingerprints from the cell by wiping it on her hoodie and lets it slip to the floor under her seat, the first step in a long journey northward. At 103rd she gets out, crosses over, and takes the next train back the way she came, to Penn Station, where she has time to reclaim her luggage, buy an American-sized burger, and climb aboard the Acela Express just as the conductors are closing up the cars.

It is a little early and the train is maybe two-thirds full. Every fourth person is on a smart phone. She goes as far away from people as she can, which isn’t far, sits down, plugs into her music, eats half of her burger and throws the rest away.

Once it wobbles out of the yards, the Acela is reasonably smooth. She watches backstreet New Jersey rush by. Gray wasteland and the remains of chemical plants. Scrub growing along the right-of-way punctuated with neon blue and orange tarpaulins and an occasional tent made of sheets of clear plastic strung to the branches and then abandoned. Buildings that are black with grime dating back a century.

Through the music—something blissful she downloaded eons ago in Cairo—she hears happy voices. There are two students dressed as Civil War soldiers, one blue and one gray, coming through the car and giving a spiel about touring the battlefields. The shorter is a girl with a painted-on mustache. They have been delayed by a retiree, a rickety veteran, who nevertheless is neat as a pin, sideburns trimmed, the memory of a flat stomach, a steadfast set to the jaw. There are thousands and thousands of these men, and already, for Daria, they are becoming a type. The veteran’s wife sits there enjoying the fun while the students regurgitate what they know about geography and military strategy.

“You can head west up to Antietam and see that. You can see the bridge and that was very bad,” the boy says.

“Bloody work,” says the vet.

Daria looks away and slides up the volume and waits for them to finish discussing the stats of historic American death, but they don’t leave. In fact, the clowns attract another mythologizing necrophilic ghoul, this time a little round balding man, a history buff who enthusiastically joins their conversation.

To get away, Daria walks along until she finds what passes for a lounge car. There is a stainless steel bar being tended by a tandem of middle-aged Amtrak staffers. There are meal selections, mostly sandwiches that are wrapped in plastic. Neither of the two staffers seem to care about their job, the food they serve, or the people who are buying it. From their body language and attitude, it’s obvious
that they are overworked, underpaid, bored, and/or eternally pissed off, and would rather be doing anything else but. She waits her turn, asks for some potato chips, and then inspects the package carefully.