The Messenger (16 page)

Tina only got basic television, so Daria got a good dose of community news. There were photographs of fatigue-clad members of the Twenty-first Signal Brigade arriving at Fort Detrick for security. A roadblock had been thrown up on both ends of Military Road.

When she landed back on the national news, she saw similar precautions were being taken all over Washington, D.C. There was footage—she had seen it three or four times already—of an out-of-focus Tété, a black bag over his head, revealed through the smoked glass of an SUV as it bounced down into a basement garage. Poor beautiful Tété.

She started crying and put the wine back in the refrigerator because now it was too dangerous to get hammered. The stakes were too great and she had big decisions to make.

She looked over at the laptop. They would be looking at everyone Tété ever had known. They’d be onto her, probably were onto
her now, right now. Could they trace her computer somehow, even going through Zappz’s router?

She got up, went over to the kitchen counter, and shut down.

Maybe she could sell it.

She examined Tina’s bills and unopened mail, looking for something she could use. For starters she had the address and telephone number. A little more digging got her Tina’s date of birth and a credit card number. She copied it all down on the back of a bank statement. Judging by Tina’s clothes they were almost the same size.

She started pulling out anything else she thought she could use. From the shoe box in the bedroom she copied the addresses of Tina’s Honduran family. She looked for but could not find an address book.

The problem was figuring out how to strike at Fort Detrick and then get out of town somehow, but it was like being in a cage. The more she learned, the worse her situation was getting.

On the eleven o’clock local news, she learned that enhanced security procedures had been put in place around the perimeter of the base. Traffic was restricted. The campus of Frederick Community College out on Opossumtown Pike was completely closed to students, because the school was adjacent to the boundary of Fort Detrick.

She was right at the center of Tété’s anthrax swarm.

Too dangerous.

She found an alarm clock and checked the time against the television.

* * *

Lansing ferries Sam Watterman through his life, which has devolved into a double helix of meetings he is forced to attend even if they are irrelevant to his expertise. He really does try to think before he speaks, keeps a pretty good lid on his temper, and resolves to do everything he can to erase his reputation as an irascible retread brought in from the Cold War. He hopes it works, because he secretly is enjoying being back in harness, and is even getting used to falling asleep in armored SUVs.

He jots his reminders and ideas alongside his hours in a White House notebook he lifted from the West Wing, and has been surprised to notice his fortunes rising in tandem with the crisis.

He is the beneficiary of the inevitable equation: There is an emergency, someone has decided that he is part of the solution, therefore he attracts resources. In its role as catalyst, the FBI has provided him with Agent Aldo Chamai, who looks sixteen, but is already showing signs of obesity. It turns out he is part Filipino, blessed with an uneven tuft of dark hair that sprouts from the crown of his head, and wears glasses carefully designed to hide their thickness. A wisp of a mustache and a spritz of acne across his cheeks. Chamai is huge, at least six-two. He was probably a great center on his high school football team.

“The other thing I did wrong was to be a hippie,” Sam says to Lansing. “I did my undergraduate at Berkeley. From ’64 to ’68 and then postgrad until ’72. They see that on the résumé and it’s a dead giveaway. Career dive. You get involved in protests, you go to meetings. It’s an interesting time to be living. And God forbid you should ever inhale …”

“That’s not such a big deal anymore, Doc.”

“Nevertheless, if you stand up and call out the criminals, well … You can subtract thousands of bucks per year over the course of your career because you did something idealistic in your youth. Lab work? You’re on your own cloud, dreaming up stuff. You’re a hermit and people don’t come into it, but if you get into administration? It’s savage. They eat each other’s children once you get into the office.”

“Politics is everywhere, Doc.”

“Vietnam, the civil rights movement … feminism. I guess it was worth it.”

“Human progress,” Lansing says. The J. Edgar Hoover Building floats by. Surrounded by concrete barriers, metal detectors. Burly policemen wearing masks. Not that any of it would keep anthrax out.

“Did we get an update on Sawalha?”

“He’s pretty sick. But that’s not going to stop them scheduling as many interviews as they can before he dies,” Lansing says.

“He doesn’t know anything. They just gave him a plane ticket and a tourist map,” Watterman says.

“Doesn’t matter, Doc. They’re going to drain him like a prune.”

“The guy they want is the creator, the god, the guy that made it in the lab. You need somebody with a certain amount of skill to weaponize anthrax, even a little bit. It’s a problem of size, and static energy. The goal is to armor the spores so you keep them alive, and at the same time get them to float.”

Lansing navigates the closed-off streets of the capital. As they approach the roadblocks, he flicks on his siren. There are soldiers at the bridge, managing traffic.

“The talcum powder bottle Sawalha carried holds 325 grams of anthrax. He said it was full when they gave it to him in Vienna. He used almost all of it around Washington. With the kind of dispersant qualities it has, particles with such low mass—and I’m basing this on what Walthaer said in the meeting—from the second they gave it to him, Sawalha was doomed. It only takes twelve spores; you breathe in twelve spores and you’re dead. He was breathing them in all day, every day.”

“Carrying it in his pockets …”

“Sure, just put it in your pockets. Take your hands in and out. You’d have to refresh it. It would go pretty quick, just float right through the fabric. Fine. Bravo, good job, yes, they quarantined all the locations, but we need to get his exact route, where he walked. Buses he took. Cabs. If he took the subway …”

“Homeland Security’s all over that, Doc. The Metro is shut
down. They tested at the airport in Vienna. They didn’t find anything.”

“Oh, right, I really believe that.”

When they arrive at Justice, Grimaldi comes into the parking lot and waves them back into the car. They simply spin around and drive out in silence. Seven minutes later he’s at the Washington field office, sitting across the desk from a very grim Special Agent Barrigar.

“We’ve been putting pictures in front of Sawalha. He didn’t recognize anyone. Except this guy …” Barrigar opens an envelope and spills out a sheaf of photographs.

The images are from diverse sources—open source and archival, but also recent surveillance photographs. Wide angles and flat light.

A man.

Brown skin mottled with age. Dark hair graying and thinning over time. Included in the package are a half dozen older pictures: yearbook portraits, smiling faces cropped out of group shots, something from this decade, something from that. Barrigar arrays them across the desk in a cloud.

“Do you know this man, Doctor?”

“Sure,” Sam says, gazing at the face oldest in years—something probably taken only a few weeks ago. A senior citizen not unlike himself.

“That’s Saleem Khan. That’s ‘Dr. Death.’ ”

She sleeps only a few hours. During the night she has been startled awake several times, sometimes by her dreams, but earlier there was noise from the apartment next door—heavy boots walking in. A door closing, then someone clumping out and down the steps again.

Jumpy, she tells herself. Scared. What is she afraid of, dying? She gets up and looks through all the drawers to see if Tina has a gun. It would be in the bedroom, where most Americans keep their guns, maybe on a shelf? But there is nothing. She gives up and falls back into the bed. Her throat is raw and dry.

Is this the start of the flulike symptoms? Remembering Youssef crouched beside her, the needle sliding into her arm—could she have been given a combination of the two—anthrax and smallpox? For a moment she feels nauseous. What has she let them do to her?

From television she knows that anthrax spores are tiny—two hundred make up the width of a human hair—and are lethal unless treated immediately. But she hadn’t been given a wispy powder that would carry on the wind, she’d been given a
liquid
that was supposed to be smallpox.

But that didn’t have to be the truth, did it? Maybe when the fluid evaporated, anthrax spores suspended in the solution would dry and become transmissible. What if the injection was one virus, and the liquid another? The oily feeling was long since gone from her fingers. She had dutifully covered her hair and used rubber gloves in the shower in New York, and she had been running her hands over everything in sight. Could her touch still kill?

Finally acknowledging that she is unable to sleep, she gets up in the dark room and feels her way into the bathroom and pees. Finds herself ritualistically touching everything. By the time Tina returns, the apartment will be a stew of microbes. Daria has already made her decision to keep running. The terror threat is bright red and there is no more likely place in the world to get picked up than Frederick, Maryland.

She carefully hangs her business suit in Tina’s closet. Takes her other clothes and tucks them into a pillowcase. Makes up the bed, spritzes the pillows with her little vial of perfume, and then leaves it with Tina’s toiletries as a gift for the next time she goes out with Scott and friends.

Tina has a backpack … almost new, a blue duffel bag that can be configured to be worn over the shoulders. Daria stuffs the laptop in it, puts on her street-urchin outfit, takes the envelope with Tina’s numbers and stuffs it in her pocket, pulls the hoodie over her hair, locks up, drops the key through the slot, and plugs in the Nano as she crosses the parking lot in the predawn.

She walks for about a half hour. There is a strip mall near the highway and she stops there to call for a taxi.

It’s only three dollars to get into the heart of the little city. With so many soldiers around, and in the middle of heightened security, the town is restless. The coffee shops always are the first to open and she goes in, has her starter espresso, and watches CNN. It might be theoretically possible for her to get into Washington, but certainly impossible to get near any of the government agency buildings, or close to the Capitol or White House.

She walks along the historic brick sidewalks of Frederick. The town is appropriately quaint and obsessively preserved. Charming antiques shops, huge churches, and plenty of places to spend money when you come up from Washington or Baltimore on a day trip.

As she walks she works out a plan. It’s pretty simple; she’ll head for the bus station and take the first bus to anywhere. She has to ask directions because she has somehow gotten turned around in all the historical architecture. In a parking lot beside a Catholic church, she stuffs the pillowcase full of infected clothes into a donation bin, a good choice, she thinks.

On the way to the bus station, she passes a car lot. There are hundreds of them, it seems. All the young soldiers have money for the first time, and immediately rush out and buy a car. Car lots, fast food, and pawnshops.

But this is not a car dealer’s lot. It’s called Rick’s Wrecks-4-Rent. It’s closed, but she takes a few steps onto the lot to check out the cars. They seem sound enough, a year or two out of date, dented fenders here and there, nothing serious.

She finds a restaurant, goes in and orders a giant-sized American breakfast. Sugary pancakes, and bacon. Eggs. She is surprisingly hungry for someone who is near death. She finishes off with a sour black coffee, but the rental car lot is still not open. She stuffs the
backpack in a locker at the bus station and wanders around the surrounding blocks admiring the little brick buildings, all kept in perfect trim, the better to evoke the region’s heritage—Hessian farmers who settled the area in the mid-1700s. Just yesterday in Muslim time.

She circles around and comes back to the rental car lot. A young man is inside and more than happy to rent her something to use while she visits her sister. She uses Tina’s address, and shows reluctance when he asks for her credit card.

“This is for her, my sister. She’s renting it, not me. Can I pay cash when I bring it back?”

“Sure. We just need the card number for a security. We don’t even run it. Tear it up when you bring the car back.”

She uses Tina’s card number and books the car for two weeks, gives the man Tina’s name and her driver’s license number. “Can I get unlimited kilometers?” she says.

“Well, its unlimited
miles
in Maryland and Virginia.”

“We don’t need that much really. We’re just going to be right around here in … Frederick.”

“No problemo …” says the young guy. He makes an imprint with Tina’s number written in, laughingly accepts Daria’s international driver’s license, and in five minutes she’s on her way to get her stuff out of the bus station locker, and getting used to driving a totally nondescript white Nissan Sentra.

Navigating around the roadblocks, she circles Fort Detrick. It’s divided into two vast tracts of land, and except for the olive drab vehicles, and signs that are untranslatable acronyms, it looks like an agricultural college surrounded by razor wire.