The White Plague (13 page)

“They’re individuals and now they have the documents to prove it,” she said.

How wise she is.

He restored the three unused passports to their hiding place and returned to the forgery. He felt feverish and wondered if he had picked up something from his work down in the laboratory. No. He had been very careful about his own body. That was part of his total purpose.

It was as though only this purpose kept him alive. All else receded into projections and the strange movie-memory. It was only the urgency making him feverish. He could feel time pressing at him. The fateful letters were almost ready to be mailed. He turned on the lights in the narrow stairway off the kitchen and took Mary’s erased passport down to the lab. The stairs creaked as he descended and he wondered what time it was. Dark outside. No matter. There was a spiderweb within the exposed studs where the stairs turned.

How many times have I come this way?

He felt that he had always lived here, had always known the creaking stairs. This was the only place where John McCarthy had ever lived, and the basement laboratory restored his sense of being. It had become a basic part of his life – the white-painted bench with its three gas burners, the homemade centrifuge in the corner, the autoclave built out of a pressure-cooker, the oven with its precision thermostat for the controlled environment, the electron microscope, the petri dishes stored sterile in Tupperware boxes… He could hear the paint-compressor pump cutting in to prime the vacuum system, which was mediated by the scuba pump.

Carefully, he bent to the forgery, delicate movements, precision in each tiny action. The master forger had been right. He was good at this. And there it was, a new identity. Only the ache in his back told him there had been a significant passage of time. He looked at his wrist, remembering that he had left his watch beside the kitchen sink. It didn’t matter. The feverish sense of urgency had gone.

John Garrett O’Day had just been born. There he was on the forged passport – a bald man with a toothbrush mustache, dark eyes that stared directly out of the square photograph.

John stared back at his new self. John Garrett O’Day. He already felt like John Garrett O’Day. There had been O’Days on the O’Neill side of the family. And there he was in the photograph. John felt that he had receded farther back into the ancestry, farther away from John Roe O’Neill, cutting that man off even more sharply.

There would be searchers after O’Neill, and perhaps even more searchers after what John McCarthy had done. But those men were gone. O’Neill and McCarthy. Only O’Day remained and soon O’Day would be far away.

A hunger pang struck him. He turned to the airlock, crawling out and sealing the lab behind him. It was daylight outside. His watch on the drainboard showed 9:36 and he knew it must be morning. It had been dark when he entered the lab. Yes, Saturday morning. In only two weeks, Achill would awaken to its horrible day of reckoning. Then the letters of explanation and warning would start to arrive. His soldiers were on the march. That was how he thought about the things he had sent to Ireland, Britain and Libya.

Soldiers.

The irrevocable thing had been done. There could be no turning back.

He heard children shouting in the alley and thought suddenly of the neighbors around this Ballard hideaway. Would his soldiers come here, too? The question was a matter of indifferent curiosity in his mind, gone as soon as it entered.

Time to leave.

He felt something strange about the house then. Was there something he had forgotten to do downstairs? He strapped on his wristband and hurried back down to the lab, crawled through the airlock hatches, leaving them open. No need for lab security anymore. John McCarthy’s meticulous habits could be abandoned.

As he stood up in the first safe room, his gaze fell on the side bench and the kitchen heat-sealer bolted to it. He thought then that the simple kitchen device, a thing made to preserve food, set the style for his entire lab. Investigators might marvel over the inspired adaptations here, the machines and devices put to uses for which they had never been intended.

Now, he remembered what he had forgotten to do, the thing that had sent him hurrying back down into the lab. The thermite bombs! Of course. He moved carefully around the lab, setting the timers, then out into the basement where there were more devices.

Back up to the kitchen then and a bowl of dry cereal. The food made him sleepy and he set about brewing coffee, but decided he would rest his head on his arms at the kitchen table for a few minutes first. He had until night to leave.

When he awakened, it was 12:11 and still daylight. He felt rested, but his back was sore from sleeping bent over the table. He could still hear children playing in the alley.

That’s right. It’s Saturday.

He splashed cold water on his face at the kitchen sink, dried it on a dishtowel, then went into the bedroom and completed his packing. He took his suitcases down to the power wagon and began climbing back up the stairs to the kitchen, intending to brew the coffee he had left unfinished. At the landing, he stopped, frozen in shock at the loud sound of something crashing in the kitchen.

A burglar!

That had been John McCarthy’s constant fear during the project. 

Rage engulfed him. How dare they? He charged up the final flight into the kitchen and almost tripped over a softball. The sink held a jumble of broken glass. Only a few shreds remained in the frame over the sink.

He could hear a woman’s voice shouting in the alley behind his house: “Jimmeeeee! Jimmeeeee! You come here this instant!”

Relief drained him.

“Jimmeeee! I see you there!”

A vague sense of amusement came over him. He picked up the softball and went out onto the back porch. A young woman in a blue housedress came through his gate from the alley and stopped in the backyard. She held the right ear of a boy about ten. The boy, his mouth contorted with pain and fear, his head twisted to accommodate the force holding him, pleaded:

“Ma, please! Please, Ma!”

The woman looked up at John and released the boy’s ear. She glanced at the broken window and back to John, then to the softball in his hand. The boy sheltered himself behind her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “We’ll get you a new window, of course. I’ve warned him time and again, but he forgets. My husband will get the window on his way home. He’s good at fixing things.”

John forced a smile. “No need, ma’am. I guess I owe for a few windows from my own childhood.” He tossed the softball into the yard. “There you go, Jimmy. Why don’t you kids play in that empty lot at the end of the block? It’s safer than the street or the alley.”

Jimmy darted from behind his mother and retrieved the ball. He held it close to his chest, looking up at John as though he could not believe his good fortune.

The woman grinned in relief.

“How very nice of you,” she said. “My name’s Pachen, Gladys Pachen. We live just across the alley from you on Sixty-fifth. We’ll be glad to pay for the window. It shouldn’t…”

“No need,” John said, holding tightly to his good-neighbor pose. The last thing he needed right now was intrusions by neighbors. He spoke easily: “You just make sure Jimmy prepares himself to pay for the window some other youngster breaks when he’s my age. We men pass along the cost of broken windows.”

Gladys Pachen laughed, then: “I must say you’re being so very, very nice about this. I never… I mean… we didn’t…” She broke off in confusion.

John maintained his smile with effort. “I guess I must’ve seemed pretty mysterious all these months. I’m an inventor, Mrs. Pachen. I’ve been working pretty steadily on… well, I guess I can’t talk about it just yet. My name’s…” He hesitated, aware that he almost had spoken of himself as John Garrett O’Day, then, a self-conscious shrug: “John McCarthy. You’ll be hearing that name, I think. My friends call me Jack.”

That was well done
, he thought.
Plausible explanation
. A smile.
No harm in giving out that name
.

“George will be delighted,” she said. “He fiddles around a lot in the garage, too. He has a little shop there. I… you know, the next time we have a barbecue, you’ll have to come over. I won’t take no for an answer.”

“That sounds wonderful,” John said. “I do get tired of my own cooking.” He looked at the boy. “You investigate that lot, Jimmy. That looks like a good baseball lot.”

Jimmy nodded his head twice, quickly, but didn’t speak.

“Well, Gladys, no harm done,” John said. “No real harm, anyway. Good way for me to get a clean window over the sink. I have to get back to work now. Got something brewing.”

He waved casually and let himself back into the kitchen.
An inspired performance
, he thought, as he set about putting a temporary sheet of plastic over the sink window.
No need to replace the glass. It would all go up in flames tonight anyway
.

Gladys Pachen returned to her own kitchen, where she invited her neighbor, Helen Avery, over for coffee.

“I saw you talking to him,” Helen Avery said as Gladys poured the coffee. “What’s he like? I thought I’d die when I saw Jimmy’s ball smash that window.”

“He’s kind of sweet,” Gladys said. “I think he’s very shy… and lonely.” She poured her own coffee. “He’s an inventor.”

“Is that what he does in that basement! Bill and I have been wondering – the lights on there at all hours.”

“He was so nice to Jimmy,” Gladys said as she sat down at the kitchen table. “He wouldn’t let me pay for the window, said he owed for a few broken windows from when he was Jimmy’s age.”

“What’s he inventing? Did he say?”

“He wouldn’t say, but I’ll bet it’s something important.”

There was never a greater anti-Irish bigot than Shakespeare. He was the ultimate Elizabethan jackanapes, a perfect reflection of British bigotry. They justified themselves on the grounds of religion. The Reformation! That’s where they began their policy of exterminating the Irish. Back then we learned the bitter truth: England’s enemy is Ireland’s friend.

– Joseph Herity

“W
E ARE
to concentrate on how he spread the disease,” Beckett said. “They still haven’t solved it.”

It was The Team’s third afternoon and they had moved their meeting to the small dining room off the DIC’s main cafeteria. It was closer to the lab facilities, had brighter walls and lighting, a smaller table. Coffee or tea could be delivered via a pass-through with a sliding panel from the kitchen. Security had objected and there was a certain amount of crockery clatter to contend with, but it was a more comfortable setting for all of them.

“Is anyone asking does our Madman act alone?” Hupp asked. He moved aside slightly as a white-aproned waiter finished clearing away the dishes from their lunch.

“A conspiracy?” Lepikov asked. He looked at the departing waiter. “Are those waiters in your army, Bill?”

Foss answered: “It’s our most carefully guarded secret, Sergei. Two years of this duty and they’re guaranteed to be insane killers.”

Even Lepikov joined in the wry chuckle at Foss’s wit.

Danzas said: “Infected birds. We have the precedent of parrot fever. Could he have modified psittacosis?”

“Somehow that doesn’t strike me as his style,” Hupp said. “He’s not leaving us an easy trail to follow. No.” He looked down at a blue folder in front of him, opened it slowly and leafed through the enclosed pages until he found what he was seeking. “There’s this from his second letter,” Hupp said.
“I know there are links between the IRA and the Fedayeen, links with Japanese terrorists, the Tupamaros and God knows who else. I was tempted to spread my revenge into all the lands that have harbored such cowards. I warn those lands: do not tempt me again for I have released only a small part of my arsenal.”

Hupp closed the folder and looked up at Lepikov across the table from him. “We must assume that this is not an empty threat. I do not think this man bluffs. On that assumption, we must also assume that he has more than one way to spread his
arsenal
. Because if we find the way or ways he did it in the present instance, we could close off that channel.”

“Could we?” Beckett asked.

Lepikov nodded to agree that he shared this doubt.

Godelinsky leaned forward, sipped her tea, then: “He infected specific areas. The fact that his plague has spread, this can only mean human carriers are involved in some way.”

“Why is that?” Danzas asked.

“The way everything is being sprayed, no insect could be doing it,” she said. Godelinsky rubbed her forehead and frowned.

Lepikov said something to her, low-voiced, in Russian. Foss caught only part of it, but turned to peer sharply at the other woman.

“Is something amiss?” Hupp asked.

“Only a headache,” Godelinsky said. “I think it is the water change. Perhaps I could have some more tea?”

Beckett turned to the panel behind him, opened it and confronted a face bent close on the other side, a bland, smiling blond man with white teeth. “Anyone else want something from the kitchen?” the man asked.

“Bumpkins!” Lepikov said.

“They just haven’t had time to install microphones in this room,” Foss said. “It’ll be less obtrusive tomorrow. I’ll take coffee, black.”

Beckett glanced around the table. The others demurred. He returned his attention to the bland face at the pass-through. “You heard?”

“Right-O, Doc.”

The covering panel slid closed.

Beckett returned his attention to the table.

Hupp lifted a briefcase from the floor beside his chair, wiped a piece of lettuce from it, and removed a small notepad and pen. “It will be something simple,” he said.

The panel behind Beckett slid open. “One tea, one coffee, black.” It was Bland Face. He pushed two steaming cups onto the inner ledge, closed the panel.

Without getting up, Beckett took the two cups from the ledge and slid them along the table. As Godelinsky took her cup, Beckett noted a patch of white on the back of her left hand. It was not prominent, but quite noticeable to his trained eye. Before he could comment on it, Lepikov said: