“There will be single women at the party, Tom. Maybe you’ll meet someone.”
“I have a girlfriend in Ohio.” He’d never been there.
He’d told her that he’d moved to New York to “give photography a try.” “That’s what I use the darkroom for.” That his trust fund came from wealthy parents, which was how he afforded to rent a loft on his shop salary. She knew nothing of the fallback apartment in Queens or the cash in the darkroom, or the Subaru. Or how none of it had come from a trust fund but from opium sales or gold smuggling.
“Many rich, spoiled children, a whole society who never grow up, live in New York,” Dr. Cardozo had told him. “They pretend to be artists. They spend their nights in dissipation. Your background makes you perfect for this role.”
Now the apartment door behind Rebeca opened and Greg the architect came into the foyer, smiling as if his party had already started; bulky guy, ex — rugby player at Penn, but these days more fat than muscle. Dark haired and handsome, he carried himself with confidence. His pink button-up shirt hung loose, shirttails over cargo shorts. His tanned, sockless feet were encased in Italian loafers. At thirty-eight, his hair was thick and wavy and his false bonhomie made him likable for the first nine minutes in any social setting. He was a self-made man who confused romance with control. In this society he had to keep up appearances with women to be respected, but he reminded Tom of the brutes in the villages who used religion to harass: hit women, rape them, or worse. Tom knew what he was seeing, and it was something primitive and dark that lived in all cultures, in different ways.
“It’s the Cycle Man!” Greg put his arm around Rebeca’s shoulder and she flinched. Greg always called him Cycle Man. Like they were buddies. The architect dwarfed Rebeca, was four inches taller even than Tom, who was five eleven, but Greg would not have lasted three seconds in a fight. Greg said, “I told her you’d be out pedaling. What’s the deal, Cycle? Where do you go?”
“All around.” Which was true. “The club pedals all night.” That part was not. He traveled alone. Sometimes on the bike. Sometimes in the subway. Sometimes on busses. Learning all the different routes for attack or escape.
Greg didn’t care about the answer. He asked, “Did you see all the cops in the subway this morning?”
Tom Fargo’s heartbeat went up, but he kept the tension off his face. “Cops?”
“I’ve never seen so many down there. They’re opening packages right and left!” Without invitation, Greg brushed past Tom and strode into the apartment, past the hand that had risen fractionally toward his neck. A wall of windows overlooked the Brooklyn Bridge’s magnificent cathedral-style arches and latticework of cables and walk and bikeway running along the center span.
Greg said, “I saw them shove a guy up on the wall this morning, some Muslim kid. What’s in the knapsack?”
“How do you know he was Muslim?” Tom asked softly.
“You know what I mean. I’m not prejudiced. Dark. Pakistani. I work with these guys. Hell, I drink with them, well, the nonobservant ones. Calm down, Cycle! I didn’t know you were so politically correct!”
Greg put his arm around Rebeca and steered her away, and she glanced back, smiled… Greg’s awkward but he means well. The hand fluttered toward the bruise, then stopped.
Tom went back to the darkroom. The air vibrated in here with need, blood, humidity, and there was a swampy smell from all the life. On the heavy worktable were plastic trays and liquids and special foods, reflected in the glass terrariums that he’d emptied for this attack. Temperature kept at eighty-one degrees.
There were seven packages and tubes of varying sizes on the table, wrapped and labeled. At least a thousand bombs, but not bombs — adults — in there.
He needed to hurry.
Cops in the subways… try a different route.
The first tube was addressed to a framing business on 5th Avenue. The six-by-six-inch box to a medical lab on 3rd. The fancier box—flowers? — was allegedly going to a condo penthouse on Park Avenue. But the labels were lies. Inside the packages, plastic lining contained wet rags to keep in moisture, and adults and larvae lived in double-walled plastic bags. Petri dishes were stuffed with wet paper toweling, and on the toweling, rafts of tiny eggs. You needed to leave eggs because the adults would spend their whole lives within a mile of where they hatched. If he wanted to infect various spots around the city, with regularity, he had to make a separate deposit in each one.
The egg rafts he cleared from pans covered by plastic sheeting, filled with tap water. From other pans he took hatched larvae, swimming and wriggling.
He fed his wards every third day, crumbling a small bit of food between two fingers for larvae. The adults got infected blood. Larvae grew in three stages, molting every few days, and then rising to the top and molting one last time, into pupae. Morphing into things that could kill. They swam by abdomen, moving in rapid jerks.
After this attack I’ll need a new shipment. I’m using the last of what I have. But the supply should be here by next week.
“I’ll hit them with what?” he’d asked Dr. Cardozo, frowning, when he’d learned of his full assignment. Before that he’d envisioned explosives. At first the truth made no sense. “That’s what all the fuss is about? Mosquitoes?”
But Cardozo had seemed happy at his doubt, as if it confirmed his hypothesis that the Americans would react the same way at first, not seeing the danger.
“You will spread a ramped-up disease that has destroyed empires and still kills millions around the world,” the biologist said. “Our Anopheles gambaie look identical to the ones that bite Americans every summer day. But yours have been changed. Two thousand people died in the World Trade Center, but you can kill many more. Each female lives for weeks. Eight hundred females to a package. One thousand eggs per hatching. You figure it out.”
“Just females are infectious? Not the males?”
Dr. Cardozo had graduated from Duke University and smelled of Irish Spring soap and grew his own mint for tea. They’d met in a modest cream-colored villa on the outskirts of Rio. And later, in Porto Velho, Dr. Cardozo said, “No metal detector can detect an insect. No dogs can sniff them. By the time the Americans figure it out, thousands will be infected.”
Tom had started to grow excited.
“Tom, right now our enemies see mosquitoes as you do, as a nuisance. When they realize what is happening, they will come after you with everything at their disposal. They will turn their country upside down to find you, and finding you,” Cardozo said, “they will kill you.”
“Inshallah.”
“The Americans have a peculiar expression: weapons of mass destruction. I’ve never understood it. They mean nuclear weapons or chemicals. But isn’t a plane that drops bombs and destroys villages a weapon of mass destruction? A machine gun that mows down civilians? They play with words! Well, we will give them a new weapon of mass destruction. It will be something they see every day.”
Tom frowned. “But what if the insects get into a plane that flies to an Islamic country?”
“They will spray their planes to prevent this.”
“What if an infected American flies overseas?”
“That might happen, but only a few times. Once the panic starts, they’ll close their airports. I’m surprised you didn’t ask the other question. About you getting sick.”
“If you want me to stay on the island for weeks, and work with the insects, you have a way to protect me.”