“Very good! An existing drug prevents infection, and you will take it. But there isn’t enough of this drug to go around. You see? The panic?”
“I want to watch it up close.”
Dr. Cardozo poured more tea and showed genuine sympathy. “After what happened to you, I understand.”
“You on the bike,” the cop ordered Tom. “Pull over!”
It was too late to turn around. He cursed himself for letting his thoughts drift as he approached the Brooklyn bridge, and not seeing guards sooner. They never stopped bikers and pedestrians on the bridge, but six of them watched him approach: two Army Reservists with M4s, two uniformed cops, and two auxiliary cops in wilting white shirts with stupid-looking gold badges, looking more like office workers dressed for Halloween. The auxies were inconsequential because they did not carry arms. One cop selected passersby and sent them to a folding table on the bridge bikeway, manned by the second cop, who examined bags. The reservists, weapons unslung, stood watching, probably pissed off to be standing in ninety-degree heat, in what they regarded as one more useless terrorist drill.
Dismounted, Tom moved one step sideways as if to turn away, but saw one reservist nudge the other. Riding off would run him into the spotter cop. Or they’d get on their radios.
Three people waited in front of him in line.
Two. At the moment the table cop was arguing with a hefty German tourist who objected to his opening of her box of lingerie.
Stupid, arbitrary catch! All kinds of other people flowed around the table, allowed to pass. Three kids who looked like gangbangers walked by, laughing. Their pants were worn so low at the hips that Tom saw the crack of underwear beneath their jeans. A man with his face wrapped in gauze passed. He looked ten times more suspicious! A trio of Muslim women in head scarves. Two fat guys drinking from bottles in paper bags, but the cop had stopped a bike messenger! He didn’t care about illegal drinkers today.
“Next!”
The bombs, but not bombs were in a canvas messenger bag, hung around his shoulder. Tom’s frayed cap showed the New York Mets logo. The David Wright jersey was identical to ones worn by thousands of fans. The bike was a thirteen-year-old Cannondale hybrid, with thicker tires for traversing rougher streets. Like many messengers, Tom carried a thick steel chain around his neck, and a heavy bike lock. He could kill with them in several ways. If he had to attack, he’d go for the reservists first.
Allah, make the police wave me on so I can do your bidding.
“Sir, open up your camera case, please.”
“Ma’am, please unzip the portfolio.”
“So! Bike messenger! What’s in the tubes?”
The cop looked young, black, fit, and ready.
“Open it up, please.”
“I’m not supposed to do that. They’ll fire me.”
“Well, one of us is going to open it. So! You or me?”
Tom saw the face with special clarity. He reached back, touched the heavy chain, judged he could take out the cop with the first swing. But there would be witnesses. And the soldiers. The tube was on the table now.
I will go down fighting. I will take as many of them with me as I can.
He pulled the chain off his shoulder, as if the weight bothered him.
The cop popped the metal tube top, peered inside, holding the tube up to catch the light. Tom had the Sig Sauer behind his back, under his shirt. If things went bad there would be a hundred witnesses, photographs, descriptions. Sweat broke out in his armpits. The cop began inching the rolled-up lithograph out. It was a cheap copy of an old Spanish drawing of two galleons anchored off a Guyana jungle beach. The poster was too short to take up the entire tube length. The tube had a false compartment on the bottom. Packed with insects.
The cop pushed the drawing back in and closed the cap. “You know why we picked you, Mets?”
“No.”
The cop grinned suddenly, like it was a big joke. “Go Yanks,” he said.
Tom resisted the urge to swing the chain in the man’s stupid face. “Screw the fucking Yanks,” he said.
“Testy, testy,” the cop laughed. Tom mounted up and pedaled past the men and onto the wide walkway taking him over the East River. One Police Plaza and the great towers of Manhattan were ahead, the afternoon sunny, traffic normal, and he thanked Allah for safety, reaching the island itself.
First stop was a shut-down gas station near Elizabeth Street, off Canal, closed for remodeling, where a row of discarded snow tires leaned against the rear brick wall, filled with rainwater.
Two stories above that were the open windows to one of the city’s premier Chinatown restaurants. Many famed athletes ate here, as did politicians, entertainers, and fashion models. Around the corner was a street where hordes of tourists passed each day, shopping at open-air stands. More than five thousand people would pass this spot at dusk each day.
He shook out a bag filled with larvae into the water in the tires. He shook out eight hundred adults.
Next stop, Midtown, and an open trash Dumpster beside a new hotel under construction, a block from Times Square. The Dumpster had two inches of water on the bottom. He mixed in a bag of adults and then opened a tube of larvae and shook it out. The larvae would mature in one to three weeks.
Third stop, the Upper West Side and the busy 96th Street IRT station, which fed up to 40,000 passengers a day into the red line that traversed the length of the borough. He carried the bike onto the platform. After a train passed and no one remained on the platform, he tossed an open ziplock over the side, into rainwater on the tracks. New Yorkers were pigs who used the tracks as trash cans. The baggie fell with a splash, and he watched a mosquito emerge. In two hours, at dusk, a little swarm would rise out and buzz and fly onto the bare arms and legs above the tracks.
For the rest of the afternoon he and a thousand real bike messengers traversed the city; over the Queensboro Bridge to Astoria, where he left a deposit in a quiet eddy in the East River, a hundred yards from a public swimming pool that several thousand people visited each summer week, mostly kids. The pool stayed open at dusk.
He was exhausted by late afternoon, and taking a break in a bodega, buying iced tea, he saw a Channel One News broadcast: Terrorism drill is over. The subway was clear now. He rode the One train up to Riverdale, a pricy suburban neighborhood in the Bronx. The streets here were shaded by oaks and lined with well-kept Tudors, ranches, and split-levels. Here was the old Dodge Estate and several private schools catering to the sons and daughters of the city’s elite. Getting off the elevated train, he rode the bike to a low-income home for the elderly on busy Riverdale Avenue: a faded yellow brick final stop for the men and women who sat staring at passing traffic in cheap folding chairs outside, forgotten by their families.
Dr. Cardozo had told him, “The cameras will go wherever outbreaks occur. Spread it everywhere. Make none of them feel safe. Once the panic begins, a single mosquito in a subway, a house, a park… will set them off. Go with God.”
EIGHT
She stirred as her ancestors had as far back as forty-six million years ago, at dusk. Her food source then was dinosaurs. Now it was mammals. But food was still blood.
One by one, she and her sisters rose into the air from the pond, a shadow mass, each unit so small that in fading light it was almost invisible to the crowds streaming into New York’s Central Park. FREE PHILHARMONIC CONCERT TONIGHT!