“Someone ought to stop it, sir.”
Stay out of it, Tom Fargo told himself. What happens to Rebeca is none of your business.
“You’re a good guy, Mauricio,” he said.
Mauricio, disappointed, went back to watching the news.
The elevator had a TV in the wall — Americans needed them like drugs — that showed CNN news, something about an explosion in Miami. Four stories up the door opened into a freshly painted semi-private foyer providing entry to only two apartments. There were framed lithographs of British jockeys and barristers on the wall, his neighbor’s idea of class. He slipped the key into his top lock, then the dead bolt. Inside, the polished concrete floor threw back moonlight flooding in through floor-to-ceiling windows. The view of the Brooklyn Bridge was close and magnificent. The lights of Manhattan — even from across the river — drenched exotic artwork on his walls: jaguar head Day of the Dead mask from southern Mexico; tropical hardwood crucifix inlaid with Spanish gold links, from Peru; lacquerware bowl, 1859, Guatemala; Chacala rosary necklace that Tom’s mother had picked up on a buying trip south, fifteen years ago, when she only owned one shop, not fourteen, scattered around the U.S., and an online shopping site, too.
Just the art that a spoiled trust fund artist wannabe — as his neighbors believed him to be — might display.
Forget Rebeca. Check the darkroom, he thought.
The darkroom — ground zero — had been installed by the owner, a photographer who was in China on assignment, and who had sublet the place to Tom for cash. He’d installed extra locks. Tom stood in a red glow, excitement building. The room was hot and moist. He could almost feel the vibration coming off the terrariums on the shelves, from a thousand particles, as he thought of them. He’d learned about particles from Hobart Haines when he was a teenager, in the high mountains, under a clear blue sky.
Bombs, but not bombs.
There was also $30,000 in cash here, and two perfectly good credit cards in other names. There were pistols and explosives, a microscope, a laptop, medicines and Clorox wipes, and, in a rack on the wall, bulb-shaped glass containers clasped upside down, and, stretched across each top, a thin membrane of elastic covering.
He was startled when his encrypted phone rang. It was not supposed to ring unless there was an emergency. His heart seized up. “Hi there,” he answered, casually.
A half-drunken voice slurred, “Felix? Felix! It’s Marty, man! Marty Bolton!”
“There’s no Felix here.”
The caller hung up, and Tom Fargo — in shock — took the SIM card from the phone. He smashed the card and phone with a hammer. He tried to control his racing heart. His plan had just changed almost before it started. Felix—said twice — meant bad news. Bolton made it worse. Marty was a worst-case scenario. He understood instantly that the CNN report, the Miami explosion, meant that the other team here to carry out attacks was all dead.
Shocked, he went back into the living room, with its view of the high-rises, power centers, and apartments across the river, filled with enemy. Enemy extending across a continent; 350 million of them. He had always dreamed of facing long odds. Now he faced the longest.
The message had been: You are the last one left. They will kill you if they find you. Good luck.
Back in the darkroom the red light seemed to come from inside him now, pulsing into the air to saturate the glass containers and water pans, plastic cassettes, steel tweezers, and glass pipettes. As if fission was produced by intent, and will answered a scientific question, will was a formula that Dr. Cardozo jotted on his blue board. Will = energy. Energy = destruction.
Tom, filled with will, thought, I can do it. He was hot with rage but not fear. He’d lost that capacity some time ago. I can fool them. I will make them think there are many groups here. I will finish this thing even if I have to do it alone.
TWO
No one at the gold rush was interested in the missing American. They were too busy to care about my best friend. They were used to men being present one day, disappeared the next; dead from illness or murder, accidents or suicide. Miners died when rusty anchor cables snapped and their boats swept into jungle rapids. Rival crews cut cables on boats at 2 A.M., and turgid currents finished the job. Divers fought with knives in the darkness below the surface, sliced one another’s air hoses and died clutching rubber tubing. Some got dengue fever, or keeled over in the 110-degree heat. They killed one another over prostitutes and $4 beer tabs. One man liked samba on a jukebox. Another wanted heavy metal. In the end, a body floated on the Madeira. Caimans ate it.
“The captain says that Dr. Nakamura was very sick,” the translator told me. “Your friend was shaking with malaria. He was advised to go to the hospital in town, and Senhor Edward said he would. This is what the police told us also. I am sorry. The police gave up the search.”
“Eddie never reached the hospital or our hotel.”
“This happens,” said Anasasio sadly.
“If he was going to town someone must have taken him. If we find that person we’ll learn more,” I insisted.
“Here, no one ever learns more.”
Here was the Madeira River, forty miles from the Brazilian Amazon city of Porto Velho. From the deck of the mining boat I saw a ragged moonscape of bad possibilities: red mud that bred malarial mosquitoes, tin-roofed shanty bars where knives flashed at night, thick jungle. Rickety docks sagged in brown water. In mid channel were anchored two dozen mining boats, dragas, in calm areas between rapids. They were big as 1850s Mississippi riverboats, two-story-high herds of dumb animals belching smoke, pumps roaring, decks crawling with poor men come to seek their fortunes. They slept on hammocks on deck.
“Dr. Nakamura is tough,” I said. “He would have found a way back.”
The captain of the boat said something in Portuguese, and Anasasio nodded with sympathy. “Tough is nothing against illness. He says sick men can be robbed or killed. They are weak and cannot defend themselves. They have hallucinations and wander into the jungle. The police said this same thing, Joe.”
“Let’s try the next boat.”
“We’ve been here for seven hours.”
“The police kept me in town for two days!”
“They checked your story thoroughly.”
“You mean they grilled me. Are you really a doctor? Are you involved in transporting drugs?”
I’d told the Federal Police major, over and over, back in town, that we were here for pure research, science, a joint humanitarian project with their government and not any secret reason.
Which was a lie.
Eddie and I had been friends for over twenty years. We met in Marine Corps ROTC at UMass and went through boot camp together. I was best man at his wedding and godfather to his daughters. We served together in Iraq and shared more memories than a married couple. Now I was sick with apprehension. Eddie and I had split up three days ago for a day of studying new malarias. I’d stayed in town, interviewing sick people in slum areas. Eddie was supposed to take a translator with him to the gold rush, but had not told me that the translator was sick, so he’d gone alone, hoping that his California Spanish might get him by, that he wouldn’t lose a day of work. He’d planned to go out in the morning and come back at night. He had a road map and a rented jeep, which he’d paid a man to watch as he went out to the dragas. The police had found the jeep onshore.