“Where can I get a gun?” I asked Anasasio now.
“You cannot have one. I explained this. You are a foreigner. It is against the law.”
“You said no one around here obeys laws.”
“If the police know I gave you a gun, I will be arrested,” he said stubbornly, in heavily nasal-accented English, reflecting the rough local Portuguese called língua geral. Anasasio looked like a cross between a thug and a dandy, tall and leanly muscled with a brush mustache—1950s Madison Avenue style — and gleaming slicked-back hair. His shirt was blue silk, open to a Saint Christopher medal. His pleated Italian trousers were creased, but he’d rolled them up past his hairy knees, making them shorts against the heat. Baby-blue hospital booties protected his loafers from mud, and a Beretta 9mm rode at his belt. He worked for the miners’ union, a local partner for our health project with Columbia University. I was liking him less and less by the hour.
“We’ve visited ten boats already, Joe. Maybe Eddie fell out of a launch and drowned. On the highway are many accidents, not reported. Nothing here is reported. Give up.”
But Eddie wouldn’t have given up on me. He would have torn this place apart. I leaned over the gunwale and waved to hail a small passing outboard. These one-man ferries carried miners from dragas to shore, to bars, or for supplies: potatoes, meat, bullets, medicines.
Anasasio sighed, his ferret face shiny with sweat. “This is a tragedy.”
“Not yet it isn’t.”
Anasasio had been confident when we left this morning. “I am a human lie detector,” he’d bragged. “We will get to the bottom of things!”
Now he mopped his brow with a soiled handkerchief and said, “This place eats men.”
My name is Joe Rush, and I grew up in the hamlet of Smith Falls, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Hills, where there was no gold rush or malaria or 110-degree heat, not ten miles south of the Vermont line. My problem then was lack of challenge. There was nothing to do for a restless kid.
I was bored with our school board squabbles and Labor Day parades and hot dog cookouts. Bored even with my friends. I thrilled to commercials showing U.S. Marines storming ashore in foreign lands, saving lives, having adventures. So I left my girlfriend and parents and enrolled in Marine ROTC in college. I met Eddie Nakamura there. We competed — between us — to win best recruit, obstacle course, map use, range contest, until I edged him out and Eddie started calling us One and Two. As young lieutenants, in Iraq, we led our squads down a hidden tunnel and into a biolab where Saddam Hussein’s scientists were experimenting on monkeys, trying to weaponize disease.
The experience changed our lives. The Corps paid for med school, and later we were seconded to a small, secret bioterror unit. Our records were sheep dipped, falsified so that even most high-level Marines never knew what we really did. The sections labeled EXPERT MARKSMAN and COMBAT EXPERIENCE and ABILITY TO RUN FIELD HOSPITALS remained; all true. But new parts, the killing of eight innocent Marines to save a thousand, the cooperation with an unfriendly intelligence service to murder a terrorist… were left out.
Eddie and I were sworn to secrecy without understanding what that meant. I don’t think anyone understands the price of secrecy, even after you pay. I’m talking about more than the healed shotgun scars on my back, or my two amputated toes from a mission in northern Alaska. I’m talking about my wrecked marriage, and the way, a year later, my work led to the violent death of someone I loved very much.
These days, looking back at age forty-three, I realize that I would have made the same decisions. Looking forward, I’ve resolved to never put another loved one in danger again.
“How will you do that?” Eddie asked me on the plane that took us from New York to Brazil, three weeks ago.
“George Washington said it. No foreign entanglements.”
“You can’t spend your life alone.”
“I’m not talking about forever. Just now.”
Now Eddie lives in Boston with his wife and daughters. I live in the Berkshire Hills, back in Smith Falls, a tranquil place that I appreciate more than when I’d been growing up. Eddie and I have quit government employ and own a two-man biocure company, looking for microbes in the wild to help cure diseases. Good bacteria for a change, not bad. Little one-celled missiles to kill pancreatic cancers, or AIDS. We also work with the Columbia University Wilderness Medicine Program, heading down to New York on Amtrak two days a week to consult. And it was at Columbia, two months back, that I’d made the decision that led to Eddie disappearing now.
“You don’t have to do what he wants,” our boss, Dr. Stuart Harris, had griped that morning, glancing at his unwanted guest. He’d moved us from Harvard to Columbia some months before.
I pictured it as Anasasio and I rode a flying boat toward the last draga. I saw Stuart’s cramped office two stories above Broadway, three blocks from Columbia’s campus, where Wilderness Medicine shared a floor with researchers from NASA. The outer-space guys were addicted to popcorn, and the hallway smelled of butter. I saw the well-groomed, gray-suited man who occupied the steel chair by Stuart’s desk, eyeing me with a businesslike smile. Eddie stiffened at the sight of the man.
“You know Ray Havlicek from the FBI,” Stuart said.
Yes, I thought. Ray thinks his fiancée is in love with me, and her daughter told me he’s right.
“Nice to see you, Joe,” the new FBI assistant director said. “You’re looking fit. Eddie, too.”
“Whatever you need, the answer is no,” Eddie said. Stuart brightened at that, but Ray concentrated on me.
“I understand you two are headed to Brazil to study frontier malaria,” Ray said, crossing his legs.
Wilderness medicine means providing care to people in hard-to-reach corners of earth. Sometimes they are wealthy adventure seekers: shark divers in Ecuador, or bungee jumpers in Malawi. But more often they are the poor: impoverished settlers pushed from third-world cities into jungles where they have no experience with diseases, or natural disaster. Indonesian fishing villagers after a cyclone. Haitian cholera victims. Colombian peasants after an earthquake.
And frontier malaria is a new, resistant variety exploding through Amazon settlements. The mosquitoes that carry the disease have evolved to survive pesticides. The parasite is growing hardier, which makes mosquitoes the most deadly animal on earth; a nuisance in the United States, a tragedy overseas. Worldwide, fifty thousand people a year die of snake bites. Twenty-five thousand die of rabies. Two hundred fourteen million people caught malaria last year, and five hundred thousand died. So it was good to be working on preventing disease, instead of on weapons.
Ray said that day, “As long as you’re going anyway, how about doing your old friends a little favor?”
I’d waited for more. Ray, Eddie, and I had served on a bio-attack task force a couple of years back. Ray was now promoted. And the bioterror world is small. The same people stay at the same hotel in Zurich, drink at the same bar in Port-au-Prince, run into one another at Defense Department conferences, birthday parties, or war games. Sometimes they fall in love. Ray was engaged to a woman we’d both worked with, and who had rejected him earlier. I had feelings for Chris Vekey but had never acted on them. Her daughter was my sixteen-year-old summer intern. I warned you that our world is incestuous. “Mom went back to Ray, on the rebound from you,” Aya Vekey had told me, two months back.