“Good! With clotting gone, the bacteria could spread into the victim’s lymph nodes, and start multiplying. One bacteria became a hundred, a million. All a victim had to do was sneeze to pass it on.”
“Wait a minute,” Sean had said, puzzled. “I thought you said the disease was transmitted by a bite. Now you’re saying a sneeze could transmit it?”
“That’s the third change that happened; a last mutation changed one amino acid in pla, and made the bacterium contagious from coughing or sneezing. Much easier to transmit. The bubonic plague became the pneumatic plague, more virulent, ninety to one hundred percent death rate, fevers, headaches, pneumonia. Spread by aerosolized particles, it devastated a quarter of the world’s population.”
Sean shuddered, remembering the rat he’d seen a few minutes ago, and he wondered whether the process that had been horrifyingly described to his class back in Cork could ever happen again. No, he reasoned. It couldn’t. Because in the modern world there was better medicine, equipment, and preparation, so something as small as the mutation of a single protein could not do the kind of massive damage that his old science teacher had riveted the class with, on a foggy day, years back, when the teacher told the tale.
Sean had no idea that the opposite had occurred twelve feet behind where he was sitting. No idea that there were insects packed inside the cargo carried in his truck. No idea — as he brought the truck to a halt in front of a small folk art shop, and went to the back and caught sight of a box teetering on top of the pile — that inside it was something that could wipe out a quarter of the human population on earth, if it got out.
Sean got into the truck fast, and stabilized the box.
Inside were thousands of female anopheles mosquitoes and larvae that carried virulent malaria, the original kind that could be transmitted by the bite of a mosquito only.
But one mosquito carried a genetic alteration in the malaria parasite. In her, just as in a flea/bacteria combination a thousand years ago, a tiny parasite could be transmitted by coughing, sneezing, or kissing. Even by an infected man breathing into your face on a subway, during evening rush hour.
No mosquito necessary to transmit this variety. Which meant that the single insect carrying this new variety was capable of starting a chain reaction sweeping across earth. Even the men who had genetically altered the insects in the shipment were unaware of the existence of the mutated parasite inside one of them.
The men who had created the disease that Tom Fargo was spreading had thought they could control it. But if the new variety got out, no one could control the spread.
Like the pneumatic plague, this was aerosolized.
Sean remembered the closing words of his biology teacher, as he watched the door to the Nizhoni Yee shop open, and the man who ran the shop come out, happy to see his shipment from the airport finally here.
“Mutation is, by definition, always a surprise.”
TWENTY-ONE
We were stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, on our way to the art shop, crammed in the middle of a honking mass of delivery trucks, taxis, and autos. Nothing moving. Progress stopped dead.
“There’s some kind of demonstration on the Brooklyn side,” our detective driver Jamal informed us. “Community groups claim that Manhattan got all the spray and medicine. That no one cares about them.”
“That’s ridiculous! Spray supply just ran out!”
Jamal shrugged. “To me, this traffic is normal.” He put on the siren. It helped us move two feet ahead.
“This is normal?” Izabel shook her head. “I would not want to live in this insane place.”
She held in her hand a fax from Brazil. The artist’s sketch of the man who had visited the jungle island.
The day was broiling, and with no fresh attacks, some New Yorkers were going back to work. Some shops and offices were reopening. Wall Street brokers were back at the nexus of world finance, at our backs. Airports open. And a few more supermarkets.
“How far to the shop, Jamal?”
“In normal traffic, seven minutes.”
“And in this?”
A shrug. Jamal mercifully shut the siren off.
“Could be thirty, could be fifty.”
At least Ray Havlicek finally answered his phone.
The head of the national manhunt to find the attackers was in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. He was two blocks west of the campus of Northwestern University, off Lake Michigan, on Lincoln Street. He was crouched behind a Bureau car, outside a private home surrounded by FBI and Evanston police. He wasn’t the on-the-ground commander, or he wouldn’t have picked up.
“Turn on CNN if you can,” Ray said.
On Eddie’s iPhone I saw it from a network copter; the leafy oak-lined street, the target, a two-story-high yellow Victorian home, with its wraparound porch, gables, and turrets. A bird feeder on an upstairs porch. The stupid ceramic gnome on the front lawn. The snipers lying on the roof of the brick colonial home across the street.
“Who’s inside the house, Ray?”
“The house is divided into apartments, evacuated except for one. Two males. Chemistry majors from Belgium. Looks like the big break, Joe.”
“Is that you, Ray, behind the black car?”
“Damnit! I told my guys to move the cameras back!”
I saw Ray, crouched, looking around, shouting orders.
Then he was back. “Talk fast, Joe. Your message said important.”
FBI tracks malaria threat to Illinois, said the rolling banner crossing the bottom of Eddie’s mini-screen. Foreign students threaten to blow themselves up.
“Does CNN have the story right, Ray?”
“For a change, yes. What do you have for me?”
“How’d you find the students?”
“They made a mistake. They made a threat call to someone in D.C. last night.” I envisioned Kyle Utley. “They mentioned things they’d only know if they’re involved.”
“Like a refugee camp named Tol-e-Khomri?”
Silence. I heard sirens, and a bullhorn in the background. But I couldn’t hear the words. Ray’s breathing came over the line, quick and hard.
“Where’d you hear that name, Joe?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Do not mention it to anyone! Say you hear me.”
“How about the man with the gap in his teeth? Is he in that house, too?”
Ray’s anger came across the line as a sharp, sour buzzing. “Damnit. If you’re trying to impress me, congratulations. Talk fast. What do you want?”
Taken beside the array of firepower in Illinois, the story I told sounded flimsy even to me, my alleged evidence thin. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe the folk art shop in Brooklyn was nothing more than a store. That the men in Illinois had barricaded themselves in a house was proof that they were involved in something. All I had was a story about ceramics coming into the country without any record at Customs, and a vague sketch from Brazil, a face.
“That’s it? The whole thing?” said Ray, unimpressed.
“His name is Tom Fargo.”
A sigh. “Fine. We’ll put it on the list of five thousand other names we’re checking out.”
“We’re heading over there now.”
Ray said, “Good. Wait! Something is happening!”
Jamal broke free of traffic, moved thirty feet forward, and braked behind a smoke-belching appliance truck with cartoon elves on the rear door. SAME DAY SERVICE. Izabel Santo was turned from the front seat, staring at the screen in Eddie’s hand. I saw the angle suddenly shift. Instead of the FBI at the house, I saw a pack of newspeople, across the street, grumbling, leaving. Ray had ordered the cameras turned away from the house.