“I’m paying for the flight, sir. Not Uncle Sam.”
He blanched. “You?”
“Why not? My trip. My dollar.”
He had the self-awareness to turn red with embarrassment, grace enough to apologize by asking if he could buy me a drink, even though they were free. I was not interested in fellowship, but, contrite now, he wanted to talk. Hell, it kills time. He told me that his name was Robert Packer and he was the president of a hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut. He was on his way to Albuquerque to meet with an important client. I didn’t care. He asked the purpose of my trip. I just said, “Family.” This was true, but not related to my family at all.
I almost married Tom’s mother, Hobart Haines had said on the phone. We were over Texas, the pilot announced.
“What did you just say, Robert? My mind wandered.”
“I was asking what you learned about the investments.”
“What investments?”
“You know! The fund? The South American one that poured all that money into drug companies that make antimalarials, two weeks before this whole mess began?”
I turned to him, my pulse picking up. Maybe this was one more silly rumor. But maybe Mint class travel had not been a bad idea after all. No one had said anything to me about suspicious investments. Ray just said that I didn’t understand the big picture. He’d never explained what the big picture was.
“You don’t know?” Robert Packer looked surprised.
“I just track disease.”
“Well! I talk to brokers all over the world every day. We all know that the FBI’s checking out money that went into drug companies — Capper, Poong-Koman, Humbles — before the outbreak. Whoever did it made billions. By the time everyone else got in, those stocks had hit the roof.”
“These firms are in South America, you said?”
“Argentina and Brazil, I think.”
“Do your, uh, friends know if the FBI found a connection between the outbreak and investments?”
He looked puzzled. “I was asking you that.”
“We’re compartmentalized,” I said. “The left hand never knows what the right one is doing.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“Tell me about it. Excuse me, Robert. I have work to do.”
I e-mailed Eddie and asked him to check on the alleged investments. And then Izabel, asking her to check brokerage firms in Rio or São Paulo. Might be nothing. Might be big.
I tried Aya again. Still no reply. I dozed, dreamless. Suddenly I was awake and we were landing. Robert Packer waved good-bye in the terminal. I rushed outside with my carry-on bag and got in line for a yellow cab, whose driver shook his head when he heard where I wanted to go.
“Santa Fe? That’ll cost about three hundred eighty dollars. There’s a shuttle bus, though. A lot cheaper.”
I handed over four one-hundred-dollar bills. “Big tip if you hurry up.”
The one-hour ride felt like five. The dawn sky was starting to lighten. We passed the twinkling lights of desert towns beneath white morning stars. The moon was a huge reddish crescent that looked closer to earth than it did back East. It seemed that it might strike the horizon. Climbing, the highway passed an Indian casino’s neon sign. The number of trucks on the road multiplied with daylight, as if they were animals emerging after sleep.
I tried Aya again, and checked news, to read with gratitude but alarm that police in Memphis had just announced that Tom Fargo had been in their city yesterday. Positive ID.
So the news conference worked.
My excitement turned to dread as I watched a mom and her son — he looked about eight — being interviewed.
“I saw mosquitoes flying out of his car! There was a hole in the door!” the boy claimed.
Next came clips of police roadblocks near Memphis, and along rural roads in nearby Tennessee and Mississippi. Every officer in that tristate area had been provided with photo kits and sketches of Tom Fargo, the ones I’d shown at the conference, and which now flashed on-screen.
He’s driving around releasing mosquitoes, I thought.
Ping! E-mail from Aya! Finally!
But I didn’t open it because the cab had left the interstate and was turning onto Hobart Haines’s red-dirt, suburban road, on the outskirts of Santa Fe. It was narrow enough for two cars to barely pass if they risked ruts on the side. Properties were large. Driveways snaked to half-hidden one-story homes. The land was arid; arroyos, dry runoffs from violent downpours, depressions sprouting cactus and thorn shrubs, wet leaf hackberry, quince, and peachleaf willows. The cab threw up dust. The sky was pastel blue and smeared with a single dagger-shaped cirrus cloud facing east — west.
“Tell me what you know now,” I’d urged Hobart Haines, on the phone. “It will save time.”
“Face-to-face is better, Colonel.” The voice had been hoarse, and hesitant, as if the man was sick. “I was a diplomat. I don’t want anything for myself. I don’t want publicity. I saw the FBI shut down your press conference. So! Just between me and you.”
His property began at a cattle guard fence, which swung open by remote control after I phoned to tell him I was here. The house was almost invisible from a hundred yards off because it blended in, built into the mountain. Or, more accurately, it seemed to be emerging from the mountain, as a low mass of steel and concrete that jutted into the morning chill. The angular construction might have graced a 1960s architecture magazine. The steel deck — and figure in a wheelchair — was accessible from a staircase or deck-level sliding picture windows. The view would be downhill to city and valley. I smelled sage, pinyon, and coffee as I got out of the cab, and asked the driver to wait.
“Waiting costs more.”
“Then you will get it,” I said as a woman came down the steps from the deck. Filipino, I saw. In her late twenties. Short and slim, in denim jeans and matching lightweight jacket, long black hair falling free to her narrow waist.
“I’m Josie. Hobart didn’t sleep, waiting for you. He is sorry he made you come so far, but he did not want people listening in on the phone.”
“He’s sick?”
She considered the question, a gentle intelligence in her face. “He is…” She searched for a word to describe his condition. “Lonely.”
Her boot heels made snapping sounds as we mounted the deck stairway. A big house, an old man, a private nurse. Money. Haines looked shrunken close-up, and I smelled wool and age over the sharper odors of bacon and coffee. I saw a green oxygen canister beside him; unused but ready if he started to wheeze. The house seemed solid, and its sharp angles challenged a notion of deterioration. The figure looked as if a good wind could sweep it away.
“Colonel Rush, thank you for making a long trip.”
“I hope it will be worth it, sir.”
Haines nodded as Josie set up folding tables and put steaming coffee mugs on them. He was a soft lump beneath a Pendleton blanket, a red stocking cap on against the morning chill. The eyes were watery blue. The voice was hoarse. I imagined Tom Fargo — at this moment — releasing thousands of vectors by a river, park, field.
“I want to tell you a story, Colonel.”
If regret had human sound, it would be the voice of Hobart Haines.
An outdoor fireplace/oven sent mesquite smoke across the deck. Josie was putting down, for me, scrambled eggs with peppers mixed in. Crispy bacon. Tabasco sauce. For Hobart, oatmeal and a small spoon, for tiny bites.