“I knew it!” cried Jerry happily. “How about a little wager?”
Three and a half hours later, on the eighteenth hole, he pretended to poke around in the dense juniper and bushy cleyera trees for a lost ball. He emptied the last container of nine hundred mosquitoes in a little standing pool of water, emerged from the trees, took a one-stroke penalty, and hit his next shot onto the fringe of the green.
“Nice shot, Seth!”
“Guess I’m just lucky today,” he said.
THIRTY-THREE
Eddie started to shiver in the car. Malaria parasites can hide out in the liver, go dormant, and even after medical treatment sneak back into the blood years later. Until then, the patient thinks he’s beaten the illness. As Stuart drove us back toward LaGuardia Airport, to make an Atlanta flight, I saw Eddie’s clenched fists. He was fighting the fever, willing it away.
“I’ll go alone,” I said. “Get to the hospital.”
Eddie shook his head. “No.”
“Eddie, I’m just going down for a few hours. It’s probably unrelated. A double check.”
“I’ve had fevers before.”
“Not like this. And you know it.”
We reached the Delta terminal, and I climbed out and looked back at Stuart, who spoke to Eddie as if to a child. “Neither of you will get any work done if you’re sick on the plane. Check in with Joe from the hospital.”
“Shit.” Eddie looked yellowish.
In the air, I tried to keep my mind off Eddie and on the report on Tol-e-Khomri. It was thick, thorough, and made no mention of infected food. But reports are distilled observation. Even the best ones discard facts. Good reporters choose the right facts to eliminate. Mistakes happen if wrong ones get left out.
“We conclude that at least a dozen jihadists hid amid refugees with the goal of creating havoc in the camp. No evidence points to company culpability or infected food.” Signed: Bob Welch and Christine Mahin.
Back at Fresh Unity, as George Riverside sternly grilled Welch, I’d wondered if it was an act.
“Is there anything you’re not telling us?” Riverside demanded.
“Absolutely not, sir.”
“If there is, you’ve got five minutes of amnesty. Onetime offer. If our product made people sick, even accidentally, even a possibility, I want to know.”
“Sir, we shipped over four thousand cans and only thirty people got sick. There were no expired cans in the warehouse. No way to check one hundred percent because any food residue burned. What can I say? It’s impossible to reconstruct totally. Christine assured me, no link.”
“Don’t let her know that Dr. Rush is coming.”
“I promise. I won’t.”
“Bob’s reliable,” Riverside assured us, after the man left. “The sweating? He picked up a bug a few years ago in Uzbekistan. Wreaks havoc with body temperature. He sweats all the time. He’s honest, that Bob.”
Is he? I thought. Are you?
Stuart reported by e-mail that Eddie was vomiting by the time he checked into Columbia-Presbyterian. He was in the malaria ward. His relapse meant that this new malaria might be tougher than originally thought.
Then Stuart’s news got worse. “There’s breaking news about Kyle Utley. A problem in Washington.”
I turned on seat-back NBC, to see the correspondent who I’d ditched in New York. Washington whistle-blower accuses Administration of dealing with terrorists. With the reporter was Kyle Utley, in the studio, in suit and tie, looking unhappy. I’d liked the man, and was surprised at my anger at the word whistle-blower. After all, I was a whistle-blower, too. I’d released news about Tom Fargo to the world.
Joe Rush, hypocrite. Go figure, I thought.
NBC: You personally received a threat from Tom Fargo?
UTLEY: Yes. Then he called my wife and made a second threat.
NBC: The FBI knows this, you say?
UTLEY: I told them immediately.
NBC: And now you allege that the White House’s diversion of military funding was a capitulation to jihadists?
UTLEY: That’s what they demanded.
The reporter looked triumphant.
NBC: But just to be straight, you have no proof that the diversion wasn’t planned anyway, as the White House insists. You say jihadists played the White House for fools, since attacks are still going on. They allege that you’re lying because you are about to be fired.
Stuart e-mailed me as I watched Utley flailing around before cameras. The message read, “Havlicek is at Congress, to testify. The investigation’s stalled. I can’t get through to anyone. You’re on your own, Joe.”
Atlanta is one of the twenty worst cities in the country when it comes to mosquitoes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sixty-five varieties live there. The majority are not potential malaria carriers, but larger tiger and smaller culex mosquitoes. Tigers can carry Zika virus. Culex can carry West Nile, too.
“Welcome to Atlanta,” the flight attendant announced.
I studied photos of mosquitoes as we taxied. Christine Mahin was on maternity leave, Bob Welch had told us. She was probably at home, eight and a half months pregnant.
It’s my custom when traveling in a potential outbreak area to ask people there if they’ve taken precautions to reduce the chance of getting sick. I did not like what I was hearing now. The flight attendant said that she did not need malaria pills because she “stayed inside during layovers.” My seatmate had taken Lariam when the outbreak began, but his pharmacy had run out. The cab driver explained on the way to Christine’s house that since the CDC was headquartered in Atlanta, he was confident that the disease would be kept away. And besides, the pills could cause bad dreams or hallucinations. His neighbor was taking herbal remedies, not pharmaceuticals. I would have thought that with so many medical experts here, there would be more medicine, more belief. Not less.
Add in delays from a traffic pileup and I didn’t reach Christine’s driveway for another hour. The Buckhead neighborhood, Bob Welch had said, is the Beverly Hills of the South. It was beautiful in an antiseptic way, as if a child’s plastic toy set had gotten large enough to house people. Homes looked more like showrooms. The leafy trees had a sheen that, near dusk, made them seem artificial. At 6:20 P.M. the sun had another two hours until it sank away.
Local mosquitoes would stir soon, if they were alive, but most of the urgency I felt was for Eddie. After all, there were no facilities in Atlanta operated by Christine’s old company. I just wanted to see her expression when we talked. But the bad part of using surprise as strategy is that the surprise happens to you if you can’t locate the person who you’re looking for.
And nobody answered the door of the adobe-colored ranch house set beside a two-story French provincial. I saw an envelope taped to the door with a name, Ted, in black. The note inside, in feminine script, read: Ted, My neighbor has the key.
I rang the neighbor’s bell, and a slim woman yanked the door open as if she’d been watching me from her window. Freezing air-conditioning washed out. The woman seemed to be in her early forties, friendly, and I heard a TV on inside, a cartoon children’s show. Lots of shooting, beeping, and trombone music. Roadrunners falling off cliffs.
“Are you the architect?” she asked.
She had a tanned face, green/blue eyes, and wore a gold sweater, white slacks, and matching sandals. Her dirty blond hair was feathered. She held a Paul Theroux novel. The Mosquito Coast. The title made me want to laugh, but not in a funny way.