She must have anticipated my next thought, because she added, “Bob Welch had nothing to do with it. It was my decision. That’s what I told the FBI.”
“When did you tell them this?”
“The last time? Weeks ago. Don’t you know? But they didn’t tell me about any connection to malaria. They just showed up as if they’d been looking into it for a long time. I never connected all this until now.”
I said, regretting my harsh words a moment ago, “I don’t know what you should have done. The man spreading this disease is filled with hate. Nothing you could have done would have changed that. He would have gone after someone else if not that company. Believe me, his people didn’t develop this weapon just to use once.”
“Really?” She was like a five-year-old asking for assurance that I lacked power to bestow, but she wanted the illusion anyway.
Alan Mahin massaged her shoulders, tried to calm his wife. They seemed a caring couple, and I liked them. He reminded her that anything I said was just supposition, and told her to “do the breathing exercise.”
“There’s no proof of this, is there?” he asked me aggressively, defending her.
“You’re right, sir.”
“Your jacket is ripped. You’re not on the guest list. You snuck in here. You’re upsetting her.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“We waited a long time to have this baby. She’s had a bad time of it. I didn’t even want her to come tonight.”
“Alan, it’s all right,” she said. “Really. Maybe we can help him. Help people. Dr. Rush, is there anything else you need to know?”
That’s when I saw the mosquito land on her arm.
THIRTY-SIX
The mosquito must have flown in through the gash in the screen, in the hallway window. It crawled on the fleshy white of Christine’s bare wrist, above a bluish vein that rose into her lifeline. She didn’t see it and neither did Alan. She might never feel the bite.
I felt it squash beneath my thumb. She looked startled, but eyed the crushed insect. I’d killed it without thinking.
“Sorry,” I said. “Habit.”
There was no blood smear, so the mosquito had probably not started to feed, and no reason to think that the presence of a single mosquito meant anything alarming. Christine and Alan didn’t seem to think it troubling. After all, no one in Atlanta had gotten sick yet.
I didn’t see what kind of mosquito it was.
I thanked her for her time and excused myself and went back inside. She lingered, reluctant to go back to the party, upset by talk, memory, and pregnancy. The moment I opened the door the music grew deafening. The swirl of bodies on the dance floor was thick, and the patio doors were shut across the room, except for one, still open.
Everyone smiling. Dancing. The parade of grotesque images on-screen—our good work—remained off for now.
It was just one insect.
The bar area was packed, and conversation lively. No one here was paying attention to anything serious as my head swiveled this way and that, search-pattern style.
I don’t even know if it was an anopheles mosquito.
I walked the periphery of the room and tried to spot insects. A couple of dancers eyed me, maybe because of the rip in my jacket, or my rumpled appearance. There were millions of mosquitoes in the United States. There was no reason to assume that what I had seen was anything other than a natural phenomenon.
But then I saw another person across the room, doing the same thing I was, walking, solo, head swiveling toward the ceiling and corners, moving as I moved. Pause and look. From a distance he seemed to examine thin air. He was the man who had stared at Christine and me earlier. Suddenly his head swiveled sharply, as if he followed the zigzag route of an insect that was too far away for me to see. Then he turned and his eyes met mine and he froze for a fraction of a second. His gaze slid away, and he slipped sideways into the crowd, as a fish seeks concealment in a school. Hide among your own.
Could it be?
Now my search pattern changed. There had been something wrong with that man. This was the second time I’d noticed him. I recognized the quickening pulse in my throat as battle instinct. Always pay attention to the invisible soldier on your shoulder. Ignore him at your peril.
The hair was not Fargo’s. He wore glasses, unlike Fargo. The height was right but everything else wrong. The last place Fargo was seen is only a few hours from here. Is it possible? And if he did come here, why stay?
But then I thought, He’s been ahead of us since Brazil. The FBI isn’t here. They’re concentrating on other cities. No one thought to protect the people who ran that camp.
A woman on the dance floor several feet away from me suddenly jerked away from her partner, slapped her neck, and pulled her hand away. She went back to dancing.
A second woman — nearby — waved her hand violently before her face, as if shooing away an insect.
And then, with horror, I saw the small cloud of insects floating in from the patio, individual dots breaking off and zigzagging into the light. Outside, the shadow of a bat swooping. It might be the last survivor of the pesticide spraying, doing its job, using radar to accomplish what I’d been unable to do, track Tom Fargo’s damage.
Where the hell is he?
I felt an itch and saw that one of the creatures had landed there. I held up my hand, fascinated. And I knew.
I was looking at exactly what I’d seen in microscopes weeks before the outbreak, what Stuart had shown Eddie and me in photos and artists’ renderings and what we’d seen a thousand times in Brazil. Anopheles mosquitoes rest with abdomens up in the air, unlike other mosquitoes. I saw the maxillary palp jutting out between the two antennae. The perfume and carbon dioxide detector. I saw black-and-white scales on the wing.
The mosquito took off before I could slap it.
I have to get these people out without alerting him. If it’s Fargo, he’ll be armed. He murdered his neighbors in New York. There are more than two hundred guests here. And if I’m wrong and it’s not him, the worst that will happen is that I’ll make a fool of myself.
More insects flew in now. People became aware of them. Someone shut the door to the patio, too late.
Where is he?
As I rushed through the sea of celebrants the oddest fraction of a boyhood memory flicked to me. I was in row four at Horror Film Sunday at the Pittsfield Cinema. A rainy October afternoon. The Masque of the Red Death playing, an oldie based on Edgar Allan Poe’s tale. In the story, a plague ravaged a European country. But the wealthy and powerful believed they were immune. They isolated themselves in a castle, locked the gates, and held a masquerade ball. They giddily ate and drank. But one celebrant among them — masked as death — was not in costume. By the end, all those people were infected. It was a story about self-deception, possibly the worst disease.
Pull the fire alarm. No, that won’t work. All that will do is send the guests outside, have them milling around where mosquitoes are rampant. Think, damnit!
Suddenly I knew what to do.
Tom Fargo watched Rush from the bar area, through the crowd. Rush slapped one of his hands. There must have been an insect there, and maybe Rush had killed it. That left more than eight hundred other vectors here. Well, Tom thought, you’re probably vaccinated, unlike many people here.