Dogs (26 page)

Jess woke late on Wednesday, to gunfire.

He leapt out of bed and hit the floor before his sleep-clogged brain registered that the shots were outside, close but not immediately outside his window. They'd been rapid-fire, as if from an automatic weapon—the Guards? Some maniac with an AK-47? Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since the bombing of the Stop 'n' Shop, and FEMA had not returned the uninfected dogs to their owners.

9:30 A.M. He'd slept through his alarm. Or turned it off in his sleep, or something.

Throwing on yesterday's jeans and sweater, lacing up his boots with unsteady fingers, Jess grabbed his gun and raced to the front door. The snowy street outside was deserted and absolutely quiet. He saw nothing amiss. But then he heard a single dog, somewhere a few streets over. It was giving out the single saddest sound a dog can make, two or three quick barks ending in a long howl, what some people called the “death howl” of a dog in mourning.

Jess got into his truck and drove to look for the dog. The Guard troops that circled Tyler like a noose weren't evident in this residential section, but neither was anyone else. Jess's was the only vehicle disturbing the pristine layer of snow on the street. But he saw curtains pulled back and faces at windows as he passed.

He found the dog, a brown-and-white beagle, sitting on its haunches on the open front porch of a house that appeared to be deserted. Soggy newspapers dotted lawn. Some people had chosen to leave Tyler as soon as the epidemic had started, even when that meant leaving pets behind. The beagle howled again, a long mournful cry with no hint of aggression in it. Its coat was filthy; blood spotted one hind leg. Somewhere the beagle had lost its collar. Jess wasn't close enough to see if its eyes were filmed with white.

He called the Animal Control office on his cell. “Suzanne, I need—”

“Where
are
you? We're backed up with calls!”

“Overslept. I'll be in soon but right now I need a dog I.D. for 627 Herlinger Street. Get it off the computer.”

“Okay, 627 Herlinger…That's the Dorsey residence. They show a licensed male two-year-old beagle named Hearsay.”

“Hearsay?”

“Maybe he's a lawyer?”

Jess buckled on his protective gear, got a medium-sized crate from his truck, and started toward the house, gun in his right hand and crate in his left. Hearsay turned and wagged his tail. His brown eyes were clear. In all Jess's years working with animals, beagles were about the only breed he hadn't seen bite anybody. He always thought that if he ever got another dog, it would be a beagle.

“Hey, Hearsay. Here, good dog.”

The beagle wagged his tail harder and tried to drag himself toward Jess. It was obvious that his bloody hind leg hurt him. Jess was three or four feet from the dog, just setting down the crate, when a single shot sounded. Hearsay screamed and dropped. A pool of blood spread onto the porch.

Jess wheeled around and shouted, “Who fired that!” A nanosecond later it occurred to him that he was a target and there was an armed nut out there, but he didn't move. Scanning the street, he saw nothing. The shooter was hidden.

His cell rang, an unfamiliar number. Even before he answered, he knew.

“Langstrom,” a male voice said, “If you and the whole damn federal government can't kill these vicious dogs, we'll do it for you. No more kids are going to die because you guys won't do what you fucking well should,” Click.

Jess stood motionless. The voice was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't place it. DiBella could have the call traced.

The cell rang again, but this time he recognized the number: Latkin. “Jess? Joe Latkin. Listen, my team and I spent all night with that spaniel you brought us, the one killed with the hiker in West Virginia. Thank God the media haven't got that yet. The spaniel wasn't infected, but the neck-bite area held the virus in saliva, and it seems to have come from a primary, not a secondary.”

“I don't understand that, doctor.” And why was Latkin telling Jess? He scanned the street for something, anything, that might tell him where the shooter was. Nothing.

“Let me give it to you briefly,” Latkin said. “The virus is highly mutable, which shows through the way it manifests in different animals. There are very tiny changes with each transmission. It's called branching, and it lets us construct a diagram: A bit B, and B bit C and D and F, and then C bit G and so on. It's not a perfect history but it's not bad, either. We think your King Charles spaniel was bitten by the original source of the plague, not by another dog somewhere down the line.”

Jess tried to concentrate. “You mean the Doberman captured in West Virginia was the source of the plague?”

Yes. But that Doberman wasn't the one that bit the spaniel. The salivas don't match.”

“You mean there's
another
source out there?”

“Yes. Another primary source of the virus. And I need you and DiBella, plus whoever else you trust one hundred percent, to go look for it.”

“Why me, Joe? God, you've told the FBI and FEMA, right? The feds'll comb those hills.”

“Yes. But they won't know where to look because they don't know the terrain, and they won't get anyone to tell them anything because they don't know the people. Scott Lurie won't use local help, Maryland or West Virginian, because he's a supercilious son-of-a-bitch who thinks you're all a bunch of bumpkins. I'm outside my own sphere of authority here, but God, I can't work if they won't let me get at the right material! I need you to go back up to West Virginia and find that other dog. You know animals, and you know whom you can trust to look along with you. I
need
that other primary source.”

“Is it another Doberman?”

“Can't tell. Can you? You saw the hiker.”

Jess said, “It could be any big breed. But I looked at her carefully and I didn't see any hairs, and the spaniel's neck was snapped with a single shake, so probably a short-hair with really strong jaws.”

“See what I mean? You know what you're doing. How many FBI agents would know all that? Do you know what story the family of the dead hiker was told? That she was killed by a bear.”

Jess thought of the West Virginia medical examiner, the undertaker who would prepare the corpse, the family who would view her for identification of the body.
A bear, my ass
. That story would dissolve like sugar in rain.

Latkin said, “Will you do it, Jess?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Bye.”

Jess put Hearsay's body in the crate. From his truck he called DiBella, told him what had happened, and read him the phone number from his cell's call record. DiBella swore for a full, creative fifteen seconds. “Jess, last night we broke up a bad fight at the Moonlight Lounge. Dennis Riley and them want their dogs back. The other group of drunks wanted every last dog in Tyler killed yesterday to keep the people safe. The fight got really ugly. FEMA hasn't returned the uninfected dogs like the bombers demanded—well, Lurie can't do that, of course. But FEMA's just making the whole situation worse by locking the whole town up tighter than a virgin's ass… I'll get on that phone number.”

“Thanks, Don.”

Jess drove to the Animal Control office. He saw no one on the deserted streets but he could feel eyes on him, hear uncaptured dogs baying in the distance, could smell the tension like fumes in the air, gasoline too close to way too many sparks.

Tessa woke early Wednesday morning, hiked to the library, and waited impatiently for it to open. A different librarian was on duty and, this time, the local kids were in school instead of waiting to use the Internet. She had email from both Maddox and Ebenfield. Maddox merely repeated his demand that she come inside. Ebenfield's email was in the form of a 200-kilobyte attachment. At least fifty pages.

She scanned it quickly, grimacing. It was a political screed, railing against the United States government, big corporations, the corrupt medical establishment, political parties, and science. Tessa caught phrases here and there: “soft-bellied elite,” “godless values,” “corruption at the core,” “suffering of the poor,” “necessary downfall,” “choosing easy pleasure over hard necessity,” “duty to destroy.” She'd heard this mish-mash before, from other domestic terrorists. Different lyrics, same tune.

It wasn't until the end that Ebenfield turned personal:

So, my Tessa, now you understand. If you understand, you must come to me, because that is what is right. First destruction of the soft and corrupt Old Order, then the rightful ascension of those meant to rule.

And just as you were first with the enemy Salah, now you will be with me. Everything goes full circle. Where are you? Give me a phone number and I will call you.

Richard

 

Give me a phone number.

So this was it—decision time. She stared a few seconds at the Arabic below his name: “Dogs first,” again. Then she typed back, “This is my cell-phone number. But I'm not going to turn it on until 3:00 P.M. today. We can talk then.”

To Maddox she typed, “Call you at noon. Be ready. Tessa.”

Outside, Tessa wrapped her head in the scarf she'd bought with pretty much the last of Ruzbihan's money and walked back toward the side street where she'd left the Toyota. She approached cautiously, slipping into a backyard from an adjacent street, watching a while from behind a hedge. This lower-middle-class neighborhood was deserted in the day, kids at school and adults at work. So it wasn't hard to spot the FBI agents.

They'd traced the hot car. They'd taken a chance that she might have bought a car in the same city she'd used her American Express card to buy the cell phone, and they'd come up lucky.

Carefully Tessa backed out of the hedge, out of the yard, out of the neighborhood. She walked to the highway, took a deep breath, and caught a ride with a man heading east. He leered at her and she told him her husband was a cop and she was leaving him because he turned violent at the slightest provocation. In fact, he'd already be in jail for assaulting someone if his buddies on the force hadn't protected him. He'd accused her, Gina, of having an affair with the guy, which was ridiculous because she'd never been unfaithful,
never
, but her husband was so insanely jealous and vindictive she just had to get away. Although it was possible her husband would follow her. The driver stopped leering.

She left him at a truck stop in West Virginia, a small seedy place with minimal facilities. It was twenty minutes to noon. She called Maddox from a pay phone, using one of her prepaid phone cards.

“John, it's Tessa. Did you get that long manifesto from Ebenfield?”

“Yes. Tessa—”

“Have you found him?”

“No. Where are you?”

“He's going to call me at 3:00. I'll call you after that, Bye.”

“Wait! Tessa, just a minute. I want to run some names by you again. You—”

“I can't—”

“Just
listen
, for once! Do you know anything about any of these people? Hakeem bin Ahmed al-Fulani?”

“No.” Was he trying to keep her on the line long enough to trace the call? But he must know she wouldn't fall for that.

“Aktar Erekat?”

“No.”

“Sometimes he uses the name Abd-Al Adil Erekat.”

Abd-Al Adil.
The name of Ruzbihan's son. But that wasn't an uncommon name in Tunisia, and Erekat was not among Ruzbihan's surnames.

“No.”

“Tessa—”

She hung up.

For the next few hours, she drank coffee quietly at a table in the truck stop, reading discarded newspapers, her chilly manner a clear warning to leave her alone. At two-thirty she started watching the truckers coming and going. She picked an older man, kindly looking, fairly slightly built, went over to his table, and asked him for a ride when he left.

“Sorry, no.” He kept shoveling in his hot roast-beef sandwich.