The Coward's Way of War (16 page)

Maria tuned the speaker out as she cleaned the suite, shaking her head at all the signs of a bored young man with nothing to do.  The table was covered with filthy magazines, while there was a faint stench in the air that suggested that he had been doing more than just looking at the pictures.  She was glad of the mask as she sprayed air freshener into the air, hoping that it would blot out some of the smell.  If her brother had done anything as blatantly unclean as that, her father would have brought out his belt.  The rich kid had had no one to teach him the error of his ways.

She went through two more suites before she finally reached one that had been marked OCCUPIED for the last two days.  Some of the guests at the Marigold liked their privacy, to the point where they insisted that no one, not even Room Service, interrupted them in their rooms.  It wasn't as if Room Service had been what it normally was over the past five days.  The mainly American-born staff had deserted.  Maria considered the sign and gently pushed at the door, feeling the slightest hint of resistance from the lock.  She pulled out her swipe card and, feeling a sudden hint of mischief, unlocked the door and pushed it open.  Perhaps, she thought, she would see a celebrity banging someone he shouldn't be banging.  Perhaps the celebrity would pay her some hush money to keep her mouth shut...

The smell struck her at once, a mixture of piss and shit and something else that cut through the mask as if she wasn't wearing any protection at all.  Maria staggered back, gagging, feeling her chest contracting as if she was going to vomit in her mask.  If she had eaten more for breakfast, she
would
have been badly sick, but for once her manager’s penny-pinching had worked in her favour.  Her rations had barely been enough to keep her going.

Carefully, wondering if she shouldn't close the door and call the manager, she stepped into the room.  It looked reassuringly normal, yet the smell was only growing stronger and even more unpleasant.  Maria held one hand to her nose and walked through the suite – noting how the bed was clearly dishevelled – and into the bathroom.  She looked down into the massive bathtub and felt a second wave of unease churning within her.  Marina dry-heaved until she felt as if her chest was contracting, on the verge of collapsing.

A body lay in the bath, almost completely unrecognisable as human.  The occupant of the suite, she remembered suddenly, had been a young Arab spending a holiday in New York away from the dour strictures of his native country...or so she had been told.  Now, he was nothing more than a bloody mass of meat, covering in burst pustules and lying in a mass of his own blood and body fluids.  It looked to her as if he had melted down like candle wax, leaving her unsure of his orientation.  It took her several minutes of helpless staring to identify his face and eyes amid the pustules. 

The corpse moved slightly and Maria screamed, all rationality gone.  She was still screaming when they broke down the door and came to find out what had happened.  Her manager came in and shook her, before seeing what lay in the bath...and he
did
throw up.  His vomit added yet another stench to the room...

Desperately, heedless any longer of her job or pleasing the manager, Maria staggered back into the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed.  She knew what had happened to the young Arab and she knew what it meant for her, a death sentence.  The Arab had died of Henderson’s Disease and, just by breathing in the air surrounding the body, she might have caught it as well.  Her life was over, she realised, and she had never truly lived.

“Maria,” her manager bellowed.  “Maria, you stupid girl!  Where the hell are you?”

He came into the bedroom and glared at her.  “Get back on duty,” he snapped.  “You have seven more rooms to clean before...”

Somehow, knowing that she was going to die allowed Maria to stand up to him.  “Get fucked,” she said.  The profanity slipped through her lips before she quite realised what she intended to say.  “I’m going to die and you’re going to die with me.”

The manager stared at her...and then threw up again.  Maria looked away, unable to quite repress a giggle.  It was funny, she decided, as her manager ran spluttering from the room, just how a sentence of death changes a person’s perspective on life.

Pulling herself to her feet, she left the room and its ghastly sight behind.  If she had only a few days to live, she might as well make the most of them.

***

Mija was rathe
r amused by her sudden rise in status, although it had been made clear to her that there would be no additional pay or benefits.  The editor had seen so many desertions over the last few days that he’d offered the reporters who remained on the job their own private offices, allowing them to work in private – without the danger of breathing in someone’s germs.  The office had once belonged to one of the sports writers, who had covered baseball and football for the
New York Times
, but he’d caught Henderson’s Disease and was currently in the hospital.  The prospects didn't look good.

She glanced around her office one final time, silently planning the redecorating she intended to carry out when she had a moment, and then looked back at her computer.  The
New York Times
had been going paperless for years, much to the annoyance of most of the old sweats who believed in notepads and pencils, and now electronic communication was really proving its value.  Hardly anyone wanted to share any form of bodily contact if it could be avoided, from chatting at the water cooler to flirting and platonic hugs.  Even Olson had halted his endless campaign to climb inside as many different pairs of panties as possible.  Some of the more thoughtful commenters were already joking about the bottom falling out of the prostitution market, or – more interestingly – a reduced rate of AIDS transmission.  She moved the mouse and smiled as her email program blinked up.  There were over five hundred new messages, most of them completely useless.

Mija skimmed through them thoughtfully, rolling her eyes at what some people considered important, even during the best of times.  Several emails were trying to tell the newspaper something that was already in the public domain, others were trying to hint that the senders knew more information...and would quite happily sell it to the paper for the right price.  Some of those emails, at least, were amusing, although the editor had warned her not to be taken in by scam artists.  The mainstream media had been spoofed before by hoaxers and some of those hoaxes had led to lawsuits and immense sums of money being spent on lawyers.  One email caught her eye and she read through it carefully, forwarding it to the tech support department and asking them to try to trace the email.  If it was genuine, it was a real scoop...

“I work at Town Hall besides the Mayor,” she said, reading it out loud.  “I heard His Honour speaking on the telephone to the President and the Governor.  The promised twenty thousand doses of vaccine for the city is not going to materialise.  We’ll be lucky if we get around five thousand doses.  Even so, there is going to be a delay of at least six days before the vaccine finally arrives.  His Honour has drawn up a list of priority recipients, which I have attached.  You may find it interesting.”

She sat back, studying the email address.  It was a stealth email address rather than a permanent address, a system intended to make it impossible for anyone to trace the email back to its sender.  Given time, she was sure that the technical wizards in the building could track it back to its point of origin, but if someone was paranoid enough to use a stealth email address...they were probably paranoid enough to send the message from an internet cafe or a public library.  That might not mean that it was a hoax.  Despite government protections for whistle-blowers, it wasn't uncommon for whistle-blowers to be fired or otherwise pushed out of employment, once the excitement had faded away.  The sender could be exactly who they claimed to be, someone close enough to the Mayor to listen to his telephone conversations.

“Odd,” she said, to herself.  The list attached to the email was plain text, without anything that might be used to trace the sender.  The formatting had been completely stripped from it, leaving the words floating on the screen.  She skimmed through the list, recognising some of the names as being city councillors, while others were unknown to her.  Puzzled, she copied some of the numbers into the newspaper’s database and activated the search engine, waiting to see what popped up.  The results almost made her cry out in fury.  “Son of a bitch!”

Over a thousand of the names on the list matched a different, very selective list; the richest and most powerful people in New York, and their families.  The Mayor and his entire extended family were on the list, followed by the Deputy Mayor and
his
family, the councillors and
their
families, the business and financial leaders of Wall Street...shocked, she discovered that most of the newspaper’s board was included in the list.  She was unsurprised to discover that she was not on the list, nor was anyone else at her level.  A quick check revealed that the picture was the same all over.  The senior managers and their families would receive doses of the vaccine; the lower-ranking employees would have to whistle for
their
vaccine. 

The remaining recipients were mainly emergency personnel, but even that was badly slanted.  The NYPD – which had around forty thousand personnel in all departments – was due to receive only two thousand doses of vaccine.  Perhaps that made a certain kind of sense, because many police officers would have been vaccinated long before all hell broke loose, yet it was a perverse waste of resources.  The other two thousand doses were going to be scattered among the medical personnel, where they might be useful, and a handful of unmarked categories.  It made absolutely no sense to her. 

She looked up towards the window, staring over the deserted field of cubicles towards her editor’s office.  He was on the list, of course, along with his family.  If she took the list to him, once she’d checked it carefully, he would order her to bury the story.  He wouldn't want to delay his family getting their vaccine.  She couldn't really blame him for that, but how could he be so selfish?  No, forget him; how could the
Mayor
be so selfish?  She looked back at the list of names and knew the answer.  The people who were due to receive their vaccines were among his strongest and wealthiest supporters, the ones who paid for his election campaign and his hoped-for march towards the White House. 

Mija felt a wave of anger bubbling up within her as she concealed the email and started to think.  How
dare
they do that to their city?  Did the Mayor not realise, she wondered, what would happen when the news got out, as it inevitably would?  New Yorkers would explode in fury when they realised that their Mayor was damaging the city with his selfish interests.  The doses of vaccine would have been far more useful given to medical personnel...

She scowled.  The
New York Times
would not publish the story, nor – looking at the other newspaper editors on the list – would any other newspaper.  The bloggers, on the other hand, would pick it up and run with it, assuming she forwarded it to them.  There would be outrage, of course, but there would be less outrage if the public discovered the truth before the vaccines arrived, or so she told herself.  The bottom line, she knew, was if the public had a right to know.

The answer was obvious.  The public had to know what was being done in their name.  Carefully, working with a frantic haste that would have attracted attention if she had been back in her cubical, she started to forward the email to certain bloggers.  By the time the Mayor realised there had been a leak, the information would already be out.

Mija just hoped that she had done the right thing.

You Americans have it easy.  A friendly neighbour, reall
y a satellite, to the north and a containable problem to the south, one you should be able to handle with ease.  We have enemies on all fronts, with a long history of European and Chinese invasions.  You prattle about the laws of war; we know the truth that war has no laws, or limits.  Your limits are a result of your impregnable position; our lack of them is a result of our vulnerable position.

- General (Minister of Defence) Igor Ivanovich Zaitsev

Moscow, Russia

Day 11

Unknown to most of the world’s population, the Kremlin extended far down below the surface of Moscow, spreading out like a giant iceberg, with most of its mass concealed below the water.  The building itself, a popular tourist destination for western tourists, was merely the entryway to a network of underground offices, bunkers and record storage sites that preserved secrets that dated all the way back to the Tsars.  Stalin and his successors had extended the network, linking it into the Moscow Underground and turning it into their base of operations during the Second World War and the Cold War.  The brief period of democracy in Russia hadn't impeded the expansion of the network in any way, even the upsurges of violence as ordinary Russians finally fought back against the oppressors hadn't touched the underground bases.  It had been preserved for Yeltsin and Putin, his successor.