The Messenger (10 page)

The front of the entertainment section is gone, so she reads what’s left—the continuation of an article about an experimental theater company’s production of a show on Eadweard Muybridge, an analysis of how Broadway’s recruitment of Hollywood “stars” has become the default business plan on the Great White Way—

“Here you go, I’m done with this …” It is the cute guy. He hands her the sports section, which boasts a half-page photograph of a gap-toothed hockey player.

“Thank you,” she says.

He nods and smiles.

And it would be so easy, she thinks.

And she could make him stay.

She could make him talk to her for a little longer.

He has gone now, that smile like smoke.

A big event.

That night she returns to the Grand International, puts her camera battery in the recharger, and holes up with room service calamari and a bottle of red wine. The movie is an old one,
Giant
, with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean in a triangle. It’s one of those movies that is a lot like the city, she thinks. She’s never seen the whole thing, just little snippets of it, and she marvels at Dean’s twitches and his sloppy voice and the way Hudson and Taylor are consumed by greed, love, and ambition.

Inexplicably, she bursts into tears, her chest hurts, and she coughs several times.

… symptoms begin much like an ordinary influenza …
Perhaps this is it, she thinks.

Once Rock Hudson gets old, he gets real, and he and Taylor continue their epic tiff while Daria sits there, dabbing at her face with a wet washcloth. She is too tired, she realizes. She is doing too much. She has to take care of herself. She has to be prudent. She has to hold on. She takes the wine, turns the cork over and wedges it back down into the bottle, puts everything over on the night table.

And at that moment she notices the message light on the telephone.

She hadn’t seen it before. Has it been on since she came in? She had ordered room service and then stepped into the shower, her hair capped, washing with rubber gloves. She’d only been in there long enough to shower and towel herself dry—two or three minutes. She hadn’t heard anything.

Then she’d come out and clicked through the channels until she’d landed on
Giant
. There hadn’t been any calls.

She picks up and gets the switchboard, and is instructed to hold for her message. After a pop and a whirr of static, a robotized woman’s voice comes on.

“Your message at 8:42 p.m., from Mr. Creighton. Please return call to: area code seven-seven …”
Daria scrambles for a pen and
rushes to take down the number, is so flustered that she thanks the nonhuman operator, and hangs up.

She boots up the laptop, opens her email, and looks in Drafts. Nothing.

Outside it has grown windy; she can feel the force of the gusts against the tall windows of the hotel.

She has no idea who Mr. Creighton might be.

M
r. Creighton gets in her head and will not let her sleep.

They could take her now, she thinks, tossing and turning in the immense bed in her hotel room. She’s got her clothes laid out because she is going to get a very early start, prodded by the advent of Mr. Creighton on the line. Maybe they’ll take her in the morning at the front desk, but wouldn’t it be easier just to come up in the wee hours? They might pick the lock, jam a needle into her arm and smother her like they did Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

Okay. So why not? What’s stopping them? There’s been no bust, so Creighton has to be Ali. And he’s calling because something is wrong. Whatever it is, it’s too important to leave in a hotel message.

Unable to let it go, she falls asleep, wakes up, rolls over. Not quite like sleep, more like an enforced rest. She gets out of bed, boots up the laptop and checks the drafts of her email—

Nothing there, nothing on Facebook, nothing tweeted to her at
Klic!
, nothing texted to her phone. Nothing. She paces around the room until she gets chilled and then goes back to bed. Sleep. That’s all she wants. Oblivion.

The thing to do is to get out in the morning and return the call
to Creighton when she can. Then work her way down the list of targets. Stay on schedule, right? The thing to do is work harder. If she is going to be caught, then she should make it as inconvenient as possible for her pursuers. Work it, as they say.

She finally does fall asleep and then awakes with a start, having left the curtains open. The sound of distant honking, the occasional siren. Below her is Broadway.

It’s showtime, she thinks.

Back in his tenure, there used to be several ways to get into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention complex, but today there is only one, guarded by a platoon of black-clad emergency response police.

Lansing drives, with Barrigar in the front. Watterman sits in the back and waits while they pass through security and park beside what looks like a construction contractor’s mobile office. It has been elevated on railroad ties to allow for plumbing, and along one side is a ramp to comply with the disability laws. The ramp intersects with a set of plywood stairs at an Astroturfed landing in front of an orange door. Duct-taped to the door is a sheet of paper with a single word—
DIRECTOR
—printed across it.

Inside, taking up one end of the trailer, is a shabby foyer with two desks, a landline, a laser printer, and a door that a nervous aide opens for them.

Joe Norment, the current director of the CDC, is on the telephone, he waves at them to take a seat while he finishes his conversation. There are two good chairs, which Watterman and Barrigar take, and Lansing decides to stand.

“Green grows the grass, Teddy, just remember that.” Norment laughs and hangs up, extends his hand. It’s been about eight years since Watterman has laid eyes on the man. They shake.

“How are you, Sam?”

“Not that good, actually. Maggie’s sick, and I want to get back to the house.”

“Give her my best and tell her that I’m still pulling for the Mets,” he says. That pinched mouth, watery little eyes. A true devious mouse. Some stupid joke from the era of Mookie Wilson.

“I hope they give you the resources you’re going to need, Joe,” Sam says.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Norment asks him.

“I’ve risen from the dead.”

“Dr. Watterman is consulting for us,” Barrigar says.

“More taxpayers’ money going down the drain, because there’s nothing for you to do, Sam. It’s under control.”

“Well, that’s great,” Watterman says, turning to Barrigar. “Maybe I could go back home now. It’s not that far.”

“We’re here to coordinate and liaise, Dr. Norment.” Barrigar says it flatly.

“Sure. Sam and I know each other from way back, don’t we, Sam?”

“Yep, from way back.” Norment is short, fair, and more bald now than Sam remembers. The kind of man who uses what little friendliness he can manufacture only if he wants something. An animal of the bureaucracy. It’s been so long since Sam’s hung out with any of these people that he’s forgotten what they are like. It’s almost a shock to see Norment still alive. Still working away. Well, it’s the run-up to flu season. The CDC is probably busy.

“Okay, Sam, I’ll give you and the FBI my report. But weren’t you in on the conference call last night?”

“Oh, yes.” He’d waited all night for the conference call, and then it was just like it had always been, layers of obfuscation and bullshit. No one speaking directly. Not that he had much choice about it—in the end he’d agreed to consult for the FBI because he needed the job—but listening to the voices over the line he was secretly glad he’d been out of the hurly-burly for all those years. Maybe Amerithrax was the best thing that ever happened to him.

“Well, there’s no news since then. Yes, we’ve detected anthrax spores in three locations here at the CDC and at one location at DeKalb General Hospital.” Norment sat back in his chair, shrugged and turned his hands up to the sky as if to say
That’s it
.

“Right. That’s what you said last night. How come they’ve got you in the portable, Joe?”

“My building is under quarantine. Look, if you’re a consultant, maybe you should consult.”

“Sure. Have you got a look at it yet?”

“No. Not personally.” It figured, Sam realized. Absurd as it was, Norment was never a microscope guy.

“So, not having looked at it, you don’t know if …”

“If it’s weaponized? Something as exotic as Bruce Ivins could have made? Something imported from
Russia
? I rather doubt that, Sam.”

“What about samples stored here?”

“All accounted for.”

“No information on any likely suspects? Anybody get fired, or book off work and not sign in the last couple of days?”

“No,” Barrigar says quietly.

“Come on, Sam. This is your specialty, isn’t it?” Norment is smiling.

“Have you started checking all the other vectors?”

“Such as?”

“There’s a university right across the street. Some international students over there, I’d guess. That’s worth a test. Maybe the airport—gee, where else? Maybe the federal buildings, the draft board, the nearest synagogue …”

“Sure you would, Sam. The draft board? Yeah, sure, that’s exactly what you’d do. And you’d start a panic. Blow things out of proportion. We’ve got three
little
sites. My boys and girls tell me these are minimal. And we’ve managed to handle things quietly.”

“So, somebody walked in, dumped some spores on the floor …”

“Yes. That’s exactly what happened. All our people have been vaccinated already—that’s new since your day—we’re already cleaning up, and I’ll be back in my office by the first of the week.” Norment smiles.

“There’s a list of vectors. For the Atlanta area, for DeKalb County. It might be out of date, but it’s a start. You can look it up. It might give you something to do, Joe.”

“I’ve got plenty to do, Sam. Thanks, it’s been fun chatting. Love to Maggie.” Barrigar has been in enough pissing contests to know when it’s time to leave, and he finally stands. Sam is already at the door when he hears the agent’s voice behind him.

“Dr. Norment, we’re sending out an investigation team today. We’ll be wanting to interview your staff.”

“This hasn’t got anything to do with my staff! This is from outside, definitely.
Interview my staff?
That’s absurd,” Norment says, his voice rising.

Watterman turns and watches him. It is really weird. Like déjà vu all over again.
Absurd
. A decade earlier, he had said almost exactly the same thing. Almost the same thing.

Word for word.

Most of the morning talk shows have audiences. She lines up for standby tickets for
The View
and gets in. Smiles, applauds, waits as the room heats up. Whoopi and Joy are professional and engaging and Whoopi makes a few jokes during the commercials. Daria takes the opportunity to leave, visit the bathrooms, shake people’s hands. She texts Creighton, gets nothing back and as she walks across the city tries calling, but the number just rings a dozen times and goes dead.

She works her way from
Good Morning America
and over to NBC for the
Today
show. Eventually she washes up at Fox and has to wait for almost a half hour before being shuffled off to Kyle, who is gay—outrageous with orange streaks in his hair and wearing some kind of shiny lotion for his skin.

He tells her that there aren’t any jobs at all, but “You speak languages, so that’s good.” He leans back in his chair, eyes her narrowly. “And you’re hot enough. I mean that in a good way.”

They laugh. He takes her information and an infected
Klic!
card and walks her back to the lobby.

She uses her cell to try Creighton again, with no result, and decides to try for
Martha Stewart
. Now she cannot help looking around to see if she is being followed, but the city is so busy they
could be anywhere. She has grown used to the gusting winds down the canyons of buildings, but now there is a change. The weather has turned, perhaps for the first time of the season. It’s going to rain, she decides.

Martha’s show starts at two; she pays to get into the studio audience and repeats her tactics there, and is out by midafternoon.

She takes on all the great networks one by one. Visits their stages if she can get in, or calls on corporate offices and sets up ad hoc job interviews. They all love the languages, and she’s obviously vivacious enough to do PR, so she gets good penetration. She’s in her good clothes—the tight little suit and the big lethal hair. Killer fragrance and the smile nailed on, and off she goes.

She infects everyone at MTV, but gets nervous when one of their marketing clones decides to do a search on
Klic!
She smiles and steps out of his office to take a call, puts the phone to her ear and just keeps going out onto the street.

It feels good. It feels wonderful. She’s on top and if the germs on her hands are still good, she’s taking God’s revenge with every breath she takes, every taxicab, every elevator button pushed, every handshake. She runs on espresso and chocolate, and is not shy about taking on targets of opportunity. She goes into the
New York Times
offices and asks to put in an ad, then stops the whole process to think about maybe buying a bigger one, or maybe she should talk to someone else about proposals for
Klic!
’s upcoming U.S. market launch. With newspapers tanking and ad revenues sinking, they bend over backwards to accommodate her.

Elevators rising, falling.

At one point she catches sight of herself in a mirror—a buzzing Italian diva, bursting out of her fitted power shirt, heels drilling all the way down into the diseased psyche of the Americans. Like a leper hiding under layers of theatrical makeup. Shameful, decaying, and broken. She glimpses herself in the reflections on windows, on polished granite, in the facets of revolving doors, lenses of security cameras … Now she is a brain virus, she thinks. Some germ that divides and divides, leaving the victim berserk, memories lost, perceptions gone awry. She will spark nightmares, hallucinations, delusions.
Now they will talk in tongues and flay themselves as they are driven mad.