The Messenger (11 page)

And nothing shows on her face. Nothing at all.

When entertainment and information merchants are proud of a show, there are always posters, shrines to promote the current hits produced or picked up by whatever corporation she’s visiting. Walls of smiling or smoldering young actors—boys still in the throes of puberty, girls waiting for the right guy.

Then there are the so-called reality shows, the business shows. Celebrity gossip and game shows. As one penetrates deeper into the well-appointed offices of the studios, the décor shifts, displaying memorabilia from more-venerable hits. Often she will recognize an actor’s face from a familiar role—Eva Longoria in
I segreti di Wisteria Lane
—but there are plenty of icons from television shows so ancient they are unintelligible, cultural artifacts that should be in a museum:
The Lone Ranger, I Love Lucy, Mork & Mindy
.

By late afternoon, she is dazed and needs to sit down somewhere to rest her feet and eyes.

It’s insane. Everywhere there is advertising. Where she looks, or where she chooses
not
to look—pays off for these people. Oh, it’s not much, but later, statistically, when she thinks of spending some money, she’ll make a decision. Usually that decision will be made in ignorance, with no hands-on knowledge. At that point she will pick a brand—maybe the last one she’s seen, or the first one that comes to mind, but always one that she
trusts
or
likes
. Those feelings can be measured, those feelings can be evoked with images. And it’s everywhere.

You can’t look away. They won’t let you.

America is the site of a good idea gone insane, she thinks. Its fragile psyche is propped up by a few precarious narratives. A hero will come along into the executive office. America is the biggest, the best, the most successful. She wins the most gold medals, has the meanest army, the highest tech. Americans are proud to respond should they be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. Good-looking and rich is nice, but ideally one should be intelligent and hardworking. Being a schoolteacher is a lousy job. Management is
what everyone should aspire to, even the workers; however, everyone knows that financial matters are complicated. Naturally this requires legions of specialists who actually run the economy, and that’s probably best—that the actual running of things should be left to the experts. Mathematically challenged need not apply.

America’s ego was protected by a shell of case-hardened bullshit. The myths and the propaganda were its armor. Here was the battle for the hearts and minds—in these towers above her. Up there, ambitious boys and girls her age stoked the fires of the mythmaking apparatus. Here the news was spun, stars were born, deals were cut, reputations were polished, and America tended her face. Once it was all gone her citizenry would be revealed for the cowering, naked dogs they were.

She finds herself standing at a corner, lost amid the rush of the city.

Suddenly … she needs to hide, to get away. Her stomach swirls. She changes course and abruptly goes into Macy’s, forces herself to walk along the aisles.

Panic, that’s what it is. Sudden, irrational panic. She is convinced that somebody is watching via the cameras in the ceiling, somebody is following her on a parallel aisle. She is careful not to break into a run, keeps to an easy stride, pretends to look at the merchandise as she goes, and once she gets across the great floor she pushes her way outside again and discovers she is next to the entrance to the subway. She turns, walking back the way she’s come, searching for the face of her pursuer …

But there is no one. Is it an omen, this unheard message from Creighton? At the very least she will have to change hotels. How long will her identity hold? She has no security. How long before the virus is discovered? Soon in Berlin, surely. The computer says a classic case of smallpox has a seven-day incubation period, but what if it’s “on steroids”? A few days? A few days at most. By then people will start to sicken and CIA agents will be searching for Patient Zero from among recent arrivals.

She goes down to the subway, puzzles out the fare machines, buys a MetroCard and pushes her way through the turnstiles. The
subway map confronts her—looking like nothing so much as one of those diagrams of the reproductive system. She finds her place on a mustard-colored vein.

As in any big city, it helps if you know where you’re going. New York has managed to confuse her. She is running out of time, and realizes that she will never be able to visit all the high-priority targets.

She edits her list down to a handful, but right away, at the Israeli consulate, she strikes out and is reduced to breathing on the glass that separates her from a stiff-faced guard. She attempts to give him a
Klic!
card but he waves it away and all she can do is lamely agree that, yes, it’s reasonable enough that people should phone for an appointment if they hope to book a publicity interview with the consular office. She offers to come back. Is there a more convenient time?

“This is not a tourist stop,” the guard says, stone-faced.

She smiles and promises she will do as he has suggested, then leaves, thinking that even if she were to follow the procedures, it would be just like the Israelis to run some kind of a computerized check on her and, upon turning up a big fat zero at
Klic!
’s offices in Rome, arrest her as she waits in the embassy foyer.

She walks down Second Avenue, frustrated, head down to avoid the hidden cameras on the roofs, thinking that it was probably stupid to even dream of taking on the hyper-paranoid Israelis, and that she’s moving way too fast and overreaching whatever plans her handlers had made for her.

But … that’s part of the problem. It’s something she should have at least asked about in Berlin. They never gave her any … any training, or any specifics, or even any advice. No time for the farewell message. Obviously the situations that are cropping up for her hourly were never anticipated.

The United Nations building is eerie because, for all its modernism, now it seems so old, everything a little shabby and out of style.

She takes a brief guided tour, asks if there might be any cute Italian boys that she can soul-capture for team
Klic!
By the time she’s
finished, it is after five and men and women are leaving in ones and twos. Should she trust her cell phone? Everybody knows they can be traced, the drones can track their signals. She’s been paranoid all day, and she knows she’s being paranoid now, but at the same moment, across the foyer, she spies what she thinks is probably the last bank of pay telephones in the city.

“May I speak to Mr. Creighton? I’m returning his call.”

“Your name, please?”

“Signorina Vermiglio.”

There is a beat.

“One moment,”
says the same voice. There is an accent, but it could be anyone, anywhere in the world.

She waits. Looks out on the street; smatterings of rain, fluttering flags from all the nations one can imagine.

She is waiting. Waiting for a long time.

Too long.

She hangs up and is out onto the plaza in a New York moment. She lines up behind three cabs’ worth of diplomats who have decided to knock off from solving the world’s problems. Others are arriving right behind her, all sorts of people—diplomats, translators, tourists. A welter of languages surrounds her. There are women in saris, men with strange braided hats; a troika of Africans moves to the head of the line just in front of her. She glances back to the entrance. A security guard has come out and is looking over at them.

She turns back, waiting while the Africans wedge themselves into the cab ahead of her. Finally it tears away from the curb and it’s her turn. “Pennsylvania Station,” she tells the cabdriver. As they leave, she looks again through the back window. Now there are two guards standing there.

Just standing there.

When they get to Penn Station, she walks all the way through and right out the other side and grabs another cab back to the hotel. The whole time she is thinking furiously.

If they know where she is already, they could have gotten her at
the hotel, could have followed her all day long and arrested her with ease. But they didn’t.

So, it’s definitely not the FBI or the CIA.

It has to be Ali, she thinks. It has to be.

She does not need or want another Burke, so she spends the evening alone, purchasing a rush ticket to the theater to see Helen Mirren in
The Glass Menagerie
. Her ticket to this decadent event costs a hundred and twenty dollars. The conceit is that a mother cannot allow her daughter any kind of adult independence. The men show no spine at all and are essentially cowardly. She doesn’t know the play and has never heard of Tennessee Williams. It is the movie star Helen Mirren that has attracted her, but in this production she speaks strangely and poses against the furniture. The set is meant to evoke a nightmare of deteriorating wooden houses, but looks only half built.

She watches as the daughter, played by a waiflike blonde, costumed like Alice in Wonderland, stumbles through the play and unrealistically falls for the man procured for her.

This is their art, she is thinking. This is the high art of the Christian conquerors, the race that extinguished its nomadic native peoples and laid waste, first to their own continent, and now the world. Still the same myths, she thinks. Reduced to its essence, it’s the same idiotic delusions that govern everything. All around her: retired people and greed, punctuated by the occasional starstruck teenager. The fine fabrics of the audience’s evening wear, everything rich and understated, even the designer blue jeans worn by the grad student who’s come to smirk at the very people he aspires to work with.

At the intermission she goes to the restroom, touches everything, reclaims her coat from the booth, tips lavishly and leaves.

It has rained during the first act, and now she walks through the wet streets surrounding Times Square. She is angry, perhaps feverish. Her brain fizzing. Thinking that this is truly
it
 … she has shot herself into the pituitary of the United States, the center of its terrible
urges and repressions. If the SUV with the amateur bomb had gone off a few years back, there would be a curfew here now. But instead New York still flaunts its hedonism amid dazzling lights, barely concealed pornography, conspicuous consumption, and the promise of unbridled wish fulfillment.

But she has won. The arrow has struck home.

All around her the digital whirlwind grows, changes, refreshes. This is what it feels like, she thinks—the fabled Big Apple buzz. In the distance are the omnipresent sirens. But the people continue their laughing, their faces contorted like denizens of hell. There is music playing from some boom box, and a group of boys in fat pants are dancing on flattened refrigerator boxes and passing a wool cap around. She tries to imagine an explosion—the shattered glass, the choking smoke, the screams …

She looks up into the beginnings of a new rain. Above her is a huge flashing sign, a billion LED pixels all to display a movie star promising beauty that will last forever.

It will not happen.

Back at the Grand, a man gets in the elevator with her. He smiles. He is white, young, and fit. He could be a cop, or a CIA agent, or … just a guy. For a moment she thinks about letting him have the car to himself, or pushing the button for a lower floor and getting out. But he stares straight ahead and, when she gets off, stays behind. “Good night …” he says quietly as the doors slide shut.

She walks down the carpeted hallway. It’s empty. Somewhere she can hear a muffled television from one of the rooms. At the end of the hall, someone has a tray out for room service to pick up.

Another two paces and behind her she hears a door being unlatched.

She keeps on going. Waiting for something, listening for steps on the carpet. She tries to pick up reflections from the glass in the framed art on the walls, but can’t. Has to walk on. Hearing nothing, when she turns the corner she takes an opportunity to look back.

Nothing. Whoever it was has disappeared.

Her skin has gone clammy. Her face, drained of blood. Her heart is rippling like a scared bird.

The keycard in the lock. The light turns green. She pushes open the door.

Nothing. Everything’s normal. She stops at the threshold and looks back down the hall. Nothing.

A maid has come in and turned down the bed. There is a cluster of chocolates waiting on her pillow.

No message light. She exhales, sits on the bed and rubs her face. There is a headache that is lurking back behind her eyes.

Less than thirty seconds later, after she has kicked off her shoes and pulled the cork out of the wine bottle, the room telephone rings.

“Yes?”

“Good evening, Ms. Vermiglio. Front desk—”

“Yes?”

“In preparation for checkout, would you like us to have your bill sent up, then all you have to do is sign it in the morning?”

“My checkout?”

“Yes, ma’am, we have you checking out tomorrow? Checkout is at eleven, and this way it speeds it up for you.”

“My checkout?”

“I’m sorry, just let me look at … Yes, ma’am, that’s what I’ve got here …”

“Yes,” she says. “I see.”

In the night, anthrax spores are found at four additional Atlanta area locations—two new ones at the CDC (underground parking lot, main complex bathrooms) and two more across the street at Emory University (student union washroom and Biology Department offices). Back at the field office Sam Watterman puts in a call to Norment, and is informed that the director is busy and cannot be reached at the moment, but will return his call.

An hour later more white powder is discovered in the waiting room at the headquarters of the Atlanta Police Department, and
over the next half hour come reports of spilled powder on the floor at St. Joseph’s Hospital and inside the Atlanta Medical Center.

Well, for the CDC it’s no longer being handled quietly, Sam thinks, and he is not surprised when no call comes in from Norment, who actually is busy right now.