The Messenger (15 page)

In the rear windows float the names of universities: Duke, Harvard, Tech, each with its attendant symbol. A blue devil, a demon deacon … a snapping turtle. The specialty license plates are a crowd of political statements as well. There are veterans, of course, veterans everywhere, young ones and ancient ones who should not even be on the road. There are people who believe passionately in the beauty of their state, the virginity of Virginia, the willingness of North Carolinians to take up flying. There are fish and Darwinian amphibians, and fish eating smaller fish. Twisted magnetic ribbons of various colors adorn the tailgates and trunk lids of many of these cars—more advocacy. All these people choosing sides and making alliances so frenetically, and yet there they are, stuck in traffic going slower than a tired dog can walk.

She plugs in, turns up the volume, and tries to sink deeper into her role. She will get rid of the huge rolling suitcase, take a change of clothes and her toothbrush and stuff it all into the first backpack she can find. She’s going to look like a young American, not a tourist. She won’t have much money, and she’s going to travel light.

An hour later the bus turns off the crowded superhighway at a town called Mount Airy and half the passengers get out while only two get on. One is a young soldier, all his hair shaved off on the sides and only fractionally longer on top, a fully stuffed backpack on his shoulder, dressed in sagebrush-colored fatigues that have some sort of dazzling pattern printed on the fabric. From a distance
he probably thinks he looks like the desert floor, she imagines. Still, he is smiling and, seeing her, wedges his gear into the seats behind him and then takes up the row across from her.

She thinks that she should kill him. Be friends and kill him. If she were thinking clearly, wasn’t terrified and on the run, she could do it. All it would take is a smile. She looks over at him, his face sunburned from the training, new muscles bulging beneath his shirt.

“How far is it to Frederick, do you know?” she asks.

“Hell, with the traffic like this here and with everything that’s goin’ down, it’ll take at least another hour. Everybody’s been called in …”

“Is it very big?”

“Frederick? Nah, it’s not that big. It’s pretty small really, just a medium-sized place.”

“Can I get a room there?” she asks. The boy looks at her for a moment and then out to the highway as once again they grind to a halt.

“I guess … you oughta be able. Sure.” Then, after referring to the outside again—“But I don’t know … everything’s real crazy right now.”

“But I could find a hotel, or …”

“Oh, yeah. Sure, you can find
something
 … You oughta be able to …”

“I just need to stay one night.”

“Well, one of my buds has a girlfriend and she’s up in Chicago right now, so he could maybe fix you up at her place …”

“I should try the hotel first …”

“Nah, come on, save your cash. When we get there I’ll … hold on.” The young man pulls out his cell phone and punches in a number. “Hey-oh …” he says a few seconds later.

They are going through a long stretch of fields and distant developments of huge houses, almost identical, set into rows that drape across the recently cleared hills. All around the new houses are scars of fresh orange soil; elsewhere these have been patched over with fresh ribbons of turf. The houses are, like the cars, variations on the
same theme, all the same palette of colors—beige, white, or, on rare occasions, leaf green.

“Beam me up, Mr. Scott. Airborne …” the soldier says, snaps the phone shut, and winks at her. “He’ll get back to me, no sweat.”

His name is Aaron and he is a skateboarder who wasn’t good at school and enlisted for the occupational training. It’s pretty good. Now he has money for the first time in his life, and the Army will let him go to college if he gets accepted. The way he talks it sounds like a good business proposition. He has been in for nine months.

A few minutes later his cell rings and he exchanges cryptic comments, looks over and makes the “okay” sign, smilingly describes her as a “close friend,” and then snaps the phone shut.

His moods seem to alternate between hyperaggressive and scared child, and all she has to do is listen to him. Sooner or later he will make, or feel that he has to make, a move on her. The apartment has been arranged. Scott is going to meet them with the key, and Daria can stay there all weekend if she wants.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe this is a bad idea …” She doesn’t actually calculate before she says it. It just comes out. Maybe she doesn’t want to kill him; he’s such a child.

“Hey, look … I’ll let you in, and maybe I’ll come by in the morning and we can have breakfast or something, but I’m not going to be around, so … there’s not a … not a …”

“Okay. If you’re sure.”

“Everybody’s coming in. I was sitting there with my aunt Neenee and the phone rang, and that’s it for this po’ boy …” When he says that “everybody is coming in,” she learns that his unit has been called to duty. “Because of the terrorist thing …” he says. And she realizes that he means Tété.

“If we run up on anything like that, if the FBI finds something that they think is a biological agent or a chemical agent, that’s when the alert goes.” He works at Fort Detrick, he tells her. Security and administration at “… You-sam-rid,” he says.

“What? What is that?” she says, even as she starts to remember it from her research.

“Fort Detrick’s the home base for USAMRIID.” He spells it out for her. “The United States Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases—the government’s medical labs. It’s sorta like the Centers for Disease Control down in Atlanta, except we’re military. Chemical warfare branch, germ warfare, biological warfare countermeasures, all that kinda stuff. It’s a spooky place. Scientists doing experiments. Very scary, you know?”

“I guess …” she says, amazed at the coincidence, and continuing to listen. She can tell he’s impressed by the place.

“Oh, yeah, it’s nervous-making shit, girl. You don’t know what’s going to come outta them chimneys. And something goes into effect, like this goof down in D.C., we go operational. So … I’m not going to be bothering you very much, okay? What’s your name, little sister?” He smiles at her.

“Maria …”

“Where are you from?”

“Hollywood,” she says.

“I guess so. How come you’re going to Frederick?”

“I just had to get out of Baltimore.” She shrugs. “There was this guy …”

“Sure. Yeah. Okay …”

“So, I just up and left. Thanks for the loan of the apartment …”

“Nah, hey. It’s nothing … You take your time.”

When they get there, Scott turns out to be a ferret-faced fellow soldier whose girlfriend, Tina, is coming back after the weekend. She’s been contacted, and said it’s okay, on the condition that “Maria” keeps the place clean, pays for anything she breaks, keeps the noise down, and replaces the groceries. He looks over at Aaron. “There’s a gas station that sells sandwiches and stuff over there, and a KFC down at the mall; I guess that’s about it.”

“It’s good enough,” she says.

Scott heads back to his car and rumbles out of the parking lot.

Aaron unlocks the door and they wander through the stale-smelling rooms. The apartment is actually more like a townhouse, with a kitchen that opens onto a living room and a single bedroom upstairs. Aaron gives her the tour. It all smells of cigarettes and stale
beer, and if she weren’t already infected, she’d be afraid to touch the linen or step in the shower. Maybe it was a mistake to have taken up Aaron on his charity.

“Is this going to be okay for you?” he asks. Great big scared eyes, like a kitten.

“It’s really great. Thank you,” she says, blowing him a little kiss from the top of the stairs.

“Hey, Maria, I might get off tonight, who knows?” he says as he heads out, slinging the heavy pack over his shoulder.

“You can come back, if you want.” It’s actually beautiful to see how happy he is when she offers.

He raises his hand in a little salute. “ ’Re-viderchi,” he says, still smiling.

S
he did the sheets in hot and hot, ran them through the dryer, and tried to decide if she should use Tina’s bed or make a place for herself on the sofa.

At nine the telephone rang; Aaron calling to say that, because of the emergency, he wouldn’t be able to make it over, but that he would try to come by in the morning. Also there was some bad news, he said. Scott wanted her gone tomorrow. It didn’t matter that he had vouched for her. Scott claimed Tina was pissed off about the arrangement, but Aaron didn’t believe him.

She cleaned up the apartment as she went. It wasn’t really dirty, but it looked like Tina had left in a rush. Things undone, clothes still in the dryer. Food left in the fridge while she was in Chicago doing whatever she was doing.

Tina’s real name was Celestina Pedroza. Scott, in his role as caretaker, had managed to pick up the mail and dump it in a cardboard box next to the sink. There was a sheaf of unpaid bills, photographs magnetized to the refrigerator door. Several were of children, and a woman she decided was Tina holding babies. A thin, dark woman, long brunette hair, and a look in her eye that said she might have a taste for the wild side. Bottles in the garbage, a bong
hidden in a drawer beneath the TV, and in the night table two boxes of condoms, lube, and a vibrator zipped inside a white nylon pouch. On the bedroom windowsill was a shoe box half full of letters to Tina. In Spanish with stamps from Honduras.

She unpacked and weeded out her clothes. Maybe Tina could do something with them. Supposedly they were loaded with whatever germ she was carrying. Where would be the best place to leave them? For now they got laid out on the recliner facing the television.

While she was waiting for the laundry and cleaning up a place for herself to sleep, she plugged in her laptop on the kitchen counter. There was a weak unsecured connection in the building—someone called Zappz—but she connected and found Baltimore on a map, and then discovered Frederick to the west. By increasing the scale of the map, she zoomed down to where she thought the apartments were … on the northwest side of town.

And there she was. Just down the road from USAMRIID—the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Amazing, she thought. Amazing coincidence. The opportunity made her dizzy as between Wikipedia and the “you-sam-rid” website she learned more about Fort Detrick. As a target, it was too important to pass up, but the problem, especially now that Tété had been caught, was how to get inside.

She found the television remote under a throw pillow on the sofa, flipped through channels to the news, and waited through a commercial for the latest disinfecting mop, and a preview for a television series about cops pushed beyond the edge. An animated vortex dissolved to reveal the genial host who promised—

Almost immediately there was a fresh set of commercials, for chocolates, for absorbent towels, for more-fuel-efficient vehicles not yet built, for Viagra, for health insurance no matter how unhealthy
you might be, a promotional clip for an upcoming football game … Then Tété’s mug shot filled the screen. A caption across his neck read,
THE FACE OF TERROR
.

Tariq Abdel Sawalha had been captured after acting suspiciously in the corridors beneath the Library of Congress, where someone noticed him sprinkling “a white powder” near a heating vent.

The sheets and pillowcases ended their cycle in the dryer, and she went upstairs and made the bed. There was a great woolen blanket, and a sleeping bag on top of that, and she took them out to the front steps and shook them out.

When she came back to the television, there was an older man in a policeman’s uniform talking at a press conference. Under his voice she could hear the spasms of the flash cameras.

She returned the blanket to the bed and then watched more of the news. Now a man in a suit, younger, his face a serious mask, had taken the podium and was briefing the press on the effort to undo
Tété’s work. She could tell by the panic in the reporters’ voices how scared they were.

Good.

She went out to find the “KFC,” which, after a glimpse of its towering illuminated sign picturing a smiling old man in a strange tie, she realized was the famous fast-food franchise. There was one in Rome that was always full of tourists. Outside, while she was waiting for her order, there was a loud rumble of exhaust.

A car was driving up. It was wide and low, painted orange with black flames, and when the motor was switched off, a series of tiny black lights winked out in sequence under the wheel wells and behind the grille.

Four soldiers came in and placed an order. They were dressed in fatigues, like Aaron’s, and their shoulders bore the same insignia. They looked at her while they were ordering, and one actually smiled. When her number was called, she paid for her box of chicken, biscuit, and something called “coleslaw,” and took it across the parking lot and back up the sidewalk to the apartment.

In the fridge door was half a bottle of chardonnay, and she sat in the recliner, ate her KFC meal and flipped through the channels.