The Messenger (21 page)

When Lansing comes back he sits and brings him up to date: “The Germans have tracked Khan through Berlin. Also we know that two men met him in Vienna, but he was ticketed to travel alone. That suggests he met accomplices in each city.”

“That all sounds reasonable, Mike, but I’m not really law enforcement …”

“Sure, I’m just informing you, Doc. So, they are producing a database, everybody who flew in and out of Berlin, right? Everybody in the Adlon. Hotels in Europe make you surrender your passports. We’ve got Khan in Vienna to distribute the anthrax to Sawalha plus one more; after that he goes to Berlin and starts spreading out this Berlin pox. Did anybody brief you about the anthrax that was released in Israel last week?”

“That’s news to me.”

“Okay. Supposedly it’s chemically different or something, so says NIH.”

“Well … that just implies a level of cooperation, coordination.”

“Yes, it does. Arrangements, alliances, that’s conspiracy. Could Khan pull this kind of thing off?”

“He’s a germ guy, not an administrator.”

For a moment Lansing looks disappointed. “Well, we know that
Khan is just one part of it. You said we should go for the creator, and he’s admittedly the kind of guy who could develop the stuff, but if there’s two varieties of anthrax samples, that would indicate at least one other source, a different scientist who also developed his own batch of anthrax. The labs supposedly say they can back that up.”

“Nightmare,” Watterman says.

“But, okay. Here’s the big news for today. When they coordinated the Berlin database with INS and airport arrivals, they came up with two names. People in school with Sawalha. Plus three more who attended other language schools in Florence, Italy.”

“I know where Florence is.”

“So, that means possibly eight, nine, let’s say maybe ten that Khan kicked off just by himself. Could he administer something like that?”

“All to the United States?”

“No. I don’t know. This is all happening right now, Doc. Not just here, probably in other places too.”

“Right, right …”

Watterman stands up from the seat. His back is stiff. Everything hurts. Anthrax starts off feeling like a flu. Maybe he’s allergic to the Cipro he’s been gulping every four hours. India, London, Beijing, he is thinking.

“Go get me a line into Joe Norment and people from NIH right away. We’ve got to get some real hard focus on this Berlin strain of smallpox variola. If I’m going to be any good, I need that as fast as possible. What’s happening there? They must be on that already—”

“Smallpox samples are supposedly en route.”

“Well, look, make sure that Joe gets his share. It doesn’t matter about identifying the strains or finding the source, all the cop shit can come after. It doesn’t matter what everybody else is doing, okay? We’re looking for a tweak. It’s the DNA structure of the Berlin smallpox strain we need to focus on, okay? You’re going to get that rolling for me?”

“Sure, okay.”

“Genie is out of the bottle now.…”

* * *

Louisville isn’t much. An old city walled off from an older river by a network of awkwardly placed highways. She has ridden this last part of her voyage by city bus, almost empty except for members of what Americans call their “underclass”—bulging black women with shopping bags and sore ankles, undocumented refugees, and rickety old men wearing embroidered baseball caps with cryptic names of ships now in mothballs.

It is the America you never see on television, the drab part with termites and a bad smell coming from the dumpster. Nothing funky or cool. No beatbox or wah-wah pedal, only the bottom of the pyramid—the place where America eats her own, the fuel the leviathan must consume to keep going.

Daria gets off the bus when she sees a group of poverty-stricken wretches lined up around a church. It is a food bank, and, not having a place to live or cook, she really doesn’t need their particular type of charity. But spending a few minutes in the line gets her directed to the Salvation Army’s women’s shelter just around the block, and she hefts the pack over her shoulder and walks along, past the soot-encrusted bricks of the old city.

She is lucky, she is told. There are remaining beds, and she is read the rules—no drugs, no weapons, no alcohol. One of the black-clad “nuns” that officiate in the building gives her permission to check her pack into a locker.

She discovers additional rules—everyone must share in the task of keeping the shelter clean while they are in residence. Two meals are served, at times posted on the dining room wall. There is a curfew of 11:00 p.m. Smoking is allowed only on the patio deck.

She hides in a bathroom cubicle and changes her bandage. The flesh around the shallow bullet hole has swollen and is tender. When she pushes on it a clear liquid oozes from the wound. She will have to wait to dig out the bullet, wait until there is somewhere she can scream in private. She tapes herself back up, and when the announcement is made, she goes out to the grotty dining room for her evening meal.

It is like dining in a prison, she supposes—a glop of creamed ground beef with noodles and a cheese sauce, a few leaves of lettuce, and a puddle of peas and carrots. Sweetened iced tea to wash it all down. It is a diet that would lead you straight into addiction if you were not there already.

There is a common area, and she sits in an overstuffed donated armchair, tries to stop scratching at her skin, takes shallow breaths, and watches while the other women flip around the channels. Sooner or later they land on the news. When it’s too depressing they flip away, but it only comes up again.

Someone has flipped until the channel ends up on a war documentary. The black-and-white footage of American soldiers is plentiful: young men laboring in the hot Pacific sun passing ammunition boxes up a sandbank, young men cleaning their ancient weapons, young men being carried back on improvised stretchers. The then-president, a grim face Daria remembers but cannot name, makes a terrible announcement. A day of infamy. American historic trauma, relived over and over … Geriatric survivors remembering how the kamikaze was the terror weapon of the day. Someone changes the channel.

Daria looks around the room. Here too most of the women are black; it’s no surprise to her now, this flip side of the land of opportunity. The women are “Black” in the same way that she is an “Arab,” which is to say not black or Arabian at all, but simply nonwhite. The ultimate sin. All sinners—all ages, from girls barely
emerging from their teenage years, to women who are pregnant, to the old and infirm. Beaten and abused, addicts and alcoholics who lost hope long ago and who have given up on finding it again.

It is race, yes, but it is also class that brings these women to the shelter. They have no money, few skills, little motivation, a long history of defeat, and a dearth of expectations. All that waits for them on the streets is exploitation, poverty, and violence. They huddle over their cups of stale coffee, fortify their soup with crackers, and scuttle out to the patio to smoke their cigarettes. They are scarred and tattooed, outside and in. Some talk like men, and some don’t talk at all. All they want is to get through the night.

Each day these women are confronted by alternative visions of what they ought to have been, compared and contrasted with their present degradation. There is no shortage of encouragement that only drives the depression in deeper. Advice. Programs. Abstinence. Empowerment. All delivered as if they are sparkling brand-new ideas. All they have to do is look around! There are plenty of models out there—not just fashion models—whose presence serves to remind them of the intelligent choices they missed. Even if they turn away they are rewarded with advertisements—fabulous Amanda Seyfried wearing mascara to make her eyes look even better. Charlize Theron selling perfume. Could these women afford that? Will they ever attain even a fraction of that white perfection? Smell better for whom? To what end?

Down a hellish catwalk the women of the shelter flounce, failing once more to put their not-so-dainty feet right in front of each other, failing to display the designer’s clothing at its best, failing to have good hair, smooth skin, to purse their lips just so. Failing, failing, always failing.

These women are victims, and she, Daria, has no business being there. Why pass along her germs to these poor sisters? She should be at Fort Knox, just down the street; she should invent some way to crash the gates, shoot her way into the bullion room and die in a hail of gunfire. Would they get the message then? Would they understand that the enforced blessings that the nuns require before serving them the god-awful evening meal are only an additional indignity, a mere distraction from the cruelest of jokes?

Because no Jesus is coming to save these women.

When Watterman finally gets permission to call home, it’s too late and Maggie is “resting comfortably,” a nurse’s voice assures him. He is using Chamai’s secure cell, stumbling along a few paces behind him down a wet path that extends along the outside of the long steel wall, while the young man struggles with the zipper of his tent-like
FBI windbreaker. They are taking the opportunity because the building is going to be locked down soon and access to the outside will be forbidden.

The wind is up, rushing down the valleys between the wooded hills. Far across the factory roofs, he can see the trees bending as a weakening hurricane Joyce tries to spawn tornadoes in her wake. Crappy weather. The cold would help preserve the disease and the wind would spread it, but then again, the rain might help wash it out of the air …

“… and she’s got plenty of spare tanks for now anyways …”

“You sound different. Which one are you?” he asks the nurse.

“I’m Alice. I’ve been here twice now.”

“What happened to Irene?”

“Irene got sick and had to stop.”

It causes him to stop on the wet path.
“Goddamn it …”
Chamai’s voice floats back to him on the wind; he’s still trying to fix his jacket.

“You’re okay, though? Was Irene
quarantined
, do you know?” Sam’s voice quavers.

“No, sir. She really does only have the flu.”

“Okay, okay. And everything is fine? What about her eating? She doesn’t eat that well at the best of times.”

“She’s eating everything.”

“She is?”

“She did at dinner. I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

For some reason he doesn’t want to hang up, even on this distant voice, so courteous that it will tell him anything he wants to hear. “And is she sleeping? Her sleep can get thrown off easy, you know?”

“She’s sleeping okay. If she watches her show, she watched
Dances with the Stars
tonight. She likes Edgar, he’s the one from Brazil.”

“Right, right …”

“And we talked about your daughter, and she showed me the pictures. You know, I lost a child myself.”

“Oh …” His heart stops. His tongue feels like lead. “I’m so sorry,” he manages to reply.

“Yes, I did, Dr. Watterman, so I sympathize, because I know how hard it can be.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. Yes. Thank you,” he says to … Alice. Chamai has kept on walking, leaving him … 
immobile
there on the path. Finally the boy has zipped his windbreaker up, and now is patting his pockets looking for a cigarette. Sam sags back against the steel wall, bends over staring at the grass path. Yes, he thinks, yes, how hard it can be.

“But, to tell the truth, I think she liked speaking about her, you know? Remembering the good times?”

“Yes …” Watterman says, his voice almost a whisper. He has never, will never like talking about it. Never. What can you say about a drunk driver that hasn’t already been said? What can you say about a beautiful girl eradicated just as she was becoming a woman? Nothing. Nothing at all. So why do it? Why go there? Why try to revive her, preserve her? It’s unrealistic. His beautiful Amy. He could love her until the day he died, but she wasn’t coming back.

“… and then she had a cookie and her tea and she watched her show and now she’s sleeping like a baby.”

“Good,” he says. “Thank you, Alice,” he says.

So … in the end there are no real problems. Even in the middle of an apocalypse, everything is fine.

He and Chamai stand there in the windy silence and watch the dark hills, the low clouds speeding over the obscene buildings. The boy likes to talk, and Watterman has learned from him that there are tunnels that are being opened so that a second of the adjacent chicken-farm buildings can be used. Everyone seems to feel good about it. Energized. The Department of Homeland Security is throwing resources at them, so they must be doing something right.