The Messenger (29 page)

Blood has value, so the wording of his message has to be careful. The important thing is to open the lines of communication.

He turns in his list to Barrigar and frets while he waits for approval.
Walks through the bulletin board gallery in the situation room, where someone has taken down Namar Yaghobi’s photographs.

Yaghobi dead equates to one more opportunity gone. With no surgeon on the medevac team, a local veterinarian harvested Yaghobi’s spleen, but not having been fully informed, he ruined it by preserving it in a pouch of formaldehyde. Blood samples were taken from the corpse, and are being analyzed in multiple Level 4 labs across the continent; Yaghobi’s blood, or what’s left of it, will eventually travel the world and be studied by thousands of scientists.

Maybe it will be good enough.

He goes down the aisle of photographs of the Vermiglio woman. There is a map of the rest area, a series of photographs of the chalked outline where the West Virginia trooper fell beside the crushed door of his cruiser. A dark stain on the pavement.

More photographs. Her car, found by searchers across the state line in Kentucky. A dark hole punched in the side of the thin metal of the driver’s door. Spots of blood on the seats—not much. Not buckets of blood, not enough to kill her. There is, he has been told, an abundance of fingerprint evidence. The automobile itself is “hot” with smallpox virus and has been quarantined. She’s been exposed for more than a week now; without immunity she would surely be ill.

She is a vector. There is a radius. Given the timeline, how far could she have gotten by now? She has the trooper’s gun. Could she have hijacked another car? If she was driving straight through, she could be almost anywhere in the United States by now. Helicopters have been combing the woods and fields near the crossroads in Kentucky where the Nissan was recovered. The assumption is that she will follow Yaghobi’s example and find an inconvenient place to die. In the communications center there are dozens of screens dedicated to image analysis—overhead views from the helicopters, and others rapidly culling surveillance photographs taken at Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport.

“Sam …?” Grimaldi looks around the corner of the aisle.

Something’s wrong. Watterman can tell immediately from her
eyes. And then Barrigar. Also very serious, walking past her to put one steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Sam … I’m very sorry, but your wife had … an episode. It’s the hospital on the line for you.” He holds out a secure cell phone.

Everything seems to suddenly slow down. It’s gotten quiet or maybe he’s gone deaf. His chest feels tight and he braces himself against the edge of the bulletin board. “Hello …”

“Dr. Watterman?”

“Yes.” It is Alice’s voice.

“I’m so sorry about Margaret. But I was just in there and she’s resting quietly.”

“What happened?” he asks. Grimaldi and Barrigar are watching him, and he is surprised at how calm his voice is … how reasonable he feels. Another setback, another bit of inconvenience, another life-altering tragedy.

“They say it is a heart attack, but it wasn’t a hard one.”

“What? What do you mean ‘not a hard one’?”

“She just set her food down and lay back on the pillow and I couldn’t wake her. That’s what happened.”

“Ahh …”

Barrigar squeezes his shoulder one more time and turns away. He and Grimaldi exchange glances and walk down the aisle to give him some privacy.

“What’s her … do they have any idea of how she’s …”

“I’ve got Dr. Nakamura right here. Just a second.”

“Mr. Watterman?”

“Is she conscious?”

“No, she’s not. She’s stable and sleeping. I understand you are on government work and can’t be reached?”
Nakamura says.

“Uh … yes. Yes, I am.”

“Is this a good number to reach you on?”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“We’ll call you when she regains consciousness, and hopefully you can talk.”

“Yes. Yes, please. Do you have any idea … how she is going to, how she’s doing or …”

Does he hear Nakamura sigh before he answers?
“I really can’t say. She’s not in the best of health, I’m sure you realize.”

“No. Yes, I know.”

“She’s in a very difficult situation,”
Nakamura says.
“I’m sorry,”
he adds.

Alice comes back on the line. She assures him she and Irene will take turns staying at the hospital with Maggie. The idea of her being alone is too terrible for him to imagine. Stupid, he thinks. Why did he do it? No amount of money is worth getting lured back to work. It was vanity. Just vanity and avarice. He should have said no, and stayed with her. They should be in the garden, planning already for next spring. They were happy. Stupid.

“She’s in the best place she can be right now,”
Alice tells him.
“She’s not in any pain and she knows how much you care for her. I’ll tell her, Dr. Watterman, I promise.…”

She sits with Paulina, listening to more of the sisters’ stories—tales of self-loathing, two suckers lured by free tickets and jobs as day-care workers to Canada, and then a cascade of deteriorating situations as they escaped Toronto, then were caught en route to Stockholm and sold by their Canadian owner into Niv-L’s custody in fabulous Detroit.

“Detroit? Oh, compared to … lots of places in Russia, it was living the high life. He broke us, right away, like animals in a zoo, there is the reward and there is the whip, and always the promises. Do what I say always and you are going to have a fabulous life, be a rock star …”

“But now he wants to kill us,” Nadja says, bringing in the tea.

“He drowned a man once. With his bare hands. They tortured and drowned him,” Paula says, looking up to Nadja. “It was Richie told me that.”

“Fuck …” Nadja says, and goes back out to the kitchen.

“It was because of a debt. Everything is business. He had signed for us, that’s Niv-L’s way. He likes to do things legally. Your job is to stay pretty and don’t talk back, and you get three meals a day, and you get to work, and there is free drinks, and he might sell you drugs cheap if he likes you, and maybe he fucks you every now and then just to show who is boss. That’s the way it was.”

Their story goes on and on like that, a saga of hellish reminiscences. Daria pours tea, and covers herself with a blanket, tries not to actually touch Paula, but that plan falls apart when she has to help walk her to the toilet.

In the late afternoon there is a series of contractions.

It is a surprise at first, and Paulina falls silent abruptly and puts her hand atop the curve of her great lump. She is illuminated only by the sun that is blazing through the curtain, really a children’s bedsheet that has been hung over the bedroom window.

“No …” Paulina says after a minute or two.

Brutus brings over barbecue, which he has decided is something that would be healthy for Paulina to eat on the brink of having a baby. Zeno, who doesn’t talk, brings in a DVD player and they hook it up and sit around and watch
Avatar
.

Xavier and Brutus have brought two bottles of rosé, and they laugh at the movie and make jokes about the possibilities of linking up to animals or each other using their tails. Paula laughs too much and gets another contraction, and the room falls silent, but again it’s only a false alarm.

“You better hurry up, because we only got this one movie,” Brutus says to her, which starts them laughing again.

At around ten o’clock another boy comes calling. Clumping up the steps, waiting outside the door and very serious. There is a quiet discussion on the porch, and within a minute all the boys leave without saying anything. In the distance are sirens.

“They do this shit all the time. This is the tragedy of the neighborhood displayed in front of you right here tonight.” Monica
reaches into her pocket and brings out her cell phone. A moment later it rings.

“There you go,” she says, and gets up to take the call, walking out into the kitchen so that she can be private and they can go on watching the movie.

“We’re moving. We’re going to get out of here, okay?” Paulina says quietly to her sister.

“As soon as you can walk …” Nadja raises her hand and they mime high-fiving.

Six streets over, there has been a shooting. One boy is dead and two others are wounded and may yet die. Monica has to go out in her beat-up Jeep to do what she can. It leaves the three girls alone in the house. Nadja locks the doors and peers frequently through the front windows to see if anything is going on out on Fifty-second Street. The sirens come and go in waves.

Paulina wants to go back to the bedroom, and Nadja helps her. Daria remains, watching war rage across the surface of Pandora. It is blue people against white, only in this story the blue people win. Or at least they win this battle. Will there be a part two, in which the mining-corporation police return with bigger guns and better robots, to shoot the flying dragons out of the air? Isn’t the triumph of the mining corporation inevitable? Then the blue people will have to start strapping bombs on their long bodies or learn how to use box cutters.

Nadja returns just as the movie ends, and they switch back to the television.

Two middle-aged men are yelling at each other on a news program. The volume is suddenly loud once they change from the DVD player, and Nadja mutes the sound. The men are shouting and gesturing. One of the men, the one who is the host of the program, turns to the camera and makes a dismissive gesture.

The screen changes. It is more footage taken in the mountains of Kashmir. Children are wailing, the wounded are being tended on bloody concrete floors, women are keening in grief. Roads are choked with refugees fleeing the explosions. Nadja gets the volume
back on just as the footage changes. There are grim Asian faces, a phalanx of spotlessly clean tanks on parade.

“This is too serious,” Nadja says, looking over at her.

“Yes …”

“I was hoping for a comedy,” she says, and the two of them sit on the sofa as Nadja flips through the channels, finally settling for a commercial because it’s the safest thing to watch.

E
verything is being done in shifts. Daria and Brutus follow Monica to the mall to get groceries while Monica meets with the doctor at the clinic. The office of Brush Creek Rescue is a shabby ex-retail space in one wing of the mall. It must be a better deal for the landlord to get the tax receipt from a charity like Brush Creek Rescue than to sign a real tenant.

As far as shopping goes, there is nothing any good for sale, because the people who live around there have no money and thus a small business cannot turn a profit. Ultimately the mall is owned by … whom? By banks? By rich investors who shuffle it around as a loss on their books, the speculative price rising ever upward? Maybe Brush Creek is supposed to function something like a human carbon offset … a conservation area set aside for the broken and poor, which will permit the rest of the forest to go on being burned?

Beside the doctor’s office there is a café where Daria waits for Brutus to do the shopping and to pick up anything the doctor tells Monica they might need.

The headlines in the
Kansas City Star
are devoted to the president’s speech and the reorganization of Homeland Security and FEMA triggered by the Berlin Plague. A pair of dueling columnists project opposing versions of American anxiety over China’s declaration
of vital interests in Pakistan. Will Pakistan have a big brother backing her up? Everyone has the bomb these days. With the economy still sluggish and very little leverage, what can the U.S. do? The American president is visiting Europe prior to this month’s meeting of the G8. The Berlin Plague and Kashmir are the only topics on the agenda.

The front page of a
USA Today
has the inevitable graphic showing the distribution of known cases of smallpox across the nation. Simply counting the cases is proving difficult. A sidebar reminds her once again that smallpox resembles the flu or common cold. From the first cough, the patient is capable of infecting others. Initial discomfort is followed by the typical smallpox “flush,” a rash that “blossoms” centrifugally to the limbs. There are “pimples” that morph into “pustules,” which are highly contagious. The pustules themselves leak and flake. Bandages, garments, and clothing should be destroyed immediately. Incubation can take from seven to seventeen days, but can occur more quickly. The result is that the graph numbers have been rounded:

She looks out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the café.

Every cup of coffee tastes different in America, she thinks. A triumph of individualism. Out the window there is a parking lot that will never be full again, if it ever was. Dotted around it are abandoned automobiles. At any given moment, some of them will have been stolen, Brutus has told her.

She could go now, she thinks. Go right now, while the rash is just an emerging storm of red clouds arrayed across her abdomen.

She can get up. Walk to the bus stop. Just go. Keep on going. Yes, she decides. She will go back with Brutus and the groceries, get her things and sneak away.

It will be fine, she tells herself. Back at Monica’s they’ve all had injections. It will be fine.

Yes, she will go. And … take responsibility for what she has done. Go and turn herself in. Tell them she’s sorry. Soon she will sicken and die. They will not torture her, because they will not have to—she will willingly tell them everything before she dies.

Everything that has happened. Everything she has done. About her family, and the way her brothers were destroyed. And why she thought the way she thought, and hated the way she hated. And why she still does. They will scream at her, they will imprison her. They might even torture her after all.