The Messenger (32 page)

Daria begins to laugh, and so does Nadja. Monica has risen and moves quickly to the table they have set up at the end of the bed, checking the baby’s eyes and airway. A tiny cry comes out of it. The little face screwed up and flattened, the skin suddenly suffused with oxygen and turning pink.

“Healthy baby boy. Got all his fingers and toes and everything else he needs. Here you go, Mama,” says Monica as she puts the baby to Paulina’s breast.

Daria is crying, tears streaming down her cheeks, nose running. It breaks over her, sweeping her away, the miracle of it. She has been there, a witness and participant in the impossible thing occurring. Right before her eyes!

The magnificent creature tries to twist in his mother’s arms, but even with the excitement, he too is exhausted, confused, and learning that everything has changed. And with everything—the brand-new feelings, the never-felt sensations, all of it pulsing through him—he is still safe, falling asleep on his mother’s breast.

Daria takes photographs until her battery dies and she has to recharge it. Digging the charger out of her pack, plugging it in with trembling hands. It’s impossible. Everything is impossible. How can she go on staying here with these people? With the child now with them, the living marvel, the manifestation of … of everything humans are supposed to be and do—how can she stay? She walks back to the bedroom, lingers by the door. Monica is wiping her eyes. Nadja mops her sister with a warm washcloth. Paulina is smiling, exhausted, blissful.

Now the boys come to see, shuffling and nodding, embarrassed and weak-kneed, joking with Paula about how much noise she made and how she kept them all up. Brutus has hidden a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, and they pass around coffee mugs. And Daria carefully takes the last sip and rushes to clean the glasses, fresh tears in her eyes.

Monica leaves, to hugs and applause. Paula’s eyes are half
closed. They have made a crib there on the bed beside her, and she falls asleep with one hand draped over the edge of the basket, against her son’s cheek. His name will be Daniel, she tells them, and Nadja smiles. A child with many fathers, named in honor of a favorite uncle. “The only nice one in the family,” Nadja laughs. All that behind them now.

They let Paula sleep and Daria begins cleaning up. There is, for what has basically been an uncomplicated birth, lots of blood, bloody sheets, towels.

The boys have been shooed out of the bungalow, even Brutus, who claims not to mind on the excuse that he has business to attend to across town. He and Nadja part at the door, just a little kiss. A place marker to hold them until they can meet again.

Daria throws open the dusty curtains in the front room. Suddenly she is bone weary, staring into the yellow motes in the dawn light that slants through the room.

She has just finished making a bed for herself on the sofa when there is a knock on the door and Monica pops back in with a short man, skin black as coal, a completely shaved head, dressed nicely in tweeds with a mismatched tie. He is Dr. Durham, who will do the certificate of live birth. They go into Paula’s shadowy room, and wake her gently. From the open doorway Daria can hear a series of croaking sounds from Daniel, and a few minutes later they exit. Nadja goes in and makes sure her sister has enough water, while Monica and Dr. Durham confer in the kitchen.

Dr. Durham charges nothing; his work at the Rescue is
pro bono
. There will be a fifteen-dollar fee to the Missouri Department of Health and Environment in order to register little Daniel Pravdin, and they must file within the next two weeks, the doctor explains, even though Monica knows it all already.

They all troop back out. “A new little citizen. It is a beautiful day,” the doctor says, nodding to Daria as he goes down the steps.

She will leave, she will go before they invite Aunt Daria to lift the perfect baby to her toxic breast. She should have left yesterday, should have been stronger, should have never stayed. She wanted something, she wanted love. She wanted a family again. She needed
to be safe too. She was weak, wounded, and sick. She let herself do the unthinkable. An ignorant fool. A killer. A pariah.

She stares at the television for a long moment there in the dusty living room. Trying to decide whether she should turn it on or not … reaching for the remote, holding it in her hand. She presses the power button and simultaneously the mute so the volume won’t disturb them. She flicks through the silent commercials, going around the cycle until she lands on some news.

Overnight, while little Daniel was busily fighting his way into this world, there has been a new terror attack. A group of camouflage-clad men are shown, all glaring at the camera. Mug shots. All of them dressed in identical green T-shirts. She tries to read fear or triumph in their blank faces. She taps the sound and moves closer to the screen so she can hear the fabric of America unraveling.

They are Christians, proud members of the white race who believe in their divine right to defend themselves, especially now that the end days are nigh. The federal government is their enemy, and they have sworn to destroy it, starting with the local office of the Internal Revenue Service.

The images suddenly are whisked away by the magic of television, and she finds herself watching a grainy surveillance photograph. An entire series. The images are in black and white, and the resolution is startlingly bad. What’s the point of a surveillance camera if they can’t see any better than that? People in a corridor, walking through glass doors. After a few jerky frames, there is a cut and another image fills the screen—

Her face
.

The image is much clearer and in color. Something that has been taken automatically across the shoulder of the immigration official at JFK.

There is a noise in the hall and she flicks the channel a few times and turns off the set, manages to get one step across to the sofa and start undressing as Nadja leans in. Her eyes are half closed and she
is smiling. Then she rushes into Daria’s arms, presses her face into her neck and snuffles. “You’re really sweet,” she says. “Thank you …” and pulls back, wipes the tears out of her eyes, and leaves.

She hears Nadja padding down the hall to the bathroom, and she goes over to the corner of the room and grabs her pack, brings it around to the side of the sofa. Her shoes are at the end of the bed; she’ll have to wait for Nadja to go to sleep before she can get the water she’s stashed and slip out.

She sits there in front of the blank television for a long moment. While Nadja is in the bathroom, she looks around the back of the set.

It is despairingly simple, a cable that runs from the wall and connects into a socket in the back of the set. She unscrews it and jams the single wire against the edge of the brick fireplace until it’s deformed, then screws it lightly back onto the set. There is a flush and she hears Nadja leave the bathroom, and she gets back in her bed on the sofa to wait for a chance.

“
Her
—that one right there—” Barrigar says. A red box appears around one of the people in the surveillance photographs, then enlarges until it half-fills the screen.

A young woman with strikingly white-blonde hair, cut short and spiky. Turned away from the camera so her face is not revealed.

“What you’re seeing, this is raw, and this is enhanced …” The picture changes, clarifies. Jogs ahead a frame at a time. A backpack slung over her shoulder. A tight-fitting jacket. Jeans slung low. She turns now. She’s unexpectedly very pretty; tough-looking in the way young people think tough people look.

“We assumed she had changed her appearance, so we were looking for that. We did the radius search and this blonde girl came up.”

“This is in the bus station in Louisville, Kentucky,” Chamai says. “Four days ago, in the afternoon. See, we’re looking by radius, thinking, where is she? Where is she going to land? Radius grows larger with time …” Like the diagram of a spreading pandemic,
Watterman is thinking. Like those old targets from school, diagramming the blast effects of an atom bomb in five-mile increments from ground zero.

Now it’s a girl at the center of the explosion.

“We’re getting all our eyes on every bit of footage we can get and we start looking for the same people, then we follow them backwards from where they are to where they came from, or forwards to where they are going …”

“Complicated,” Sam says.

“There is a lot of software that goes into this, Sam. Face recognition,
gait
recognition, all kinds of bells and whistles …”

“I’m sure.”

“Obviously, if we can spot them, if we can locate them, then we can use satellites and surveil them like we were doing with Yaghobi. We’ve got drones we can put up to watch them in real time …”

“Domestic drones?” Sam says, not having ever really thought about such a thing. Reilly snickers at his naïveté. Sam turns to stare down the man, but when he looks, Reilly is gone. Maybe he wasn’t even there.

“Do you have any coffee?” he asks. An ATF agent speeds off to get him some. He smiles his thank-you and discreetly checks to see if Reilly is there now or if it was a hallucination. Dementia. He’s going senile.

“So … okay, we’re looking, we’re looking, and what we get is
her
 … here she comes through the door to the waiting room to the café …”

The view has shifted. Now there is an angle right over the register. Again, Sam is struck by how pretty the terrorist is. She looks like a Nordic sea sprite with her hair like that.

“See what she’s got there?”

“A bottle of water and … is that potato chips?”

“Yep.” Watterman watches as the girl takes a billfold out of her jacket, pays with a five, and turns …

“Okay … now we follow her back … And now, right here—” Barrigar’s finger taps on the screen. “See her sitting down?”

She sits at a table, the kind you’d find in any food court.

“So, okay, you see this right here? There? That’s somebody else’s feet—”

Sam watches as the smudge moves into frame. Shoes … or boots of some kind.

“Stop it right there—” The image shudders to a halt.

“We think that’s Vermiglio.” Barrigar taps the screen with his finger. “Run it forward for him slow,” he says to Chamai, who is beached there in the cubicle, leaned sideways away from the screen to give the two older men a better view as he works the mouse.

All Sam can see is the sheen of the floor, the legs of the table, and the blonde’s feet doing a restless dance, then she gets up to refill her coffee, comes back to the counter, vanishes off frame, comes back and buys a slice of pie. Walking back to the table, then slowing … Back to her companion, waiting at the table, who is doing—nothing. Just a pair of shadowed legs.

Vermiglio
.

The image slows and stops. Something changes, a date/time stamp flickers on a bar at the bottom of the frame. A different angle, almost straight down over a pair of glass double doors. “Now … this is taken forty-five minutes later. The both of them go. See … she’s helping someone.”

Another girl. Walking stiffly.

“Her. That’s her. And look—we were right. Vermiglio’s changed her appearance as much as she can. Her hair is different. And you can see the way she’s walking …” Stiffly, hobbling along.

“She’s hurt.”

“That’s right. You can see it, she’s hurtin’,” says Chamai.

“And … there they go, off the frame.”

“To catch a bus?” Sam asks.

“We’re looking at all the possible routes. But the time would indicate a bus to Kansas City. It’s a busy station.”

“Or a cab?”

“Cabs are on the back side of the lot. No, it’s a bus.”

“So?”

“So … she’s gone again.”

“What do we do now?”

“Well, we’re going to Kansas City, of course,” Barrigar offers.

“But while we do that … if we can’t follow forward, we follow back,” says Chamai like a sideshow barker. “Time flows like an arrow in at least two directions.” He clicks and a series of still images of the blonde slide across the screen. “We have walked Vermiglio’s blonde friend back in time—and I have to speak up here and say that when we do this we end up with a route that doesn’t exactly compute, but, hey. First … she arrives via Cincinnati, then before that, in Pittsburgh. And we almost missed her there because—you see what she’s doing?”

“She’s wearing a scarf.”

“She’s evading, man. She knows she’s recognizable, and she’s evading. Until she gets out of Pittsburgh. But all the time this blonde, you know where she was originating? Motown, gentlemen.” Chamai says it triumphantly, cutting to a final image: the blonde, still covered up, walking into a different bus station, wearing sunglasses.

“Detroit,” Barrigar repeats.

“So, that’s a little whacked out, isn’t it? To start in Detroit, go east to Pittsburgh, then make this big right turn in order to get to your real destination—which we think is probably K.C.”

“So, the Canadians are looking to see if she came over the border from Windsor, which would help explain all the Vermiglio Amtrak shit …” says Barrigar.

“We focus on the blonde’s origins in Detroit and, I’m just sayin’, soon we are going to have her mama, daddy, and her granny,” Chamai says, smiling.

“No police warning.” Sam is not smiling. “You have to take away the suicide option … We can’t let any of these people kill themselves like Yaghobi did.” He feels his heartbeat quicken. He needs to convince them. They have to understand.

“They have had the word laid down, Sam. I talked to Roycroft this morning and he spoke to the mayor and the chief of police personally. Joe Norment says his best CDC regional people are on it. They track either one of these women down, they observe, then it’s you and the negotiators. And backing you up is a full extraction team, including a medevac team—”

“Good,” Sam interrupts, not really meaning it, knowing that, like all plans, this one has built into it a genetic code of potential failure. “Good,” he says again, and walks away, shaking his head.

Uncomfortable. Knowing how many things can still go wrong.