The Messenger (33 page)

So, it’s not
good
. Not at all.

Noise. Someone … something. Knocking. She is awakened from a black sleep by the sounds. Someone running. For an instant she thinks it’s a dream. Then remembers where she is, and from the sound, she knows—yes, someone running down the hall to get the front door—

—a squeal of distress—
Nadja—

—and now she is up, fighting her way free of the blankets, standing and leaping back, all the way to the end of the big sofa, everything by reflex and not really grasping what is—

—realizing the sound was Nadja running
away
from the front door … Now the sound of glass breaking in the kitchen. A sudden smash against the front door, and Nadja screaming to Paulina to get up, get up, get up, and
run
!

Someone kicking open the kitchen door—

A man comes through the curtains by the recliner. He has a pistol in his hand and he stops when he sees her crouched at the end of the sofa, her feet involuntarily kicking away the pillows, trying to back away, even if it means pushing herself
through
the wall. She stands up and sends a lamp clattering to the floor.

“What’s your name, sissy?” Now he’s got her in the corner.

He is tall. Thin, wearing a dirty white dress shirt. He must be the one Nadja saw circling the house. And they’d all made fun of her.

The front door crashes in and a man comes falling through, catches his balance and stands there on the threshold. “Hey, little sweet one?” he calls.

He is short, only a little taller than she is. His skin is olive. His eyes dark. He is wearing a fedora and a suit in tones of black, gray, and steel blue.

“Where are you, my little sweet, sweet?” he shouts.

She can hear Nadja and Paulina screaming, furniture being slid around, and thumps on the wall where they are barricading themselves inside.

“This her?” the white man calls out. Niv-L—for she knows immediately that he is Niv-L—looks around at her for a split second and then just steps past her and down the hall.

“You don’t give me any trouble now, sissy,” the white man says. He reaches out and grabs her breast, then leaves, out into the hall and down to where Niv-L stands in front of Paulina’s bedroom door.

“You know I need to speak with you. It’s better if you help me out, you know? I don’t want to hurt you. But if you don’t help me out, I’m going to cap your asses …”

The women’s screaming in Russian has not stopped all through Niv-L’s presentation of his demands, and now there is a sudden shout followed by an explosion of glass from where they have tossed something through the front bedroom window. Niv-L throws his weight hard against the door and then fires two bullets into it. The white man turns and begins to run down the hall toward the porch, his gun out.

And as he gets to the front door, Daria steps into the hall and shoots him in the ear.

It knocks him sideways, and he crashes face-first into the doorjamb and falls backwards at her feet. Niv-L is running down the hall straight toward her. They both swivel their guns toward each other but she fires first, lunging toward him and pulling the trigger—the bullet going in beside his tie through his breastbone. She fires again. A second bullet into his face, pitching him back onto the hall floor, where he begins to leak a great pool of blood.

Her ears are ringing and everything sounds muffled, but she hears something behind her and she jerks around to see Nadja holding the baby in her arms, gaping at her. Behind her Paulina emerges from the porch, dressed only in a T-shirt. “Oh, God …” she whimpers.

There is a rumbling sound, and Daria stares past the sisters to where Brutus’s car is turning into the driveway, boxing in another car … it can only be Niv-L’s.

Now Paulina and Nadja are in the hallway, turning, trying to step away from the blood leaking out of the white man’s head. Daria still holding Officer Preston’s gun as Brutus runs up. He stares openmouthed at the carnage. Nadja keeps trying to shut the broken door that won’t shut, and Paulina has stumbled away into the living room with the whimpering baby.

She looks down at Niv-L. His face has been warped by the bullet so that his teeth are exposed. As if he were still hungry for something.

“Hey …”

Niv-L’s arms are curled up and his hands clutched over his chest. There is only a little spot in the shirt where her first bullet hit him, but there must be a lot of damage in the back for him to bleed out this way.

“… we got to clean this up. Hey … 
Daria
,” Brutus snarls, pushing her roughly. “Get your shit together, goddamn it!” He punches her, hard, on the shoulder.

“Yes …” she says, taking the gun and tucking it in the band of her jeans. Brutus winces, gently pulls it out by the butt and flicks the safety on, and gives it back to her. “Don’t want you to hurt yourself by accident,” he says.

Paula steps out of the living room and holds Daniel to her cheek, stares down at the dead white man, then over at Niv-L.

“Thank you,” she says to Daria. “Thank you, very much.”

They find the keys to Niv-L’s Mercedes and drive it all the way around the rear of the house and park it with the trunk close to the back door, because it is Brutus’s plan to get the bodies out that way.

The freshly cleaned laundry from the night before is used to sop up the blood. They pad the trunk with garbage bags, and with Paulina and the baby keeping a lookout, they wedge the two dead men
into the trunk, bending their knees and fitting them in like spoons, the car sitting down on its suspension with their weight.

The shards of glass from the front window, the broken mullions, get swept off the porch. The door is shattered around the lock, but Brutus knows where he can find a new one. It is a frenzy of cleaning; Daria mops and empties the bloody water down the drain, then pours bleach all over the floor and repeats.

The day has passed and the sun is slanting low through the jungle beside 3050 when she tosses her duffel into the backseat of the Mercedes and turns to the two sisters and the baby, leaning over the porch railing.

“Seattle, remember,” says Nadja, and Paula looks at her and smiles. “You will be there,” she commands.

And she is not able to say a word. Nothing, not even to say that she is sorry—they wouldn’t know why she would even say that—and all she can do is put her fingers to her lips, to her heart, and climb into the car. She coasts down the cracked driveway, trying to imagine seeing them all in Seattle or Portland or Honolulu in some future, but she can’t. Her tears run down her face and her heart begins to flutter as she cruises behind Brutus through the still neighborhood.

The house he has picked out is only a few blocks away. She watches as he slows, flicks his turn signal, and when she looks across the street, she sees it. Made of tawny brick, with a plywood-covered front door and windows.

She pulls up the driveway of the abandoned house and parks in the shadows behind it and waits as the darkness gathers. Sitting in the cool listening to crickets, and far across the neighborhood an owl asking its question over and over again.

A minute later Brutus comes whistling up the driveway; he has a paint bucket in his hand and a crowbar. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s get it opened up.” He steps up onto the back steps, inserts the crowbar behind the plywood, and pops it off.

She opens the trunk and together they pry the bodies apart and roll them out onto the ground. Niv-L is too heavy. His clothes are
soaked with blood, and it is impossible to carry him up the steps properly. He falls onto the dusty ground and they get him in the house by each taking a foot and pulling him up the steps.

“You know what he did to those girls?” Brutus asks as they tug him up into the house. “He’d let his friends rape them. He’d throw a party and his friends could do them as much as they want. So I’m glad this motherfucker’s dead …”

They have worked out something to tell Monica, and Brutus will have his friends begin repairs immediately. He can move the men’s guns, no problem, and the sisters can make good use of his money. The same with the white guy’s van. “It’s already been stolen,” he laughs. She has a few days’ head start, Brutus tells her, time where she can drive the Mercedes before she’ll need to disable any antitheft chips that are part of its ignition and GPS system.

“You got until they identify this asshole. Then that car is going to be way too hot. You have to lose it by then.”

“I’ll be in Las Vegas by then.”

“Most of those casinos are on quarantine, I heard.”

“Well … I’ll find a way.”

“You are stone cold, Daria.” He says it with admiration.

They get all the garbage bags, and shoes that have fallen off, and anything else in the trunk that looks incriminating, wipe everything down, and carry it all up into the house.

Daria closes the trunk, and finds Brutus inside the house dragging the two men deeper into what once was a dining room. The house is completely vacant. Only slivers of streetlights filter through the plywood panels covering the windows.

He comes to the kitchen door and finds the bucket, pries open the top and discards it, spinning it like a Frisbee deep into the dark innards of the house. There is a chemical smell.

“What is that?” she asks.

“This here is floor sealer. It’ll work fine.”

He pours a pool of the sealer around the men, then makes a long thick river away from them. It smells like when they fix roofs on a hot summer day.

He finishes his river at the top of the steps, and then tosses the bucket back inside the dark house.

“You going to stick around and watch?” he asks, looking up at her. “Maybe not. If people see that car around …”

He lights a cigarette, takes a draw, then takes the book of matches, tucks the flap closed over it, and stands it edge up in the sealer to burn down.

“It’s time,” he says after he has prepared the fuse. “Let’s get out of here, girl.”

He gets in the Mercedes and she drives to where he’s parked the Pontiac. A place where the street rises and they can get out and see. Together they wait until the fire takes hold in the abandoned house. It is just smoke at first, then they can see red light coming from the back. When the flames break through the roof, she cannot escape Brutus hugging her, lifting her off the ground and twisting her side to side, like a rag doll. “I love you. You are stone cold, Daria, stone cold …” he says, over and over, finally putting her down, still laughing.

There are still no sirens.

“You better get on the road,” he says.

“I guess so.
Yes
.” She turns and climbs in the Mercedes before he can see her crying. She looks up anyway and waves at him when she starts the engine. The duffel bag is on the seat beside her, the pistol tucked under the zipper, right on top. “Bon voyage,” Brutus says, leaning on the door of his car, holding up one hand as if he were taking an oath.

She starts off down the street, past the burning house that has lit everything orange, one hand in the smoky air to let Brutus know how much she loves him.

How much she loves them all.

“D
oc, Doc … Wake up. Time to go …”

Someone, somewhere, has made a decision, it seems. Dr. Samuel Watterman, the distinguished biowarfare and bioterrorism consultant, sits up and tries to shake off his profound depression. Chamai tells him that he’s being loaned to the Kansas City field office as tech backup to the senior FBI negotiator who will be orchestrating the dialogue with Vermiglio when they find her.

“It’s all going down as we speak. Leaving the complex in ten.”

He has no possessions, so there is nothing to pack. He spends what little time is left on the phone to the hospital.

Nakamura tells him they are trying to determine if it is possible to do an operation, but because of Maggie’s general health, the doctor holds out very little hope. Irene says she hasn’t woken up again.

A thirty-second shower, an electric shave.

It’s the decision process that takes up most of the time, he thinks. FBI Special Agent Grimaldi’s coming along, it’s been decreed, to be his nurse.

And then—everything goes swiftly. Over a span of minutes: a blacked-out panel truck up the state highway to the helipad, maybe
another half hour to a deserted airstrip where a business jet waits. From there to Kansas City it is supposed to be only two hours.

But it feels much longer.

Almost as soon as he takes his seat in the Department of Homeland Security jet, Grimaldi links him up via super-secure laptop to a National Response Plan crisis-update teleconference.

There are twelve thumbnail windows rimming the screen, and a larger image in the center to display the sleep-deprived face of whoever is talking. Right now it’s Major General “Gordo” Walthaer.

“… on the analysis of DNA we have sampled, conclusively demonstrate that the Berlin variola strain—itself a derivative of India-1—has been further modified.…”

“Oh, God …” Grimaldi says beside him. “Is this what you were talking about, Sam?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so …”

“… the new strain has the human gene for IL-4 combined into it. This has produced extraordinary lethality, the effects of which are becoming rapidly apparent.…”

With his finger, Sam can enlarge the faces of all those at the meeting. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Ordoñez is in the chair. Roycroft is absent. He’s sick, it turns out.

“… and the CIA has told us that it’s their belief that a terrorist subcell, one of the smaller groups who were part of the so-called coalition—”

“That’s Khan’s cell …” he says, unable to not interrupt.

“Yes, Dr. Watterman. Khan. Just as you predicted, his smallpox is a true ‘superpox’ and its release is part of what we can only suppose is a greater strategy.”
Walthaer pauses, straightens the papers in front of him.

“If you’ve got something to say, Sam, now’s the time,”
Joe Norment says, but for once he’s not being sarcastic.

“It’s a betrayal. On the surface, Khan’s going along with his coalition’s plan, but in reality he probably has a grudge, or a list of grievances. He might not like his allies or even think they’re competent; nevertheless, he’s played along. He helped them launch their India-1 attacks, maybe loaned his expertise to help produce the anthrax.
But from the beginning he was careful to hold back the tweaked pox. And he’s the only one who has the cure.”