STINGER
                Nancy Kress
  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and
events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or
are used fictitiously.
  Copyright © 1998 by Nancy Kress
  A Forge Book Published by Tom Doherty
Associates, Inc.
  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.” ISBN
0-312-86536-8
  First Edition: October 1998




      New kinds of evil threaten democratic
      institutions in these closing days of the
      twentieth century. They must be
      addressed quickly and comprehensively.
      —Louis J. Freeh, Director, Federal
      Bureau of Investigation, 1996



                PROLOGUE
MAY 2

  The green Chevy Lumina sped through the
darkness. For several miles the two men inside said
nothing, until the driver yawned and the other said,
“Tired?”
  “It’s three in the goddamn morning.”
  “Yeah.”
  “Well, we’re almost to Virginia. Bridge is just a
few miles away.”
  “Pretty heavy woods.”
  “The ass end of nowhere.”
  The passenger didn’t reply. He stared at the road
ahead. The car’s headlights carved a narrow lighted
path down the highway, itself a gray slash through
the black silhouettes of oak, hickory, southern pine.
Once the driver reached for the radio, glanced at
the other man’s face, and drew back his hand.
Another car, the first in several minutes,
approached in the other lane, and both drivers
switched from high beams to low.
   The huge buck in full spring antlers dashed from
the woods so fast it seemed to materialize directly
in front of the Lumina. The driver cried, “Son of a
bitch!” and wrenched the wheel to the left,
fruitlessly. The Lumina slammed into the buck,
flinging its body to the left onto the narrow, grassy
median. The Lumina spun ninety degrees while
skidding sideways. The rear crashed into a hickory
at the edge of the woods. Metal shrieked as the
trunk flew open, the rear body crumpled, and the
backseat thrust forward, hard. With a final shudder
the Lumina came to rest backward against the tree,
engine stopped and headlights still shining.
  The driver’s face was moonlight white. “You
okay?”
  “Yeah. You? Oh, God—the locals.”
   The second car had skidded to a stop. A man
jumped out and ran toward the crash. In the beam
of the Lumina’s headlights his deputy sheriff’s
uniform was clearly visible.
  “Anybody hurt? Are you people all right?” His
voice was young and excited.
  “We’re fine,” the driver called. He gave his
companion a look that said shit shit shit. The
passenger tried to open his door, but it had been
mangled too badly when the rear of the car caved
forward. Finally he climbed awkwardly over the
gear shift and followed the driver out the left front
door.
  By that time the driver stood with the deputy at
the front of the car, away from the gaping trunk.
The passenger walked toward the back and peered
inside. The metal cage sat as twisted and crushed as
the back end of the car, a cage no longer. Empty.
   “Can I see your license and registration?” the
deputy said. The passenger walked to the front of
the car to join the driver, so both of them could talk
to the deputy. Could persuade him of what had
really happened here. How the scene had actually
gone down.
  They had fucking better make it A-one.



MAY 28

   “… and now, ladies and gentlemen,” the local
chairwoman finished in her strong Brooklyn accent,
“join with me in welcoming the United States
senator from Pennsylvania, Malcolm Peter
Reading.”
   Not too bad, Larson thought as he watched the
senator mount the steps of the school auditorium. A
fairly short introduction, dignified but not starchy,
and no “proud to present to you the next president
of the United States” in that too-insistent,
too-confident way that some supporters had. That
wouldn’t have played well, not in this particular
section of Manhattan. Premature. Larson had an
ear for these things.
  Although maybe, he thought, as he watched
Reading launch into his speech, it wouldn’t have
mattered after all. Damn, but Reading was good.
The candidate stood on the wooden grade-school
stage, under that faded school assembly flag, as if
the place were the Oval Office. He had the facts, he
had the grasp, he had the vision, and none of that
would have mattered if he hadn’t also had the
touch. Which he did. Able to touch any
group—black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight,
conservative, liberal, men, women. Furthermore, it
was sincere. Larson had watched a lot of politicians
over the years. This one meant what he said, and he
didn’t say what he didn’t mean, and he was able to
say it in ways that different audiences could
actually hear.
  Maybe Reading really could go all the way.
   It was the first time Larson had really let himself
believe it. A handler, after all, was paid to
manufacture images, not to be seduced by
substance. And the skeptic in Larson didn’t actually
believe the United States was ready for a black
president. But listening to Reading in this too-old
school with its echoing wooden halls and
permanent smell of chalk, Larson suddenly wasn’t
so sure.
   Reading had it all. Intelligent, educated, born in
the racial disaster of North Philadelphia but now
comfortably upper-middle-class, war hero (only in a
“minor” war, although they never were minor to the
guys who had to fight them). Solid-gold
middle-of-the-road voting record. Faithful husband
to the pretty-but-not-too-pretty wife listening to
him with her intelligent eyes alight. High-achieving
kids, no other women ever, no financial scandals. A
capable and decent human being. And Reading had
the touch, without which the rest of it wouldn’t
have mattered for shit.
   The audience, mostly left-of-center middle-aged
New York types, laughed at something Reading
said. Larson could feel them warming. A few more
minutes, and Reading would have them eating from
his hand. Which was just the right color: clearly
black, but not too black. A rich chocolate. Malcolm
Peter Reading, he of the racially provocative first
name and reassuringly capitalist last one, was a
handsome man. On top of everything else.
   The audience laughed again. Beside Larson, an
elderly white man in preppy khaki trousers nodded
thoughtfully. A young black couple in the row
ahead—she wore one of those African headscarf
things, he had on a Grateful Dead T-shirt—grinned
at each other delightedly. Even the cop stationed at
the door looked impressed.
  Jesus. If Reading could do this equally well in
New Hampshire, the primary would be a walk.
   Larson’s head whirled. In a flash—it felt like that,
a brilliant flash of Technicolor light—he pictured
himself at the White House, still advising long after
the campaign was over, still necessary… to the
president of the United States. In the Oval Office, at
a press conference in the Rose Garden, on Air Force
One…
  Rein it in, Larson.
   He did. From long habit, from innate skepticism.
Keep grounded, keep focused. Listen to what the
candidate is saying here and now, not at some
hypothetical moment in some hypothetically
glorious future. More important, listen to the
audience. How is the candidate playing now?
   From his wooden folding chair on the far left side
of the auditorium, Larson bent forward, hands on
his knees, intent gaze scanning the audience
overflowing the small room and craning necks in
the hall outside. Thus it was that he missed the
beginning of Reading’s trouble. He didn’t notice it
until the audience began to frown, to twitch, to
glance at each other in concern. Larsons eyes
snapped to the stage.
  “… policies that… embrace all of… that
embrace…”
  Reading stopped speaking. He seemed dazed,
uncertain. Sweat glistened on his forehead. His eyes
unfocused, then focused again with what looked to
Larson like a supreme act of will.
  “… policies embrace… our diversity… policies…”
   Suddenly the left side of Reading’s body jerked.
His left hand fell from the lectern, dangled
helplessly by his side. He swayed and crashed to the
floor, thrashing to the left of the lectern and coming
to rest at the very edge of the wooden stage.
   Anita Reading screamed. People rose to their
feet, calling out. A few tried to climb onto the stage.
Larson stood immobile. He knew what he was
seeing.
   “Please let me through, I’m a doctor. Let me
through please, I’m a doctor—” A tall woman in
jeans, pushing her way determinedly down the
center aisle from the back of the room. She leapt
onto the stage and bent over Reading.
  No. Larson refused to believe it. Malcolm
Reading was only forty-nine, healthy as an ox.
Never smoked, ate right, exercised. How could he
be having a stroke?
   Still Larson didn’t move forward. The doctor
looked up from Reading and said briskly to the
people clustered behind her, “Ambulance, please.
Tell nine-one-one you need it for a thrombosis—a
serious stroke. Go now.”
   Someone—Larson couldn’t see who—went now.
Anita Reading had stopped screaming and seemed
to be quickly following whatever instructions the
doctor was giving her. The crowd changed subtly
from startled hysteria to the kind of half-guilty
excitement that meant somebody else was the
victim. A few people talked excitedly into cell
phones. Reporters.
   “Bill?” Anita Reading called, her voice high with
strain. “Where’s Bill?”
  “Here,” Larson said, and finally moved forward.
His body felt thick, clumsy, as if he were moving
through something sticky and clotted. And he was.
Disappointment could be as retarding as mud, slow
you down as much as sewage.
   Malcolm Peter Reading would never be president
of the United States. Bill Larson would never stand
in the Rose Garden, advising the president about
the world.



JUNE 3

  The small Maryland city of La Plata steamed in
the humid heat, even at night, even though it was
barely June. Over ninety in the day, only marginally
below eighty at night. Rain every afternoon, a
choking hot drizzle that passed in an hour and left
nothing cooler than before.
   “Gonna be a wild night,” the nurse said, coming
back into the Emergency Room from the parking
lot. Smoking was forbidden anywhere inside the
community hospital, a one-hundred-bed,
well-staffed facility that was the pride of two
counties. “Lots of violent trauma. I can smell it.”
   The younger nurse smiled nervously. It was her
first night ever in Emergency.
  “They’ll all be outside, escaping the heat.
Drinking and fighting and shooting each other. Like
they do every hot summer night. You mark my
words, Rachel.”
  Rachel turned away. There was something in the
older woman’s use of “they” and “them” that the
young girl didn’t like. Something… well, a little
racist?
   She told herself not to judge too hastily. Manners
in the East were just different from the small town
in Ohio where she’d grown up and gone to nursing
school. People here just talked rougher, didn’t
consider as much what they said. Just a regional
difference. That was probably all it was.
   By nine o’clock, two hours after her shift had
begun, Rachel still hadn’t seen any trauma due to
violence. A car accident, minor abrasions only. An
infected compound femoral fracture. An elderly
phlebitis, a woman in labor, a little kid who had
fallen off a fence and needed six stitches. A man
brought in falling-down drunk, his speech slurred.
An average night.
  Just after nine, the ambulance shrieked up. The
charge nurse got off the phone. “All right, people,
resident’s on his way down. Two strokes— not one
but two, count ‘em—within a few minutes of each
other at an AA meeting. Both severe.” She talked
rapidly, organizing the response duties. The
resident rushed in from the corridor.
   For the rest of her life, the next half hour
remained a blur to Rachel. No matter how hard she
tried, she couldn’t recall any details. Apparently she
did everything she was told to, and did it right,
because nobody yelled at her afterward. She must
have assisted with the CT scans to determine if the
strokes were ischemic or hemorrhagic, must have
administered the tPA, must have hooked the
patients to acute-care monitors. But she couldn’t
remember what she had done, or how, or in what
order.
   She only remembered the patients. A young
woman in her twenties, with a ring in her nose and
corn-rowed braids. A man in a clerical collar. He
died; she slipped into a deep coma. And the
falling-down drunk, it turned out later, had no
alcohol at all in his blood. They’d just assumed he
had, from his behavior and his stinking clothing
and the plastic garbage bag full of all his
possessions. But he, too, had had a thrombotic
stroke. And so had another patient, on toward
midnight. A young, active mother of three, her
husband said, who had never been sick a day in her
life. And then, at 3:17 A.M., a vacationing professor
from Howard University, a healthy man in his
thirties, who died at 4:30.
   The resident frowned constantly, lost in thought.
The charge nurse was subdued, not looking directly
at anyone. The older nurse said, too loudly,
“Coincidence. Bound to happen someplace,
sometime. If all the apes in the British museum…”
  “Shut up,” the charge nurse said.
  Rachel said nothing. There was a tight mass in
her stomach, as if she were constipated in the
wrong place. I’m scared, she thought clearly. I don’t
know why, but I’m scared.
  All five patients had nearly identical thrombotic
cerebral strokes. All five were black.



                      ONE

     I do solemnly swear that I will support
     and defend the Constitution of the
     United States against all enemies,
     foreign and domestic…
     —Swearing-in oath, Federal Bureau of
     Investigation



  “Starting over is always more difficult than doing
something the first time,” Judy Kozinski said from
the sofa, where she was knitting something in
bright purple wool. “It’s the lost innocence.
Different expectations.”
   In his comfortable wing chair across the room,
Cavanaugh looked up, alert as a mouse scenting
feline. Were they talking now about the FBI or
about the marriage thing? Lately, with Judy, he
never knew.
  He really didn’t want to talk tonight again about
the marriage thing. Not tonight. Not again.
  “I mean, any change of that
magnitude—naturally it turns everything in your
mind upside down for a while.”
  No clue there. Cavanaugh made his
noncommittal noise, “Ehhrrrmmm.”
  “I understand how you feel, Robert, even though
you think I don’t.”
  Still no clue. He tried a vaguely thoughtful frown.
   “Once you get used to the new assignment, you’ll
probably be as happy there as you were in
Organized Crime,” Judy said, and Cavanaugh
relaxed.
   He had been transferred from the Bureau’s
Organized Crime and Racketeering Section at
headquarters to its Resident Agent program only
four months ago. No, “transferred” wasn’t the word;
it had been a goddamn heist.
   The FBI regs were clear: “Upon completion of
four years in his/her first office of assignment, and
until reaching ten years in the same office, a
Special Agent can be considered for a
nonvoluntary rotational transfer to a second field
office depending on the staffing needs of the FBI.”
Fair enough. Cavanaugh was able to concede the
staffing needs of the FBI. Cavanaugh had been in
Washington for over four years—barely—and less
than ten. Cavanaugh was willing to learn new roles,
new skills, new procedures.
  But as a resident agent for southern Maryland?
   “You’re assistant special agent in charge,” Judy
said soothingly.
   “Out of two people! And Donald Seton is an idiot.
I’m the only real, functioning FBI agent in a place
where the biggest federal crime is the condition of
the roads.”
   Judy laughed, knitting needles clicking away. The
sound irritated Cavanaugh. They’d been living
together for over a year now, and only recently had
Judy taken up knitting. A freelance science writer,
she could work anywhere and had taken the move
from D.C. to Rivermount with equanimity.
No—with relish. The sight of her hanging curtains
and matching fabric swathes and buying scatter
rugs for the little house they’d rented—she’d even
found the house, falling in love with the view of the
Patuxent River—all this made Cavanaugh
profoundly nervous. It looked so… domestic. And
now there was this knitting. He had avoided asking
what the purple thing was going to be.
   Restless, he opened the sliding glass door to the
tiny redwood deck and stepped outside. Beyond the
air-conditioning, the early June night throbbed hot
and fragrant. It smelled of honeysuckle—it seemed
to him that all of Maryland smelled of
honeysuckle—and of the river marshes below him
somewhere at the foot of the bluff. It smelled of
intrigue that brought the senses alert and the blood
soaring, of mysteries, of surprises… The smell was a
lie. Nothing surprising was happening in
Rivermount, Maryland.
   A small town almost straddling the borders of
Saint Mary’s and Charles Counties, Rivermount was
seventeen miles from Cavanaugh’s new FBI office in
Leonardtown. It really was a new office; until now,
the Bureau hadn’t had a “Resident Agency,” its
term for a satellite office, in southern Maryland.
“It’s part of our expanded community presence,” his
new supervisor, Jerry Dunbar, had told him.
“There’s no Bureau presence at all in the southern
three counties. And the Patuxent River Naval Air
Station needs closer attention, which Don will take
care of. You, Robert, will handle the rest of the
district. You’ll be breaking new ground.”
  Which was fine for Special Agent in Charge
Dunbar, who got to head the Baltimore Field Office.
Things happened in Baltimore. Things did not
happen in southern Maryland, at least not outside
of the naval air station. Not things requiring action
by Resident Agent Robert Cavanaugh. The kingpins
of serious crime simply didn’t frequent salt
marshes, state parks, or tobacco farms losing
ground to golf courses.
   His new and inactive fiefdom was a vast
peninsula, surrounded by the Patuxent and
Potomac Rivers as they emptied in all their delta
wideness into Chesapeake Bay. Every day
Cavanaugh drove from Rivermount to
Leonardtown, population 1,683, the county seat of
Saint Mary’s County. Here he sat in his tiny office
on the second floor of a remodeled Victorian house
and scanned the dailies from D.C., hoping that
something was breaking that might involve him. So
far, this had not happened. His biggest
commitment for the upcoming week was a talk at
the local junior high, as part of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation Adopt-a-School program.
   Cavanaugh stared moodily into his backyard,
invisible in the darkness. Probably the grass needed
cutting again. He had never before lived in a house;
when he’d been married to Marcy, they’d always
lived in apartments in D.C. He had never before
realized how demanding grass could be. Certainly
the lawn demanded more of him than his job did.
   “Hunt that crabgrass,” he said into the
river-smelling darkness. “Indict those chiggers.”
  His arm stung, and he slapped at a mosquito.
Then another. The third one drove him back inside.
   “Can’t even stand on the deck, the damn bugs are
so bad.”
  “It’s all the rain this year,” Judy said. “The
Benadryl Itch Index is way high. But I’m—”
  “The what?” Cavanaugh asked.
  She grinned at him. “The Benadryl Itch Index.
There really is such a thing.”
   “I believe it,” Cavanaugh said moodily. It fit right
in. Saint Mary’s County had the most roadkill of any
place he’d ever seen; it ranked second in Maryland
counties’ hog production, and it paid serious
attention to an itch index.
  “Anyway,” Judy persisted, “I’m glad you’re back
inside because I’d like us to talk.” She put down the
knitting and looked at him.
   Immediately Cavanaugh wanted to be somewhere
else. He loved Judy. She was very important to him.
She was intelligent, pretty, sexy, warm… She also
had the acquisitive instincts of a Medici. “Mad in
pursuit, and in possession so…” Cavanaugh had
graduated from college as an English major, a fact
he tried not to mention at the Bureau.
   Looking at Judy curled in one corner of their
joint sofa, Cavanaugh wondered yet again where in
that tiny body she kept all that steel. Five-two, a
hundred twenty pounds tops, her red hair currently
in a boyish crop, she looked about twenty-five, not
thirty-six. She looked as different from his ex-wife,
Marcy, as it was possible for two women to be. Not,
of course, that that was a bad thing…
   “Robert,” Judy said, her hazel eyes bolted to his
face, “we’ve been together for two years now—”
  “No, only about eighteen months,” he said
hastily.
  “I’m counting from our first date, when you—”
  “But those first six months we hardly saw each
other at all. You were in Boston and I was in D.C.
and—”
  “Robert, the exact number of months isn’t the
point. We’ve been living together for a year—”
   This was incontrovertible. Cavanaugh said
nothing. “—and it’s time to think about where we go
from here.”
  “Why do we have to ‘go’ anywhere?”
  “Because I love you. Because I’d like a permanent
commitment to, and from, you.”
  “Judy, sweetheart… nothing’s permanent.”
Christ, she of all people ought to know that. Her
husband, an eminent microbiologist, had been
murdered. Cavanaugh had met her while
investigating the case, his first. “We’ve both been
married before, and neither marriage worked all
that well, and—”
  “But you’re not Ben and I’m not Marcy! And I’m
getting a little tired of paying for Marcy’s sins!”
   Cavanaugh walked to the sideboard and poured
another vodka and tonic, mostly to give himself
time. He plunked ice in it from the filled bucket on
the coffee table, which Judy used to replenish her
iced tea. He didn’t consider that Judy was paying
for Marcy’s sins. Marcy’s sin had been ambition, the
slow-growing type that had only gradually realized
that her glamorous competence in the corporate
world could actually do much better than a
fledgling FBI agent four years her junior. Marcy, as
far as Robert knew, was now living with her boss,
the CEO. Despite the eminence of her first husband,
Judy was not ambitious in that way. Judy had her
own sins.
  “Judy, I’ve told you before… I love you, but I’m
happy with the way things are.”
  “But I’m not!” Judy cried. “Doesn’t that count?”
  Cavanaugh closed his eyes. He really, really didn’t
want to have this conversation. Not again. Not
tonight. “Judy—”
  His official cell phone rang.
  Cavanaugh yanked it from his pocket. “Saved by
Graham Bell,” Judy muttered sourly. He pretended
not to hear her.
  “Hello! Robert Cavanaugh speaking!”
  “Is this… Agent Cavanaugh? Of the FBI?” A
female voice, young and nervous.
  “Yes, this is him.”
   “I’m sorry to bother you at night, but I called the
FBI number in the phone book and a recording gave
this number…”
   “Yes,” Cavanaugh said neutrally. The tape
recorder was the third and final occupant of his
office, unless you counted Seton’s daily debris:
Dorito bags, soda cans, crumpled printer paper,
302s. It all flourisheth as the grass. “What is your
name and how can I help you?”
   “My name is Rachel Pafford. I’m a nurse—a new
nurse, actually, I just started—at Dellridge
Community Hospital in La Plata. I’m calling
because I think there’s something… well, strange
going on here that nobody’s doing anything about.
And I thought the FBI might be the right people to
tell. I mean, I told my charge nurse, but she said it
wasn’t statistically significant. But I think
different!” A note of quavering defiance.
   Cavanaugh kept his face set in lines of
professional concern, even though he’d already
decided this was another paranoid call. They came
in two varieties: the nuts who called to report UFOs
landing in the salt marshes, and the easily
frightened conformists who saw conspiracy to
overthrow the government in every pierced nose,
shaved head, or odd noise on their phone line. A
smoke bomb in the high school lavatory made them
expect Waco. But Judy sat across the room, purple
knitting on her lap and fiery light in her eyes, and
Cavanaugh was prepared to listen indefinitely to
Nurse Pafford.
 “Tell me the events you’re concerned about,
ma’am. From the beginning, please.”
   “Well, we kept having stroke victims come into
the hospital. I mean, we always do, but not as many
as this. I worked the weekend night shift. We had
five strokes Saturday night and three Sunday night.
And most of them were people who wouldn’t
ordinarily be in the risk population— young adults,
even kids. But the thing is”—her voice
dropped—“they’re all black.”
  “Every one? Not even one white patient?”
  “Well, no, of course we had that, too. But only
one. The blacks… there are just too many of them to
be normal.”
  “Ehhrrrmmm.”
   “So I looked up the admission records. The
unusual number of strokes started three weeks ago,
in the first part of May. I made a graph. The
number has just mounted steadily. And all but two
are black.” The uncertain young voice took on a
sudden dignity. “I do know how this sounds, Agent
Cavanaugh. But I’m not just being weird.”
   “No. I’m sure your reasons are of the highest.
Look, suppose I come over the hospital and
interview you about this. Are you on duty?”
  “You mean… now? No, I’m at home in Port
Tobacco; I didn’t want to call from Dellridge…”
   “Fine, give me your address please,” Cavanaugh
said briskly. He wrote it down on one of the
pen-and-memo pad sets Judy kept all over the
house, color-coordinated with the curtains. “I’ll be
there in twenty minutes.”
  “Oh, thank you!”
   “Gotta go, sweetheart,” Cavanaugh said to Judy,
“business at last. Up in Charles County.” He ducked
into the hall that led to the house’s two bedrooms,
hoping she wouldn’t follow. She didn’t. He changed
from a T-shirt to a button-down, knotted on a tie,
and gathered his credentials, a notebook, and his
regulation Smith & Wesson. The latter made him
feel ridiculous—to talk to a compulsive nurse in
Port Tobacco? But he wanted Judy to see this was a
legitimate Bureau call, not merely an excuse to
avoid their talk.
   She sat stonily on the sofa. He kissed the top of
her head in passing. “Sorry, sweetheart. I’ll try not
to be late.”
   “Right,” Judy said. “You wouldn’t want to miss
all the good sex we’ve been having lately.”
  Cavanaugh didn’t answer. He was careful not to
bang the kitchen door on his way out.



   All right, so they hadn’t been having much sex
lately, Cavanaugh thought, on the drive west. At
least, not compared to when he and Judy had first
gotten together. Well, that was normal, wasn’t it?
Sex fell off after awhile together. And Judy had been
busy with that big paleontology article for Science
Update, when she hadn’t been creating the Perfect
Rustic Dream House. And he’d been busy not being
busy. So of course it was natural that they didn’t
have as much sex. Wasn’t it?
  Christ, if it wasn’t the presence of sex screwing
up people’s lives, it was the absence of sex. Either
way, you couldn’t win.
  He parked in the large central lot of Rachel
Pafford’s apartment complex, a well-kept cluster of
buildings surrounded by speed bumps,
playgrounds, and a duck pond. Kids swarmed all
over the place. It was nine-thirty—shouldn’t they all
be in bed? Wasn’t tomorrow a school day? The little
kids, Cavanaugh noticed, climbed on the floodlit
jungle gym and dug in the sandbox in integrated
groups, impartially throwing sand at other black
and white cherubs. But the older lads, with their
oversized clothing and very cool, nonchalant
expressions, kept mostly to their own.
  “Ms. Pafford? Special Agent Cavanaugh.”
   “Oh, come in,” she said, sounding as if he was the
rescuing cavalry. Cavanaugh wasn’t surprised.
Anyone who graphed stroke incidence was going to
be pretty intense. A thin, wiry brunette with large
glasses, she looked fifteen, although common sense
told him that she must be at least twenty.
  “Would you like a Coke?” He heard the flat vowels
of the Midwest.
  “Thank you. Now, why don’t you show me your
graphs.”
    They were in three colors, each bar drawn with a
ruler. Nervously, Rachel Pafford went over the same
information she’d given Cavanaugh on the phone,
with embellishment. “In a stroke case, you only have
about three hours before several million brain cells
disintegrate. But before we can do anything, we
need to know if the stroke is ischemic, which means
it’s caused by a blood clot, or hemorraghic, which
means a blood vessel burst inside the body. Because
if it’s a clot, either a thrombus or an embolus, you
want to administer medicine to break it up; but if
it’s a hemorrhage, the same drug will only increase
the bleeding.”
  She stopped and looked at him quizzically;
Cavanaugh nodded to show he understood. On his
notepad he doodled a large blood clot fleeing from
three small bottles of medicine. He always doodled
while listening; it helped him concentrate.
  “So we did CTs, and that’s how I know the clots
were all the same: cerebral thromboses. Of the nine
patients, seven died. One is in a coma and will
probably have severe permanent brain damage, and
the last one is in critical condition. Here, I’ve
indicated which is which, with ages, race, and home
addresses.”
  She handed him a chart to match the graph.
Christ, Nurse Pafford was more organized than half
the agents he’d known.
   He said, “Don’t I remember reading somewhere
that African Americans are more susceptible to
stroke than whites?”
   “Well, yes. That’s true. But not to this extent!
Anyway, I took all this data to my supervisor. She
told me it wasn’t important, I was too young and
ignorant to know that cases came in unpredictable
clumps, and maybe next month it’s be a bunch of
heart attacks or car crashes.”
  Rachel Pafford bit her lip. Cavanaugh guessed
that the supervisor’s disdain had wounded her. But
not to the point of giving up.
   “I went next to the director of the hospital. She
said the same thing, only in nicer words. When my
supervisor found out I’d seen her, she was a real
bitch to me!”
   Cavanaugh was glad he wasn’t in the middle of
this behind-the-scenes hospital drama. Nurse
Pafford, for all her youth and nervousness, looked
tenacious. In fact, she suddenly reminded him of
Judy.
  “So what will you do with the information, Agent
Cavanaugh?”
  “Well,” he said, inventing fast, “you yourself must
know, the data sample is small, only nine cases—”
  “Yes, of course, we need more. I’ll photocopy this
week’s records when I go in on Friday!”
  “I don’t—”
    “And, of course, if this is happening at Dellridge,
it’s probably happening at other places in the area,
although this is the only real hospital in southern
Maryland—but you’ll check with private physicians,
of course. And the county medical examiner. She’ll
have to do autopsies on anything
suspicious-looking. Then you’ll have enough data to
run T-tests for significance… my training included
basic statistics, you know. Will you let me know
what you uncover?”
   Cavanaugh felt dizzy. She had it all planned out.
But “it” was probably just what the supervising
nurse had said: a normal variation in the various
ways human beings could die. “CIVILIZATION
PURSUES NATURE” Cavanaugh scribbled under
his racing medicine bottles, closed his notebook,
and stood.
  “If I uncover anything notable, Ms. Pafford, I’ll
contact you again. If you don’t hear from me, you
can assume I found nothing significant.”
  “But—”
   “The Federal Bureau of Investigation thanks you
for your patriotic concern as a citizen,” Cavanaugh
said. This useful formula, the invention of his
former supervisor Martin Felders, invariably shut
people up. It sounded so final, so official. Rachel
Pafford was no exception. She followed him
unhappily to the door, but she didn’t thrust on him
any more graphs or lists.
  In his car, Cavanaugh considered. If he drove
home, he’d get there by ten-thirty. Judy would still
be up. She’d want to continue talking about
marriage. He just wasn’t up to it.
  He drove instead to the main street of Port
Tobacco and found a bar. A sign in the gravel
parking lot said CUSTOMER PARKING ONLY—NO
AUTO REPAIRS. Cavanaugh was lucky. Not only
did his car not need repairs, but the bar was
actually open. The only other restaurant he’d found
open this late in Saint Mary’s County was the
International House of Pancakes.
  Inside, the bar was cool and dim. By nursing two
beers and then driving very slowly back across the
peninsula, he arrived in Rivermount at fifteen
minutes to midnight. The lights were all out in the
house on the river bluff.
   Before he tiptoed into the house, Cavanaugh used
his cell phone to call his office answering machine.
Two messages. Nurse Pafford, asking him not to
mention her name when he talked to any other
medical people, and the principal at the junior
high, reminding him that on Thursday, forty-two
eighth graders were signed up to hear him talk
about all the exciting career opportunities in the
FBI.
                      Two

     In medicine, sins of commission are
     mortal, sins of omission venial.
     —Bulletin of New York Academy of
     Medicine, 1929



  On Wednesday mornings every second week,
Cavanaugh reported in to the field office in
Baltimore for a staff meeting. He was the southern
Maryland representative, mostly so Donald Seton,
special agent in charge, didn’t have to be bothered.
   “Going up to Baltimore?” Seton asked. He was a
career agent, close to retirement, and as far as
Cavanaugh could find out, a dead weight on the
Bureau for twenty-three years. Overweight in the
way of a once-handsome man gone to lazy fat, Seton
still dressed like a member of J. Edgar Hoover’s
FBI: dark suit, narrow dark tie, white shirt now
straining at the buttons. Every morning he puttered
around the office. Every afternoon he either went to
the Patuxent River Naval Air Station on
unexplained “investigations” or spent the time in a
bar “developing informants.” Seton filed more 302s,
the form the Bureau used for case and informant
reports, than any agent Cavanaugh had ever seen.
He suspected that Seton’s informant files were
mostly bogus, but so far he hadn’t had the heart to
check this out, which he wasn’t supposed to do
anyway. Seton was his boss.
  Cavanaugh said neutrally, “Staff meeting.
Anything to give Dunbar?”
  “Of course,” Seton smirked. He always had
papers to give Dunbar. Informant reports, on-going
investigation reports, travel reports, report
reports—on paper, Seton looked like the most
productive agent on the East Coast. “This folder
here.”
  “A lot going on at Pax River?”
  “You know it,” Seton said, and winked.
   “You must fill me in on all of it soon. In case one
of your dangerous suspects tries a hit and I have to
finish the investigation.”
  Seton laughed. He was impervious to sarcasm.
“Have a good meeting, Bob.”
  “Robert,” Cavanaugh said automatically, yet
again. But Seton had gone back to his computer.
Cavanaugh glimpsed graphics of an alien spaceship.
Soundlessly it blew up. He left for Baltimore.
   Staff meetings were always mixed occasions. Just
driving north filled Cavanaugh with intense longing
for multilevel cloverleafs, interconnected malls, and
Chinese restaurants. The row houses of Baltimore
ignited nostalgia. But none of that began to
approach the envy of sitting in the meeting itself.
   Special Agent in Charge Jerry Dunbar, who
supervised over two hundred investigators in
Maryland and Delaware, tossed a
cigarette-pack-sized object in the middle of the
table. Wires dangled from its featureless metal
surface. “This thing is our single worst nightmare.
And we’ve made no progress at all on it.”
   Twenty-four agents stared at the gizmo, which all
of them recognized. It was legitimately marketed by
mail-order electronics houses. It cost about $1,200.
Cabled to a cellular telephone, it allowed criminals
to change their cell phone number every three or
four minutes with just a few key strokes. It was
making wiretaps completely ineffectual.
   “If it weren’t for that, I’d have had a warrantable
transcript on Carlo DiBenedetto,” said Alex Vallone,
from the Wilmington Office.
 “You know what the wiseguys are calling it? ‘The
magic box,’” said Marie Mooney, from Hyattsville,
outside D.C.
   “Even the army noncoms have them,” said John
Stoneham. “I was this close to a warrantable
transcript on that weapons-stealing ring at
Aberdeen Proving Ground.” He held up his thumb
and forefinger a quarter inch apart. “This close.”
  “Headquarters says they’re working on it,”
Dunbar said. Sounds of derision around the table.
Dunbar stiffened; he didn’t have much of a sense of
humor.
   Cavanaugh reached for his notebook and
sketched the telephone device. He gave it horns and
a sarcastic leer.
  “Robert,” Marie said kindly, “have you run into
any trouble with these magic boxes from your hate
groups?”
   “No,” Cavanaugh said, trying to keep the envy out
of his voice. He hadn’t even “run into” any of the
hate groups themselves, although southern
Maryland was lush with them: home-grown militia,
white supremacists, neo-Nazis, religious warriors.
In the deep forests and trailer-park dirt roads and
tidal swamps, they flourished like kudzu in Georgia.
Thanks to Headquarters data, Cavanaugh knew
who the hate groups were, and where they were. But
lately they had all been quiet or inactive or—for all
the opportunity they gave him to do
anything—completely dead.
  He labeled his drawing “THE MAGIC MOCKS.”
  The conversation moved on: a terrorist
investigation in Dover. A kidnapping in Baltimore.
RICO statutes, task forces, warrants, informants,
subpoenas. Cavanaugh said nothing. He sketched a
cat, tightly imprisoned inside a perfect circle,
squashed and motionless. Then a second one.
  Surveillance, bomb teams, advanced training at
Quantico.
  A few more lines, and the cats inside circles
became the wheels of a police car.
  Sabotage, money laundering, bank fraud,
problems in coordination with local law
enforcement.
 This drawing he labeled “UNSTOLEN
HUBCATS.”
  “Well, I think that pretty much wraps it up,”
Agent Dunbar said. “Anybody need help with
anything else? Robert?”
   This week I have a housing discrimination in a
senior citizen complex and an Adopt-a-School talk
to the eighth grade. Want to help? “No,”
Cavanaugh said. “I’m fine.”
  He couldn’t get out of Baltimore fast enough, and
he hated it that he had to leave.



   On the way back to Leonardtown, Cavanaugh
stopped at Dellridge Community Hospital in La
Plata to talk to its director, who turned out to be a
woman in her fifties, trim and cool except for her
accent, which promised a lush magnolia-scented
warmth that her manner did not deliver.
   “I have to say that I still don’t understand why
you’re here, Agent Cavanaugh,” Dr. Lawrence said,
after he had explained for ten minutes why he was
there. “Are you asking”—Ah yew-ah ay-askin
—“whether or not these deaths by stroke on the
dates in question actually occurred? I can, of
course, verify that for you.” Vuh-ah-fy.
   “Not exactly,” Cavanaugh said. “I’m asking more
whether such strokes—such a number of cerebral
strokes all in a clump—are normal.”
  She squinted at him across her desk. “Strokes are
completely natural, Agent Cavanaugh, in that the
body has a million different ways to malfunction.”
  “Yes, I know, Doctor. But the unusually high
incidence of strokes here at Dellridge last
weekend—is that medically notable?”
  “Agent Cavanaugh, are you investigating a
possible mishandling of medical emergencies at
Dellridge? If you are, please tell me outright.”
Out-raht.
  “I’m not investigating anything at this point,”
Cavanaugh said, and saw in her eyes the question,
Then why are you here? “I’m merely following up
on an anomaly. Any insight into the anomaly that
you can give me would be very helpful.”
   “And this anomaly is racial in nature. That’s
what you mean, isn’t it? Let me just put a few facts
on the table, if I may. The population of Maryland is
twenty-five percent African American, far above the
national average. African Americans, for some
reasons we understand and some we don’t, are
twice as likely as whites to suffer a stroke. For
African Americans between thirty-five and
fifty-five, the rate is four times higher than for
middle-aged whites. National studies show that
when blacks do suffer strokes, brain damage in
survivors is more extensive than in other racial
groups. No one knows why. And let me just add that
Dellridge Hospital has an unparalleled commitment
to providing quality care to all our patients. And
the unblemished record to back that up. Is that the
sort of insight you’re looking for, Agent
Cavanaugh?”
  Cavanaugh said neutrally, “Its very helpful, yes.”
  “I’m so glad.” Dr. Lawrence stood. “If there’s
anything else I can do to assist you…”
  “No, I don’t think so. You’ve been very helpful.”
Clearly expected to stand and leave, he did.
   He could feel her eyes on his back all the way
down the hospital corridor, through the lobby, and
out the door, where the unseasonable heat hit him
like a damp shroud.
  “Here’s the lab report you asked for,” the young
doctor said, laying a sheaf of papers on the desk of
the chief of medicine, “on Senator Reading.”
   Dr. Goldstein skimmed the report. He was a
slight, handsome man in his sixties, with a full head
of curls the same gunmetal gray as his eyes. As he
read, the gray eyes narrowed. “There’s some
mistake.”
  “I don’t think so, sir. I had the test done twice.
Both reports are there.”
  “Had the senator been traveling overseas? Or
even in the Caribbean?”
  “Not according to his wife. He’s been too busy
precampaigning.”
   Goldstein got up and walked to the window. The
view from the third floor was discouraging. Like
most New York hospitals, parking was a problem
second only to sanitation. Cars jammed the
inadequate parking lot, many of them skewed at
clearly illegal angles in clearly illegal spaces,
blocking Dumpsters and delivery bays and other
cars. Among the illegals was a sound truck with
CHANNEL SIX NEWS on the side. Goldstein
scowled and turned back from the window.
  “Rafe, I can’t give this out at the press
conference. Not unless we’re absolutely sure.”
  The young doctor didn’t answer. He had peered
through the scanning tunneling microscope
himself; he was already sure. He said, “I’m afraid
there’s something else, sir.”
   “Something else besides the fact that a United
States senator and strong presidential candidate
died of a thrombus, but tests show that he also had
the beginning stages of malaria when there hasn’t
been any malaria in the United States since the end
of World War II?”
  “Yes, sir. The last page of the report.”
  Still standing, Goldstein shuffled to the last page,
past the tests confirming malaria: decreased
hemoglobin, hemocrit, platelet count and
haptoglobin. Increased levels of lactic
dehydrogenase and reticulocytes. Not to mention
the Plasmodium falciparum parasites viewed under
the X-ray microscope. The chief of medicine read
the last page once, twice. “No,” he said. “Flat out
impossible.”
  The younger doctor said nothing.
   Slowly Goldstein shuffled through the pages of
lab reports, looking for a way to make sense of the
results. He didn’t find it.
 “Sir, I looked through the microscope myself. The
merozoites—”
  But Goldstein wasn’t in the mood for eyewitness
news. He made a sudden decision.
   “Rafe, don’t mention this to anyone, including
the senator’s family. Not just yet. And I’m going to
leave the malaria out of that damned press
conference, too. Meanwhile, package up samples of
the senator’s blood and copies of all the lab tests,
and send them to the CDC in Atlanta, and to the
Infectious and Tropical Disease Unit at Walter
Reed. Call both places and explain the problem.
They’re set up for this kind of weirdness. We’re
not.”
  “Yes, sir,” Rafe said. His eyes met Goldstein’s.
The two gazes, one gunmetal gray and one bright
blue, held briefly. Then both looked away.
   Each was intensely conscious of what had not
been said aloud. David Goldstein was Jewish; Rafe
DuFort was French. Both considered themselves
fair-minded men, without prejudice, and politically
astute.
  “The CDC,” Goldstein repeated, “is set up for this.
That’s what they’re there for.”
  He went off to make his statement to the press on
the causes of Senator Malcolm Peter Reading’s
death.



   The package from the New York hospital arrived
at the Centers for Disease Control main receiving
dock by overnight Federal Express. It was labeled in
red magic marker: DANGEROUS. INFECTIOUS
SUBSTANCES. DANGEROUS TO HUMANS. The
men working at the dock paid no attention. They
saw dozens of such packages every week.
   The box was routed to Dr. Melanie Anderson,
malaria epidemiologist in the Special Pathogens
Branch. She read the accompanying letter, studied
the lab reports, and removed the tubes containing
blood samples from their packing of dry ice, staring
incredulously.
  Somebody somewhere had fucked up big time.
What the letter and reports said just wasn’t in the
annals of medicine.
   Not that Melanie Anderson had any great respect
for the annals of medicine. She had graduated third
in her class from Yale School of Medicine, had
returned to her native Mississippi full of crusading
zeal to treat poor up-country folk in areas without a
decent doctor, had set up shop in a dirt-poor
community—and had then discovered that she
hated being a doctor.
  She hated it almost as much as she’d always
hated her name. What kind of self-respecting black
woman, she’d railed at her hapless mother when
Melanie had been sixteen, named a black girl after
a Gone With the Wind magnolias-and-Confederacy
belle? Where was her mothers pride, her righteous
anger? Patty Anderson, intimidated into
helplessness by this verbal and alien daughter, had
only shrugged helplessly. She lacked the courage to
say that she’d actually told the birth-certificate
recorder “Melody,” as in “A Pretty Girl Is Like…”
The white woman had apparently misheard Patty’s
soft, blurred, childbirth-woozy accent, and the birth
certificate came back “Melanie.” Patty had settled.
Probably Melanie would have thought “A Pretty
Girl Is Like a Melody” an even worse insult. It
seemed that almost everything Patty said lately
somehow was.
   At med school Melanie had called herself “Mel.”
She’d kept to the small number of blacks in her
class. It was like that in the midseventies. She’d
joined the Black Panthers and worn her hair in an
Afro that, since she was light and her hair waved
softly, was a pain in the ass to maintain.
   Melanie reverted to her full name in her first
practice, but within six months she didn’t care
what she was called as long as she could be called it
someplace else. She was bored with treating the
same old things over and over, easy nonchallenging
things: colicky babies and elderly influenza and
summertime rashes. She found—appalled at
herself—that she was growing resentful of the obese
hypertensives who refused to lose weight, the
smokers’ coughs who refused to quit smoking, the
incipient cirrhoses who refused to give up the
bottle. Out of boredom and frustration, she was
coming to almost hate the people, her people, that
she’d trained herself to help.
  Before it reached that point, Melanie Anderson
quit private practice and joined the CDC’s
Epidemic Intelligence Service. If medicine was
going to inspire her with hatred, let it be hatred for
microbes and not people.
   She turned out to have an enormous talent for
disease identification and control. Her required
field training took place in Africa, during a swine
flu outbreak in Senegal. There she discovered that
she also had a talent for languages. The natives
trusted her, this African American who took the
trouble to learn their dialects, and Melanie
contributed to the Senegal team a set of
outstanding epidemic curves, those all-important
graphs that identify the growth and source of an
outbreak. She was also a pretty fair lab
epidemiologist, at least for anything larger than
DNA itself.
   Over the next five years, Melanie returned to
Africa six times, five of them for malaria. In central
Africa, malaria was still the single greatest killer. In
some areas, during the most serious outbreaks of
the most virulent strain, 40 percent of toddlers
died. Melanie was sometimes heartsick by what she
saw, but she was always challenged, always useful,
never bored. She was happy. The men she dated on
two continents, attracted to her silk-and-sass good
looks and focused intelligence, eventually learned
that she enjoyed their company, but no more. They
would always come in second to a good outbreak of
Plasmodium falciparum.
  Now Melanie reread the New York reports, rolled
her eyes in private disbelief, and prepared to thaw
the blood samples for a battery of tests.
  Four hours later, she stood dazed in the middle of
her lab. No. No. It simply was not possible. She had
made a mistake somewhere.
  But she knew she hadn’t.
  With most Special Pathogens Branch operations,
the first, lengthy step was to isolate the unknown
pathogen. That meant days—or weeks—of
experimenting to find the right medium to grow
samples in, the right techniques to manipulate
cultures, the right tests and reagents and stains and
optimum temperatures and a dozen other factors.
This time, none of that applied. The New York lab
had known what they were sending her. It just
wasn’t supposed to exist.
  She picked up an in-house phone and called her
supervisor, Jim Farlow, head of the Special
Pathogens Branch.



  “Holy Mother of God,” Farlow said. “You’re sure,
Melanie?”
  “I’m sure,” she said grimly.
  “All right, go over it once more. I just want to
hear it again.”
   “The stroke victim, Senator Malcolm Peter
Reading, was in the first stages of malaria.
Electrophoresis confirms that he was also positive
for sickle-cell trait. And that malaria merozoites
were in the Hb S blood cells.”
  “That isn’t possible,” Farlow said.
  “I know it isn’t possible! Do you think I don’t
know it isn’t possible?” Melanie cried. She heard
her own anger, but for the moment, at least, she
couldn’t help herself.
   Sickle-cell trait, an inherited blood abnormality,
protected against malaria. That had been known for
decades. Plasmodium, the one-celled parasite that
caused malaria, couldn’t flourish inside red blood
cells with the abnormal form of hemoglobin called
Hb S. Those blood cells tended to sickle—that is, to
curve into rigid sickle shapes—when they
deoxygenated. Plasmodium found this uncongenial.
   A personal with sickle-cell trait had his own
problems, of course, but they were not very serious.
Unlike full-blown sickle-cell anemia, which caused
frequent pain and sometimes death, the person
born with sickle-cell trait carried only one gene for
Hb S, not two. This meant that some of his red
blood cells would sickle, but most would not.
Usually this meant that if he was careful not to
exercise way past his limit, or to take long flights in
underpressurized airplanes, he might not realize he
even had a genetic deficiency. The sickle-cell-trait
carrier was slightly more susceptible to blood clots,
because the red blood cells that did sickle grew
sticky and tended to “sludge,” clogging small
capillaries. This was a constant danger for those
with two genes for Hb S, but a fairly minor danger
for carriers of only one gene.
  In exchange, the sickle-trait carrier was
protected against severe malaria, although he
might get a mild case of it at first infection—if there
was malaria to get, which in the United States, for
over fifty years, there had not been. The last of it
had been wiped out by the end of the World War II.
In fact, the CDC had been founded in 1942 as the
MCWA: Malarial Control in War Areas.
   But now the CDC was looking at evidence that
not only said that Senator Malcolm Peter Reading
had died of a sickle-cell-crisis thrombosis, but also
that the very red blood cells forming the fatal clot
had been colonized by P. falciparum merozoites,
cells with Hb S. Which was flat-out impossible.
  Melanie willed herself to calm. “Look for yourself,
Jim. There’s no mistake. The parasites are inside
the sickled cells.” She pushed him toward the
microscope.
   Farlow looked. Melanie visualized what he saw:
the unmistakable forms of P. falciparum like tiny
signet rings, stained now to a small ruby nucleus
embedded in a wispy blue circlet, inside long,
banana-shaped, clearly sickled cells.
  Farlow gazed a long time, turned away, and
rubbed his jaw with the side of his palm. He and
Melanie looked at each other.
  “Senator Malcolm Peter Reading,” Farlow said.
  She said clearly, “A black man.” And waited to
see what he’d say next.
   Nearly all carriers of sickle-cell trait were black.
The diseases genetic trade-off, hemoglobin S in
exchange for protection against malaria, had
evolved in Africa. Sickle-cell trait had come to the
United States with the slave trade. At present, one
in twelve African Americans carried the trait.
Almost three million people.
   Farlow said slowly, “P. falciparum has a high rate
of spontaneous mutation. Christ, six percent of its
genome is already devoted to antigenic variation.
And part of its life cycle is sexual, with more
chances for frame shifts. This mutation could have
arisen completely spontaneously.”
  “Or,” Melanie said, “it could have been
genetically engineered.”
  “Melanie—”
   “In which case we might be looking at an attempt
at racial genocide.”
   Farlow held up a hand. He knew her history:
Black Panthers, the arrest for anti-apartheid
demonstrations, activism for various black causes,
her refusal to date white men, although she
accepted them as friends. Melanie had always felt
he’d had reservations about her, at the same time
that he admired her scientific work. The
combination made him uneasy—but that should be
his problem, not hers.
   “Look,” Farlow said, “let’s take it one step at a
time, okay? Without any premature theories. First,
I’m going to have somebody else repeat your tests,
Melanie, before we even consider vectors. Just as a
check. But you’re on the epidemiology team for this,
of course.”
  She said grimly, “Just try to keep me off it.”



                  INTERIM

  The child lay in her bed, listening to her mother
yell at her older sister.
   “Don‘ never gonna get anywhere in this life if you
don’ go back to school… no more sense ‘n a baby…
stuck all the resta her life on some dyin’ tobacco
farm… sixteen years ol‘ and she think she know
everything in God’s green world…” Bang. Bang.
BANG.
  The child smiled. The first bang, and the last one,
was Mamma clapping around cooking pots, which
she always did when she was mad at Rhonda. The
middle bang was Rhonda, slamming the screen
door as she stamped out of the house. None of this
upset Kwansia. It was morning. It was normal.
  And it was Saturday.
   Soundlessly, Kwansia slipped from her bed. The
room was tiny, furnished with only a battered
dresser and thin-mattressed bed. The screen on the
window bellied inward, worn soft as old cloth, loose
at the edges. The child was careful not to tear it any
farther as she raised the window and climbed
through.
  The day was beeee-uuuu-ti-ful! That was the way
Kwansia’s kindergarten teacher always said it:
beeee-uuuu-ti-ful! When school ended in a few
weeks, Kwansia would miss Mrs. Calthorne, but not
very much. It was too summery out, and summer
was too much fun, and right now sunshine made
the water on the big farm pond shine like it was
gold.
   Barefoot, she padded across the back field,
keeping out of sight both of her mother’s kitchen
window and of Rhonda, sulking at the road as she
waited for the bus to town. Kwansia wiggled her
toes in the grass, which felt so good she started to
trot, just to have even more grass stroke her feet.
Someone mowed yesterday; the grassy smell was
fresh and sweet. Heaven, Kwansia thought, was
going to smell exactly like Mr. Thayer’s farm just
after it done got mowed.
   She stopped, out of breath, by the cow barn.
Kwansia like cows. She liked the way they looked at
her, like they was thinking, chewing their grass
gum. She liked the kittens in the hay loft, their eyes
just open. She liked—
  Something sharp stung her arm. Kwansia
jumped, shook herself all over, then looked down.
The mosquito was still there. Instead of slapping it
again, Kwansia raised her arm until the mosquito
was inches from her face. It didn’t fly away. She
stared at it, fascinated.
  Its nose was stuck right in her skin! How did it
do that? Almost as dark as her arm, the mosquito
balanced on six long skinny legs. There were white
dots on its wings. It looked so funny, bent over like
that, almost standing on its head to eat little bits of
her.
  “I got lots,” the child told the mosquito.
“Everything on God’s green earth got to eat.” Her
mother often said that.
  “Kwansia, where you at? You outside again
without no shoes?”
  Guilty, Kwansia yelled, “Here, Mama!”
  “You get in here and eat your breakfas‘!”
  The child brushed the mosquito off her arm and
ran toward the house through the glorious spring
morning. The mosquito, sated, flew toward the
quiet waters of Thayer’s pond.



                     THREE

      Fidelity, bravery, integrity.
      —FBI motto



  Cavanaugh arrived at Rivermount Junior High, a
consolidated school district, just as the bell rang to
change classes. The central hallway, which
moments before had been a peaceful, locker-lined
thoroughfare, instantly took on the character of the
D.C. beltway during a nuclear evacuation.
   Cavanaugh flattened himself against the wall in
self-protection. He hadn’t set foot in a junior high
since he’d been in junior high, and surely then it
hadn’t looked like this? All the boys looked like
runts inexplicably dressed in clothes three sizes too
big for them. All the girls looked like hookers.
Makeup, big hair, short skirts, developed
figures—these girls couldn’t possibly be the same
age as the boys pushing past them. They looked at
least five years older and from another culture
entirely. Some of them were also dazzlingly pretty.
   After the stampede had slowed, Cavanaugh found
the principal’s office and was escorted to the Large
Group Instruction Area, a term he’d never heard
before, which turned out to be the cafeteria with a
stage built at one end. The eighth grade, eight to a
table, awaited him. As he mounted the podium,
every male eyed the bulge of his gun, including the
teachers. He had no idea what the girls eyed, and
didn’t want to think about it.
  “Hello. My name is Robert Cavanaugh, special
agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
 Feminine titters from a table off to the right.
What was so funny about that?
  “I’m here today to talk to you about careers in the
FBI. The Bureau needs bright, ambitious young
people, and by the time you finish college, it will
need even more of them.”
   Titters from a table to the left. A blonde
Madonna-wanna-be put her perfectly manicured
finger between her bright red lips and made a
discreet barfing sound. A teacher stood up and
directed “The Teacher Look” at that table.
Cavanaugh inwardly cursed the Adopt-a-School
Community Outreach Program and whatever
underemployed moron had dreamed it up.
   But they warmed as he talked, or at least enough
of them did so that no other teacher had to stand
and give The Look. Cavanaugh covered the standard
information: FBI mission, programs, successes,
opportunities, employment requirements. Then he
threw it open for questions.
   An intense-looking black kid in a Dilbert T-shirt
stood. “Agent Cavanaugh, how closely do you
monitor the Ku Klux Klan activities on the Internet?
I don’t just mean their Home Page, but the
information going by in the chat rooms and stuff
like that.”
   Cavanaugh shifted his weight behind the
podium. He had received intelligence about the
local chapter of the KKK, of course, but he had no
idea they had a Home Page, much less chat rooms.
That was the sort of thing monitored by analysts,
not agents, who received the information in hard
copy as they needed or requested it. And 70 percent
of Cavanaugh’s civil rights cases, like agents’
everywhere, concerned not racial discrimination
but alleged police brutality. Although they were
often the same thing.
   However, looking down into that serious, intense
young face, Cavanaugh didn’t want to say any of
this. For the first time, he realized that the black
eighth graders and the whites, with few exceptions,
sat at separate tables.
   “The Bureau stays on top of Klan developments in
every form the information is offered. All agents
receive instruction in computer use during initial
training at Quantico, and refresher courses
afterwards as needed.”
  The kid nodded and sat down, evidently too
young to realize that Cavanaugh had said nothing.
A girl stood. “How much money does an FBI agent
make? How much do you get?”
  “Pay scale depends on position and length of
service. And you really don’t expect me to stand up
here and tell you my personal income, do you? The
IRS might be listening.”
  That got a laugh. Other kids asked about
weapons training, fingerprinting, UFOs (The
X-Files had a lot to answer for), bombing cases, and
if he’d ever met the president. Then a boy stood
near the back. Taller than most, he looked as if he
had no flesh at all, only skin stretched over bones as
sharp as chisels. His hair, skin, and eyes were all the
same color, pale as dry sand. He blinked twice and
said, “Does the FBI ever hire entomologists?”
   The whole room exploded into laughter.
Cavanaugh couldn’t see why, except that it seemed
to be provoked by the kid himself, not the question.
Catcalls from all over: “Go back under your rock,
Insect Boy!” “What a dork!” “Earl, you look like one
of your bugs!” Three teachers stood and gave The
Look. One also clapped his hands and called out,
“People! People!” The students ignored him. Then
the bell rang. The eighth grade grabbed its book
bags and fled as if from chemical contamination.
The teachers followed the students.
   Only Earl didn’t move. He stood rooted, staring
at Cavanaugh. In sixty seconds, the room was
empty except for Cavanaugh, Earl, and the
principal. Cavanaugh addressed this minuscule
audience, since clearly Earl was not going to budge
until he did.
   “The FBI has what it calls Professional Support
Personnel positions, who do jobs like computer
specialist, lab technician, photographer. I don’t
know if Professional Support Personnel includes an
entomologist, but I would guess not. When we need
technical science advice outside of the usual
forensic activities, the Bureau often consults with
scientists at the National Institute of Health, which
is right outside Washington in Bethesda.”
   Cavanaugh, proud of this answer, waited for Earl
to nod and leave. He didn’t. Instead he blinked his
pale eyes twice and said, “You ought to have an
entomologist.”
  “Well, as I explained—”
  Two more blinks. “Insects tell us a lot about
everything.”
  “Thank you, Earl,” said the principal. “Now you
should go to your next class.”
   Earl threw the principal a look of utter despair,
startling on that bony, washed-out face, and
slouched off. The principal climbed the stage steps
to Cavanaugh.
   “Interesting boy, that. Earl Lester. Absolutely
fanatical about insects, and knows everything there
is to know about the latest research. But somewhat
deficient in social skills, as you saw, which
unfortunately evokes a negative reaction from his
insecure peers.”
  Cavanaugh wondered why principals talked like
that. The principal walked him to the main
entrance, mingling jargon and thanks.
   Back in his office in Leonardtown, he sat at his
computer, accessed Web Crawler, and typed in KU
KLUX KLAN. And there it was: the KKK Home
Page, with a history section, frequently asked
questions, organization listings (including the
chapter on Robert’s jurisdiction), and pictures. In
fact, it looked depressingly like the FBI Home Page,
except that the Klan couldn’t spell (“upholding
there tradition”) Web Crawler also gave him sites
for chat groups about the Klan. He found one billing
itself as WHITE PRIDE OF MARYLAND and
followed a few of its message linkages through the
hateful, pathetic conversation:



     I WANT TO BE IN THE KLAN WHEN
     I’M OLDER. EVERY WHERE I GO ALL
     THE NIGGERS ARE CUTTING ME
     DOWN AND I DON’T LIKE IT
     ANYMORE.
     TIM—I WANT TO BE IN THE KLAN
     TOO. OKAY DO WHAT YOU WANT,
     AND DON’T LET ANYBODY TRY AND
     STOP YOU.



     BLACK POWER!!! HEY TO ALL OF U
     INBREEDERS FROM THE KLAN. IM
     JUST WONDERING WHATS GOING
     ON IN YOUR LITTLE BRAINS. IM NOT
     BLACK, BUT ME AND ALMOST THE
     REST OF THE WORLD LOVE THEM.
     ON THE OTHER HAND JUST WHERE
     ARE BLACKS ACCEPTED IN THIS
     WORLD? ANYONE WANT THEM?
     HOW ABOUT AFRICA? NO THEY ARE
     KILLING EACH OTHER BY THE
     THOUSANDS. BECAUSE BLACK
     BEHAVE WITHOUT CLASS AND
     DIGNITY, NO BODY EVER WILL
     ACCEPT THEM UNTIL THEY TRY AND
     ACT LIKE THE REST OF US.



     HEY DOES ANY BODY KNOW ABOUT
     THIS BUNCH OF STROKES KILLING
     NIGGERS IN KING GEORGE VA? MY
     COUZIN IS A ORDERLY AT
     MEMORIAL HOSPITAL AND HE SAYS
     THEY HAVE WAY TO MANY NIGGERS
     DYING OF STROKES. GESS WHAT I
     SAID BACK?!!



   Cavanaugh straightened in his chair. He dragged
his cursor to the SAVE icon on his PC.



  The Potomac River Bridge on Highway 301
connected Charles County, Maryland, to King
George County, Virginia. Driving over it,
Cavanaugh noticed the giant waterborne mowing
machine cutting channels through hydrilla, an
aquatic weed that had sneaked into the U.S. from
someplace else. The channels ran from launching
ramps and marinas to the open water of the
Potomac. Without constant mowing, the hydrilla,
which sprouted as fast as eighth-grade girls, would
wrap itself around boat propellers. The machine
whirred along; above the driver’s head hummed a
cloud of insects.
  Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital in
Dahlgren, Virginia, was about the same size as
Dellridge. Cavanaugh talked to the director, who
showed the same paranoid distaste as Dellridge
about the idea that blacks might not receive equal
health care to whites. Nor did he believe Cavanaugh
when Cavanaugh said that wasn’t his concern. But
he gave Cavanaugh the information he wanted and
didn’t want:
  In the last three weeks, cerebral strokes in black
patients had occurred at triple the usual rate. There
had been no change in rates for other ethnic
groups, except for Indians from northern India.
  “Indians?” Cavanaugh said.
  “Yes. We have a growing Indian population,
many of whom are doctors employed by our
numerous pharmaceutical firms. Three Indians
have had similar strokes in the last two-and-a-half
weeks, which I have to admit does seem a little
unusual, especially since two were comparatively
young. And three came from Jamnagar. Does that
help?”
   “Afraid not,” Cavanaugh said, noting that the
director had turned much more cooperative when
discussing Indian stroke victims at Memorial
Hospital than black stroke victims. Federal civil
rights laws did not extend special protection to
Indians, “Were autopsies done on these stroke
patients?”
   “I’d have to check, but I imagine they were on at
least some of them, the ones who didn’t fit the
profile for a stroke—you know, much younger than
average, nonhypertensive, no elevated cholesterol,
things like that.”
  “Would you please fax me copies of those autopsy
reports?”
  “Certainly,” the director said, clearly not happy.
“May I ask just what the FBI’s concern is here?”
   “I’m sorry, I’m not able to say,” Cavanaugh said,
which was certainly true. He was fishing in the
dark. “One more question, Doctor. It’s true that an
autopsy only finds those things it’s looking for,
right? I mean, anything large like a gunshot wound
would be noticed, but subtle stuff, slight
metabolism differences, something like that, that
wouldn’t show up in a routine autopsy, would it?”
  “Such as what?”
  Cavanaugh had no idea. “Just… differences
among brains? Or blood?” He sounded lame even to
himself.
  The director said neutrally, “It’s true that an
autopsy includes some tests and not others, since
there are literally hundreds of different tests it’s
possible to perform on a dead body.”
  “Thank you, Doctor.”
   “One more thing. Agent Cavanaugh. I just want
to add that Soldiers and Sailors Memorial has an
outstanding commitment to providing quality care
to all our patients. And the record to prove it.”
   They were almost exactly the same words used by
the director at Dellridge. Maybe, Cavanaugh
thought, hospital administrators had to memorize
set speeches, the way law-enforcement officers had
to memorize the Miranda Rights. That made sense,
when you thought about it. On the whole,
Cavanaugh approved. The whole world would be
better off if it ran by shared and easily recognizable
rules.



  “The thing is, I don’t feel I know the rules here,”
Judy said. “In our relationship, I mean.”
   She and Cavanaugh sat on their tiny deck in the
red twilight, sipping wine. Judy, who disapproved
of pesticides on ecological grounds, had installed a
bug lamp on the deck so they could sit there after
dark without being nibbled alive by mosquitoes.
Every few seconds a hapless insect flew into the
lamp’s purple light, was fried by an electric field,
and dropped to the deck. Small insects made a
quiet zap as they fried; moths made a loud ZAP!
that made Cavanaugh’s neck crawl. He had read
that bug zappers were actually ineffective against
mosquitoes; 99 percent of what they fried were
some other bugs. However, he didn’t mention this
to Judy. Things were fragile enough already.
   “I’ve been trying to see this from your point of
view, Robert,” Judy said in a reasonable voice. “I
know you do care for me.”
  “Yes, I do,” Cavanaugh said.
   “And I can understand that you’re reluctant to
risk another marital failure.”
  “Yes.”
  “What I can’t understand is your belief that we
would be a failure.”
  Zap.
  “I mean, Robert… I’m not Marcy.”
  “I know you’re not.”
  “Although sometimes I think you wish I were.”
  Zap!
  “No,” Cavanaugh said carefully. “I don’t wish you
were Marcy.”
  Judy looked out toward the river. Boat lights
moved on the dark water. By the purple light of the
bug zapper Cavanaugh could see she was trying very
hard not to cry, to stay calm and reasonable. This
made him feel worse. Judy was not a calm person,
she was intense and open, that was one of the
things that had attracted him. And now he resented
her for it. Was that fair?
   Could it be true that he wanted her to be more
like Marcy? Cool, controlled Marcy, who never got
upset or hurt by anything he did, thereby letting
him just be himself…
  Zap.
  Judy said, “Sometimes I think you don’t really
know what you want.”
   I want this conversation to end. “Judy, I… I’m
just not ready.”
  Her tone shifted. “And when do you think you’ll
be ready?”
   “Don’t push me.” The second he said it, he knew
he shouldn’t have. But she surprised him. Instead of
getting hurt or angry, she said with genuine
contrition, “I’m sorry. I have been pushing, haven’t
I? That can’t feel very good to you. I mean, your
point of view is just as valid as mine.”
   “Oh, Judy,” he said helplessly, overwhelmed with
love, and guilt, and wariness, and the desire to
change the subject. Inspiration suddenly seized
him. “Honey, I know I’ve been distant, but I have a
lot on my— there’s something at work that I really
need your help with!”
  “My help?”
   “Yes! You’re the science writer. You know how to
really work the Internet, and you have so many
contacts in the scientific world. Here’s the
situation.”
  He shouldn’t do this, he knew. Bureau cases
weren’t supposed to be discussed outside the
Bureau, not even with spouses, which Judy wasn’t.
But this stroke thing could hardly be called a case
as yet—there wasn’t a suspicion of any foul play.
And Judy really did have solid groundings in the
scientific community. And if it would divert her
from the idea of marriage… Of course, Cavanaugh
had also put an analyst on it at Headquarters. Jim
Neymeier, Cavanaugh’s favorite intelligence analyst,
who loved data—especially computerized data—the
way moths loved porch lights. Not that Cavanaugh
was going to tell Judy about Neymeier.
  “Blacks and Indians,” Judy said thoughtfully,
when he’d finished telling her about Nurse Pafford,
Dellridge, and Soldiers and Sailors Memorial. “And
you think it’s some genetic brain difference,
something in the cerebral chemistry—”
  “That’s only a hypothesis,” Cavanaugh said. “But
can you check it out for me?”
   “Yes,” Judy said. She sounded happy again.
Almost shyly, she touched his arm in the darkness.
“I’m glad you asked me to help, Robert. I like being
useful to you.”
   Her words barely registered. But her touch did.
Suddenly, to his own surprise, he had a mammoth
erection. He got up from his deck chair, pulled Judy
to her feet, and kissed her deeply.
   “Well,” she said. “And what’s all this?” He could
feel her grin against her shirt.
  “Let’s go inside, honey.”
  “I’m willing,” she said huskily, and kissed him
again.
   So that was all it took! Some affection, some
lust… sex was the answer then. Or, at least, an
interim answer. It distracted her from thinking
about marriage. Sex was his best ally.
  Pleased with himself, Robert led her inside the
house.
  ZAP! went the purple light behind him.
   Melanie Anderson looked around the table at the
other three members of the newly formed CDC
team: Gary Pershing, the top laboratory man in
malaria; Susan Muscato, experienced veteran of
disease outbreaks in the United States—she’d done
some good sleuthing with hantavirus; Joe Krovetz,
very young, an unknown quantity, whom Jim
Farlow was probably giving a chance to do his
EPI-AID, Epidemic Assistance Detail, necessary to
becoming a full-fledged epidemic intelligence
officer. And Farlow himself, who was supposed to
be administrating the CDC Special Pathogens
Branch but could never bear to be left out while
anything hot was breaking. Melanie took Farlow’s
inclusion as a sign that the implications of the
Senator Reading blood samples were being taken
seriously. The team was a good one.
  It was also, except for her, all white.
  “All right,” Farlow summarized, “we have the lab
results. We have the stroke data, in rough form, in
the weekly morbidity reports for the last month. We
have—”
   “There’s something I don’t get,” Joe Krovetz said.
He was heavyset, with a neck thick and strong as a
bulldog’s. Everybody at the table, except apparently
Joe himself, noted that he didn’t hesitate to
interrupt Farlow.
  “What don’t you get?” Farlow said.
   “The Anopheles is infected, right?” This was a
safe assumption; Anopheles quadrimaculatus was
the only mosquito found east of the Rockies that
could carry malaria. “Anopheles bites a victim; the
parasite enters the bloodstream and goes straight
to the liver. All normal so far.”
   Normal. Young Joe Krovetz had never seen a
village devastated by an outbreak of lethal tertiary
malaria. Never seen people shivering through
bone-shattering chills, followed abruptly by fevers
so high that they hallucinated. Never seen mothers
too weak and dazed to feed their children, men too
sick to reach for the water they craved, while more
mosquitoes fed on their burning skin. Never seen a
fetal death rate of 50 percent among pregnant
women whose bodies could not support both
Plasmodium parasites and a fetal one. Normal.
   Joe went on. “The data so far show that the
Plasmodium parasites leave the liver on schedule,
enter the bloodstream, and invade the sickled cells.
But when the first batch breaks out of the red blood
cells to infect another bunch of cells, the host should
start to show signs of malaria, right? Fever, chills,
all the rest of it. But Reading didn’t, and neither did
the others. So that means the sickle cells form a
fatal clot almost as soon as Plasmodium enters
them, before there’s even an hour or two for the
victim to start feeling sick. Right?”
   “Right,” Farlow said, smiling faintly. Melanie saw
that he knew where Joe was taking this. He was
giving the kid a chance to work it out for himself.
  “So the victim has a stroke and dies. Most of
them, anyway. But that means the parasites die,
too—before they can be sucked back up into
another mosquito and passed on to somebody else.
So how is the disease spreading from person to
person and mosquito to mosquito?”
   Susan Muscato said, “Maybe it’s not. Maybe
there’s only one batch of infected mosquitoes
somewhere, and once we get out in the field we’ll
find that all twenty victims so far were in the same
place—a park or something—and got it at the same
time. And when they die, the outbreak will die with
them.”
  “Could be,” Farlow said.
  Joe said stubbornly, “I don’t think that’s what’s
happening.”
  “I don’t think so, either,” Farlow said. “Joe, what
do you think is happening?”
   “I think that the new strain doesn’t infect only
people carrying sickle-cell trait. It infects everyone.
But in people with normal hemoglobin, the parasite
can’t flourish. So those people get a very mild case
of malaria—possibly so mild they don’t even know
they have it. Maybe just a slight fever, headache,
little bit of a sore throat. After a few days it’s gone,
and then they’re immune to reinfection. It’s the
exact reverse of how sickle-cell trait protects
against the usual strains of malaria. Except that
with Plasmodium reading—”
   “What did you call it?” Gary Pershing
interrupted.
  “Plasmodium reading. You know, after the
senator.”
   There was a little silence. Usually diseases were
named after either the place it first appeared, such
as all the Ebola strains, or after the person who
discovered it. A National Institute of Health
researcher named Don Eyeles had been the source
for Plasmodium eylesi. But as far as Melanie knew,
no malaria had ever before been named after its
first identified victim. What a memorial to the man
who might have been the next president of the
United States.
   Farlow said, “Joe’s theory about universal
infection with Plasmodium reading is certainly
plausible. We need to check blood samples from
victims’ family members, neighbors, associates. But
there’s also another possibility: a second host to
sustain the parasite between Anopheles’s breeding
cycles.”
   “Well, maybe,” Susan Muscato said thoughtfully.
In her midforties, she still looked like an athlete:
strongly built, pared down, not weighted by
anything to slow her down. “Transspecies parasite
migration has happened before, but only among
primates, and never with any variant of P.
falciparum. Besides, apes and gibbons are rare in
Manhattan, where Reading collapsed.”
   “It wouldn’t have to be gibbons,” Joe
said—Melanie saw that he was both persistent and
humorless: one plus as a team member, one
minus— “or any other primate. But I suppose there
could be another host.”
 Gary Pershing, the lab man, said suddenly, “The
DNA homology of P. falciparum is closer to the
malaria parasites of birds than of monkeys.”
   Farlow said, “Only one way to tell. When we’re in
Maryland we need to collect blood samples from
people without sickle-cell trait who have been in the
same locales as the victims. And do interview
follow-ups on both.”
   Gary said, “But if that doesn’t play out, we should
look at birds. God, Maryland is so species-rich…”
  Melanie couldn’t help herself. She had planned on
saying nothing, just listening, until the end of this
meeting. But the word just burst out, “Birds.”
   “No, I don’t see how it could use birds as an
alternate host,” Susan agreed, or thought she did.
“Bird malarias use Culex mosquitoes as vector, not
Anopheles. Cattle or pigs or something are more
usual.”
   “Let’s not be premature here. About anything,”
Farlow said, looking directly at Melanie. “One step
at a time. Gary, you’ve had two days with the
senator’s samples. What can you tell us?”
   Pershing shook his head. Melanie could have
sworn the gesture was admiration. “It’s quite a
piece of work. This is just preliminary, of course,
but there seem to be three changes from standard
P. falciparum. First, the merozoites have a surface
peptide that attaches itself only to a receptor on the
surface of a cell with hemoglobin S. I haven’t found
the peptide or the receptor yet, but I’m almost
positive that’s what’s happening. The surface of
sickle cells already differ in so many ways from
normal ones: in stickiness, in oxygen acquisition
and release rates, all kinds of ways.
   “Second, once they’re inside the cell, the altered
parasites make attaching knobs that prefer the
vascular endothelium of cerebral blood vessels
rather than any old vessel walls. So the infected
blood cells migrate to the brain.
   “Third, once they’re there, they excrete
something, or do something, that makes the blood
vessel constrict and the blood clot. My guess is a
protein that binds to the nitric oxide that’s
supposed to act as vasodilator, but I haven’t verified
that yet. But anyway, the result is a fast, big blood
clot in constricted blood vessels in the brain.”
  “And a fatal stroke,” Susan said.
   “And a fatal stroke,” Gary agreed. “But only in
people with sickle cells in their blood. Some
Mediterranean peoples, some Indians. But mostly
blacks.”
   There it was, out on the table. Nobody spoke
until young Joe Krovetz said, “There’s something
else I don’t get.”
  “Yes?” Farlow said.
   “If only blacks are in danger from this disease,
what’s Melanie doing on the team? I mean, no
offense, Melanie, but you’re at risk in a way none of
us is.”
  Melanie saw now the value of Joe Krovetz,
despite his inexperience. He would say aloud what
everybody else was only thinking.
   She said evenly, “No, I’m not at risk. I’m negative
for sickle-cell trait.”
   “And we’re all grateful for that,” Susan Muscato
said, too quickly. They were embarrassed, Melanie
knew. Here, in one of the most advanced scientific
establishments in the world, in one of the most
democratic countries in the world, her colleagues
were embarrassed to discuss racial differences.
Enlightened America was supposed to be
color-blind.
  She put both palms flat on the table. “There’s
something I don’t get.” It came out harsher than
she intended, not an echo of young Joe but a
sarcastic mockery. Joe didn’t react. Chalk up
another plus for the kid: he didn’t take things
personally.
  Farlow said, “What’s that, Melanie?”
   “I don’t get why we’re not discussing whether
this P. falciparum strain was deliberately
engineered to kill carriers of sickle-cell hemoglobin,
which means mostly African Americans.”
   Farlow said instantly, “Premature. And that’s our
official stand on this, people. I talked to the director
this morning. He’s setting up a meeting for early
next week. It’ll be us, the Public Health Service, the
FBI, and a team from the Army Medical Research
Institute at Fort Derrick. We’ll get in several good
days’ work on site before the meeting and go in
prepared to make recommendations. Until then, the
official word is to keep this away from the press
until we have more information. If asked, we just
say that all theories are premature.”
  “Which is true,” Susan said. “Especially your
theory, Melanie. There’s no evidence at all that P.
reading is any kind of plot against African
Americans. It could just be a natural mutation. You
know it could.”
   Everyone looked awkward. Susan was right,
Melanie knew. Melanie had no hard evidence that
P. reading was anything other than a natural
mutation. Unless, of course, you counted the
statistical chances of three entirely different genetic
mechanisms all mutating at exactly the same time,
in the same parasite, to produce a disease fatal only
to a population subgroup that just incidentally
happened to have been oppressed and
discriminated against for three hundred years.
Yeah, right.
   She said, “Right now the official death toll from
P. reading is one. We may find a lot more once we
start field work. My question is, if we don’t alert the
press, how many more people out there will die who
could have been saved by being told about the
problem? Radio and TV should carry instructions
on using insecticides, using mosquito netting,
destroying or staying away from breeding
grounds—”
   “They will be, Melanie,” Farlow said, “they will
be. That’s on next week’s meeting agenda. But first
we have to be sure there really is a problem. There’s
no use in causing a panic if it turns out we haven’t
got an epidemic, just a local pocket of morbidity
that disappears with a single batch of mosquitoes.
After all, Anopheles can’t pass on parasites to
larvae.”
  Melanie said, “Jim, tell me we’re not going to sit
on this very long. Not when lives could be at stake!”
  “No, of course not. Not if lives really are at stake.
But give it at least a few days of initial field work,
Melanie. Don’t cry wolf if all we’ve got is one cub
dying from natural causes.”
  “If you really believe Senator Reading’s death was
an isolated ‘natural cause,’ then why is the FBI
coming to tomorrow’s meeting?”
  “I don’t know,” Farlow said. “Maybe because
Reading was a senator and a presidential
candidate. We’ll find out more tomorrow.”
  Melanie subsided. She had no choice, really. Yet.
   The team began to plan the painstaking
interviewing of medical personnel and next-of-kin.
That was the first step in finding the patterns of
who got infected, where, and how. An indispensable
step, Melanie told herself. They needed the data to
trace this thing to its source.
  But, meanwhile, more people might die. Black
people, mostly.
  That was the trade-off.



  FOUR



      Nature does not proceed by leaps.
      —Carolus Linnaeus, Philosopha
      Botanica, 1751



   Cavanaugh sat in his office, filling out expense
forms. This task always made him feel vaguely
guilty. On the one hand, it was clearly necessary;
agents needed reimbursement for legitimate
expenses, and the Bureau needed a record of where
and how it was spending its funds. Also, it gave
Cavanaugh a sense of satisfaction to complete the
neat rows of figures in his small, precise
handwriting. On the other hand, this satisfaction
was tainted because filling out expense vouchers
didn’t, after all, lead to the apprehension of any
criminals. Every hour spent on paperwork was one
hour less spent on real law enforcement.
   “Anybody calls, I’ll be out till tomorrow,” Seton
said.
   Cavanaugh looked up from his forms. “Anywhere
in particular?”
  “Out developing informants for the naval
complex,” Seton said, and winked.
  “Those informants sure take a lot of developing,”
Cavanaugh said evenly. “Why is that, Don?”
  “Well, Bob—”
  “Robert.”
  “It’s like this. A lot of them aren’t too bright.
They need to be asked the same questions over and
over before they remember the answers. And that
takes a lot of time.”
  “I’ll bet.”
  “Sign me out for six P.M.,” Seton said. “That’s
how long it’ll probably take.” He winked again and
lumbered out the door.
  Cavanaugh was just as glad; the very sight of
Seton was beginning to make his skin crawl. Seton
was a canker sore, a smiling treacherous boil on the
ass of law enforcement, a… The phone rang.
  “Robert? Jerry Dunbar. Listen, I’ve got
something for you.”
  Cavanaugh’s hand tightened on the phone. Oh,
God, at last… “What, Jerry?”
  “Probably not anything real. But it’s connected
with that report you gave me last week on the high
incidence of strokes among African-American
patients at Dellridge and at Sailors and Soldiers.”
   “Connected how? Somebody willing to talk about
civil rights infringements? Somebody at one of the
hospitals?”
  “It’s not about civil rights infringements. It’s…
something else.”
   What else could a difference in the ways blacks
and whites received medical care be except a civil
rights infringement? Cavanaugh waited.
  Dunbar said, “I’m not even sure it is connected.
But they are. The CDC has formed a task force to
investigate the stroke rate.”
   “The CDC?” Now Cavanaugh was more
bewildered. The CDC kept statistics on various
health problems, of course. Cavanaugh had even
seen copies of its journal of record, the Morbidity
and Mortality Weekly Report, lying around the
house. Judy sometimes used it in writing her
science articles. But what did a CDC task force have
to do with the FBI?
   Dunbar said, “The task force thinks the strokes
might not be accidental. Or maybe the USPHS
thinks that—you know, the Public Health Service.
They made the actual contact with the Bureau.
Apparently the USPHS thinks that there’s a
possibility the strokes could be the result of some
sort of selective biological warfare toxin. Something
that… Robert, are you still there?”
   “Yes,” Cavanaugh said. He forced himself to relax
his grip on the phone. “What sort of toxin? Spread
by whom?”
  “Unknown. Frankly, I think the whole thing
sounds wild-eyed. For one thing, they’re dragging in
malaria.”
  “Malaria?”
   “Yes. And there’s been no malaria in the United
States since the end of World War II, except for the
odd isolated case coming in from overseas. I looked
it up. For another, they’ve got nothing hard. The
CDC guy I talked to even said that the most likely
probability is that malaria mutated by itself. But
the USPHS requested we supply FBI presence, and
so that’s you. Unless Don wants to take it. Is he
there?”
  “No. He’s out with an important informant from
Pax River.”
   “Good. He’s doing an excellent job with the naval
station. Tell him I said his last report was
outstanding. So I guess this one’s yours.”
  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said.
   “I’ll give you Dr. Farlow’s number. He and his
team are set up at a motel on Route 5, the Weather
Vane. Near Hughesville. Apparently they’ve been
there almost a week already, doing whatever they
do. They’ll meet with you there.”
 “Okay. Good.” Something to do. Something real.
Maybe.
  Dunbar said, “Nothing they told me sounds
concrete or substantial, Robert. The whole thing
sounded bogus.”
  “You never know,” Cavanaugh said. “Anyway, I’ll
check it out.”
  “Do that. And, Robert—even when it’s nothing,
anything like this is sensitive. Anything racial. It
has to stay quiet.”
  “I understand,” Cavanaugh said. Which was the
perfect excuse not to tell that moron Seton. At least,
not yet. Not while he, Cavanaugh, at least had
something to do.



   Judy Kozinski was pretty good on the Internet,
for someone who didn’t understand it at all and
didn’t particularly want to. She drove the Net the
way she drove her Toyota: for purposes of getting to
her destination, and without looking under the
hood.
  She finished with the FTP and Gopher files on
her paleontology article. Looking good, looking
good. She closed the paleontology files and accessed
the medical sites.
   Many of these were test files: articles and updates
on every medical condition imaginable. Judy read
about strokes for an hour, until she was sure she
understood enough to know what questions to ask.
Everything that she thought Robert might also want
to read, she sent to the printer.
   Next, she accessed her medical lists. These were
closed communications, limited to verified
members, most of whom were doctors or medical
researchers. Judy had used years of scientific
contacts, both her own and those of her late
husband, to get on the lists. They provided her with
both valuable background and a forum to ask
questions. In return, it was understood that she
would write about nothing she read on the lists
without express permission from the poster. Much
of the discussion concerned research-in-progress,
which should not break prematurely to the public.
  Today she posted a short note:



     J.K. HERE. ONCE MORE I NEED TO
     PICK ALL THIS COLLECTIVE
     BRAINPOWER. CAN ANYBODY PUT
     ME ON TRACK OF INFORMATION
     ABOUT BRAIN-CHEMISTRY
     DIFFERENCES, POSSIBLY GENETIC,
     SHARED BY ASIAN INDIANS AND
     BLACKS BUT NOT WHITES? I DON’T
     REALLY KNOW WHAT I’M LOOKING
     FOR YET—NEUROTRANSMITTERS,
     FETAL WIRING, SUBMOLEC ULAR
     STRUCTURES—SO ANYTHING MIGHT
     HELP. IT SHOULD BE CONNECTED
     TO ISCHEMIC CEREBRAL STROKES.
     THANKS. OF COURSE, NO
     ATTRIBUTION WITHOUT YOUR
     WRITTEN PERMISSION.



     OH, ONE THING MORE—THE VENUE
     IS SOUTHERN MARYLAND, SO I
     SUPPOSE ENVIRONMENTAL
     TRIGGERS FOR GENETIC
     DIFFERENCES COULD BE A FACTOR,
     TOO. THANKS AGAIN.



 Hours later, she checked back. Three list
members had replied:



     JUDY—YOU PROBABLY ALREADY
     KNOW THIS, AND IT’S PROBABLY
     OFF TARGET ANYWAY, BUT YOU DID
ASK. ASIAN INDIANS, ALONG WITH
SOME MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLES,
SOME GREEKS, AND MANY AFRICAN
AND AFRICAN DESCENDANTS, CAN
CARRY SICKLE-CELL ANEMIA. THAT
CAN CAUSE STROKES IN ACUTE
CRISES.—MSJ



TO: J.K.
RE: REQUEST FOR RACIALLY
DIFFERENTIATED STROKE
INFORMATION.
NEW RESEARCH HAS EMERGED IN
THIS AREA RE MALARIA,
SPECIFICALLY THE SUSCEPTIBILITY
OF VARIOUS GENOMES TO P. VIVAX,
P FALCIPARUM, AND P. MALARIAE,
ESPECIALLY WITH REGARD TO
CHLOROQUINE AND CYCLOSPORINE
RESISTANCE.
SEE MY ARTICLE IN LAST ISSUE OF
MALARIA AND TROPICAL DISEASE
WEEKLY. RICHARD KAPPEL, M.D.,
NIH



TO JK—YOU MENTIONED SOUTHERN
MARYLAND. IS THIS CONNECTED TO
THE RUMORS I HEARD ABOUT
RACIALLY CONNECTED STROKE
RATES AT DELLRIDGE HOSPITAL IN
LA PLATA? SUPPOSEDLY, THE CDC IS
THERE INVESTIGATING. HAS
ANYBODY ELSE HEARD RUMORS?
WOULD APPRECIATE FURTHER
INFORMATION.
     —K. MAHONEY, RICHMOND, VA



   Judy frowned. The article in Malaria and
Tropical Disease Weekly was probably too
technical for her to follow; she wasn’t an M.D. Still,
she could probably get the gist of Kappel’s research,
and anyway Robert could take the article itself to
the NIH for help if it turned out to be really useful.
The Bureau used the National Institute of Health,
conveniently nearby in Bethesda, for most medical
questions.
   And what was most important was that she be of
help to Robert: to show him how necessary she was
to him, how needed, how desirable to have around.
Someone, in short, that he’d be a fool not to marry.
She cooks, she makes a wonderful home, she’s great
in bed, she has a flourishing career of her own, and
she’s helpful to his career! What more could
anybody want in a wife?
  God, she hated herself when she got like this. It
was degrading to feel she was constantly
auditioning for the part of “wife.”
  On the other hand, she made herself admit, she
was.
  Judy accessed the Kappel article and began to
read carefully.



   The Weather Vane Motel was not the sort of
place that Cavanaugh would have expected CDC
hotshots to stay. Separate bungalows, all with
slightly peeling paint, clustered around a pitted
parking lot. On one side stood a 7-Eleven, on the
other a gas station. But there was no doubt that the
CDC was indeed there; behind the motel stood
parked a huge trailer, windowless and padlocked, as
secure as if it held the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted. The
trailer was unmarked, but Cavanaugh figured it
didn’t belong to the vending-machine retailer.
   Inside Dr. Farlow’s bungalow, however,
Cavanaugh could see the Weather Vane’s
advantages. Evidently the CDC team liked to make
itself at home. Pots and dishes littered the kitchen,
along with shopping bags from the 7-Eleven.
Computers and binders covered every surface. Two
of the minuscule “dining tables” from different
bungalows had been shoved together to make a
meeting area. Coffee and beer were continuously
available.
  Cavanaugh approved. The setup was an efficient
use of taxpayer money. It was also oddly cozy,
except for a vague medicinal smell that hung over
everything, including the team members.
   There were five of them, two women and three
men. Only one was black, the younger (and prettier,
he couldn’t help noticing) woman. Farlow made the
introductions. Melanie Anderson smiled at him; the
other three did not. So there was an internal split
about Bureau presence. Cavanaugh was interested
in learning why.
  “Let’s sit down while we wait for the others,”
Farlow said. “Coffee, Agent Cavanaugh?”
  All the others had some. “Yes, please.”
   “The Health Service section of this team asked
for somebody from the FBI to join us because we
wanted to touch all the bases,” Farlow said,
reminding Cavanaugh of Jerry Dunbar, “even
though we’re not sure ourselves what’s going on
yet.”
   “Some of us are surer than others,” Melanie
Anderson said, sipping her coffee. Farlow didn’t
look annoyed. His staff must be used to airing their
opinions without reserve. Cavanaugh revised his
opinion. Farlow was not another Jerry Dunbar after
all.
  Farlow continued. “We also asked you here a half
hour before the Health Service and
USAMRIID—that’s the United States Army Medical
Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, as you
probably know— so we could bring you up to speed.
The other groups already have all our data. We’ve
been briefing them right along. Now, Agent
Cavanaugh—”
  “Robert,” Cavanaugh said.
   “Fine. Robert, nearly a week ago the CDC
received blood and tissue samples from the New
York City hospital that treated the late Senator
Malcolm Peter Reading. You probably read in the
papers about how the senator collapsed with a
stroke during a precampaign speech and died.”
   Senator Reading? New York City? This wasn’t
what Cavanaugh had expected to hear. Something
tingled at the back of his neck.
   “The tissue samples showed that the senator had
contracted malaria. It also showed that he was
positive for sickle-cell trait. Do you know what that
is?”
   Cavanaugh did, sort of. He nodded. Better to let
Farlow talk and than ask questions later. The
tingling grew stronger. It said to him, This matters.
He sipped his coffee.
   “The odd thing is that the malaria parasites were
inside the blood cells with defective hemoglobin.
Usually, those cells can’t host P. falciparum. But
Gary here—he’s our lab man; that portable
monstrosity outside is his—established the facts
without a doubt. This mutant strain of malaria
colonizes only sickle cells with any real success. It
causes them to clot fast and hard near the brain,
causing severe stroke. And sickling is a genetic
trait, carried mostly by African Americans. That’s
why we called the FBI in. We thought—”
   “Some of us thought,” Susan Muscato said, not
looking at anyone. Farlow plowed on.
   “—that since the FBI has jurisdiction over civil
rights and discrimination issues, the racial aspect
could—”
   Cavanaugh asked, “Can Indians from India get
this thing, too?”
  “Some can. There are segments of the Indian
population who carry sickle-cell trait.”
  Bingo. Cavanaugh’s mind raced. The strokes at
Dellridge, at Memorial across the river in Virginia…
but malaria? Nobody at the hospitals had
mentioned malaria.
   He said, “There’s been an increased stroke rate
right here in Maryland. At Dellridge Community
Hospital—”
  “Yes, we know,” Susan Muscato said. Cavanaugh
caught her disdain. “We’ve spent a week mapping
the epidemiology curve. That’s what we do, Agent
Cavanaugh.”
  Farlow said, “Joe, bring it out.”
  The youngest CDC guy, Joe Krovetz, opened the
door to the bedroom. Immediately the medicinal
smell became sickening. Nobody else seemed to
notice. Krovetz returned with a rolled up sheet of
paper and an ice cube tray. Each of the tray’s
compartments, which were lined with some sort of
paper, held a single dead mosquito.
   “See,” Krovetz said, unrolling the paper, “the
official death count is now forty-six. The
epidemiological curves show a recurrent peak,
completely consistent with the breeding patterns of
Anopheles…”
   “Let me, Joe,” Farlow said. “This has to look a
little bewildering to someone without our passion
for P. falciparum. Robert, why don’t I start by
explaining the life cycle of the mosquito that carries
malaria in the eastern United States: Anopheles
quadrimaculatus.”
  Cavanaugh blurted, “I thought malaria had been
wiped out in the United States.”
  Susan Muscato said, more forcibly than
necessary, “Diseases are reintroduced to
geographical areas all the time. And they’re virulent
because the population has lost all resistance.”
  Melanie Anderson said, “Or they’re virulent
because somebody made them that way.” The two
women glared at each other.
  “Made them that way.” As in… what? Genetic
engineering. Suddenly Cavanaugh realized why he
had been called. A biological weapon, targeted
toward blacks—mostly, anyway—although so far
they’d shown him no hard evidence of that.
   If this new malaria really was being used as a
terrorist weapon, the case would be transferred to
Counterintelligence.
   No, it would not. At least, not until it had to.
Until Cavanaugh was sure. From the way Drs.
Muscato and Anderson were glaring at each other,
not even the CDC team could agree that this
malaria was some sort of terrorist bioweapon. Until
they did, the case was Cavanaugh’s. He shoved away
his coffee and picked up his pen.
 “Let’s start where you suggested, Dr. Farlow.
With the mosquito, Anna Follies.”
   “Anopheles,” Susan Muscato corrected, lips
tightened.
   Farlow said, “Okay. All the anopheline
mosquitoes have a rather improbable life cycle. Half
of their life is sexual and that occurs inside the
mosquito. The other half, the asexual half, occurs
inside a vertebrate host, typically a bird or
mammal. So starting with a mosquito…”
  Cavanaugh began sketching.
   Ten minutes later, all five members of the CDC
team were looking at him doubtfully. Evidently
some of his questions had been ridiculous. But it
didn’t matter. Cavanaugh had a drawing of
malaria’s life cycle:
  Cavanaugh said, “And you think all this is going
on in southern Maryland… ?”
   “See this graph?” Krovetz said, unrolling another
paper. “It plots the stroke rate in the infected
three-county area for the last six months. The red
line is African Americans, the blue line is whites.
You can see that the increase in strokes among
blacks starts the second week in May. Now look at
this map. From the geographical pattern of the
spread, the epidemic seems to have originated here
and spread out in rough circles. That’s consistent
with an abrupt introduction of the disease into the
area.”
   Cavanaugh stared at here. It was a small circle
drawn around nothing in Charles County, a mile or
so from the town of Newburg, not too far from the
Potomac River.
  He said, “You found that out by talking to
people… to the relatives of the stroke victims… But
what about Senator Reading? He died in
Manhattan, and he was the senator from New
Jersey.”
   “Pennsylvania,” Farlow said. “But he had
attended a family wedding in the town of Bel Alton
just two weeks before his death. The timing is
exactly right for Plasmodium reading infection.
And it was an outdoor wedding, in somebody’s
garden.”
  “Plasmodium reading.” They had already named
the disease, while Cavanaugh still struggled to
understand the basics. “So you went to this place
near Newburg—”
  “The epicenter,” Muscato said impatiently.
   “—and collected the mosquitoes in that ice cube
tray—”
  “Among others,” Farlow said. “Gary has done
nothing but dissect, examine, and run tests on
mosquitoes for five days and nights. They’re the
vector, all right.”
    Cavanaugh studied his drawing. Something
wasn’t right, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on
it. The others looked at him doubtfully, except for
Dr. Muscato, who gazed with open disdain.
  “Wait,” Cavanaugh said. “Wait…”
   They waited. As the seconds dragged by,
Cavanaugh realized that if he couldn’t formulate his
question, he was going to look like an ass. A bigger
ass. Carefully he followed the steps in his drawing:
from mosquito to person, who was killed, to… He
had it.
   “If the person dies before the… the parasite
things can get sucked up into another mosquito,
how does the disease spread around in your
concentric circles?”
   Farlow said, “We asked that question, too. And
the answer is: carriers with immunity. We took
blood samples from guests at the Reading wedding
who do not have sickle-cell trait. Both white and
black people. Twenty-one percent were carriers,
which is more than enough to reinfect A.
quadrimaculatus and keep the epidemic going.”
  Cavanaugh thought of the mosquitoes on his
back deck, arrogantly ignoring Judy’s bug zapper.
He said, “So anybody—like, say, me—could walk
around being a carrier for malaria reading without
even knowing it.”
   “Yes,” said Gary Pershing, the lab man. “But
you’re in no personal danger, you know. We found
no case of anyone with normal hemoglobin who
reported anything more than a very minor flulike
illness.”
   Cavanaugh digested this. “So you know where the
epidemic started, and when. And you know how it
keeps going, even though it kills its real victims. But
you don’t know where it came from in the first
place.”
  “It mutated,” Susan Muscato said.
   “It was introduced by accident via a carrier with
natural immunity himself, probably an immigrant
or overseas traveler, that we haven’t traced yet,”
Gary Pershing said.
   “It was genetically engineered,” Melanie
Anderson said, glaring at the other two. “The
mutations are too extensive and too coincidental to
have happened by chance. And if it had been
introduced accidentally from somewhere else in the
world, the CDC would have heard of it being
somewhere else in the world. Which we haven’t.”
  “Yet,” Muscato said.
   Melanie Anderson exploded. “You just don’t want
to admit that this thing is a genocide in the
making! You told me to be patient, Jim, and I have
been. But now we have a week’s worth of clear data,
and the numbers point to at least a dozen breeding
pairs of infected mosquitoes. Not just one mutated
female—a dozen breeding pairs at once. That
doesn’t happen by coincidence!”
  Farlow said sternly, “The data isn’t that
unambiguous, Melanie, and you know it. If you up
the larval mortality rate by only—”
  “There’s no reason to up it by anything! Jim, the
numbers are there. Why won’t you see them? It’s
the same way all the so-called ‘good Germans’
wouldn’t admit that Auschwitz was going on!”
  “I resent that!” Gary Pershing said.
  “And I more than resent it,” Susan Muscato said.
Her face had gone rigid. “My maiden name was
Horowitz.”
  “That’s enough,” Farlow said.
  There was a painful silence.
   “All right, I’m sorry,” Melanie Anderson said. “I
overspoke. But it is a deliberate biological weapon
targeting African Americans. The sooner we admit
that, the sooner we can warn people and save lives.”
  Farlow said reprovingly, “We’re all in agreement
about that. Even without knowing where this thing
originated, we can still create an action plan. That’s
why the Health Service and USAMRIID will be here
in five minutes. And if there is criminal intent, the
FBI will track it down.”
   They all looked at Cavanaugh, who now knew why
he’d been summoned. Somebody
somewhere—Health Service or CDC or the U.S.
Army—wanted their ass covered just in case this
disease was a bioweapon aimed at blacks. The
political implications of that were terrifying.
Whoever had called in the Bureau wanted to be able
to say they’d turned the problem over to the proper
law-enforcement authorities early on in the
epidemic.
   It didn’t seem the right moment to say that Jerry
Dunbar had a low opinion of “a bunch of paranoid
bug hunters.” Besides, Cavanaugh agreed with the
fiery Melanie Anderson. There was something here.
He could smell it.
   He said, “How many African Americans have this
sickle-cell thing?”
  “About one in twelve,” Dr. Anderson said. “Over
two and a half million.”
  Two and a half million.
  “Yeah,” she said, watching his face. “That many.”
   Cavanaugh looked at the ice cube tray of dead
mosquitoes. He saw now that each compartment
had a detailed tag stating where and when the
insect had been captured. He thought of the cloud
of mosquitoes around Judy’s bug zapper, above the
channel-clearing machine on the Potomac, in the
parks where kids played in the hot, heavy
twilights…
   He said, “Suppose for a minute, for the sake of
argument, that the parasites are genetically
engineered and then put into the mosquitoes. How
hard is that to do? What kinds of equipment and
talent do you need to do it?”
  Farlow said, “A lot of talent. But not much
equipment, relatively speaking. That’s the thing
about a genetic-engineering lab—it’s not like
producing a terrorist atomic bomb. Everything you
need is easily available from any scientific supply
house, and any researcher at any private firm can
buy samples from blood libraries.”
  “So we’re not looking at a big fancy lab?”
  “Hell,” Farlow said, “you could put the lab in a
good-sized basement.”
  A good-sized basement. Jesus J. Edgar Hoover
Christ.
  Farlow said, “How will the FBI handle this, Agent
Cavanaugh? On our end, we’ll keep mapping the
epidemic and searching for the missing alternate
host. But what will your people do?”
   Good question, Cavanaugh thought. The FBI was
a covert investigative operation, and like all covert
operations, it valued secrecy. The last thing the
Bureau usually did was make public
announcements of public problems, especially if it
couldn’t solve them. “Confusing the leads,” it was
called. “Compromising the investigation.” But in
this case, a public announcement might be the only
thing that would save lives.
   “Well?” Melanie Anderson said pointedly. She
stared right at him.
   “In cases of public danger, the FBI can issue a
Terrorist Warning Advisory,” Cavanaugh said
slowly. “But of course that has to come from
Headquarters. And until it does, especially in a
situation like this, it’s important not to cause a
panic, or to encourage false credit claims by various
hate groups.” Jesus, they’d be crawling out of the
woodwork. “So until Headquarters has a chance to
work on this a little, I’m going to ask you to discuss
it with no one outside the CDC.”
  Melanie Anderson said, “While more people die!
No!”
  Farlow said, “You don’t understand, Agent
Cavanaugh. That part isn’t up to us. The CDC has a
mandate to control disease. But on this scale, only
the army has the actual capability to do it. When
USAMRIID arrives, we’ll get—here they are now.”
  Farlow got up to answer the door. But Cavanaugh
didn’t need him to finish his sentence. Whatever
Farlow thought he’d get when the army arrived,
Cavanaugh knew what the CDC was really going to
get.
  A turf war.



   They came in like an invasion, five of them, all in
full uniform, shoulders straight and back. Next to
them the CDC team, all but Farlow in jeans and
T-shirts, looked like Sunday picnickers. The
scientists rose in a ragged body, nodding at
introductions. Cavanaugh took careful note of each
name in order to decide if the delegation was, or
only looked, impressive. How seriously was the
army taking Plasmodium reading? By their ranks
and titles shall ye know them.
  Lt. Col. Matthew Sanchez, M.D., Chief of Disease
Assessment for USAMRIID.
  Maj. David Seligman, M.D., malariologist.
  Capt. Anne Delaney, M.D., genetic
microbiologist.
  Capt. Neil Hosner, attorney for the United States
Army.
  Col. Wayne Colborae, M.D., commander of
USAMRIID, who explained that he would be
briefing both Major General Selby, the head of the
Army Medical Research and Development
Command, to which USAMRIID reported, and the
commander of Fort Detrick itself, General
Campbell.
  The army was taking Plasmodium reading very
seriously.
   Trailing behind the brass was a small man with
the expression of a nervous rabbit. He was
introduced, belatedly, as the representative from
the Charles County Department of Health, Dr. Fred
Warfield. Cavanaugh thought that never had he
seen anyone less suitably named, and resisted the
urge to sketch Warfield.
  “We’ve received all your data, Dr. Farlow,” said
Colonel Sanchez, “and we have some suggestions on
how to proceed. The first thing—”
  “—is to bring your team up to date,” Farlow said
smoothly. Cavanaugh heard the opening guns of the
turf war. “We have new data since yesterday.
Gary?”
   Dr. Pershing went into a long technical
explanation that Cavanaugh couldn’t follow.
Colonels Sanchez and Colborne sat, expressionless.
But the two noncommanders’ eyes gleamed with
interest in whatever Pershing was explaining.
  Score one for the CDC.
   When Pershing had finished, Colonel Sanchez
said quickly, “Thank you, Doctor. Now let me clarify
our position.” He glanced respectfully at Colonel
Colborne, who evidently had cast himself as final
arbiter, above the interim fray. “USAMRIID’s core
mission, as you know, is to devise ways to protect
American soldiers against infectious diseases and
bioweaponry. Your data suggest to the army that P.
reading may well be one or both of those things.
The army has been well aware since 1950 that a
biowarfare incident might come disguised as a
spontaneous event, and that American troops both
here and on foreign soil could be vulnerable to
attack in this manner. Therefore, USAMRIID is very
grateful to the CDC for bringing P. reading to the
army’s attention.”
   In other words, We’ll take it from here. Score one
for the army.
  Farlow said pleasantly, “We’re glad to have your
assistance, of course, especially with the manpower
needed to protect the public. Which, I’m sure we’re
agreed, is the first concern at this point, since all
the victims thus far have been civilians.”
  CDC-2, Army-1.
   Sanchez nodded. “Yes. In fact, we took the liberty
of drawing up a list of priorities. David?”
  The army malariologist handed around
photocopied sheets. The score was now even.
Cavanaugh skimmed the priorities:



  1. Safety of the civilian population
  2. Containment and destruction of the disease
vector, A. quadrimaculatus
  3. Identification and arrest of person(s)
responsible for vector infection, if applicable
  4. Advance of scientific and medical knowledge



   Farlow said, “Certainly the army is better suited
to priority two than we are. I suggest that control
of Anopheles rest entirely with you, although of
course you’ll have to work with the EPA on what
pesticides they’ll allow.”
   The lawyer looked up sharply from his note
taking. Cavanaugh knew that Colonel Sanchez—not
to mention Colonel Colborne—wouldn’t much like
the idea that the U.S. military reported to the
Environmental Protection Agency. Farlow
continued blandly on.
  “We do have some thoughts on containment,
however. Melanie?”
  Melanie smiled at the army. Well, why not,
Cavanaugh thought— they were taking bioweapon
theories a lot more seriously than the CDC had. She
might as well have been on their side. Had Farlow
taken that into account?
   “I know that USAMRIID already knows
everything I’m going to say,” Melanie said
graciously, “but please bear with me while I repeat
it because I don’t think our FBI representative
knows this material. Medicine isn’t his field. He’s
responsible for our priority three.”
  Everyone looked at Cavanaugh, the ignoramus
who, single-handedly, was supposed to carry out
priority three. Which, now that he thought about it,
was priority one from his point of view. He resisted
the temptation to doodle on the priority list.
   Melanie continued. “Malaria transmission,
Robert, is really sensitive to the numbers. Numbers
of mosquitoes. Size of the susceptible population.
Numbers of gametocytes in the blood of carriers,
which determines the number of sporozoites in the
mosquito saliva to reinfect people. Even the number
of days that the temperature and humidity are
favorable for mosquito breeding. There are
equations to show how even small changes in the
numbers affect the whole course of the epidemic.
The equations were developed decades ago, by Dr.
George MacDonald.
  “We’ve run the numbers, and I’m sure
USAMRIID has, too. In temperate climates it’s
possible to tip the equation by key containment
actions. In the tropics it’s not, because both
Anopheles and Plasmodium flourish so well that
they just overwhelm any changes you make. Also, of
course, places like Africa and the Philippines are
too poor to afford the necessary containment
resources. But Maryland isn’t tropical and the U.S.
government isn’t poor. Containing this epidemic
should be doable—once we actually start doing it.”
  The last was a jab at Farlow. Cavanaugh
wondered if he knew he had a mole on his side. Of
course he did.
  Colonel Sanchez beamed at her. “I’m glad to hear
we’re in agreement, Dr. Anderson. And, of course,
the closeness of Fort Derrick to the pockets of
morbidity make USAMRIID the natural choice to
direct and carry out the operation.”
   “Carry out, certainly,” Farlow said, the emphasis
slight but unmistakable.
    Uh-oh, Cavanaugh thought. Here it comes. Joe
Krovetz, sitting next to Cavanaugh, imperceptibly
moved his notepad closer to Cavanaugh. On the
bottom Krovetz had written “HISTORY OF FEUD
THERE. EBOLA.” Cavanaugh nodded, even though
it took him a moment to remember that Ebola was
another disease that the CDC and USAMRIID had
cooperated on containing, in Africa.
  Sanchez said stiffly, “The army will direct any
operation it carries out.”
  Farlow said, “And for the civilian population, so
will the CDC.”
   A tense silence fell. Into it the county health
official, whom Cavanaugh had forgotten was at the
table, said timidly, “Well, then, that’s settled.”
  Everyone stared at him.
  “And, of course,” he went on in his high, squeaky
voice, “the County Department of Health and the
U.S. Public Health Service will be happy to help
both of you any way we can. If, uh, you need us.
Helping with your priority two, Colonel, and your
priority four, Dr. Farlow, and, uh, any way you split
up the actions for priority one. Or we could take any
actions not on either of your priority lists. If, uh,
you want us to, of course. If, uh, that.”
   Warfield cleared his throat. Cavanaugh hid his
grin. The little bureaucrat had just settled the turf
war by dividing up the turf, and apparently he
didn’t realize he’d even done it.
  “And, uh, one more thing, if you don’t think it’s,
uh, presumptuous. The USPHS is willing—I took
the liberty of talking to them—of assigning to their
budget center the expense of printing up the flyers.
Flyers to give to the public about what to do. If, uh,
you want flyers. Won’t you? It’s up to you, of course,
but I, uh, thought they’d be good to supplement the
radio and TV public announcements. That, uh,
would be our responsibility. With, uh, your consent,
of course.”
  “Assign to their budget center.” Cavanaugh
didn’t know what that meant to the CDC or the
army, but he sure the hell knew what it meant to
the FBI. It meant that the responsible budget center
assumed the blame for screwups. Especially if its
name headed anything like public announcements
and flyers.
   Sanchez and Farlow looked thoughtful. The
lawyer, Captain Hosner, pushed a note toward
Sanchez. Then Colonel Colborne, the top brass
present, spoke for the first time. “Perhaps we
should move on to the specifics of this operation.”
Farlow and Sanchez nodded agreement, and the
jurisdiction struggle was suddenly ended. Peace
with honor.
  Only not quite.
   Farlow said, “As part of our priority, the
CDC—with the assistance of the Health
Service—can assume responsibility for blood
testing, both for P. reading and for sickle-cell trait.
Our thinking is—”
   “Excuse me,” Melanie Anderson said. “Blood
testing for sickle-cell trait?”
   Every pair of eyes in the room turned to her,
including Cavanaugh’s. Until now, no one but the
heads had spoken without being invited. From the
way that Farlow’s eyes narrowed, Cavanaugh was
pretty sure the CDC chief wasn’t welcoming
interruption by one of his own staff.
  Melanie wasn’t fazed. “Maybe we want to think
again about sickle-cell testing—in light of what
happened in the seventies.” She jerked around to
face Cavanaugh, startling him. “Let me give you
background here, Robert. In the early 1970s the
government funded a screening program to identify
all carriers of the sickle-cell gene. The idea was to
get help early to people who were at risk for
sickle-cell anemia. But no real distinction was made
between having sickle-cell trait, which is just one
gene, and being at real risk for having a full-blown
sickle-cell crisis, which takes two genes.”
   Cavanaugh nodded. Again she was using him as a
pretext to orate about what everyone else in the
room already knew. It made him look dumb,
although that wasn’t her goal. But there wasn’t
anything he could do about it.
   “Because the distinction between one sickle-cell
gene and two wasn’t made clear, a whole lot of black
people who only had the trait thought they had a
real disease. You wouldn’t believe the things that
started happening, Robert. Some insurance
companies called sickle-cell trait a ‘preexisting
condition’ and denied health insurance. Some
airlines wouldn’t hire pilots with the trait. The U.S.
Air Force Academy rejected black applicants with
the trait. And some scientists actually went on
national TV and said that black carriers of the trait
should never breed, for the good of public health.”
  “Melanie,” Farlow said tightly, “no one is
suggesting—”
   “I know, I know,” Melanie said, holding up her
hands and smiling. Cavanaugh thought she was
trying to look conciliatory. It was not a success.
“But it did happen. And we wouldn’t want it to
happen again.”
   Sanchez said to Farlow, “Are you proposing to
leave blood tests for sickle-cell trait out of priority
one?”
  “No,” Farlow said. “But confidentiality issues
should be considered as well.”
  “Certainly,” Sanchez said, but he offered no
details. Clearly this problem was now Farlow’s.
Cavanaugh was glad he was not in Melanie’s place.
  The rest of the meeting went more smoothly.
After two hours of discussion, including minor
contributions from the lawyer and Warfield, a plan
was in place.
   The Public Health Service would pass out an
antimalarial preventive called mefloquine to every
doctor, health clinic, hospital, and nurse
practitioner in Maryland and Virginia. They would
also collect blood samples for voluntary,
confidential screening.
   The CDC would create multiple sets of guidelines
in easy-to-understand language: What to do if
you’re positive for sickle-cell trait. What to do if
you’ve been bitten recently by a mosquito. What to
do if someone nearby has a stroke. Where to get
free head nets and mosquito netting dipped in
permethrin, a mosquito repellent harmless to
people. Which insecticides were safe to use around
your house and children, and which were not.
   USAMRIID would create guidelines in simple
language about what people should do to
discourage mosquitoes from breeding near their
houses: Tip out birdbaths. Bury old tires. Fill in tree
holes and shallow depressions in the ground. Clean
out gutters. Destroy shady vegetation at the edges
of ponds. Cover cisterns and water barrels. Drain
kids’ wading pools every night.
   The Public Health Service would print and
distribute all guidelines in malls, parking lots,
offices, summer schools, public events—everywhere
possible. They would also arrange for TV and radio
versions.
   USAMRIID would use the soldiers based at Fort
Detrick, the 110th Battalion, to check that the
civilian populations were carrying out domestic
guidelines. (“Whoa,” Melanie murmured on the
other side of Cavanaugh from Krovetz, “police state
toehold.” But she didn’t say it aloud.)
  USAMRIID would carry out
mosquito-destruction tactics in Saint Mary’s,
Charles, and King George Counties.
  The CDC would continue to research P. reading,
sharing all data with USAMRIID.
   “And with the FBI,” Cavanaugh said firmly, his
first contribution of the day. “Anything we know
about how this parasite might have been created
could be a lead to its creator.” Everyone nodded
except Susan Muscato, who evidently still thought
that the creator was the Creator. Well, maybe she
was right. Maybe it was a spontaneous mutation.
  Maybe.
   Farlow said, “Dr. Krovetz will be available to you
after the meeting, Agent Cavanaugh, to answer any
questions you might have.”
   Their number is legion, Cavanaugh thought.
What equipment was necessary for genetic
engineering? Where was it usually purchased?
What were the regulations? How was equipment
tracked? What scientific credentials were required
to work on this level? If Cavanaugh were going to
convince anyone—including himself—that malaria
reading really was a bioweapon, he needed tangible
evidence: paper trails, physical objects,
photographs.
  When the meeting broke up, Cavanaugh asked
Joe Krovetz, “Doctor, why aren’t you planning to
vaccinate people against this thing?”
  “No vaccine,” Krovetz said. “The disease is too
new. And anyway, even normal malaria vaccines
haven’t been much of a success.”
   “Oh,” Cavanaugh said, trying to make the small
syllable sound intelligent. “And what is this new
drug that the colonel said Fort Detrick could supply
to hospitals and doctors?”
  “It’s a variation of chloroquine. Do you know
what chloroquine is?”
   Cavanaugh shook his head. He watched the room
empty. The army lawyer was talking steadily to
Colonel Sanchez. Dr. Farlow smiled at everyone.
And even the rabbity Fred Warfield chatted with
Anne Delaney, the microbiologist, without
stammering or twitching. Come to think of it,
Warfield—
  “Do you want to hear this or not?” Krovetz said,
with a directness Cavanaugh hadn’t expected.
  “Yes, I do.”
   “Well, many strains of malaria around the world
have become immune to chloroquine, the standard
treatment. So pharmaceutical firms constantly try
to come up with new ones. USAMRIID often
contracts out to them. One of them, Markham-Jay
Labs in Virginia, has apparently just finished beta
testing a good one.”
  “How come you’re scowling about that?”
  “They didn’t offer it to us,” Krovetz said. “We run
malaria teams through Africa and Asia all the time,
you know.”
   Cavanaugh didn’t know. But it wasn’t relevant to
his concerns either. Instead he said, “Look at Dr.
Warfield. It’s like he’s a different person now.
Confident. And I don’t think he even knows he
settled your potential turf war.”
  Krovetz grinned. “He knows.”
  “He does?”
   “We were at a summer conference together once.
Fred knew exactly what he was doing and how to do
it.”
  So Warfield had skillfully directed events,
without anyone important realizing it. The man
would have made a good FBI agent.
   Although nothing Warfield had done—or anyone
else at the meeting—had helped Cavanaugh. He now
knew a lot about mosquito control, but no more
about identifying, finding, or capturing whoever
had genetically altered malaria to kill blacks.
  If anyone even had. There was no evidence. There
were no leads. And, so far at least, there was no
public outcry. The public didn’t even realize that
one segment of the population was dying at
anything more than the usual rate. But when they
did…
   The CDC and USAMRIID were right. Everything
depended on how the public was told and advised
about P. reading. With the right handling, you had
responsible health agencies doing everything they
could to help people survive an inexplicable disease.
With the wrong handling, you had a government
sitting for two weeks on critical information while
citizens died. Farlow was right to restrain Melanie
and her explosive pronouncements. Farlow knew
what he was doing. That’s why he was chief.
  Comfortable with this affirmation of the chain of
command, Cavanaugh began his grilling of Dr.
Krovetz. He took careful notes. When he got back to
Leonardtown, he would have to write a report for
Dunbar, about a crime that may or may not have
been committed by perps who might or might not
exist on a public that might or might not believe
there was a transgression.
  It was going to have to be a hell of a report.



                  INTERIM

   The Saint Mary’s County tour bus was always full
for the nine o’clock run, the only one that featured
dinner at historic Sotterley Plantation, following
afternoon drinks at historic inns. Casper Hunt
watched the chattering tourists climb aboard his
bus. He could already pick out the ones who would
be bored. The ones who would ask dumb questions.
The ones who would whisper to each other, “Is that
man black, Joanie, or isn’t he, hard to tell with that
light brown color…” The ones who would drink too
much at the King’s Arms, Farthing’s Ordinary, and
Sotterley.
   Not that Casper minded that, or any of it. He’d
been driving the tour bus for five years now. Before
that he’d spent three decades harvesting oysters off
the barrier islands of South Carolina, till the oyster
beds were destroyed by the pollution from the
Savannah River. The river was supposed to be
cleaned up now, Casper had heard. He didn’t know
for sure, and he wasn’t about to find out. Oysters
had been a hard life, backbreaking and dangerous
and dirt-poor. Driving a tour bus around southern
Maryland was about a thousand times easier, and
the tips were pretty good. Especially from the
drunks.
   “Welcome aboard, ladies ‘n’ gen’lemun,” Casper
said in his soft North Carolina accent, which he
always exaggerated when tour driving. Customers,
mostly Yankees, liked that. “Today we’re goin‘ to see
beautiful Saint Mary’s County, including historic
Saint Mary’s City, the Civil War prison at Fort
Lincoln, and Sotterley Plantation. My name is
Casper, and I’m you-all’s guide today. I used to
harvest shellfish, so I guess I can keep track of
you-all.”
  It always got a laugh. Casper started the bus. A
few minutes later he swung out into heavy traffic on
Route 235, nimbly dodging the semis and
commercial vans.
   “Our first stop this mawnin‘ will be Fort Lincoln,
in Point Lookout State Park. The park occupies a
one-thousand-thirty-seven-acre site at the
come-together of the Potomac River and
Chesapeake Bay. The fort was built of raw earth by
prisoners of…”
  Pain shot through his head.
   Casper gasped and tried to hold the wheel. The
pain came again and suddenly he couldn’t see.
Everythin‘ go dark… oh, sweet Jesus Christ, keep
me on the river… the bus swung sideways into
traffic.
  Passengers screamed. Casper heard them, but
only dimly. A third bolt of pain screwed through his
head, riveting him to darkness. He slumped over
onto the steering wheel.
  The tour bus slammed into an oncoming
18-wheeler. Both vehicles burst into flame. But by
that time, Casper Hunt was already dead.



                       FIVE

      Journalists want blood, death, and
      screaming people.
      —Dr. Pierre Rollin, epidemiologist, 1995



   The Web site began with the usual legal
disclaimer, this time in bright red capital letters:



      STROKEHELP.COM IS DESIGNED FOR
      EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
      THIS INFORMATION IS NOT
      INTENDED TO SUBSTITUTE FOR
      INFORMED MEDICAL ADVICE. YOU
      SHOULD NOT USE THIS
      INFORMATION TO DIAGNOSE OR
      TREAT A STROKE WITHOUT
      CONSULTING WITH A QUALIFIED
      PHYSICIAN. STROKEHELP DOES NOT
      ENDORSE ANY OF THE
      TREATMENTS, MEDICATIONS, OR
     PRODUCTS DISCUSSED HEREIN.



   Libby Turner, seated at her desk in the Baltimore
Sun newsroom, would have snorted if she hadn’t
been so upset. She’d been with the paper for
seventeen years, starting as a lowly police reporter
and moving steadily up. Nobody had to tell her the
legal limits of the written word, whether paper or
electronic.
  But she was too upset to feel superior. Her hands,
with their short and unpolished nails, trembled on
the keyboard. She hated that. She, Libby Turner,
never trembled. But, then, she’d never before had a
mother with a stroke, either.
   Brigit Ryan Turner had collapsed a week ago,
alone in her apartment in the Elmcrest Senior
Citizens’ Home. She hadn’t been found for three and
a half hours. In that time of oxygen deprivation, her
left side had become paralyzed, speech had been
severely impaired, and other damage may or may
not have occurred. “All we can do is wait and see,”
said the doctors, which came nowhere near to
satisfying Libby Turner. Libby loved her mother,
even though they’d fought like pit bulls ever since
Libby had been thirteen. More to the point, when
Brigit Turner was finally released from the hospital,
it was Libby, her only child, who would be
responsible for her. Libby wanted as much
information as possible on what that might mean.
  Only her fucking fingers wouldn’t stop trembling!
   She mis-hit two more keys, got a URL ERROR,
and backtracked. She had to calm down, had to
concentrate, had to follow the hyperlinks of
information till something proved useful…
   “You okay?” her managing editor asked, coming
from behind and putting his hands on her
shoulders. They were old friends.
  “Go away, Alec,” Libby said distinctly. “Go away
now.”
  “I will,” Alec said. “But meanwhile, here’re a few
other databases to check. Got them for you from a
doctor friend.”
   Alec went. Libby knew he would get someone else
to cover whatever story she couldn’t concentrate on
today. He was good that way.
   Two hours later, her fingers still trembled. But
she’d learned a lot about her mother’s condition,
following the links from one Web site to another.
Libby’s strength as a reporter had always been
thoroughness. She began on the first of the two sites
Alec had given her, which seemed to be a private
newsgroup for health-care professionals.



        J.K. HERE. ONCE MORE I NEED TO
        PICK ALL THIS COLLECTIVE
        BRAINPOWER. CAN ANYBODY PUT
        ME ON TRACK OF INFORMATION
        ABOUT BRAIN CHEMISTRY
        DIFFERENCES, POSSIBLY GENETIC,
        SHARED BY ASIAN INDIANS AND
        BLACKS BUT NOT WHITES? I DON’T
        REALLY KNOW WHAT I’M LOOKING
        FOR YET—NEUROTRANSMITTERS,
        FETAL WIRING, SUBMOLEC ULAR
        STRUCTURES—SO ANYTHING MIGHT
        HELP. IT SHOULD BE CONNECTED
        TO ISCHEMIC CEREBRAL STROKES.
        THANKS. OF COURSE, NO
        ATTRIBUTION WITHOUT YOUR
        WRITTEN PERMISSION.
        OH, ONE THING MORE—THE VENUE
        IS SOUTHERN MARYLAND, SO I
        SUPPOSE ENVIRONMENTAL
        TRIGGERS FOR GENETIC
        DIFFERENCES COULD BE A FACTOR,
        TOO. THANKS AGAIN.
JUDY—YOU PROBABLY ALREADY
KNOW THIS, AND IT’S PROBABLY
OFF TARGET ANYWAY, BUT YOU DID
ASK. ASIAN INDIANS, ALONG WITH
SOME MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLES,
SOME GREEKS, AND MANY AFRICAN
AND AFRICAN DESCENDANTS, CAN
CARRY SICKLE-CELL ANEMIA. THAT
CAN CAUSE STROKES IN ACUTE
CRISES.—MSJ



TO: J.K.
RE: REQUEST FOR RACIALLY
DIFFERENTIATED STROKE
INFORMATION.
NEW RESEARCH HAS EMERGED IN
THIS AREA RE MALARIA,
SPECIFICALLY THE SUSCEPTIBILITY
OF VARIOUS GENOMES TO P. VIVAX,
P. FALCIPARUM, AND P. MALARIAE,
ESPECIALLY WITH REGARD TO
CHLOROQUINE AND CYCLOSPORINE
RESISTANCE. SEE MY ARTICLE IN
LAST ISSUE OF MALARIA AND
TROPICAL DISEASE WEEKLY.
RICHARD KAPPEL, M.D., NIH



TO JK—YOU MENTIONED SOUTHERN
MARYLAND. IS THIS CONNECTED TO
THE RUMORS I HEARD ABOUT
RACIALLY CONNECTED STROKE
RATES AT DELLRIDGE HOSPITAL IN
LA PLATA? SUPPOSEDLY, THE CDC IS
THERE INVESTIGATING. HAS
      ANYBODY ELSE HEARD RUMORS?
      WOULD APPRECIATE FURTHER
      INFORMATION.
      —K. MAHONEY, RICHMOND, VA



  Libby’s fingers stopped trembling.
   Not because anything she’d read applied to her
mother, a white Irish harridan who did not have
sickle-cell trait. Libby’s fingers steadied because she
was looking at a story.
   So that was what she needed. A big story. A
flashy dangerous important story: FEDS
INVESTIGATE POORER STROKE CARE FOR
BLACKS AT MARYLAND HOSPITAL. Work. To
steady herself, both for her own sake and her
mothers. And this was—or could be—a story about
something that already consumed her. She always
did her best, most thorough work when she really
cared about the topic. It was as if this story was
meant for her.
   Libby Turner strode toward the Baltimore Sun
elevator that would take her to the parking garage,
and southern Maryland.



   “I’m sorry, Robert. I’m not about to commit
manpower to a crime that a bunch of scientists
can’t even agree is happening. The CDC is on the
medical aspects of the malaria, and that’s all that
actually exists at this point. What would our agents
do? Question the next-of-kin about where these
stroke victims have been that mosquitoes might
also have been? The CDC is already doing that. I
think we need to wait and see.”
  Cavanaugh said, “But—”
   “Look,” Jerry Dunbar said, “we’ve been
discussing this for fifteen minutes. I don’t have
fifteen more today.”
   They sat in Dunbar’s Baltimore office, Dunbar
behind his desk and Cavanaugh in a black,
metal-armed chair that looked like a reject from the
waiting room. Cavanaugh felt a stab of nostalgia for
his previous boss, the toe-tapping, arm-twitching
ex-cop, Marty Felders. Felders had been easy to
argue with. Felders had flourished on argument,
sucking it into his wiry frame like water into a
quivering aspen. Dunbar, the Book Man, treated
argument as if it were just one step away from
insubordination. He made Cavanaugh feel as if
there were a bulletproof shield between them.
   Nonetheless, he couldn’t let it go that easily.
“Jerry, if this is a sophisticated terrorist weapon,
the sooner we start investigating before they know
we’re doing it, the fresher the leads will be. We
don’t want to find ourselves in the position of
having some subversive group suddenly claim credit
for this and we haven’t even looked seriously at
them. I could—”
   “You could do exactly what you’re supposed to be
doing anyway,” Dunbar said harshly, “which is to
keep tabs on the hate groups in your jurisdiction.
You don’t—or shouldn’t—need additional manpower
to do that.”
  “No,” Cavanaugh said, “not ordinarily. But in this
case, I think we should at least inform
Headquarters that—”
  Dunbar got up and walked out of the room.
  Cavanaugh, left sitting there, got a grip on his
own temper. All right, he had said the same thing
over and over—how many times? At least six.
Dunbar had heard him out five of those times. But
Felders wouldn’t have cut short debate like that.
Felders would have… but Cavanaugh didn’t work for
Felders any more.
  Maybe Dunbar would come back in and let
Cavanaugh say it all again.
   While he waited, he took out his notepad and
doodled. He drew a bunch of upright, hair-on-end
people standing close together on a long paddle and
labeled it “GODZILLA’S TOOTHBRUSH.” He drew
a flowering tree with branches connected by
sections of L-shaped pipes: “A NORTH AMERICAN
PLUMBER PLANT IN BLOOM.” Dunbar did not
reappear.
  Eventually his secretary stuck her head in the
door. “Agent Cavanaugh? You have a call on line 3.”
  Cavanaugh picked up the phone. Who knew he
was here? Only Seton. Unless Judy had tracked him
down, or Jim Farlow.
  “Robert? This is Marcy.”
  His ex-wife. He hadn’t seen her since the final
divorce proceeding over a year ago. She’d already
been living with her boss, the wunderkind CEO, and
had barely glanced at him.
  “Robert? Are you there?”
  “How did you know where to find me?” he asked,
because he had to say something.
   “I didn’t,” she said. He’d forgotten how
low-pitched her voice was, a husky contralto. “I
called your old office, and they said you’d moved to
southern Maryland, and when I called that number
your partner said you were here.”
  “He’s not my partner,” Robert said.
  “Whatever. Robert… I’m calling to ask a favor.”
  That was very Marcy. Leave him, divorce him,
have no communication for a year, then call out of
the blue to ask for something, without even a
“please.” Cavanaugh was about to hang up, just as
soon as he found the perfect cutting retort.
  “Please,” Marcy said, in a different tone.
  “What is it?”
  “I can’t tell you on the phone; I have to show you.
Could you come over sometime today?”
  To the expensive Georgetown townhouse she
shared with the successful CEO? Not a chance in
hell.
  “I’ve moved,” Marcy said quickly. “To a smaller
place east of Washington. In Hyattsville. It’s on your
way home, I think. And I’m in a little trouble.”
   “All right,” Robert said. If she was really in
trouble… did she know that would be the one thing
he wouldn’t refuse? Of course she did. “I’ll come by
about six-thirty. What’s the address?”



  The apartment might be Marcy’s idea of “a
smaller place,” but it wasn’t Robert’s. Washington’s
toniest suburbs lay north of the city. However,
Marcy had managed to find the most expensive
housing of a nonexpensive area. Marble foyer,
carved wooden double doors leading to the living
room, a mix of their old Federalist furniture and
some new, Oriental-looking stuff. Thick velvet
curtains blocked traffic sounds.
  “Hello, Marcy.”
  “Robert. Thank you so much for coming.” She
gave him her hand.
   She looked sensational. She always had, but now
there was an additional gloss on it. Slimmer, her
hair pulled back into a chignon… Robert didn’t
know how women achieved these things. He only
knew she had gone from a beautiful woman to a
beautiful woman with a polish that suggested
depth. Not unlike the lacquer on the new Chinese
furniture.
  “Do you want a drink? Vodka and tonic?”
  She remembered what he drank. Alarm bells
went off in Cavanaugh’s head.
  “Just coffee.”
  “I’ll just be a minute. Make yourself comfortable.”
  She disappeared into the vast recesses of her
smaller place, and Cavanaugh wandered around the
living room, looking for clues to what was going on.
He didn’t find any.
  “Is the coffee okay?”
   “The coffee is wonderful,” Cavanaugh said,
although the truth was that all coffee tasted pretty
much the same to him.
  So why had he complimented it? He put down
the Wedgewood cup.
   “Marcy, you said on the phone that you were in
trouble.”
  “Yes, I am. It’s Abigail.”
  “Abigail? Your dog?”
  “Yes. Since I’ve moved, she’s been a real problem.
She howls all day while I’m gone at work, and the
neighbors are complaining.”
  Her dog. She had called him out here to foist her
dog off on him.
   “Before you say no, just listen, Robert. You always
liked dogs. Remember how you used to throw a
tennis ball for her for hours at a time? And you’re
home more than I am—you don’t have to travel as
much for your job. And you live out in the country;
your office gave me your new address and I looked
it up on the map.”
   “No. I can’t believe you told me you were in
trouble and it’s about discarding your dog!”
 To his surprise, her eyes filled with tears. Marcy.
Who never cried, never lost her glossy poise…
  “I don’t know where else to turn, Robert. If I take
her to the pound, they’ll just kill her. She’s not a
cute little puppy somebody else will adopt. My job
does require more and more travel—in fact, I have a
nine-thirty flight to Dallas tonight. Abigail mopes
and howls at the boarding kennel. And since Hal left
me, I’m… I’m having trouble holding it all together.”
  “Since Hal left me.” Cavanaugh peered more
closely at Marcy. The tears had vanished, a
momentary weakness. But even that was more
weakness than he’d ever seen from her during the
four years of their marriage.
   He said, “I’m living with someone, Marcy.” If she
looked stricken, he was going to leave. None of that
rebound-to-a-former-point-of-security danger.
  But Marcy only smiled. “Well, does she like
dogs?”
  Did Judy like dogs? Cavanaugh realized he didn’t
know, which just proved how little he and Judy
really knew each other. How could she want to
marry him, for Chrissake, when they didn’t even
know who liked what pets? It was irrational on her
part. Premature, presumptuous…
   He was working this into a mild resentment
when Abigail, an aging English setter, trotted into
the room. At the threshold she stopped dead, then
bounded joyfully toward Cavanaugh, tail wagging.
She licked his face, she barked in his ear, she all but
clamored onto his lap.
  “See, she remembers you,” Marcy said.
  “Hey, girl. Hey there, old girl. How’s the girl…?”
  Damn. He was already lost. Marcy had won. He
was going to take the damn dog.
   “Robert, she’d be so much happier with you than
with me… Oh, don’t mind the TV. It’s programmed
to come on for the seven o’clock news. I usually
watch it while I eat dinner.”
   She said it calmly, but to Robert it sounded sad.
Eating alone with the TV. Although, where was the
TV? He heard a broadcast-type voice. “… stories
tonight about yet another TWA crash and a
sensational…” but he didn’t see a TV set, not even
after he’d pushed Abigail out of his face.
  “So, will you take her?” Marcy said tensely.
  Cavanaugh finally located the broadcast voice; it
was coming from an antique cherry armoire with
polished brass knobs. Marcy must figure a TV was
too recent for her Federalist-Chinoiserie decor.
  “… just learned that the Centers for Disease
Control are investigating in southern Maryland…”
  “Robert? Will you?”
   “… previously unknown strain of malaria that
attacks blood cells that…”
  Cavanaugh shoved away Abigail, bolted across
the room, and flung open the cherry armoire. Tom
Brokaw’s face lectured him.
   “… urging citizens not to panic. I repeat, these
findings are preliminary. Nonetheless, Baltimore
Sun journalist Libby Turner, who broke the story in
this evening’s edition of that newspaper, received
confirmation from Dellridge Community Hospital
in La Plata that…”
  “Oh, my God,” Cavanaugh said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
  “What is it?” Marcy said. “What’s wrong?”
   “… article also raises a sensitive point: Is this new
disease, which apparently attacks mostly African
Americans, being treated with the same seriousness
as if the victims were white? That question is
already being debated on the Internet, where
rumors first alerted Ms. Dole to…”
  Rumors on the Internet. Judy? But he had
warned her—
  “Robert, I asked you what’s wrong!”
  “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” he said.
  “What wasn’t?”
  “The public was supposed to be told in a
reassuring way. Not as a civil rights issue.”
  “… further confirmation from La Plata that the
FBI has already questioned hospital personnel at…”
  “Shit,” Cavanaugh repeated inanely. His cell
phone rang.
  “… speculation that if the new disease is not an
act of nature, it could well be a bioweapon
disguised as…”
  “Bob? Listen, it’s Felders.”
  “What—”
  Marcy said, “Robert, please tell me what’s going
on!”
  Felders said, “I heard the idiotic news report and
realize that if it’s in southern Maryland, it’s you and
Seton.”
  “Ehhrrrmmm,” Cavanaugh said. Could Felders
hear Marcy in the background? Would he recognize
Marcy’s voice after three years? Did Felders think
the malaria/stroke outbreak was terrorism? Why
was Felders calling?
  “Listen, I know you don’t work for me any more,
Bob,” Felders said, “but mentoring dies hard, I
guess. I just wanted to offer a piece of advice.”
  Despite himself, Cavanaugh grinned. When
Felders mentored, he owned. It drove most agents
nuts, but Cavanaugh hadn’t really minded. They
didn’t come any more competent than Felders.
  “Like I said, I got Seton in your Resident Agency.
What kind of idiot is he, anyway? He shouldn’t be in
charge of a lemonade stand. He told me he had to
get off the phone to ‘comment to the press crowd
outside.’ You should have heard his tone. The pope
appearing on his goddamn balcony.”
  Ah, Felders. Why couldn’t Dunbar see through
Seton like that?
   “Anyway,” Felders raced on in his New York
rat-a-tat style, “I wanted to tell you to stay away
from the press while you’re doing this investigation.
The whole thing sounds like a nut theory to me, but
after Libby Turner and CBS, the Bureau is going to
have to investigate it anyway. We’ll look like racists
if we don’t. Anyway, you’re going to be talking to
local hate groups, right? Those guys only like the
press on their own terms. If you’re trailed by
reporters, you’ll never get close to the people you’re
going to need to talk to. You especially don’t want
your face on TV. Let that idiot Seton talk for the
cameras. You don’t go anywhere near your office.
Don’t go home, either. There’re only two agents in
southern Maryland, and by now every reporter on
the East Coast knows your name and address.
They’ll be camped on your lawn trying to wring
quotes out of you. Tell Judy not to talk to them
either.”
   Cavanaugh suddenly realized that Felders’s voice
carried beyond the receiver. Marcy was listening
intently.
  “Got it,” Cavanaugh said.
   “Good. It’s going to be a wild goose chase, but the
lower profile you keep, the better you’ll come out of
it after the insanity stops.” He hung up, Felders
style, without saying good-bye.
  Marcy smoothed her already smooth hair.
“Where will you stay while you investigate?”
  “A motel, under a Bureau ID.”
  “You can stay here.”
  It caught Cavanaugh by surprise, which must
have showed on his face. Marcy smiled.
   “As I said, I’m leaving on a nine-thirty flight for
Dallas. I’ll be gone at least a week, more likely two.
If you’re not going home to… to Judy, then you can’t
take Abigail there. If you stay here, nobody will
know where you are, Abigail won’t be howling at the
kennel, and I’ll feel like I’ve repaid you a little for
relieving me of the dog.”
   The logic was impeccable, the presentation
flawless. And yet under the negotiating skill,
Cavanaugh sensed something else. Something new
in his ex-wife: a desire to be useful. What had her
lover the wunderkind CEO done to this self-assured
woman to ever make her feel she wasn’t?
  “Okay, sure,” Cavanaugh said. “Thanks.”
 “Good. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to pack for
my business trip.”
   She left the living room, as graceful and poised as
Cavanaugh remembered. He stood still on the
Oriental carpet, planning. Call Dunbar, call Judy,
call Jim Farlow…
  Abigail whimpered and rolled over on her belly,
waiting for him to scratch her. It brought back a
host of memories of his former life. The dog, the
picnics at the beach, Marcy…
  But things were different now.
  Before he made the first of the calls to launch his
investigation, he knelt and examined Abigail’s
happily exposed belly, looking for mosquito bites.
   We’re besieged by calls,“ Jerry Dunbar said. He
ran a hand through his thinning hair. ”Half of them
are from people ‘turning in the terrorist group that
caused the disease.’ Candidates include space
aliens, Republicans, insurance companies,
Madonna, the vice president, and the City of New
York. Somehow a rumor got started that the big
bus crash yesterday happened because the driver
was black and had a stroke like Senator Reading’s.“
  “Jesus,” an agent said.
  “The other half of the phone calls are from
Headquarters. They want this thing solved
yesterday.”
   The twelve agents around the table nodded
sleepily. It was 7:00 A.M. in Baltimore. The first of
the Public Health Service/CDC bulletins had
already aired on the radio; Cavanaugh had heard it
while driving in. It was sane, balanced, and
reasonable. It was also too late. Panic had already
flamed, including at the FBI. This was the initial
meeting of the hastily assembled—most of the
agents had been in bed asleep—team against “the
malaria terrorists.”
  Nobody present was completely convinced it was
a terrorist attack, not even Cavanaugh. But Libby
Turners follow-up stories had everything: Public
danger. Racism. Paranoia. Death. Pictures of
malaria-carrying mosquitoes blown up ten times
their size, so that they resembled the enormous
car-chomping mutated bugs of 1950s B movies.
Naturally the journalists loved it. Naturally they
wrote about it. To be fair.
  Cavanaugh didn’t want to be fair. Like most
agents, he considered journalists jackals. Howling,
braying, preying on the weak, settling for carrion.
Interfering with solid, methodical law enforcement.
   “Cavanaugh?” Dunbar said, breaking into his
train of thought.
  “‘Let slip the dogs of the Baltimore Sun.”
  “What?”
  “Nothing.”
   “I asked you,” Dunbar said, “how much time can
you take from your other cases for this special
team?”
  “All of it.”
   Dunbar nodded. Apparently he took this as no
more than a sign of how conscientiously Cavanaugh
took directives from Headquarters. Felders would
have known it also meant Cavanaugh had nothing
else worth his time.
   “I’m case agent on this, on record,” Dunbar said,
which meant Headquarters needed to show the
public that a high-ranking supervisor was in
charge. “But you’ll do the major field work, Robert.
It’s your jurisdiction. However, everything to the
press goes through me or the Press Office.
Everything. That’s ironclad.”
  The twelve agents—the number was another
concession to the “terrorism” the public perceived
and the Bureau didn’t—nodded again. Everyone
understood. This one was hot, so they would go
through the motions, even if the motions were
bullshit. Then Cavanaugh would write a final
report, and everybody could forget about the whole
thing.
  “Okay, lets divide it up. Firchen, Santos, Phaffer,
you talk to the hospitals and the next-of-kin.
Cavanaugh will brief you. Home, McFarlane…”
    Dunbar organized the team, then let Cavanaugh
fill everybody in. All the while he was doing so, he
kept one ear cocked toward the secure phone at the
end of the conference room. The other agents did,
too. With a highly publicized terrorist attack—even
one with no terrorists except those dreamed up by
the press—sometimes a genuinely dangerous group
would claim credit. Or more than one group.
Headquarters would funnel those claims to this
team, and thus provide probable cause for
warrants, subpoenas, maybe even grand juries. Very
often the result was information useful to other
on-going cases. It was like following plastic bread
crumbs to real gingerbread houses.
  Of course, the claimants might phone the
newspapers instead of the FBI. But in that case, the
Post or Sun or Times would phone Headquarters.
   However, by the end of the meeting, no one had
as yet taken responsibility for malaria reading. The
secure phone stayed silent.



   Melanie Anderson gulped the last mouthful of hot
coffee in the kitchenette of her Weather Vane Motel
room. Late, late. It was already 7:00 A.M. and she
and Krovetz were supposed to leave at 7:10 for the
field. Melanie wore only a white, one-pocket T-shirt
and panties, her thick, shoulder-length hair
half-combed. And Krovetz, that hotshot, would
knock on her door early, she just knew it. He was
that eager.
  Well, so was she. She and Krovetz were going to
take a break from interviewing next-of-kin for the
epidemiological curves. Instead, they would leave
the rest of the team issuing more guidelines for
protecting the populace, and they would visit the
epidemiological center: twenty-five square miles of
small towns, woods, fields, and marshland. A lot of
space—but Melanie had a theory to narrow it
farther. To test it, she and Joe would gather
specimens.
  Thank God things were finally getting done.
  No, actually, thank that reporter, Libby Turner.
Although thinking about Libby Turner’s article in
the Sun made her think about Robert Cavanaugh,
which made her so furious she slammed her empty
coffee mug into the sink.
   He had actually called her last night to suggest
that she had leaked the P. reading terrorism theory
to the press! After she’d given Farlow her word of
honor that she wouldn’t! Melanie had blistered the
phone receiver with her reply, then hung up.
Arrogant honky cop!
   She yanked on socks and jeans, dragged a comb
through the other half of her hair and pushed it into
a ponytail, smeared on insect repellent. She was
lacing up her field boots when the phone rang.
Krovetz. No, he’d just show up. Cavanaugh? If he
dared accuse her again…
  “Is this the CDC nigger bitch?”
  A heavy male voice. Melanie went still.
  “Yeah, I know where you are. I see you every day,
running around with those white men scientists.
What’re you, their off-duty recreation? Well, not for
long. Get out of our state, bitch, or else you might
be next to get bitten by some rabid mosquito.”
Forced heavy laughter.
  Quietly she hung up the phone.
  Call Cavanaugh? Tell Farlow? No. Whoever made
that hate call wasn’t responsible for genetically
engineering a parasitic variant. An organization
that could do that owned brains, and this was just a
stupid racist pig. Another in the sty.
   She found she was standing with her arms
wrapped around her body, protective. Impatiently,
she bent to finish lacing her boots, then looked for
her cap. But she jumped when the knock on the
door came, and she kept the chain on until she saw
it was Joe Krovetz.
  “Mel? Ready to go? Car’s loaded.”
  “I’m ready. Did you remember the dry ice?”
   “Of course.” He grinned at her, so eager to get
started that Melanie grinned back. They weren’t all
like that caller.
  Crossing the parking lot, she eyed the teenagers
lounging around the gas station, the motel
employee hosing down a sidewalk, the customer
pulling away from a unit on the far end of the
motel, people going in and out of the 7-Eleven. Did
you call me? You? You?
  Why do you hate us so fucking much?
   They drove southeast toward the river. A mile or
so short of the Potomac River Bridge, Melanie
pulled the car off the highway and onto a side road,
and they entered a different decade.
   Away from the highways, she’d found, much of
southern Maryland looked just like this. Dirt roads
cut through dense woods of mixed hardwoods and
pine. Whenever the land lifted, small hidden farms
appeared: fields of corn or carrots or tobacco. The
scattered homes were either farmhouses or trailers,
their small yards splashed either with flower beds
and statues to Saint Mary, or with abandoned tires
and rolls of chicken wire. One sign, sometimes hand
lettered, appeared over and over: DOGS TRAINED
FOR AGGRESSION.
  Between the isolated farms or trailers, the land
was still wild: steep ravines, fallen trees, the
constant drone of insects. A deer flashed across the
road, melting into the woods.
  “Okay, here,” Melanie said. “You take that side of
the road and I’ll take this.”
   “Gotcha.” Joe stopped the car and climbed out.
To the left the woods weren’t quite as thick as in
other places, patterned with sunlit dells and fallen
logs. In the distance, barely visible above the trees,
rose a dilapidated barn roof. To the right the
ground fell away sharply in a muddy bank, then
leveled off into swampy ground covered with reeds,
stagnant pools of water, and the drowned remains
of small trees. Both left and right were good
breeding grounds for A. quadrimaculatus.
  Joe said, “I’m still not sure we’re going to find
anything new, Mel.”
  “You got a better idea?”
  “Nope,” Joe said, unoffended.
   Melanie liked that. The kid was easy to work
with. He was always cheerful, he was willing to
think out of the box, and never once had he shown
the slightest awareness that she was female. That
made things much easier. Melanie didn’t date white
men, and it was tiresome having to explain why not.
   Joe loaded himself with light traps, plus the
subliming dry ice that mosquitoes mistook for
human breath. He vanished into the trees. Melanie
slid down the steep bank toward the swamp.
   This wasn’t a part of epidemiology that Melanie
usually engaged in. But this was her theory, and so
far she was the only one who believed in it. She’d
begun with the fact that the center of this attempt
at genocide was centered in a rural subsection of
Maryland rather than, say, in D.C. That suggested
two possibilities, neither of which precluded the
other. The first was that whoever had done this
horrendous thing had deliberately released the
altered and infected Anopheles in an out-of-the-way
location, where the epidemic would have a chance
to take firm hold before the small rural hospitals
even realized it existed. And that’s exactly what
would have happened if a United States senator
hadn’t been bitten and then died at a sophisticated
New York hospital that ran obscure tests to find out
why. If Senator Reading hadn’t been an inadvertent
meal for a diseased mosquito, God knows how
many more poor blacks would have died before
anybody realized what their strokes actually were.
   As it was, the official death toll had reached
fifty-six: fifty-three blacks, one Greek, two India
Indians. Many of the dead were kids. Kids liked to
be outdoors in the summer.
   The second possibility was that the release of the
diseased mosquitoes had been accidental.
Premature. Somebody had been transporting the
vectors from wherever they had been created to
wherever they were supposed to be used. And some
had escaped. That’s why Melanie and Joe were out
in tall, wet grass, looking for clues. Route 301 ran
right through the epidemiological center, and it
contained the bridge to connect this God-forsaken
backwater with Virginia and the deep South.
   The ground was wet. Mud rose almost to the top
of Melanie’s field boots. She squished halfway
across the open ground and bent over a ditch.
Anopheles quadrimaculatus deposited its eggs on
the surface of standing fresh water, usually water
surrounded by heavy vegetation, with some shady
areas. That described most of southern Maryland,
where the water table was so high that inland
swamps were as common as salt marshes.
Anopheles larvae, called wigglers, liked to feed in
the sun, rest in the shade. Sure enough, the ditch
held a floating mass of eggs. Melanie scooped them
up carefully and put them in a collector. Gary would
examine some, hatch some. It was a numbers game.
Were there pockets of third-or-fourth generation
breeding that could indicate a single-point release
of initial vectors? The only way to find out was to
carefully sample the undisturbed breeding grounds.
  “Hey! You! Look this way!”
  Her head jerked up. Two men splashed across the
wet ground toward her. Fear iced her spine—until
she saw the logo on their truck, parked behind Joe’s
car: CHANNEL SIX NEWS.
  “Damn!” one of the men said. He raised his leg
and tried to shake the mud off his polished leather
shoe and bottom four inches of pants leg. “Hey, Dr.
Anderson! Look this way!” The other man raised a
mini-cam.
  Melanie pulled the brim of her baseball cap down
and turned her back. She waded away from the
men, across even swampier ground. The newsmen
weren’t dressed for that. But the two splashed after
her, the cameraman filming, the reporter cursing
the mud and muck. “Dr. Anderson! Don’t go! Could
you please show us which mosquitoes are the ones
carrying the malaria? Do you have one in a jar we
can shoot?”
   She turned back. “Look, gentlemen, this is a
scientific task, not medical theater. The CDC has a
vital job to do here. If you could just contact the
CDC Press Office for the information you need.”
  The reporter didn’t even deign to answer that.
The cameraman kept shooting. The reporter looked
around hopefully for mosquitoes. Back at the
roadside, a second sound truck screeched to a halt
beside the first one. It said UPI.
  “Oh, my God. Look, guys, if you go stomping
through the environment you’re just going to—”
  Three people jumped out of the second truck and
waded into the field.
   Melanie hurried toward them, her boots sticking
in mud at every step then pulling out with a little
sucking noise. “You! Don’t come in here. Do you
even know if you’re positive for sickle-cell trait?”
   The black man stared at her. Instantly she
disliked him. One of the brothers who thought black
women existed to serve their needs. She knew the
type. “Look, unless you know for sure that you’re
negative for sickle-cell trait, this isn’t a safe place
for you.”
  “I’ve got a story to file,” he said. “Who are you?”
  “Dr. Melanie Anderson, CDC!”
  “Oh, yeah. Well, stand over there and give us
about sixty seconds. Not too technical.”
  She said coldly, “Forget you.”
   Before he could answer, two white kids appeared
from a copse of trees on the far edge of the swamp.
They sloshed toward her. “This the epidemic
center? We’re graduate students from the university
on a collecting expedition. Who’s in charge here,
please?”
  “How did you—”
  “Come one, come all,” said the UPI man sourly.
Mud caked his pants legs. “They followed us,
obviously.”
  One of the grad students said, “There’re some
other researchers down the road, but they didn’t
speak English. I think they’re from the Institute of
Tropical Medicine at Antwerp. My French isn’t so
good.”
   “It wasn’t French, you dork,” his companion said.
“It was Dutch. Hey, look—CNN!”
  Another car approached from Route 301, slowed,
and stopped. Then another truck.
   Melanie took a long deep breath and put her face
in her hands.



                          Six

      Americans have every reason to expect a
     nuclear, biological, or chemical attack
     before the decade is over.
     —Senator Richard Lugar, 1995



  The fax in Judy’s office beeped and began to
whir. She swiveled her chair away from her
computer and stared at it. Let it be a cartoon from
Robert.
   He had courted her—if you could call it
“courtship” when it didn’t lead to actual
marriage—by sending her his whimsical drawings.
By fax, by letter, by e-mail. Judy loved them. She
loved the side of Robert that the cartoons revealed:
not the dogged, persistent FBI agent, but the
skewed humor, the zany tenderness. Her favorites
were pinned to the corkboard above her desk, which
at the moment she could barely see because the only
light in the room came from the computer screen.
She didn’t want to let the reporters camped outside
even know which room she was in. That was
irrational, yes, but there it was.
   The curtains, tightly drawn across the window,
blocked out the trucks rutting the lawn; the
discarded Styrofoam coffee cups blew down the
slope into the river. When Judy went outside to get
the mail, they shouted questions at her. Yesterday
night there had been a lot of them; today there were
fewer, since presumably they had found other
connections to what the press was now calling
“malaria reading.” Apparently “Plasmodium
reading” didn’t sound scary enough.
   The worst of it was, Judy couldn’t blame Libby
Turner. Turner was a journalist, doing just what
Judy herself did when she was researching a science
story. In fact, it was what Robert did in tracking
down his cases. But that didn’t make him any
happier with her.
  “I told you to keep this all confidential!” he’d said
last night on the phone. “‘Confidential’ does not
include letting in the six million people on the
Internet!”
  “I’m sorry, Robert, I didn’t think—”
  “That’s evident,” he’d said, and hung up. That
wasn’t like him, but on reflection, Judy was glad he
had. It put him in the wrong. That shifted the
balance of power to her. Now he would have to
apologize, or at least make it up to her, and that
would probably have to include forgiving her for the
Internet gaffe. Being Robert, he would most likely
apologize through a cartoon.
  So she waited for a cartoon.
   The fax stopped whirring. Judy crossed her
study, tore off the transmission, and took it back to
read by the glowing terminal. It was printed in his
small block letters:



      JUDY—I WON’T BE HOME FOR A
      WHILE BECAUSE I NEED TO STAY
      UNBROADCAST. YOU CAN REACH ME
      AT 301-5555. DON’T TALK TO THE
      PRESS.—ROBERT



  No apology. And how long was “a while?” And
what did he mean “need to stay unbroadcast”? He
wasn’t an undercover agent for God’s sake! The
undercovers were an entirely different breed—edgy,
thrill-seeking loners, who were all a little nuts. Judy
had heard Robert say so dozens of times, with the
mix of admiration and disconnection all agents
seem to have for the undercovers. So what was
going on here?
  Judy chewed on her thumb, staring at the
number on the fax. Not his cell phone. Well, that
wasn’t surprising; the cell phone belonged to the
Bureau and was supposed to be reserved for official
business. And “301-5555” was a suburban number,
not D.C. She pressed it.
    A woman’s voice on the answering machine: “You
have reached 301-5555. Please leave a message and
I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
  Who was she?
   Judy punched in another number. Science
writers met a diverse lot of people. A year ago, she’d
interviewed a female state trooper who had located
what she thought was the skeleton of a murder
victim under her rented vacation house. The
skeleton had turned out to belong to a
five-hundred-year-old Cherokee. This had made the
skeleton an embarrassment to the law, which had
already opened a murder-case file, but a boon to
science. The trooper was rueful and funny about her
mistake, and she and Judy had become close
friends.
  “Maryland State Police.”
  “Officer Tess Muratore, please,” Judy said.
  “Just a moment.”
  No cartoon. Not even a ‘Love, Robert.’ Why not?
  “Muratore.”
  “Tess, this is Judy Kozinski. Listen, I have to ask
an enormous favor.”
  Tess’s voice lost its wary cop formality. “Hi, Jude.
As long as the favors not illegal.”
  “Only a little illegal.”
  Tess said nothing.
  “I just need a name and address to go with a
phone number.”
  “You know I can’t—”
  “It’s personal, Tess. About Robert. Who’s still
being a dum-dum about marrying me. And I give
you my word your name will never come up.”
  Tess had her own man troubles, as Judy well
knew. Tess’s husband, another cop, was a skirt
chaser, like Judy’s late husband, Ben. Judy and Tess
commiserated with each other, listened to each
other, supported each other in that highly verbal
sisterhood of emotional anxiety that no man really
understood.
  Tess said, “All right. Give me the number. I’ll call
you back.” Fifteen minutes later, she did. “The
phone is listed to an M. Gordon in Hyattsville. The
address is—Judy? You there?”
  “Yes,” Judy said numbly.
  “You okay?”
  “Yes. No.”
   “Well, write down the address and phone because
I have to go now. But if you want to talk, I’ll be
home tonight.”
  “Thanks,” Judy said. It was hard to get the word
past the constriction in her throat.
   Marcy Gordon. Robert’s ex-wife. And he was
staying there for an indefinite “while.”
   Judy sat down carefully and stared at this week’s
screen saver, maniacally leaping dinosaurs. It was
important not to jump to conclusions. Robert might
have a perfectly good reason for staying with Marcy.
  Oh, yeah? Like what?
  Trust was important. She had to at least give
Robert a chance to explain.
   And how was she going to do that if she didn’t
see him? Over the phone? And how was she going to
explain to him how she knew whose apartment he
was inhabiting? She’d overstepped the information
limits once already with the Internet leak.
  No, she had to trust him. She did trust him.
Robert wasn’t like Ben. Robert was a fundamentally
decent, honest man. And faithful.
   So why hadn’t he told her outright he was with
his ex-wife?
   Judy put her hands over her face. All those nights
Ben hadn’t come home, all the other women, the
scientific colleagues and star-struck lab techs and
academic-conference hotel clerks. Perfume on the
lapels of his suits. Hang-up calls when the caller
heard a woman answer. Master Card bills for
flowers she never got, jewelry she never saw… She
couldn’t go through it again with Robert. She just
couldn’t.
  And she wasn’t going to.
  She peered through the curtains. The last of the
reporters had left for more promising prey.



  “Here it is,” Agent Chuck Romano said when the
secure phone from Headquarters rang. “I’m offering
bets of three whole dollars.”
  “No takers,” said an agent by the coffee machine.
   Since the initial meeting of the malaria reading
FBI team, things had changed. The media had
changed them. Malaria reading was now firmly
established in the public mind as a terrorist
disease, and so it had become a terrorist case. Too
many citizens were dead, too instantly, too
dramatically. Therefore, someone must be to blame.
Therefore, the FBI must locate that someone. So far,
the FBI had failed to do this. Therefore, the press
was entitled to headlines like “OVER 100
DEAD—BUT FBI HAS ZERO” and “IS FBI CHIEF
BROYLIN A RACIST?”
   Therefore, Dunbar had set up a “secret”
command center in a South Maryland motel, away
from the Leonardtown resident agency. The room’s
twin beds had been pushed against the wall.
Phones, fax, computer, and coffee machine—the
four indispensable mechanical devices of law
enforcement—covered desk and dresser and table.
Extra chairs had materialized. The blinds were
drawn, and empty Coke cans from the machine
outside already grew in a precarious pyramid on
the windowsill.
  Romano held the phone to his ear, saying little
until the call was over. The agents waited.
   “Okay, here’s what we’ve got. Credit is being
claimed by a group called Caucasian Caucus.
Robert?”
  “Yeah. There’s a chapter in Saint Mary’s County.
White supremacists. But it’s got about fifteen
members, and we have them tagged as
dummkopfs.” This, in the classification system
Cavanaugh had borrowed from Felders, meant the
Caucasian Caucus talked and published white
supremacy but had never committed any actions in
support of it, not even legal ones like marches.
“They’re empty windbags.”
   “Well, we expected false claims,” another agent
said. His mouth twisted. “Getting in on the glory.”
  Romano said, “The claimant sent a manifesto,
mailed it U.S. post to the Bureau and the White
House and the Washington Post. At least it’s
short—five paragraphs. Headquarters is e-mailing
us a text.”
   “Coming through now,” said Agent Walter West
at the computer. He printed multiple copies.
Cavanaugh studied his and found, to his surprise,
this group was actually literate:



     GIVEN THAT THE CAUCASIAN
     CAUCUS EXISTS FOR THE PURPOSE
     OF RECOGNIZING THAT THE
     CAUCASIAN RACE HAS BEEN
     RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MAJOR
     ADVANCES IN SCIENCE, POLITICS,
     AND THE ARTS, AS WELL AS FOR
     THE FOUNDING AND ECONOMIC
     DEVELOPMENT OF THE GLORIOUS
     UNITED STATES OF AMERICA; AND
GIVEN THAT THE NEGROID RACES
HAVE DAMAGED AND ATTEMPTED
TO DESTROY THESE GLORIOUS
ACHIEVEMENTS THROUGH THEIR
GHETTO VIOLENCE, WELFARE
DEMANDS, DRUG USE, AND
GENERAL SOCIAL UGLINESS IN
RAISING THEIR OWN KIDS; AND



GIVEN THAT MISGUIDED
CAUCASIAN LEADERS HAVE
ACTUALLY FAVORED THE
DESTRUCTIVE NEGROID RACES
OVER CAUCASIANS THROUGH SUCH
UNJUST PROGRAMS AS
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND
ELECTING NEGROIDS TO
INFLUENTIAL OFFICE;



THEN ANY TRULY PATRIOTIC GROUP
IS LEFT WITH NO CHOICE BUT TO
FIGHT FOR ITS COUNTRY’S
INTEGRITY WITH EVERY WEAPON
AT ITS DISPOSAL. ANYTHING LESS
WOULD BE TO BETRAY THE TRUE
SPIRIT OF THE UNITED STATES, AND
TO UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF
THE ENEMY AT WAR WITH THE
WHITE RACE; AND



THUS THE CAUCASIAN CAUCUS IS
PROUD TO CLAIM CREDIT FOR THE
RELEASE OF A BIOLOGICAL WEAPON
DESIGNED TO RIGHT THE PROPER
     BALANCE OF POWER, IN THE FORM
     OF THE ALTERED ANOPHELES
     MOSQUITO TO DEMONSTRATE WHO
     OWNS THIS GREAT COUNTRY AND
     ITS SCIENCE. HEED THE
     DEMONSTRATION.



  “Charming,” West said. “How seriously do we
have to take it?”
  “Not very,” Cavanaugh said, “unless
Headquarters knows something about other
chapters of these guys that isn’t true in Saint
Mary’s. They’re hollow megaphones. All right—I’ll
take this group. Walt, you and Danny—” The phone
rang again. Another transmission from
Headquarters flashed on the computer screen.
   Cavanaugh made sure he had his copy of the
notes from the CDC team on the particulars of the
epidemic transmission. The Bureau was going to
have to separate a lot of chaff from the rotten
wheat. Assuming the wheat was actually there at
all.



  Willis Hartman, information minister of the
Saint Mary’s chapter of the Caucasian Caucus, both
was and was not typical of the hate-group members
Cavanaugh had found in southern Maryland.
   Hartman’s home was typical. He lived in a small,
isolated house on a narrow spit of rocky
land—“upground,” the locals called it—at the edge
of a salt marsh. Here the Potomac River had
almost, but not quite, become Chesapeake Bay. On
the front of the house, a roofed porch furnished
with chairs faced the water. A quarter mile farther
inland the coast lifted into thick woods turned gold
by the setting sun. Somewhere in the woods,
Cavanaugh knew, the Caucasians would have
hidden caches of weapons, radios, and paramilitary
gear. With any luck, they would only use it for the
internal “readiness drills” that made them feel
heroic.
   Hartman’s education, however, was not typical.
FBI files showed he had a B.S. in engineering from
Georgia Tech. He had worked for Florida Power and
Light until dismissed for “failure to carry out duties
as specified,” and then had worked at successively
more unskilled jobs until he’d landed in Maryland,
working at a crab-canning factory. A misfit. His file
said he was forty-one, never married, no police
record. He was licensed to own a nine millimeter.
   Hartmans house had no sidewalk from the road,
just a semisoggy path among the marsh plants.
Cavanaugh picked his way. A fresh breeze blew
from the Potomac, cooling his face. To his right a
heron took sudden flight, graceful against the
darkening sky. Not for the first time, Cavanaugh
wondered why some of the least worthwhile people
on the planet should live in some of its most
beautiful locations.
  Hartman met him on the porch. He was tall, thin,
balding, dressed in jeans and a gray cotton work
shirt. “Who are you?”
  “Mr. Hartman? FBI, Special Agent Robert
Cavanaugh. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
   “Of course you would,” Hartman said. He smiled
slightly. “Sit down.”
  Cavanaugh sat. A cat, striped gray and white,
regarded him impassively from the porch railing.
  “I’m here to check some facts,” Cavanaugh said.
“Are you a member of Caucasian Caucus?”
 “I’m the information minister for southern
Maryland,” Hartman said. He seemed amused.
  “The FBI, the White House, and the Washington
Post all received the following communication.”
Cavanaugh handed him a copy. “Have you seen this
before?”
  Hartman didn’t glance at the paper. “No.”
  “How do you know you haven’t seen it if you don’t
look at what it is?”
   “I saw it this morning in the Post. I can read,
Agent Cavanaugh.” Hartmans smile broadened
slightly, a fraction of an inch. Cavanaugh saw that
he was doling out the smile, making it last, using it
to comment on this pointless exchange.
  “Did this communication originate from you?”
  “Obviously not, if I never saw it before.”
   “What are your duties as ‘information minister,’
Mr. Hartman? I’d like to remind you that it’s a
federal offense to lie to an FBI agent.”
  “I issue all communications originating in the
southern Maryland chapter of Caucasian Caucus.
Also, I act as liaison to pass on, as appropriate, all
communications coming from National.”
  “Yet you never saw this particular
communication.”
  “No.” Another fractional inch of smile.
  “Isn’t that a contradiction?”
  “It would seem to be.”
   Cavanaugh leaned forward. “All right, Hartman.
Lets not waste both our time. This thing is signed
‘Caucasian Caucus,’ and in southern Maryland
that’s you. Are you claiming credit for the outbreak
of stroke-inducing malaria among sickle-cell
carriers?”
 “I thought only God could take credit for
malaria.”
   Cavanaugh stood and looked down at the man:
intelligent, well-groomed, smiling faintly; a piece of
slime. He said, knowing what the answer would be,
“May I look around inside?”
  “Not without a warrant.”
   “Then one more question. Is there anything you’d
like to tell the Bureau?”
   “Yes,” Hartman said, surprising Cavanaugh. The
question was pro forma. “Tell Director Broylin to
fire all the nigger agents before they subvert the
entire government.”
   Hartman wanted him to react. With an effort of
will, Cavanaugh didn’t. He turned and walked
calmly down the steps.
  “Mind the mosquitoes,” Hartman called after
him. “In todays corrupt world, you never know
who’s got some nigger blood.”
   Cavanaugh continued along the path through the
salt marsh. Greenflies buzzed in a cloud around his
head, and a bird lifted off from the reeds, calling
raucously in a language he could not understand.



          FBI SLOW TO INVESTIGATE
              MALARIA READING
     The Washington Post has learned that
     the Federal Bureau of Investigation had
     been informed of the increased stroke
     rate among African Americans two
     weeks before any full investigation was
     launched. This means that over three
     weeks elapsed before the public was
     alerted. A nurse at Dellridge Community
     Hospital in La Plata, Maryland, told the
     Post that she had spoken with an
     unidentified FBI agent on June 4,
     informing him of the increased stroke
     rate for African-American patients. The
     nurse, who did not want her name used,
     said that although the agent wrote down
     the information, “I never heard from
     him again.”
     Malaria reading, as it is now being
called, attacks mostly African Americans
carrying the sickle-cell trait, usually
resulting in fatal cerebral stroke.
Sickle-cell trait itself is not the cause of
the disease, which…



 CDC/USPHS GUIDELINES CALLED
IMPRACTICAL BY ACTIVIST GROUPS
New York—The Coalition of
African-American Activist Groups
(CAAAG) today issued a strong
condemnation of the guidelines issued
jointly by the Centers for Disease
Control and the United States Public
Health Service. The guidelines are
designed to protect African Americans
against infection by malaria reading. “
‘Stay indoors from dusk on, drain all
pools of standing water, wear insect
repellent and body-covering
clothing’—those rules don’t make sense
for real people,” said CAAAG Jesse
Lawrence Arnold. “There’s a heat wave
in Washington. If poor people stay
indoors, they’re going to suffocate. Many
can’t afford insect repellent, and how do
you get kids to wear ‘body-covering
clothing’ in a torrid summer? Not to
mention the impossibility of ‘draining’
urban ditches, rain gutters, and roof
puddles. Get real, CDC.”



 “WHO COULD DO SUCH A THING?”
     ASKS BEREAVED MOM
La Plata, Maryland—The mother of
six-year-old Thomas “Junior” Carter,
who died yesterday of malaria reading,
     is fighting mad. “Somebody done this
     terrible thing to us,” said a tearful
     LaWanda Carter, interviewed yesterday
     at her home. “Who could do such a
     thing to a child? I ain’t going to rest till I
     find out who killed my baby.”
     Many other people would also like the
     answer to that question. The FBI Office
     of Public Affairs says the list of possible
     suspects is long. Although the FBI has
     been reluctant to give out much
     information—“It might hamper the
     investigation”—they are reportedly
     investigating foreign governments’
     espionage organizations, biotech
     companies in the area, animal research
     firms, and various “hate groups,”
     including the Ku Klux Klan. The white
     supremacist Caucasian Caucus, which
     yesterday claimed credit in an
     anonymous communication to the FBI
     and the Washington Post…



  “I’m Special Agent Robert Cavanaugh, Federal
Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to ask you a few
questions, ma’am.”
  “Go ahead,” Catherine Clarke said. To
Cavanaugh, she didn’t look like the head of an
important scientific supply house. About forty, no
wedding ring, dumpy and round-shouldered, she
wore a baggy brown suit that even Cavanaugh could
see was a disaster. Had he passed her on the
Baltimore street outside this building, he wouldn’t
have noticed her. If he had noticed her, he would
have assumed she was a low-level government clerk.
So much for first impressions.
  “You sell, among other things, live insects for
agricultural research, is that correct?”
  “Yes, it is. Would you like a catalogue?”
   “Thank you,” Cavanaugh said. He leafed through
it quickly, to show interest, although he couldn’t
imagine himself ordering a shipment of milkweed
bugs (“Ideal for physiological studies or
demonstrations”) or fig wasps (“Hardy pollinators
for your Smyrna figs”).
  “Do you sell any species of mosquitoes?”
   “Oh, yes,” Ms. Clarke said. She pulled at her suit
jacket, which had somehow rucked itself up on one
side. “We offer both adults and larvae in seven
different species. Although, of course, Culex is our
big seller.”
  “Of course,” Cavanaugh said.
   “After fruit flies, I mean. Everybody wants fruit
flies.”
   “Who wouldn’t?” he said, and she didn’t even
blink. “Is one of your seven species Anopheles
quadrimaculatus?”
  “No, it’s not. There’s very little call for any of the
anophelines.”
  On his notepad Cavanaugh wrote “no an.” “Do
you know of any other supply houses that offer
Anopheles?”
  “Let me check.” She swiveled toward a computer
and began to pull up files. Cavanaugh doodled. He
turned the “o” and the “a” in “no an” into eyes, and
both “n’s” into ears.
  “The only place on the East Coast that offers A.
quadrimaculatus, both eggs and larvae, is Stanton
Supply in Atlanta. Would you like the address?”
  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said. She gave it to him. He
wrote it on his pad, then sketched a grinning face
around the eyes and ears.
  “This must be about malaria reading,” Catherine
Clarke said. Suddenly she straightened her hunched
shoulders. “You’re the one who first noticed the
case, aren’t you! If there’s anything I can do to help,
anything at all…”
  Cavanaugh had run into law-enforcement
groupies before. They were an odd breed. Thrilled
by what they imagined the job to include: danger,
high action, split-second decisions. He said, “Thank
you, ma’am. You’ve been very hel—”
  “I could furnish you with other breeds of
mosquitoes, if you’re trying to see what kind of
cross-engineering produced these mutants. Free of
charge, of course.”
  Cavanaugh pictured Jerry Dunbar’s office full of
buzzing mosquitoes. They’d compete with the
buzzing faxes and computers. “Thank you, but—”
  “We have lots of Toxorhynchites rutilus. Used in
biological control of other species, you know, plus
using the larvae as fodder. Very versatile. We can
produce up to a million a day in our lab.”
  “The Bureau doesn’t—”
  “Or maybe some Aedes taeniorhynchus? The salt
marsh mosquito. Maybe the bad guys
cross-engineered from those! The female is a
notable blood sucker!”
  I’ll bet, Cavanaugh thought, but didn’t say aloud.
Catherine Clarke had inched her chair closer to his.
She put a hand on his arm.
  “I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of the
FBI, although this is my first chance to become
personally involved. Which I’m very eager to do.”
  “In that case, I’ll pass your name on to Dr.
Melanie Anderson of the CDC, who’s coordinating
the scientific end of the investigation. I’m sure she’ll
welcome your kind donations of insect supplies.
She’s an amazing woman.”
  Catherine Clarke removed her hand. She said
colorlessly, “We already have an established
contract with the CDC.”
  “I’m glad to hear it,” Cavanaugh said. To cover
the sudden chilly silence, he finished his drawing: a
body and wings around the grinning face. And then
lipstick. The mosquito was female.
   “Best of luck in Atlanta then,” Catherine Clarke
said, standing. She didn’t offer her hand.
   “Thank you,” Cavanaugh said. No more
information here. He’d clearly turned off his
informant. Too bad he didn’t have Seton’s touch.
  “Ms. Clarke—”
  “Please have Dr. Anderson contact me directly.
My secretary will show you out.” She turned her
back.
  It was always sex that screwed everything up.
You could count on it.



                  INTERIM

  “Hey, Charlotte! You want to go to the movies
Friday night? To see Brad Pitt?”
  The girl looked up from stowing books inside her
school locker. “Who’s going?”
  “Everybody. Cam and Sue and DeShaun and
Tomiko and Bob and Carol Ann.”
   “Well… I don’t know.” She became very absorbed
in finding the exact right place for her advanced
physics textbook.
  The boy moved closer. He was tow-headed, thin
and freckled, with the kind of intense awkwardness
that would not seem attractive for another ten
years. But Charlotte liked him. He was the smartest
boy she’d ever met, in a magnet school designed for
smart kids. And unlike some of them, he was kind.
  “Is there something wrong, Charlotte? You don’t
seem like yourself lately.”
  “I’m all right,” she said, which was a lie.
   He touched her arm, and her belly shivered. Not
a good idea, some of her neighborhood friends
said. Let like keep to like. But if people all did that,
how would the world ever change? And wasn’t
change what a school like this was for?
 He withdrew his hand and his freckled skin
mottled. “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to go with
me… with us… if you… I’m sorry.” He turned to go.
   “Bill, wait.” Now her hand was impulsively on his
arm, chocolate on cream. “Don’t think that. It isn’t
that I don’t want to go out with you. I mean… it
isn’t you.” God, she sounded stupid! But at least she
didn’t blush. “It’s just…”
  “Just what?”
   They stared at each other. The bell rang for class,
but neither moved. His eyes were so beautiful…
something in their depths let Charlotte blurt, “I’m
afraid. To go out at night.”
  He understood instantly. “The mosquitoes.”
  “I’m probably being dumb.”
  “You could never be dumb. Then how about if I
come over to your house tomorrow night, and we
can study for the calculus exam? Inside?”
  “That’d be great. Oh, God, I’m late for French!”
   “A demain,” he said, and she couldn’t stop
grinning as she flew down the deserted corridor to
class.



                     SEVEN

      Law enforcement’s mission is really very
      simple—to protect the people we serve.
      —Louis J. Freeh, Director, FBI, 1996
   When Cavanaugh woke, he didn’t know where he
was. He sat up in the darkened room, groping for
his Smith & Wesson on the bedside table, which
wasn’t there either. Then the smell hit him, and he
remembered.
   Marcy’s perfume. Overlaid with the pungent
doggy odor of Abigail. He was on the living room
sofa in Marcy’s apartment, Abigail asleep at his
feet. It had been two in the morning when he’d
arrived back from Atlanta, where he’d fruitlessly
interviewed people at Stanton Supply. Yes, they
sold Anopheles among their standard insect stock.
Yes, all their customers were reputable scientific
establishments or universities. Yes, of course they
could furnish Agent Cavanaugh with a list. Stanton
Supply had been courteous and eager to help. The
list had been completely useless.
   Cavanaugh had spent the next ten hours
interviewing other respectable scientific
establishments in Atlanta, and the three hours after
that sitting in the airport while his flight was
delayed, announced, delayed again, and finally
rescheduled. He spent the time reading
newspapers:



          FBI ACCUSED OF POINTLESS
        ACTIVITY IN MALARIA READING
      “Bureau should have time limit to show
     that somebody violated something,” says
                  Congressman



     Washington—James L. Winstead, House
     majority leader, told reporters today
     that the FBI investigation was “a joke.
     People are dying of disease, not felonies.
The CDC is the appropriate agency to
deal with this crisis, not the FBI. By
generating public panic over
unsubstantiated terrorism, the Bureau
has only made it harder for health
agencies to do their jobs.”
Citing interviews with respected
scientists stating that the malaria
reading parasite is most likely a “natural
mutation,” Winstead attacked the FBI
for “trying to obtain evidence against
Natural Tragedy.” His remarks came in
response to a statement by FBI director
Peter Broylin that more agents were
being committed to…



RIOT OUTSIDE WHITE HOUSE OVER
       MALARIA READING
     FOUR HURT, TEN ARRESTED



Rioters outside the White House this
morning protested government handling
of the malaria reading crisis. “The death
toll is over 200, and all but four are
African Americans,” said one protestor.
“The damn government don’t care.”
The riot, which did not appear to be an
organized or sponsored activity,
allegedly began when a transient hurled
a racial insult at a tourist. Abusive
exchanges concerning malaria reading
escalated into thrown punches. By the
time police arrived, at least thirty people
were involved, some of them hurling
rocks or soda cans. Ten people were
taken into custody on various charges
     from assault to resisting arrest.
     “This is just the beginning,” said
     patrolman Carl L. Brand of the D.C.
     police. “People are getting mad. We’re
     gearing up for a lot of civil unrest. It’s
     going to get a lot worse.”
     The White House declined to comment,
     even though the altercation was clearly
     visible from…



   When Cavanaugh ran out of Atlanta newspapers,
he read the late editions of the Post and the Times.
More of the same. The FBI wasn’t doing enough, the
FBI was doing too much, the FBI didn’t know what
it was doing, the FBI had damn well better do
something. People were angry, people were dying,
people were rioting, people wanted someone to
blame and the Bureau was it. Nobody knew who or
where the monsters were (if there were monsters),
but everybody knew where the FBI was. Devil you
know.
  When he finally reached Marcy’s apartment,
bone-weary, Abigail greeted him frantically. She
wanted a walk, needed a walk! Now! Now!
   “Hey, girl, good girl, not tonight, how about we
wait till morning…” Abigail barked harder. Robert
looked at Marcy’s carpets—white, naturally. How
did you get dog pee stains off carpet? He didn’t
know. He walked Abigail.
  By the time he returned, it was almost 3:00 A.M.
There were three messages from Judy asking him to
call her, each message more icily polite than the one
before. Cavanaugh would have groaned, but he was
too exhausted.
  Because of Judy, he slept on Marcy’s sofa, not in
her bed. Somehow he owed Judy that; somehow
that made it better. At some level he knew this
made no sense. He fell asleep to Abigail’s happy
snufflings beside the sofa, and awoke to the sound
of the phone.
  “Cavanaugh,” Dunbar said, “where the hell are
you?”
  “I’m… here,” Cavanaugh said, idiotically.
  “Yes,” Dunbar said, with his
special-agent-in-charge neutrality. “But you need to
be here. Meeting this morning, remember?”
  Christ. What time was it? The room was pitch
black. “Sorry, my plane was delayed in Atlanta, and
then…” Cavanaugh trailed off. Dunbar didn’t want
excuses. Nor should he.
  “We’ll start without you,” Dunbar said crisply.
“But do come in as fast as possible. It’s not a
routine meeting. They’re giving malaria reading to
Division Five.”
  “Shit,” Cavanaugh said.
  “Yeah. Well, those are the rules.”
   This fatalism didn’t fool Cavanaugh. Dunbar, the
rule man, nonetheless minded. Division Five was
the National Security Division, sent in for cases
bumped up from “criminal activity” to
“international or domestic terrorism.”
Theoretically, the Division Five agents would be
working with the field office, but in actuality the
Division Five guys would be the big cheeses, and the
case as a whole would be micromanaged from
Washington. It was no longer Dunbar’s case.
  Or Cavanaugh’s.
   “Oh, and another thing,” Dunbar said, “we’ve
already taken two messages this morning from Judy
Kozinski. She’s looking for you. Says it’s important.”
  “Okay,” Cavanaugh said.
  “The office has better things to do than track
your personal life,” Dunbar said, and even though
Cavanaugh knew it was just irritation at the world
in general, Dunbar’s words stung.
    “Right,” Cavanaugh said. “I’ll take care of it. And
I’ll be there as soon as I can.” What time was it?
  It was nine o’clock. The room was still pitch black
because of Marcy s thick velvet draperies, so unlike
the rough-weave burlap that Judy had hung in their
perfect rustic house on the Patuxent. Oh, Christ,
Judy. Two messages already today. And Division
Five—they’d just steamroll over the local agents.
This was the media’s fault, all the hype for the
Bureau to do something, do something, do
something… and Headquarters had caved in.
Maybe Dunbar even had something to do with it.
After all, Special Agents in Charge were rated partly
on how well their offices handled the press.
   He rushed around Marcy’s apartment. Within
five minutes he’d brushed his teeth, changed his
shirt, and was running for the car, leaving Abigail
barking sadly after him. He’d listen to the radio
news on the way in, see what fresh horrors had
broken overnight, call Judy during the first meeting
break… Division Five. Shit shit shit. He wouldn’t get
to do anything now except what he was told to do.
When Division Five moved in, they took over.
Whatever they wanted, they got. Two agents on
every tiny lead, priority lab work, planes, subpoenas
and warrants in ten minutes at 4:00 A.M… For a
high-profile national-security terrorist case, the rest
of the FBI just stopped. Malaria reading would
definitely be taken seriously now. Which was, of
course, the main thing Cavanaugh had wanted
anyway.
  Wasn’t it?
  At least, don’t let there be one of those
supercilious behavior profilists from Quantico, who
thought they could solve crimes without so much as
knocking on one lousy door themselves.
  The meeting had just reached the behavioral
profilist from Quantico when Cavanaugh rushed in.
Introductions were made, and Dr. Arnold Gissing
resumed handing out his packets.
   “This is the probable profile,” Gissing said, as
everyone except Cavanaugh started to read.
Cavanaugh was still catching his breath, dazed from
both the sprint from the parking lot and the size of
the meeting. No more reluctant, part-time agents in
a motel room. The conference room was jammed.
Chairs jostled each other around the large oval
table, with a second ring of chairs against the walls.
Agents. Specialists. Dr. Farlow from the CDC, today
in a suit and tie. The Baltimore Field Office media
representative. Liaisons from federal agencies
whose names Cavanaugh hadn’t caught. The two
Division Five newcomers, Agents John Meath and
Bruce Maloney, both sitting quietly and giving
nothing away. And Dr. Gissing, whom Cavanaugh
disliked even more for sounding reasonable and
unpushy.
   “The individual we’re looking for belongs to the
category ‘organized killer.’ He—and it is a male—is
intelligent, plans very carefully, and understands
exactly what he’s doing. He’s a Caucasian in his
mid-to-late forties. He’s trained in microbiology,
obviously. He—”
  “Excuse me,” Cavanaugh said, “but are we
assuming here that we’ve got a lone perp and not an
organization? Why?”
  “We covered that before you arrived, Robert,”
Dunbar said, pointedly. Cavanaugh nodded. He’d
have to get the scoop on that afterward… but it
sounded nuts to him. A lone perp? For
genetic-engineering terrorism? That didn’t make
sense. Maybe there was some explanation in the
papers stacked at his place on the conference table.
Maybe the sheets would also explain the massive
increase in manpower since yesterday. Nothing on
the radio had.
  As unobtrusively as possible, he started to shuffle
paper while everybody else concentrated on the
profile report.
   “He did well in college,” Dr. Gissing continued,
“possibly even brilliantly, but did not complete his
Ph.D. Since then, his career has not lived up to
everyone’s early expectations, including his own.
This is most likely due to conflicts with superiors, or
to a certain rigidity in procedures that he will not
adapt to accommodate team projects. He may or
may not still be working in a scientific field.”
   There was nothing among the papers that
explained why the Bureau had decided to focus on
an individual perp. But there was an airtel—an
urgent internal memo—from Director Broylin
himself. Routing info showed that it had been sent
to all 25,000 FBI employees. It announced that this
case was now the Bureau s number-one priority.
  Since two days ago? Why?
   Cavanaugh found the answer by peering at a note
the agent on his left had scribbled at the top of his
pile of papers. The note said, “Lena Penniston 12 12
12 years old!!!!” Leonard Penniston headed the
Criminal Investigative Division; he was the
highest-ranking black in the FBI.
  Any war only hit home when it came home.
   Gissing was still talking. “… heterosexual and has
a stable home life. He lives with or is married to a
woman his pronounced intellectual inferior. No
children. Probably estranged from his birth family,
or at least not close to them.”
   All 25,000 Bureau employees. That meant
secretaries, lab technicians, janitors, analysts, and
the clerical staff that handled expense vouchers.
That sort of mobilization was more than a reaction
to young Lena Penniston’s death. It was also a press
maneuver. Look how much we’re horrified at the
mounting deaths of our black citizens. All 25,000
of us will throw ourselves at this, even people who
can’t possibly influence the outcome at all.
   “… not openly affiliated with any hate group,
although he may follow their activities with
paternalistic approval from a distance…”
   Another sheet of paper announced that the FBI
was offering a $500,000 reward for information
leading directly to the apprehension of the terrorist.
 “… is following events of the case closely in the
media, although too smart to collect clippings or—”
  “Excuse me,” Cavanaugh interrupted again.
Dunbar looked at him wearily.
   “Have we discussed the fact that a reward offer
like this is going to produce even more leads about
alleged individual terrorists? A huge amount of
manpower is going to be diverted from looking at
groups, both domestic groups and international.”
   Now the two agents from Division Five, Maloney
and Meath, were scrutinizing him as carefully as
Dunbar was, although more quietly. Dunbar said,
“We’re not neglecting possible group involvement,
Robert. Domestic hate groups will continue to be
checked out whenever they meet the three guideline
criteria—you do remember what they are, don’t
you?”
  Cavanaugh nodded. Of course he knew: “A threat
or advocacy of force; apparent ability to carry out
the claimed act; potential violation of federal law.”
Dunbar wasn’t happy with him.
   “And Agents Graham and DiPreta”—Dunbar
nodded his head to the two people on his right, one
of them a woman—“are legats. As we discussed
before you arrived.”
   “Legats” were legal attachés, agents posted to
foreign offices to coordinate work with local
law-enforcement officials in those countries. They
worked openly, unlike the CIA, who were probably
also at work on the foreign terrorist angle. Of course
they were, Cavanaugh realized, but one wasn’t
supposed to mention it. The two legats studied him
expressionlessly.
  “If I may finish,” Dr. Gissing said coldly.
  “Please,” Dunbar said. His neck was flushed, just
above the collar.
   “Thank you. The key to this individual’s character
is his sense of superiority. He imagines himself a
powerful behind-the-scenes figure, manipulating
entire bureaucracies—such as the FBI—into doing
his bidding. Because of this, he has told no one
what he’s doing, not even his wife or live-in woman.
The lab where he has created the malaria parasite
and infected mosquitoes is thus not in his home. No
one but him knows about it. No one else is worthy
to appreciate his achievement.
   “And to him it is an achievement. His delusions
of grandeur are so deeply rooted that he may be one
of those rare individuals who can beat a polygraph
test. He sees himself as cleansing society for its own
good, which few people beside himself are
perceptive enough to comprehend. His belief in this
is total.”
  Dr. Gissing paused and consulted his notes.
Cavanaugh had been too busy rifling papers to
count how many of the agents in the room were
black. He counted now. About 6 percent, the same
proportion as the FBI as a whole. Somebody was
being very careful.
  He thought of Melanie Anderson, and hoped all
these black agents were negative for sickle-cell trait.
   “Finally,” Dr. Gissing said, “because this
individual considers himself a natural aristocrat, he
will pride himself on his superior taste in at least
one consumer area. It might be his car, or his
clothing, or his choice of wines. We can’t predict
which, and he does not have the income to do all of
them. Most likely he earns between forty and sixty
thousand, which he manages very shrewdly. But in
some area of aristocratic taste he will buy the best
and will be supercilious about anything less.
  “Do we have any questions?”
   Everyone glanced at Cavanaugh, Dunbar very
steadily. Cavanaugh spoke anyway.
  “Yes, Doctor. I know that behavioral profiles—”
  “‘Criminal investigative analyses,’” Dr. Gissing
corrected.
  “Yes. Right. I know that they’re compiled from
profiles of other perps who have committed the
same kind of crime in the same way. But nobody
has ever committed this crime before in any way.
So how did your unit put the analysis together?”
  Gissing smiled. Clearly he relished setting
Cavanaugh straight. “You are wrong, I’m afraid.
Terrorists may differ by individual act, and killers
may differ by behavior pattern. But by putting them
together, we obtain a profile of great probable
accuracy. And we have considerable information
about individual killers. In seventy-seven percent of
cases later solved, the investigators say the profile
was of great use in focusing the investigation.”
  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said, obscurely pleased that
Gissing himself had called it a “profile,” “I know.
But that means your entire analysis is based on the
idea that it is an individual acting alone. I mean,
profiles can only reflect the initial assumptions
about the crime. If this is a group—”
   “I think we covered that already,” Dunbar said
stiffly. “Any other questions?”
   The meeting moved on. Cavanaugh sat deep in
thought. After a while he noted that the two
Division Five agents, Maloney and Meath, were
both studying him. When he caught their eyes,
neither smiled. Stick to looking for individuals, the
looks said. We’re now covering the possibility of
terrorist groups.
  Turf wars. Felders never permitted his agents to
conduct them. Cavanaugh missed Felders. He
missed their fierce, unstifled arguments about how
to proceed on everything. He missed being key to a
case, rather than just another legman. He reached
for his notepad.
  As he listened to the people who would get to be
key, Cavanaugh sketched the Division Five agents.
He gave Maloney, who had a long, thin face, a head
that was a sausage. He gave Meath, in his fifties, a
head like an ancient goblet, spilling out drops of
wisdom. He labeled the drawing “LAW FOOD:
BOLONEY AND MEAD.” He didn’t ask any more
questions.



   He called Judy at noon, while caterers from a
local deli distributed the sandwiches and other
goodies apparently ordered before Cavanaugh’s
belated appearance. Dunbar had ordered him
something; he didn’t know what. There wasn’t
enough room for everyone to eat in the conference
room; and since it was raining outside, agents
spilled into nearby offices and lobbies, munching
ham-on-rye, dropping crumbs. Cavanaugh found a
public phone on another floor.
  She answered on the first ring.
  “Robert?”
  “Yes, it’s me.” She’d been sitting by the phone. He
was in deep shit.
  “Look, Judy, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you
before now. I was in Atlanta yesterday and didn’t
get back until—”
  “Don’t lie to me, Robert. Please.”
  Anger flared in him. “I am not lying. I was in
Atlanta until very late.”
  “Oh, I believe that,” Judy said. “That isn’t the lie.
The lie is that being in Atlanta is the reason you
didn’t call me. Are you telling me there are no
phones in Atlanta?”
   He visualized the banks of phones in the airport.
Phones at Ticketing, phones at gates, phones by
newstands, phones along corridors. Defensiveness
sprouted on top of the anger. “Yes, there are phones
in Atlanta. I could have called, I suppose. But I
really had a lot on my mind—”
  “Not me, obviously.”
  “Damn it, Judy, why do you always have to run
everything to earth like some sort of bloodhound?”
  “Oh, don’t say that to me!” she cried, and he
realized that it must have been something her
rotten dead husband had said, something that he
had used to counterattack for his infidelities. Well,
Cavanaugh wasn’t Ben! Why the hell couldn’t she
realize that? To anger and defensiveness were now
added a feeling of injustice. She was unfair. She was
impossible.
  He said evenly, “Maybe I say it because it’s true.
Can’t you just ever let me be? You insist on running
me to earth over every little thing—”
 “Moving in with your ex-wife without even telling
me is not a little thing.”
  It knocked the breath out of him. After a moment
he said quietly, “How do you know that?”
  “The point is not how I—”
  “You checked up on the phone number. Through
that cop friend of yours. Tess what’s-her-name.”
  “Don’t try to—”
  “You put me under surveillance.”
  “No, I—”
   “I don’t like this, Judy. We’ve talked about how
important it is to trust each other. I’m staying at
Marcy’s to avoid the press so I can work on this case
with some minor anonymity”—not that that would
matter anymore, now he was only a bit player in a
cast of thousands—“and Marcy, for your
information, isn’t in her apartment. She’s in Dallas.
I’m dog-sitting. And I don’t like being checked up
on.”
  “But you didn’t tell me, so I—”
  “I don’t have to tell you everything! Stop
hounding me!”
  His voice had risen, a good measure of his anger.
But was the anger at her or at himself? He knew he
was being unfair. But, perversely, that only made
him angrier. She had forced him into this position.
She was always at him!
   “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and now he heard
that she was scared: scared she’d driven him away
from her, scared he’d leave her, scared he’d
romance sleek, glamorous Marcy, just as Ben had
always romanced sleek, glamorous women. But he
wasn’t Ben! His anger grew, in exact proportion to
his remorse over awakening all her old fears. He’d
sworn to himself he’d never do that, that she’d be
able to rely on him as she never had been able to on
Ben.
  Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.
  “Robert,” she whispered, “when do you think
you’ll be coming back home?”
  And if he just said, “Tonight, sweetheart,” it
would have been all right. The fighting over. But he
couldn’t say it. She would just be controlling him
again, this time through her weakness. She was
always trying to control him, to become surer of
him, safer, until he couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t fair.
  He said coldly, “I’ll be home when I come home.
Not before.”
  “I see,” she said, not whispering anymore, and
the phone clicked in his ear.
  A disaster. A complete disaster. It would be
better if he’d never called. He hung up the receiver,
turned, and saw one of the secretaries standing
there. Her young face said that she’d been listening,
and that he was a shit.
  “Mr. Dunbar sent me to tell you the meeting is
about to resume,” she said, very clearly. Without
waiting for an answer, she turned her back and
walked away.



  “Thank you for rejoining us,” Dunbar said coldly.
Once again everyone at the table looked at
Cavanaugh. He reached for his notepad.
   Apparently Maloney had been talking. He
resumed. “As I was just saying, Agent Cavanaugh,
Washington has decided to issue a Terrorist
Warning Advisory to the public. The director has
called a press conference for three o’clock.”
   Cavanaugh nodded and kept his eyes on his
“notes.” What could he say? He was minor, he was
late, and he didn’t believe in the entire idea of a
lone terrorist. It was wishful thinking, to avoid the
racial and political implications of an organized
antiblack group, possibly based in another country.
Oh, the Bureau would investigate that possibility
thoroughly, Cavanaugh knew, behind the scenes. So
would the CIA. But for public consumption, they’d
downplay it. Too panic-inducing. Too riot-inducing,
like the riot in front of the White House. Nobody
liked riots.
   Better to let the public believe there might be a
single nut out there, a nut the Bureau would catch
just as they’d caught the Unabomber. Better to
issue bullshit all-bureau memos and Terrorist
Advisory Warnings, which made it look like the FBI
knew more than it actually did. There was no need
for a Terrorist Warning Advisory; there was nobody
left in America who didn’t know what was
happening with malaria reading. Not unless they
didn’t have a TV, a radio, a newspaper, or any
neighbors for five miles around. And if they lived in
Maryland and Virginia, even that wouldn’t help,
because the CDC, USPHS, or army would show up
on their isolated doorstep to ask questions, tell
them to empty their bird-bath, or urge them to
have their blood tested.
   The meeting proceeded. Teams were organized
for scientific-equipment tracing, suspect
identification, surveillance, background checks,
CDC liaison, international investigation. Cavanaugh
doodled on his notepad.
  He drew a huge Venus flytrap, swallowing an FBI
agent. All that was left were the agents gun and
badge. The Venus flytrap keeled over woozily. A
neighboring daisy said disapprovingly, “I TOLD
HER NOT TO EAT THAT THING!”
    He drew a stone. Eight panels, and in every one of
them the stone looked exactly the same. He labeled
it “ADVENTURES OF ROCKY.”
  He drew a man and a woman talking on a sofa.
“NEAR HUMAN DIALOGUE,” he called this one.
The man was saying, “What’s for dinner?” The
woman answered, “Yes, but should I wear a
penguin?”
  Cavanaugh realized the couple looked like him
and Judy.
   He turned the notepad facedown and paid
attention to the meeting. It was no surprise that the
Southern Maryland Resident Agency, which was
him and Seton, was assigned to continue
investigation of the local hate groups. Nobody
believed the local hate groups had the capacity to
create a genetically engineered strain of malaria.
“We need to make sure we cover all possible bases,”
Dunbar said. We need to keep you sidelined and
unvocal, he didn’t say. Cavanaugh heard it anyway.
   Only midafternoon, and he’d managed to piss off
his girlfriend, his boss, and, apparently, the gods of
law enforcement. Probably a personal record.
  There was just no end to his talents.
                  INTERIM

   The truck pulled up to the shacks just before
dawn. Inside, the workers were already up, eating
fried bacon, nursing babies, trudging to the privies
and the rough, wooden shower house. The shacks
had no indoor plumbing.
   The truck beeped its horn twice. Men and
women, shadowy in the gray dawn, walked toward
it and climbed into the back.
   “I count sixteen,” the driver said. “Christ, that
ain’t enough.”
  The man beside him said nothing.
   “Well, it ain’t. Berenger’ll have my balls I bring
him just sixteen. We’re weeding today, for
Chrissake.” He rolled down the window and waved
his arm outside. “Hey! Time to go! Hey!”
  The arm waving outside the truck window looked
ghostly gray in the predawn. But the migrant
workers didn’t have to see its color. They knew from
the voice.
   “They’re scared,” the second man in the truck cab
said abruptly. He was black. “Can’t blame ‘em.
Mosquitoes all over this year.”
  “I don’t blame ‘em. But I still gotta make my
crew.” He waved his arm again. “Hey! Hey!”
  “Can’t yell ‘em into goin’.”
  The driver pulled in his arm and snapped on the
radio. “Rioting again today in Washington, where
protestors and looters alike—”
  “Turn it off,” the black man said.
  The driver did. In the east, the very beginnings of
sunrise stained the sky. Bugs swarmed in the truck’s
headlights.
  “And close the window,” the black man said.
  “Sorry,” the driver said. He rolled up the window.
Neither man looked at each other. One more figure
emerged from the closest shack, a woman, making
her reluctant way to the open back of the truck
through the wing-buzzing darkness.



                    EIGHT

     The value of biological warfare will be a
     debatable question until it has been
     clearly proven or disproven by
     experience… There is but one logical
     course to pursue, namely, to study the
     possibilities of such warfare from every
     angle, to make every preparation for
     reducing its effectiveness, and thereby
     reduce the likelihood of its use.
     —Henry Stimson, Secretary of War,
     in a letter to Dr. Frank B. Jewett,
     President of the National Academy of
     Sciences, 1942



  Six weeks into the epidemic, Melanie Anderson
thought as she fried herself an omelet in her
Weather Vane Motel kitchen, and they still had
shit.
  No, not exactly shit. They had the most complete
epidemic curves in disease-control history. People
graphs detailing precisely who’d gotten the disease,
when and where they’d gotten it, how it had run its
course, and how often it had turned fatal. Vector
graphs, showing everything about Anopheles except
when the little suckers got horny. Time graphs
coordinating the spread of malaria reading with
Anopheles reproduction rates.
   They also had several thousand infected
mosquitoes, dead and alive. They had a complete
understanding of the altered genetic mechanisms
that let the malaria parasites colonize sickled blood
cells, where no malaria parasites had ever been able
to boldly go before. They had photographs and
computer simulations and tagged exhibits and
duplicate files. Finally, they had every
epidemiologist specializing in malaria crawling over
Maryland and Virginia. You couldn’t walk around
without tripping over an epidemiologist from places
like the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine, the
Microbiology Research Establishment at Porton
Down in England, the World Health Organization.
The woods around Newburg sounded like the Tower
of Babel. Joe Krovetz had found a Brazilian coin and
a Danish candy wrapper.
   So many of the CDC s own malaria people were
involved, either here or in Atlanta, that the CDC
hadn’t even been able to respond to a call for help
from one of their established clients. The
Democratic Republic of the Congo was having
another outbreak of malaria, but, then, Congo was
always having an outbreak of malaria. The CDC
couldn’t spare a team. It wasn’t like it was Ebola,
after all. Africa was used to malaria. The United
States was not.
  Melanie flipped her omelet so viciously it landed
half-in, half-out of the frying pan. She scraped it
back in and dumped chopped vegetables on top.
She didn’t feel like eating with the team again
tonight. She was sick of all of them, except young
Joe Krovetz. He was the only one who agreed with
her that this was an attempt at genocide. Except for
the entire FBI, who might or might not believe
malaria reading was criminal, but at least they were
acting as if they did. The rest of her own team, in
contrast, held out for a spontaneous mutation, an
accidental introduction from another country
(“possibly in larval form in agricultural produce,”
Susan Muscato had said, the head-in-the-sand
bitch) or—for all Melanie knew—an insectoid
immaculate conception. Fools.
   She dumped the omelet onto a plate. The
underside, which was now the top side, looked
scarred and patchy from her inept flipping. Green
vegetables stuck through the half-cooked patches
like mold under viscous gauze. Well, hot sauce
would help. She searched through the cupboard.
She was out of hot sauce.
   Figured. Just one more thing she didn’t have,
along with belief from her colleagues. Along with an
end to the epidemic. USAMRIID’s
mosquito-eradication program was working well,
but in this unseasonably hot and wet summer, A.
quadrimaculatus still flourished. The epidemic
curves projected that they were still weeks away
from ending the epidemic.
  She slashed at her omelet. The door opened and
Joe Krovetz walked in. He didn’t knock any more; if
she didn’t want company, she kept the chain on.
Except that this evening she’d forgotten.
   “Brought you an ice cream cone,” he said. “We
stopped on the way back from McDonalds. Good
God, what’s that thing?”
  “My dinner,” Melanie said shortly. “It’s an
omelet. You know, healthy egg dish with healthy
vegetables?”
  “What’d you do to it?”
  “I cooked it. And I don’t like ice cream.”
   “You don’t even know what flavor it is yet,” Joe
said affably. You couldn’t offend him. It was one
reason Melanie found him restful. “You’re snapping
at everyone,” Farlow had told her. “Act like a
professional, damn it.”
  It wasn’t Farlow s brothers and sisters that
somebody was killing off.
  “Okay, Joe, what flavor is the ice cream?”
  “Chocolate swirl.”
  “I don’t like chocolate swirl.”
  “Okay,” Joe said, and dumped the cone into her
garbage can. He sat opposite her at the tiny table.
“You hear what happened today? Big news.”
  Melanie stopped eating. “What happened?”
  “The FBI declared a Terrorist Warning Advisory
and got all twenty-five-thousand Bureau people
involved. It was on the six o’clock news.”
  Melanie laid down her fork. “Really? What does
that mean?”
  “What do you mean what does it mean?”
  “Well, are they going to do something different?
Whatever they’ve been doing so far hasn’t led
anyplace.”
  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “The news didn’t go into
details.”
   “Of course not. It’s TV. And probably the FBI is
just bullshitting anyway. I’ll believe they’re doing
something when they actually arrest somebody.”
   For the first time since she’d known him, Joe
looked troubled. His downy eyebrows drew
together, making an artificial wrinkle across his
young skin. “Mel… you’re not saying you believe the
FBI is in on this? That our own government is
collaborating with killing off blacks… you’re not
saying that, are you?”
  “Do I look that paranoid to you, Krovetz? No, I’m
not saying that. The government doesn’t have to be
collaborating. All they have to be doing is look like
they’re investigating when they’re actually doing
shit. After all, it’s no secret that our government
doesn’t much like blacks.”
  “Mel… you don’t believe that.”
  “Don’t tell me what I believe!” Actually, she didn’t
believe the government was condoning genocide.
But they weren’t making any progress toward
arresting anybody, either, and it made her furious
that Joe wouldn’t see that… Joe, the one white
person she thought really grasped the full
monstrosity of what was happening. Melanie had
told him about the Tuskegee Institute experiments
on syphilis, where four hundred black men had
deliberately been left untreated so the government
could study the progress of the disease. She’d told
Joe about the deliberate infection of prisoners in
the Atlanta Federal Prison with malaria in order to
test experimental drugs, a program legitimized by
an act of Congress. Supposedly the prisoners were
all volunteers and no deals were cut (yeah, right).
She’d told Joe… Oh, she was sick of it. Not even the
best of them could really see how pervasive and
destructive the prejudice was. Especially not the
best of them.
  “Mel,” Joe said gently, “you’re losing it.”
  “Thank you so much, Dr. Krovetz.”
  “No, I mean it. You have to—” The phone shrilled.
  Immediately Melanie cried, “Don’t answer it!”
  “I wasn’t going to. But why not?”
  She didn’t respond. Two rings, and the answering
machine came on. She picked up her knife, without
knowing she did it, and clutched the handle.
  “Hello, Melanie,” the same deep voice said. “Go
back to Atlanta, black bitch. You aren’t safe here. If
the mosquitoes don’t get you, the white citizens of
Maryland will. Clear out while you can.” Click.
  Melanie was abruptly calm. She walked to the
machine, pulled out the tape, and recorded the date
and time on its label. She dropped it in a drawer
will all the others. Then she slipped a fresh tape into
the machine.
  Joe was staring at her. “Fucking shit, Melanie.
How often does this happen?”
  She said crisply, “I have sixteen tapes. That’s
number seventeen.”
  “Have you told Farlow?”
  “No. And you’re not going to either.”
  “Why not?”
   “Because I want to stay on this project.” She sat
down again and leaned toward him. Her mood
changed yet again, and suddenly she wanted to
make Joe Krovetz understand. “Don’t you see?
Farlow would like to replace me here. Preferably
with another black who’s negative for sickle-cell
trait. Farlow agrees with you that I’m ‘losing it,’
only he says it more forcibly and more often. But
I’m staying on this epidemic. I have to, Joe. I have
to. So don’t you dare tell him about these calls. I
mean it. Do I have your word?”
   Krovetz sat thinking. After a minute he said
reluctantly, “Okay.”
  “Good. Now let’s go get some ice cream.”
   “I just had ice cream. And you said you don’t like
it.”
    “So I lied,” Melanie said. All at once she wanted
to get out of the motel room. The ugly sounds of the
hate call seemed to hang in the air, dirtying it. She
could hardly breathe in here. And she’d be damned
if that telephonic slime-monger was going to make
her a prisoner in this room. She’d slogged through
infested African jungles, looking for dangerous
disease vectors or their victims; she wasn’t going to
be intimidated by some pathetic maggot-souled
small-brained skinhead.
  “Well, I suppose you need to eat something
besides that,” Joe said, pointing at her omelet. “Not
that you’re eating it anyway.”
   “No, because you’re right. It’s disgusting. I want
a hamburger.”
   “Okay. Lock your room. And keep it locked, Mel.
It wasn’t when I came in.”
   Melanie locked her door. Walking across the
street to the diner, she kept a good distance away
from Joe. They’d spent a lot of time together lately.
She didn’t want to start any rumors.
   Still, although she hated to admit it, she was glad
his solid masculine bulk walked beside her.



   Judy had told the boy no. He’d phoned her right
after the call from Robert, and she’d still been
numb. Robert, whom she’d hoped to marry. Staying
with his ex-wife, telling her he’d be home when he
damn well felt like it, treating her just as Ben had.
Robert, who’d been her chance to start over, to love
again, to this time oh-please-God-get-it-right
Robert.
   After she’d hung up on Robert, she’d sat staring
at the phone as if it were alive. At some level, she
couldn’t believe everything was over. Was it over?
Did Robert still want her? Did… When the phone
rang again, she’d seized it, so grateful she was
afraid she’d cry. “Robert?”
  “No, ma’am.” A strange voice, slow and southern.
“This is Earl Lester, ma’am. Can I have words with
Agent Cavanaugh?” On the last sentence his voice
abruptly cracked, and Judy had realized it was a
young teen.
  “He’s… not here,” she said, her own voice
breaking in a way she hated. Would Robert ever be
here again? Was he moving out for good? What was
happening?
  “Then can y’all tell me where to find him?”
  “No, I’m sorry. I’m… sorry.” She hung up.
   For ten minutes she didn’t move at all. Then she
tried to pull herself together, act normally, do some
work. That was it, work. Wasn’t that what feminist
movies were always saying? Men came and went,
but you always had your work.
  She stared at the computer screen, with the first
draft of an article on left-handed molecules for
Science Today. Five minutes later, she changed a
word. Five minutes after that, another one. The
doorbell rang.
  “I’m Earl Lester, ma’am. To talk to Agent
Cavanaugh.”
  “I told you he wasn’t here.”
   “Yes, ma’am. But I figured I’d jest wait for him.”
The boy blinked twice. He was tall, skeletal, and a
uniform pale, washed-out color, like dirty cream:
skin, hair, T-shirt. Even his eyes were pale,
somewhere between blue and gray. When he
blinked like that, he looked like a rabbit.
   Judy said, too harshly—she was talking to a child,
for God’s sake— “There’s no point in waiting, Earl.
Agent Cavanaugh’s not returning.”
  Two more blinks. “He done left you?”
  “I don’t really think that’s any of your business!”
  “No, ma’am. Just being conversational. My
daddy done left my mama four or five times. Always
comes back though. Sooner or later.”
   The boy was trying to comfort her. This inept,
weird-looking kid… It was touching. All of a sudden
Judy felt much better. Fuck Robert. He’d either
come back, or he wouldn’t. She’d be damned if she’d
let either one destroy her.
  “Thank you, Earl. I can give you Agent
Cavanaugh’s current number if you’d like.”
  “‘Preciate it.”
   She gave him not only Marcy’s number but also
Marcy’s address. With any luck, the kid would
interrupt Robert and Marcy at some critical
moment.
  “Thank you, ma’am.” Earl walked
unhurriedly—Judy had the impression it was his
only mode—down the front path and disappeared
behind a clump of trees. There was no bicycle or
car. He must have walked.
   She shrugged and went back to her computer.
For the rest of the afternoon, she made herself
concentrate on left-handed molecules. In the
evening she cleaned house, weeded the garden,
ironed a skirt, moved some furniture—anything to
tire herself out so that she might have a chance of
falling quickly asleep. So she wouldn’t have to lie
awake alone, wondering where he was and what he
was doing. Anything but that.



          UNDERGROUND SOVIET
       HARDLINERS CREATED MALARIA
         READING, SAYS VET GROUP



      PATRIOTS GROUPS USING MALARIA
          READING TO UNDERMINE
       GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY, SAYS
            WHITE HOUSE AIDE



       WHITE SUPREMACISTS CREATED
       MALARIA READING, SAYS NAACP



        SAME PEOPLE MADE MALARIA
       READING WHO MADE AIDS, SAYS
            GAY SPOKESPERSON



      IRAN CREATED MALARIA READING
      TO GET EVEN FOR GULF WAR, SAYS
             RETIRED COLONEL
       GOD SENT MALARIA READING AS
      PUNISHMENT FOR FAILING FAITH,
           SAYS BLACK MINISTER



      PHARMACEUTICAL FIRMS GUILTY
     OF CREATING MALARIA READING TO
      BOOST SALES, CLAIMS CONSUMER
             WATCHDOG ORG.



        MALARIA READING RESULT OF
      ALIEN LANDING— CLEAR REVENGE
               FOR ROSWELL



       SHOCKING SECRET DOCUMENTS
      TRACE MALARIA READING TO IRS!!



   The trouble with investigating an epidemic,
Cavanaugh discovered, was that the pace wasn’t set
by the investigators. It wasn’t even set by the
criminals. It was set by the mosquitoes.
   The breeding cycle of Anopheles, Melanie
explained to him, was about eighteen days. That
was how long it took for each new generation of
mosquitoes to appear—and each new infected area
had its own new victims. Fresh information about
the epidemic was unlikely to become available until
a new generation of victims did.
   So for the next two weeks, Cavanaugh gave his
attention to southern Maryland hate groups and
their neighbors, which was what Dunbar had
assigned him to anyway. None of the groups, in
Cavanaugh’s opinion, had the capacity to engineer a
one-cell battery, let alone new genes. All of them, in
Cavanaugh’s opinion, were nuts. The neighbors
ranged from disgusted to admiring.
   “When I received the flyer about a tax-protest
meeting, I went,” said one attractive, fortyish white
woman in shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt, whom
Cavanaugh approached while she was weeding
flowers in her front yard. “But then it turned out to
be this separatist group. ‘Arcadia,’ they call
themselves, and the leader says he’s the
‘ambassador from Arcadia to the United States.’
They consider that they’ve already seceded, and the
taxes being ‘forced’ from them are a form of illegal
tribute. Like ‘the Roman Empire levied on
Atlantis.’” She hummed the Twilight Zone theme,
waving her trowel to the beat.
  “Were there any black people at the meeting?”
  “Oh, yes. The group made a big point of not
being discriminatory. It’s just the government they
hate, not individuals.”
  “Thank you for your help,” Cavanaugh said.
  “Any time.” She went back to her azaleas.
   The next interviewee was not so cooperative. He
lived in a cabin on a dirt road. “You got a warrant?”
the man asked, glaring at Cavanaugh through an
amazingly worn and battered screen door.
  “Sir, you’re not a suspect. I just want to ask you
about a group allegedly headquartered at the place
next to yours, the Christian Crusade.”
   “I don’t know nothing about them.” He slammed
his inner door.
  Cavanaugh got into his car and drove the quarter
mile to the next cabin down. A skinny, elderly black
woman dressed in jeans and a faded cotton blouse
came to the door. “Yes?”
  “FBI, ma’am. I’m Special Agent Robert
Cavanaugh. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
  “I’m Mrs. Hattie Brown,” she said, from behind a
screen door worn as soft and pliable as cheesecloth.
  “About the Christian Crusade group allegedly
headquartered at number 487 on this road.”
   Her face changed. She came out from behind her
screen door and peered up at him. She was tiny, no
more than five-one, maybe a hundred pounds. But
Cavanaugh recognized the type. She had lived too
long, and too hard, to fear much of anything
anymore.
  “You gonna bust their ass?”
  He smiled. “I don’t know yet.”
   “You should. They ain’t no good. They hate black
folk, Jew folk, Spanish folk, Catholic folk. Calls ‘em
’seeds of Satan‘ and says they ain’t even human and
got no right to no respect. One of ’em came right
into my church and had the gall to stand up durin‘
speakin’ and gush out that shit. Most unchristian
thing I ever done heard. Right in my church.”
  Cavanaugh took out his notepad. “Go on.”
   “Ain’t no ‘on.’ I stood up and hollered for him to
get his ass out of there, and Sister Walters, she
joined in. That made some of the men finally move,
and the scum left.”
  “Have there been any retaliatory actions?”
  “‘Scuse me?”
  “Has that guy, or anybody else from Christian
Crusade, tried to get even with you or Sister
Walters? Or even threatened to get even?”
  “Nah,” she said scornfully. “They ain’t that kind.
Stand up to ‘em and they back down. All talk.”
  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Cavanaugh said. It
was an unprofessional remark, but he was liking the
old woman immensely. A tough cookie.
  She threw back her head and laughed. “Sure is.
Talk don’t get nobody’s ass killed.”
  “One more question, ma’am. Have you ever been
aware of any scientific activity at Christian
Crusade? Seen any science-looking equipment go in
and out, or heard any talk about mosquitoes or
genes or diseases?”
  Her smile vanished. “You investigatin‘ that?
Lord, son, Christian Crusade ain’t made this plague.
They way too stupid. Most of ’em never finished
their schoolin‘, and all of them think science is
’most as evil as popery.”
  “Thank you, ma’am. You’ve been very helpful.”
   “No, I ain’t, but I wish I could be. My grandniece
was one of ‘em that died of this new plague.
Twenty-six years old.” Her old eyes turned inward,
to private pain. Suddenly she said fiercely, “You
catch ’em, son, you hear? You catch ‘em good!”
  “We’re trying, ma’am.”
   She nodded vigorously. “They gotta be stopped.
But you know what, son? People like Christian
Crusade ain’t the ones making this plague. They too
stupid. So why you wasting FBI time out here
asking about ‘em?”
  “Because my boss told me to.”
  She nodded again. “I see. FBI covering its ass?”
   “That’s about it. The FBI’s covering its ass.” It
was a relief to say it out loud and have someone
understand, even if it was someone with no
authority except that of years of survival. He liked
this old bird.
   “Ain’t it always the way.” She sighed, and again
the sunken eyes turned inward. “Be a whole lot of
time saved in this world if people warn’t made to
waste it covering their ass.”
  “I couldn’t agree more,” Cavanaugh said. It was
the first time he’d felt cheerful all week.



   Aryan Nation had the motivation and the wealth
to have created Plasmodium reading, but their
bent wasn’t scientific and their money went for
paramilitary equipment.
   White Maryland were a nasty bunch. They’d
throw rocks through the window of a six year old
displaying a menorah on his window-sill, through
the window of a black candidate for the state
legislature, through the window of a white public
health nurse who visited black homes. They stuffed
hate pamphlets in mailboxes, scrawled graffiti on
public buildings, harassed a pair of high school kids
who were dating interracially. Key members had
arrest sheets as varied as their spewings were
monotonous. Harassment, assault, theft, fraud,
DWI, disturbing the peace, striking a law officer,
carrying an illegal weapon, narcotics violation,
parole violation, even rape. But nowhere could
Cavanaugh find any trace of genetic engineering or
any capacity to do so.
   Not that he’d expected to. These weren’t the
kinds of groups he’d meant when he’d told Dunbar
the lone terrorist theory was ridiculous. And
Dunbar knew these weren’t the kinds of groups
Cavanaugh meant. Dunbar was just “being
thorough,” both because he was a book man and
because of the press. The groups Cavanaugh had
meant were, presumably, being investigated
through Washington: Russian hard-liners, Iranian
warmongers, German neo-Nazis, South African
white supremacists resenting the end of apartheid,
South Americans with a grudge against the United
States. Plus the homegrown insect research and
genetic-engineering companies. The good stuff,
which Cavanaugh only got to hear about, enviously,
at meetings in Baltimore.
   “Talked to another reporter today.” Seton
swaggered into their tiny shared Leonardtown
office. “That gal from the Sun. The one who broke
the story.”
  “Libby Turner,” Cavanaugh said automatically. “I
thought all press communication was supposed to
go through the media representatives in Baltimore
or Washington.”
   “Yeah, well, I didn’t say anything they’d
disapprove of. Gotta keep the old schnozz in front of
the public, though. I retire next year, and good
publicity can’t hurt a second career.”
   “And what second career might that be?”
Cavanaugh didn’t really care, but he was tracking
his hate groups’ bulletin boards on the Internet, and
the postings were even more depressing and
monotonous than Seton.
  “Haven’t decided yet.” Seton unwrapped another
Snickers and dropped the wrapper into the four
inches between their desks. He was such a slob.
Every night Cavanaugh picked up empty Doritos
bags, Coke cans, used tissues.
  “Could you please put that in the garbage can?”
   “Oh, sure,” Seton said, but he didn’t. “You
finding anything worth following up on the Net?”
  Cavanaugh stopped scrolling and looked at Seton.
“Why, you interested in helping?”
  “Can’t. Got too much to do with my informants
about Pax River. Althoooooo…” He drew the syllable
out and looked expectantly at Cavanaugh.
  “Although what, Seton?”
   “Although you’d be surprised how cases
intertwine. And what you can learn from
informants who don’t know what they’re giving
away.”
 Cavanaugh sat very still. “You got something on
malaria reading, Seton? Give it to me.”
  “Not a chance. This is my lead. And I’m the boss,
remember? Oh, by the way, how come Judy hasn’t
been calling here with her usual messages about
picking up milk on the way home or meeting her
someplace for a cozy drink? Your little domestic
paradise gone bust?”
  “Fuck you, Seton,” which was something
Cavanaugh usually never said, but Seton could
provoke him to it. Pointedly he swiveled his seat
back to face his computer. Seton only laughed and
went back to filling out 302s, the forms that
recorded information that might eventually be used
in court. Seton filed more goddamn 302s than
anyone Cavanaugh had ever seen. Dunbar had
commended Seton more than once on the
completeness of his records.
  No leads. No talk with Judy. No progress. And
when Cavanaugh dragged himself back to Marcy s
apartment, after yet another futile day, Marcy was
there.
  Had it been two weeks since she’d left for Dallas?
Yes. It seemed like two years.
  “Hello, Robert,” Marcy said. “There was some kid
here looking for you.”
   “What kid?” She sat curled in a corner of her
black sofa, watching some ballet program and
sipping a Scotch. She wore jeans and a
scoop-necked blue leotard, and her blonde hair was
pinned casually on top of her head, with strands
falling down the sides and over one eye. She looked
sensational.
  “Some little cracker. Blinked a lot. He wrote his
name and number on the phone pad, but said he
couldn’t come back ‘cause it was ’too fur a piece to
hike.‘”
  Earl Lester. And he had hiked in? From… ? Just
the thought of it tired Robert. Although maybe the
kid meant he’d hitchhiked.
   “Have a drink, Robert,” Marcy said. “You look
like you need it.”
   He poured himself a double vodka and tonic.
Marcy watched two ballet dancers wave their arms
and mince across a stage, her eyes intent on the
screen. Robert suddenly liked that she wasn’t
waiting on him.
   Judy would have jumped up, all solicitous
service, which always made him feel he had to be
ardent and communicative in return. He didn’t
want to talk. He didn’t feel ardent. He wanted to be
left alone, to brood undisturbed.
  Marcy watched the rest of the ballet program,
while Robert had another double vodka. When the
show was over, she rose and stretched. “I’m hungry.
Want something to eat before you go?”
   “You’re going to cook?” In all the years of their
marriage, Marcy had cooked about six times, never
with memorable results. She preferred catering,
restaurants, takeout, or yogurt. She could eat or not
eat with impunity, and it never seemed to affect
either her energy or her figure.
   She laughed. “Well, no. I was going to send out
for a pizza.”
  “Sounds good to me,” Cavanaugh said.
“Pepperoni and olives.”
   He finished his drink while she ordered a large
pizza with pepperoni, olives, onions, green and red
peppers. Robert hated peppers, but she’d probably
forgotten that. He was pleased that she hadn’t
asked, hadn’t been all anxious to know his dislikes
so she could make a show of avoiding them. Marcy
looked out for herself. Cavanaugh suddenly found
that restful.
   He sipped a third drink while Marcy found an
emery board and filed her nails, humming to
herself. Abigail, who’d been asleep on the hearth
rug, woke up, trotted over to Cavanaugh, and licked
his hand. Lazily— or maybe it was starting to be
drunkenly—he scratched her ears, and her tail
thumped on the floor in a comfortable rhythm.
   When the pizza came, Cavanaugh let Marcy pay
for it. He fetched plates, napkins, and cutlery from
the kitchen. It felt good to be doing something for
himself again. They ate from the coffee table.
Cavanaugh sipped his vodka between bites, and
Marcy—unlike Judy—didn’t mention his liver.
  “Damn, I smeared it,” Marcy said. A slice of
sauce-wet pepperoni had fallen on the front of her
blue leotard. She picked off the pepperoni and
scrubbed at the stain, which only made it worse.
Under the stretchy material, her beautiful breasts
bounced gently. She leaned forward for another
napkin, and the front of her leotard gaped slightly.
   Robert felt dizzy. Lust hit him like… like what?
Desire interfered with finding a metaphor.
Wordlessly, he watched Marcy rub water on the
tight cloth over her breasts. Watched the stain grow
lighter and wider. Watched the thin material grow
transparent.
  “There, I think that’s… Robert?”
   He staggered when he stood up, but he didn’t let
it stop him. Navigating the treacherous straits
around the coffee table, he inched toward her.
   Her blue eyes darkened slightly with amusement.
It was his last clear sight before his eyes closed and
his arms went around her.
  She tasted of pepperoni, of promise, of
yesterdays. Her lips smiled under his; he didn’t
care. His right hand cupped her breast.
   “Upstairs,” she whispered, and took his hand. He
lurched after her, watching her hips and ass move
under the tight jeans, the ache in his groin so
powerful he thought he would burst before they
even reached the bedroom.
   Fortunately, he didn’t. Marcy pushed him gently
onto the bed. She undid his belt and zipper, and
eased him out of pants and briefs. He watched her
undress: parts of her toned, full-breasted body
coming into view one by one: Legs, as she pulled
down her jeans. Waist and shoulders, as she slid the
leotard over her head. Breasts, as she unhooked her
bra. Robert closed his eyes, dizzy. When he opened
them again, she was climbing onto him, loose
strands of her blonde hair falling across her face,
her breathing already quickening.
  “Marcy… Marcy…”
  He didn’t last very long. She didn’t seem to mind,
continuing to move above him until her head jerked
back and she made the same little cry she always
had. How had he forgotten that little cry? Or the
soft ritual stroke of her palm against his cheek
immediately afterward?
  How had he forgotten any of it?
   “I never stopped wanting you,” he murmured,
but Marcy probably hadn’t heard him, since his
words slurred so much… or maybe she had… or
maybe he hadn’t actually said it aloud… or maybe…
By the time she nestled naked by his side, he was
already asleep.



   When he woke in the morning, there was a note
from Marcy on the nightstand beside the clock. The
clock said 6:25. This was good; plenty of time for
him to get to work and for Marcy to work out at her
gym, which is where he presumed she’d gone. The
note said only Yum.
   Cavanaugh’s heart swelled with affection. She
was being sweet; there was no way his brief and
drunken performance could have been yum for her.
But the next one would be. Tonight he would make
it up to her. After all, unless she’d changed
drastically in three years, he knew everything she
liked best. Tonight.
   That was when he remembered Judy.
Immediately his hangover kicked in. Cavanaugh
staggered to the bathroom and found ibuprofen in
Marcy’s medicine cabinet. He swallowed four pills
and shook his head from side to side. This was a
mistake. But at least it showed he wasn’t poisoned
enough to vomit.
  The best thing to do with a hangover, he’d
decided years ago, was to ignore it. Just carry on
with one’s usual routine, from both defiance and
self-punishment. He showered, shaved, put on
coffee. Then he unlocked the front door, hoping
Marcy had left the newspaper for him. She had. It
was the Sun, not the Post, since Marcy had never
trusted the Post’s liberal bent.



          FBI PUTS POSSIBLE PLAGUE
           SUSPECT UNDER HEAVY
                SURVEILLANCE
               BY LIBBY TURNER



     The Baltimore Sun learned today that
     the FBI has singled out a suspect in the
     creation of malaria reading. Although
     the FBI press office will neither confirm
     nor deny that Dr. Michael Sean
     Donohue is a suspect, Sun reporters
     observed for themselves the unusually
     heavy surveillance of the
     forty-eight-year-old microbiologist. The
     surveillance apparently began only two
     days ago, but since then at least four
     agents have been assigned to
     continuously follow Donohue, including
     a stakeout at his College Park
     apartment.
     Donohue holds an M.D. from Yale
     Medical School, plus a Ph.D. in genetic
     research from the same institution.
     Until six months ago, he was employed
     by Genemod, Inc., a small and
     struggling Virginia start-up company in
     the booming field of genetically
     engineered Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Chris
     Allenwood, the CEO of Genemod,
     declined to answer questions about the
     reasons for Donohue’s dismissal.
     The FBI surveillance of Donohue comes
     at a time when a large percentage of
     Bureau resources are being poured into
     the malaria reading investigation. This
     strongly suggests that Donohue may be
     a suspect in that extremely prominent
     case. A few weeks ago FBI director Peter
     Broylin issued a memo to all 25,000
     Bureau employees emphasizing that…



  Son-of-a-bitch. Broylin needed a suspect, so he’d
found one. And the Turner woman had put tails on
the tails to find out who the Bureau was watching.
   Cavanaugh read the first two paragraphs again.
“Forty-eight-year-old microbiologist… M.D., from
Yale Medical School, plus a Ph.D… employed by
Genemod, Inc., a small and struggling Virginia
start-up company…” Fired from his job. They were
using the profile put together at Quantico. Plus
whatever else they thought they had.
   It was possible someone at the Bureau had even
leaked the surveillance information to Libby Turner
to make sure the public knew the Bureau was on the
road to success. This was not an unknown tactic.
On the other hand, the skimpy information on
Donohue suggested that the Sun had come across
the story just the way it said it had, and had wanted
to release it with skimpy details rather than wait to
be scooped by the Post or even the Times.
   Cavanaugh turned off the water for coffee and
headed for the Baltimore Field Office. On the way
he called in, but it was hardly necessary. He knew
Dunbar would call a meeting of the investigative
team. What he didn’t know was how much the
Bureau knew that the press didn’t.
  Yet.
                  INTERIM

   When the old woman wheeled her chair into the
living room on Sunday morning, Cindy was already
watching cartoons. Cindy’s braids stuck out at all
angles; it had been at least a week since the child’s
mother took her down to LaWanda’s to get them
done. When the old woman had been a girl, folks
did their own children’s braids. But that was a long,
long time ago.
  She rubbed her hands together before pushing
again at the high, round wheels. It got harder every
day, like everything else. Her granddaughter kept
wanting to get her a motorized chair, but the old
woman wasn’t having that. Motors were for
machines, not to be people’s legs. “The Good Lord
don’t intend me to walk no more,” she told her
granddaughter, who just pursed her lips and shook
her head.
  “Cindy,” she said softly. “Chile.”
  Her great-granddaughter looked around and
smiled, only one tooth left in the front. Even so,
someday the girl was going to be too pretty for her
own good.
  “Hi, Gramama.”
  “Hi yourself, chile. Come wheel me outside.”
  Cindy glanced reluctantly back at the TV, where
some white doll-toys in boots and capes were
shooting guns at something. But she was a
well-brought-up little girl.
  “Sure, Gramama. But it’s still dark out.”
 “It’s light enough. I want to smell the Good Lord’s
mornin‘ grass.”
  The little girl grabbed the handlebars of the
wheelchair and pushed it effortlessly out the kitchen
door and down the ramp into the backyard.
  “Park it over there, behind them trees. That’s
good. Now you go back on inside.”
  “I wanta stay and smell the Good Lord’s mornin‘
grass too.”
  “No, you don’t. Your favorite TV show is on. Git.”
She watched Cindy bound back inside, on the way
turning a somersault, just because she could.
   The old woman’s stomach rumbled. She couldn’t
eat much anymore, not without terrible pain in her
belly and gut. And whatever she ate took days to
pass through her, until she felt like she might burst
from the gas. Her arms and neck and hands ached
from the arthritis, and lately it seemed like she was
losing what little taste she had left in her toothless
mouth. But the worst was the diapers. Her
granddaughter called them something else, but they
were diapers all right. Nowadays, before she ever
knew it, her water gushed out right on the bed or
the chair or, once, before the diapers, on her
granddaughter’s brand-new sofa.
   She sniffed the air. Smell mostly gone, too. But
not sight, not completely, not yet. She could make
out the toys scattered over the grass and the birds
still singing their hearts out in the trees, it was so
early. She could see the morning glories still closed
up tight and the pearly gray in the eastern sky just
starting to turn pink.
  She couldn’t quite see the mosquitoes. But they
were there.
   They swarmed in the evening and the early
morning. It had been that way when she was a little
girl, and it was that way now that she was old and
past her time. The Good Lord, she often told the
doctor, had overlooked her in His gatherin‘ in. But
the Lord helps those who help themselves.
  Shrugging her shawl off her shoulders, the old
woman waited, thinking of what a different doctor
had told her years and years ago when she got hit
by that car and had to have a blood transfusion in
the hospital. Didn’t think she’d ever need that
information again. Funny what came in handy, wait
you long enough.
  She felt the first sting and peered down at the
mosquito. It was almost standing on its head on the
inside of the arm she’d exposed by painfully inching
up the sleeves of her nightdress. The mosquito had
white patches on its dark wings. After a moment,
another one landed on her exposed thigh.
  “It’s time, Lord,” she said aloud. “The folks
inside, they won’t wake up for hours, but it’s time
now. Please, Lord. Do it now.
  “Call me on home.”



                     NINE

     We’re all mutants. Everybody is
     genetically defective.
     —Geneticist Michael M. Kaback,
     University of San Diego, quoted in
     Scientific American, 1994



  “Mel,” Joe Krovetz said on the phone, “unlock
your door; I’m coming over.”
  Melanie glanced sleepily at her watch. “Christ,
Krovetz, it’s six-fifteen!”
  “I know. Get up.” The phone went dead.
  Melanie groped for her robe and then stumbled
toward the door. What the hell did Krovetz have for
her at six-fifteen in the goddamn morning? It had
better be good or his young ass was dead meat. It
had better be at least some genetic clue that
Plasmodium reading had been deliberately
engineered after all… Suddenly she felt more awake.
On her way from the bedroom, she turned on the
burner under her teakettle.
  When she slipped the chain off the motel door
and unshot the bolt, Krovetz was already there,
carrying a newspaper. He marched wordlessly to
the kitchen, checked the water kettle, and then held
her firmly by both shoulders.
   “Listen to me, Mel. The FBI has a suspect. I’m
telling you now so you don’t go off the deep end
when Farlow makes his announcement at the
meeting this morning.”
  She shook her shoulders free. “Why would I go off
the deep end? That’s pretty insulting, Krovetz.
Unless you think the suspect is just a cover-up, a
phony fingering to hide the—”
   “How would I know that? I’m not in law
enforcement, thank God. But I was with Farlow,
just shooting the breeze, when they called him late
last night. Maybe you’d better read the story first.”
  Melanie read the front page he thrust at her. The
headlines were nearly two inches high.



           FBI PUTS POSSIBLE PLAGUE
            SUSPECT UNDER HEAVY
                 SURVEILLANCE



   Libby Turner had written the article, which was
short. Like Joe, Melanie couldn’t tell if the suspect
was genuine or a sop to the public. Nor could she
tell why Joe looked at her as if she were a bomb
about to go off.
  “So? They’ve got somebody. That’s good, isn’t it?
And it doesn’t mean they’ll stop investigating other
suspects until this one is at least charged with
something.”
  “No. Yes. I mean, there’s something more.” He
ran a hand through his rumpled straight hair.
  Melanie had never seen Joe nervous. She would
have said it wasn’t possible. Her throat tightened.
  “What is it, Joe? Spit it out. You said you were
with Farlow when ‘they’ called late last night.
Who’re ‘they’? The FBI?”
  “No. The Baltimore Sun.”
  “Who said what? What’s Farlow going to
announce at the meeting?”
  “A reporter called to ask if the CDC had any
comment on the surveillance, which Farlow didn’t
because that was the first he’d heard of it. But, you
know, the CDC maintains a hiring file, with both
resumes and interview reports. On a hunch, Farlow
accessed the CDC computer to see if this Donohue
had applied for a job after he terminated at
Gene-mod in Virginia. And he had.” Again the
gesture with the hair.
  “Go on.”
   “Someone in Personnel did the preliminary
interview. His—or her— report said that Donohue
seemed both defensive and superior. He justified
having been terminated by three different
corporations since college on the grounds of bosses,
quote, out to make trouble for me, unquote. When
the interviewer asked why they’d want to do that,
Donohue said it was because even though he doesn’t
look it, he’s of racially mixed background. His
father’s people were Irish, but on his mother’s side
one of his grandparents was black.”
  Melanie couldn’t breathe. “Black?”
  “Yeah. The FBI must know that, but this
reporter, Libby Turner, probably hasn’t had time
yet to—”
  “Black? You’re saying a black man is committing
genocide against his own people?”
  “I’m not saying anything. But Donohue himself
says—”
  “Are you crazy? Or just corrupted?”
  Krovetz drew a deep breath.
   “Do you even realize what you’re spouting? Do
you? You—or Farlow, or the FBI, or the press, I
don’t give a goddamn who—are trying to blame this
evil on us! Killing off our own! So it’s just a civil
war, nothing to threaten the white folks, just those
crazy niggers killing themselves again. What’s a
little more black-on-black murder, hey, hey—”
  “Stop it, Mel.”
   “Stop it? Don’t you dare tell me what to do! You
stand there and repeat to me the most evil lie in the
world like you believe it’s true and I’m not supposed
to—”
  “It’s not the most evil lie in the world.”
   “How the hell would you know? How would you
know anything? How would you know what it feels
like to… to…” She couldn’t go on. This was Joe, one
of the most decent human beings she’d ever known.
She was wrong to blame Joe, wrong wrong wrong…
and yet she wasn’t. Something coalesced inside her,
crystallized, something so old it wasn’t even hers…
She’d inherited it from her parents, and they’d
gotten it from their parents and so on back to the
lash, the auction block, the slave ship, the casual
tossing away of lives just because those lives were
black… The crystallized something pierced her,
sharp and hot as burning brands, and she gasped.
  “All right, Mel,” Joe said. “All right.”
  “It’s not true. It’s not true.”
  “Maybe not.”
  “‘Maybe?’ For you to say—for them to say… to
say…”
   The teakettle whistled. Joe walked into the
kitchenette and made instant coffee. When he
handed her a cup, she gulped it black, not even
feeling the burn in her mouth. Krovetz waited.
   “I’m sorry, Joe,” she whispered, when she could
talk. “I just…” Just what? Just can’t take much
more of this.
  “That’s why I wanted to tell you first, alone. So
you could get over the initial shock. Because, Mel, if
you act like this at the meeting, Farlow’s going to
remove you from the project. You know he is. He
doesn’t like researchers who he thinks can’t be
objective. And if you’re removed, you can’t help
anybody at all.”
   It was true. Melanie grasped onto this like a
lifeline: If she so much as looked distraught or
dysfunctional, Farlow would remove her from the
project. And then she couldn’t help anybody at all.
Joe was right.
  She took a sip of the coffee.
   “That’s better,” Joe said quietly. “You’d better get
dressed. Farlow’s going to phone about the meeting
any minute now, before anybody leaves for the field
or goes on-line.”
  “Okay.” After a moment she was able to add,
“Thanks.”
   “We need you, Mel,” Krovetz said. “Be sure to
lock the door tight behind me.”



  The meeting at the Baltimore Field Office
contained three surprises. To Cavanaugh, all three
were shockers.
   First, Dunbar stated clearly that no one in the
FBI had leaked news of the surveillance to Libby
Turner at the Sun. “We’ve checked this out already
this morning. Turner learned about the surveillance
just the way she said she had said, by staking out
the FBI agents on the stakeout. Unfortunate, but
there it is.”
  No surprise there. Dunbar the Book Man was
peeved but not angry. Reporters were reporters.
   “Also, I want to make perfectly plain that Bureau
surveillance of Michael Donohue in no way means a
slacking off on all other aspects of the investigation.
International, national security, hate groups,
genetic-engineering companies—all the angles are
still going to be covered just as thoroughly.
Everybody clear on this?”
   Apparently everybody was; nobody protested.
And nobody looked surprised. The men and women
around the conference table hunched blearily over
their coffee. Some team members were missing.
Investigating, Cavanaugh presumed, except for the
media representatives, who were probably
frantically trying to keep up with calls from press,
radio, and TV.
    “Third—and this comes straight from the
director—nobody talks about this case to anyone
outside the Bureau. Nobody, about anything. Not
even about how committed the Bureau is to solving
it. The only permitted comment is ‘No comment.’
The director has personally asked me to remind you
all that under the new guidelines issued last year,
unauthorized disclosure is grounds for censure,
suspension, or dismissal from the FBI.”
  Hardball. But not surprising. Libby Turner was
only the tip of the media combat about to be staged
outside the Hoover Building. Let the games begin.
  Then came the first of the lions.
   “The document I’m passing out now,” Dunbar
said, “is what we know at this point about Michael
Sean Donohue. Everything in the Turner article was
true. But in addition, there are two other major
facts the press doesn’t have so far. One, we have a
file on Donohue in connection with the Irish
Republican Army going back to 1984, when
Donohue worked in Boston. The evidence is scanty
and no charges were ever brought, but at the time
the SACs in Boston deemed there to be enough to
open a file.”
   The agents around the table lost their bleary
looks and sat up straighter, including Cavanaugh.
The IRA. But that made no sense. The Irish had
never had a strong quarrel with blacks, American or
otherwise. If they had somehow developed, or
gotten hold of, something like an engineered
parasite for a mosquito, half of London would now
be down with sleeping sickness. Or dengue fever. Or
whatever else they could make the dank British
climate support.
  Only the Division Five agents looked unsurprised;
they apparently already had counter-intelligence on
the connection. A young female agent Cavanaugh
didn’t recognize blurted, “But why would the IRA
want to—”
  “We don’t know that they did,” Dunbar snapped,
the first break in his aloof formality. “Please
remember, Agent McDougal, that what you’re
holding is a preliminary information sheet on a
suspect, not a final investigative report.”
  Agent McDougal reddened and raised her coffee.
Cavanaugh wondered how many meetings would go
by until she said anything again. Dunbar didn’t
really like rookies on his cases, although he must
know they had to learn someplace. Felders had
welcomed rookies, for their fresh perspectives.
Cavanaugh missed Felders all over again.
  “Finally,” Dunbar said, “if you’ll turn to the last
page of the document, you’ll see another key point
about the suspect. This one is potentially very
explosive. Michael Sean Donohues blood heritage is
three-quarters Irish, one-eighth German, and
one-eighth African American.”
   Cavanaugh drew in his breath. There it was, on
the last page: maternal great-grandmother Fleur
D’Orsay, born 1874 of freed slaves, married in 1903
to Hans Pfeiffer in New Orleans, Louisiana, after
ten years of common-law cohabitation.
  “How available is this information to the press?”
Agent McDougal asked, showing to Cavanaugh that
he’d underestimated her. It just proved how little he
knew about women.
  Women. Marcy. Judy.
   Dunbar said, “The family background is in the
public records, so they might have it as early as the
six o’clock news. The IRA connection, to the best of
our data, is known only to the FBI and the CIA.
Probably the—Agent Cavanaugh, do you have
something to add?”
   “No,” Cavanaugh said, trying to wipe his face
clean of whatever expression had prompted Dunbar
s notice—Marcy, Judy—“no, I… no.”
   “Well, that’s too bad, because I’m moving you
from South Maryland hate groups to surveillance of
Michael Donohue.”
   That was the second surprise. And not only to
Cavanaugh. Glances were exchanged among agents,
all of whom quickly returned to studying the profile
of Donohue. Then Cavanaugh got it.
   Dunbar wanted him someplace where he
wouldn’t stir up questions nobody wanted to hash
out openly. What better place than on the
surveillance team? Cavanaugh would be continually
in the company of one-track, unimaginative agents
with high testosterone and low doubt factors, which
was what surveillance agents tended to be like. They
would surround Cavanaugh, neutralize him. And
since the press would be tailing the tails, the gag
order on talking to them would be uppermost in
everyone’s mind, thereby keeping Cavanaugh from
pretty much asking anything inflammatory of
anybody. Plus, he would be the junior agent on
surveillance. He wouldn’t be writing any official
reports. He’d just be along for the ride.
  “I think maybe—”
  “That’s it, people,” Dunbar said crisply, and the
scraping of chairs and murmuring of voices
drowned out whatever Cavanaugh was going to say.
   Not that he knew what that would have been. A
challenge to Dunbar the Book Man was equivalent
to a challenge to the cosmic order. Nonetheless,
Cavanaugh tried.
  “Jerry, I appreciate you moving me closer to the
center of the case. What with it having started in
my jurisdiction and—”
  “Seton’s jurisdiction,” Dunbar said, pointedly.
    “Yes. Of course. But even though I do appreciate
it, there are a few more leads I’d really like to follow
through on, so if the surveillance assignment—”
   “Turn the leads over to McDougal. They haven’t
turned up anything remotely useful yet, according
to your own reports, so it’ll be a good place for her
to learn technique.”
  “But—”
   “They haven’t turned up anything, have they?”
Dunbar asked. His gray eyes fixed on Cavanaugh
like a tractor beam. “And you yourself were the one
who said the domestic hate groups were just red
herrings anyway.”
  Hoist with his own petard.
  “Didn’t you say that, Agent Cavanaugh?”
  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said resignedly.
  “Well, then, there it is. Report to Pilozzi in
Surveillance, ASAP.”
  Cavanaugh didn’t answer. No point. He was
assigned to Surveillance.
   On his way to Pilozzi’s office, he called Marcy at
work. Her secretary said she was in a meeting. He
couldn’t face the call to Judy just yet. It was going
to be awful. Judy would cry, and he would
apologize, and if he weren’t such a worm, he’d go
see her in person instead of making a lousy phone
call. But when he thought of Marcy, of another
unstrained, easy dinner on the coffee table and
another sweet reunion romp in bed, he knew he just
couldn’t do a personal scene with Judy. No matter
how much she deserved her say. He just wouldn’t be
able to stand there and meet her eyes.
  Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.
  He went downstairs to Pilozzi’s office.



   The reporter caught Melanie as she left the house
of an interviewee, mother of a six year old who’d
died of malaria reading the day before. “I’m Shakita
Franklin, Dr. Anderson, from radio station KQLN.”
   Melanie stopped resignedly, sweating in the black
dress and stockings she always wore to survivor
interviews. Mourning clothes. It was little enough to
do to show respect.
  “I know this is a hard time for me to be asking
you questions, but KQLN would appreciate a
comment from one of us who’s close to the
investigation.”
  “One of us.” The young corn-rowed sister didn’t
say it as if to claim privilege, but merely as fact.
Melanie said, “Go ahead.”
  “Thank you, Dr. Anderson. May I record?”
  “Go ahead.”
  “You’ve heard, of course, that the Baltimore Sun
has identified a suspect in malaria reading and has
him under heavy surveillance.”
  “The whole world’s heard that by now.”
  Shakita watched her closely. “Yes. And you know
that the suspect is part black.”
   Melanie didn’t ask how the girl knew this even
before it had appeared on the six o’clock news. The
world of reporters had just as many weblike bonds
of favors, family, markers, and friendship as any
other. Undoubtedly Shakita had some sort of deal
that said she couldn’t run her interview until after
the six o’clock news. But being young and
ambitious, she was out here digging.
  “You don’t look surprised, Dr. Anderson. Did the
CDC already know that?”
  “I can’t speak for the CDC, Ms. Franklin. You’d
need to ask Dr. James Farlow, head of the
epidemiology team.”
   “I understand. Can you tell us, please, what effect
this new information will have on the CDC
investigation?”
    “None. A Special Pathogens Branch investigation
is concerned with identifying an epidemic, tracking
it, and devising ways to end it.”
  “And is it ending?”
   “It’s too soon to tell,” Melanie said. Sweat trickled
down her neck and between her breasts. “The death
rate, as you undoubtedly know, is falling. But the
drop coordinates with the breeding cycle of A.
quadrimaculatus, so it could just mean that there’s
a temporary lull while the next generation of larvae
mature and hatch.”
   “I see. The press has included much speculation
about whether malaria reading could have evolved
naturally, without human engineering. The CDC
must be investigating that possibility—from a
scientific point of view, I mean. How is that search
going?”
   “Again, you’d have to speak with Dr. Farlow for
the most current information. I can tell you only
that we’ve identified a list of amino-acid-level
differences between P. falciparum and P. reading.
The list implies heavy genetic linkages among at
least three major mutations, possibly more.”
  “That’s a lot of mutating to happen by
coincidence all at once.” You know it, girl. But all
Melanie said aloud was, “Yes, it is.”
  “Thank you, Dr. Anderson. This is Shakita
Franklin of Radio KQLN in Washington.”



     SUBJ: OUTRAGE
     FROM: MX87@AOL.COM
     TO: MALAR-R@WORLDNET.NET
     SO THE FBI HAS DECIDED THAT A
     BLACK MAN CREATED MALARIA
     READING. THIS IS A <BALD-FACED
     LIE.> WAKE UP, AMERICA? DON’T
     YOU SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE?
     THE GOVERNMENT WOULD JUST
     LIKE THE PROBLEM TO GO AWAY, SO
     THEY CONVENIENTLY CHOOSE TO
     SHOVE IT ONTO US. I CAN’T
     IMAGINE A MORE DESPICABLE,
     COWARDLY, OUTRAGEOUS LIE. WE
     MUST <DO SOMETHING.>
     ANYTHING AT ALL WILL
     HELP—PICKET, RIOT, WRITE YOUR
     CONGRESSMAN, MAIL LEAFLETS. IF
     YOU HAVE TO GET ILLEGAL, DO
     IT—<THEY> ARE! WE MUST MUST
     MUST SHOW THEM JUST HOW DEEP
     THIS BETRAYAL GOES, AND THAT
     WE AREN’T GOING TO TAKE IT
     ANYMORE!



     SUBJ: DONOHUE
     FROM: REMAILER@WORLDNET.NET
     TO: MALAR-R@WORLDNET.NET
     LET THE SPEARCHUCKERS ALL KILL
     EACH OTHER OFF. PROSECUTING
     DONOHUE IS JUST A WASTE OF
     TAXPAYERS MONEY. GIVE HIM A
     LAB TO MAKE SOMETHING THAT
     WILL GET THE OTHER 90% OF
     NIGGERS. GO, ANNIE QUAD!!!!



    Judy rubbed her eyes. She’d been sitting for
hours at her computer in the Rivermount house,
surfing the Net. The medical lists, the government
bulletin boards, the news channels, and now the
chat rooms on malaria reading. Why? She didn’t
know exactly. Because it was important. Because it
threw into sharp focus the mess simmering—now
erupting—just below the surface of American life.
Because she might want to write an article about it,
if she could find the right angle.
  Because somewhere out there, Robert was
investigating it.
   He was going to call her today. He hadn’t called
for two weeks, but he was going to call today. She’d
woken up this morning knowing that, and hadn’t
been able to work since. Noon, and she was still in
her nightgown. Noon, and she hadn’t eaten
anything. Noon, and she was surfing the Net on one
phone line while her eyes strayed to the phone on
the other line. She was acting like a clinging
brain-dead dependent stereotype, and she knew it,
and she couldn’t seem to do anything else.



     SUBJECT: (NO SUBJECT ENTERED)
     FROM: MELORIAD@RPI.EDU
     TO: MALAR-R@WORLDNET.NET
     THE POSTINGS TODAY SICKEN ME.
     WE NEED TO PULL TOGETHER HERE,
     NOT GET CAUGHT UP IN BLAME OR
     GLOATING OR PARTISANSHIP.
     DON’T YOU SEE THAT IF SOMEONE
     COULD DO THIS TO ONE ETHNIC
     GROUP, SOMEONE COULD DO IT TO
     ANY OTHER? EVERY HERITAGE HAS
     SOME GENETIC ANOMALIES THAT
     COULD BE EXPLOITED. <NO ONE> IS
     SAFE!



  Judy nodded. This MeloriaD was right. And that
might make a hook for an article, if Judy could find
out enough about the specific genetic anomalies of
other ethnic groups. The Irish, say—until the last
few hundred years they’d been isolated for
centuries; maybe that was long enough for viable
genetic mutations to occur and be dispersed
throughout a population. Maybe the Chinese? No,
some group better represented in the United States
would make a stronger article. Not the Italians;
everybody in the Mediterranean world had tromped
through Italy. Not enough genetic isolation. The
Swedes?
  The phone rang.
  Judy closed her eyes, listening to it ring. Then she
reached for the receiver. “Hello?”
  “Judy. It’s Robert.”
   “Hello, Robert.” She was a little surprised how
calm she sounded.
  “I’m sorry I haven’t called you sooner. It’s been…
well, you’ve seen the papers. On malaria reading.”
  The old masculine excuse: press of work. But she
could hear the nervousness in his voice.
  “Only now… well, somethings come up. I think…
are you still there, Judy?”
  “Yes,” Judy said.
   “I couldn’t hear you breathing or anything. Jude,
I think we both know this relationship hasn’t been
going very well for quite a while now.”
  “Do we?”
  “Yes. I do. We do. You’re a wonderful person, but
we just want different things, and that isn’t going to
change. I mean it when I say you’re a wonderful
person, but I don’t think we have a real future
together; and somewhere down deep I think we
both know that.”
  Judy listened to this bullshit, thinking I thought
he was more original than that. She said nothing.
   “So what I’m saying, what I mean, is that I think
I should move out. I’ll come for my stuff, or send
somebody for it, on Saturday. I’ll… Judy, are you
there?”
  “Yes.”
  “I’m sorry about this. I know it isn’t what you
hoped for, but I think we’re both old enough to
know that sometimes these things don’t—”
  She said, “Are you back with Marcy?”
   On the other end of the line, Robert drew a sharp
breath. She could picture him, his eyes widened, his
hand holding the receiver. No rings. He never wore
rings. Nails cut short, neat and square. Palm
square, too, and callused from the odd way he held
his drawing pencils. He would answer her question,
Judy knew. He was a total screwup with women,
but he was honest. Judy had loved that about him,
especially after Ben, who’d lied as easily as he
dropped his pants.
   “Yes,” he said, very low. “I am. Judy, I’m so sorry.
I never intended this to happen.”
  “It’s all right.”
  Long pause. “It is?”
  “Yes,” she said, clearly. “If you haven’t got the
sense to appreciate me, then you don’t deserve me.”
   He was silent. Stunned, Judy hoped. Well, she
was pretty stunned, too. That was why she sounded
so calm; she was stunned, like an animal just hit
between the eyes with a two-by-four. From
experience with herself, she knew this calm
wouldn’t last.
   “Well,” Robert said cautiously, “you’re probably
right. You deserve better than me.”
  “Good-bye, Robert. I’ll mail you the papers to
cancel the lease on the house.” She hung up.
  For a long time she sat staring at her screen
saver. Then she went into the living room, found the
purple sweater she’d been knitting for Robert, and
calmly pulled it apart, unraveled strand by
unraveled strand.



                  INTERIM

   The USS Bryant cut through the water of the
Potomac River just before dawn. The executive
officer, who was the only one on the bridge who
knew what the mission was, gave the helmsman the
order to steady up. Then for the next few minutes
the orders flew thick. The ship came to a stop and
dropped anchor.
   Light fog swirled over the river. Through it the
exec could just make out the facilities of the Naval
Surface Weapons Center on the Virginia shore. He
stepped outside the glass-enclosed bridge onto the
metal deck and raised his binoculars.
   “Mr. Morton, summon the ordnance officer and
crew.”
  “Yes, sir,” said Ensign Morton, junior officer of
the deck, who was on his first sea duty after
Annapolis. He saluted smartly, executed a perfect
ninety-degree turn, and marched away. The exec,
who had been in the navy for seventeen years,
smiled to himself.
  In five minutes Mr. Horton was back. “Sir…
there’s a… problem.”
  “A ‘problem’?”
  “Yes, sir. One of the ordnance crew. Stanners. He
won’t come on deck.”
    “Do you mean ‘can’t,’ Mr. Horton? Is Stanners
ill?”
  “No, sir. ‘Won’t.’”
  “Are you telling me that a crewman of this ship
has chosen to disobey a direct order?”
  “Y-yes, sir.”
  “Why?”
  “He says it’s because of malaria reading, sir.
Stanners says this is near where it started. He says
he won’t risk the open air in the early morning
hours when mosquitoes feed. Sir.”
    The two officers stared at each other. The exec
was white; the ensign black. As was Stanners. The
exec did not know the sickle-cell-trait status of
every sailor on the Bryant. A complicated emotion
filled him: irritation, distaste, guilt, reluctance to
deal with the situation. He ignored all of these.
   “Mr. Horton, tell Stanners that he will be on deck
in three minutes or face a court-martial. This is the
United States Navy, and he is a sailor in that navy.”
  Something shifted behind Horton’s dark eyes. His
thumb moved up under his palm to stroke the
Annapolis ring. “Yes, sir.”
  Morton returned to belowdecks. The exec rested
one hand on the bridge railing and renewed his
scan of the Naval Surface Weapons Center. He had
seen action in the Persian Gulf, where sailors had
died. He firmly believed that every military man
owed his life to his country. And he had read in the
newspaper that the death rate from this so-called
“malaria” was falling anyway. It was half of what it
had been a month ago. And perhaps mosquitoes
didn’t even venture offshore, even when the shore
was this close. Stanners was a weak sister, all too
typical of the kids who signed up now, wanting the
Gl Bill and the structure and the health benefits and
the regular pay, but not wanting to take any risks in
between. As bad as the reserves. Cowards.
   And against all that, a sudden image of Stanners
keeling over with a cerebral stroke, in what only the
exec and the captain knew was a very minor naval
test exercise. Dead at nineteen. At his order.
   The exec watched the rest of the ordnance crew
assemble crisply in the cool dawn and waited to see
if Stanners showed.



                      TEN

     For extreme illnesses, extreme
     treatments are most fitting.
     —Hippocrates, Aphorisms, fourth
     century B.C.



  Cavanaugh had never seen anything like it.
   Dr. Michael Sean Donohue lived in a modest,
slightly peeling town house in College Park, six
miles from D.C. The townhouse was an end unit,
two stories high, with a one-car garage underneath.
In the front a short walk led from the door to a
large, curving, asphalt parking lot for the
apartments opposite the townhouse that did not
have garages. On the east side, Donohue’s garage
opened to an equally short driveway connecting to
the parking lot. In back, sliding glass doors opened
to a shared lawn. Scattered over the weedy grass
were a few dilapidated picnic benches and many
toys. It was suburbia writ small.
  Sound trucks jammed the parking lot, their
booms jutting over the horde of reporters waiting
patiently on lawn chairs and camp stools and cars,
AC running with the doors open. Pizza trucks came
and went. Two enterprising teenagers sold coffee
and Gatorade. Every once in a while a neighbor, or
even a dog, would emerge and everyone would leap
up and start frenziedly snapping pictures or rolling
film. Reporters interviewed anyone who emerged
from any door within a hundred yards. Between
frenzies, everyone lapsed again into sweating
torpor. Styrofoam cups and pizza boxes littered the
ground, smelling strongly in the hot sun. A camera
was permanently trained on the garage door.
  As the sun moved, the entire menage shifted
around the curving parking lot, following the shade.
   Even in this throng, the FBI surveillance team
stood out, or at least part of it did. Two agents sat
on the picnic bench in back, the only ones
authorized to trespass past the parking lot. Another
agent watched the front door, the bulge of his gun
unmistakable under his light summer suit.
Somewhere three additional unmarked FBI
vehicles—“Bucars”— waited. Cavanaugh, in one of
them, said to his surveillance partner, “Jesus J.
Edgar Christ. Does Donohue go out at all?”
   “Oh, he goes out,” Arnett said. Slow-moving and
laconic, he had the sleepy-eyed, dim look that
Cavanaugh had once thought meant hidden
strengths. Now he just thought that such men were
laconic and dim. “Wait.”
  “They also serve who…”
  “What?”
  “Nothing.”
  Arnett gave him a doubtful look.
   The trouble with waiting—a trouble with
waiting—was that it let him dwell on the
conversation with Judy. He’d gotten off very easy,
he knew. No scene, no tears. She’d sounded pretty
laconic herself, except for that one perceptive
question about Marcy. Well, he’d hadn’t lied to her.
And he hadn’t wanted to hurt Judy, although he
knew he had. But he couldn’t help it. She—
   The crowd suddenly erupted. A white Mercedes
sailed down the driveway toward Donohue’s garage.
   “Mr. Erickson! Mr. Erickson!” reporters
screamed. Photographers leapt into position. The
garage door slid up, the Mercedes entered, and the
door slid down again.
   “Who’s Erickson?” Cavanaugh asked, since
Arnett apparently wasn’t going to volunteer any
information. He was the kind who liked to be asked.
   “Donohue’s lawyer.” Arnett turned the ignition
key. The Bucar, which had been idling so the
air-conditioning would work, came to life.
  “Where are we going?”
  “Tailing.”
  Cavanaugh didn’t point out that Donohue and his
lawyer were closeted in the town house, or that it
was difficult to “tail” inside 1,235 square feet (plus
garage). Cavanaugh was the new kid on the block.
He waited.
   After a few minutes the garage door slid up
again. The white Mercedes backed out. Erickson
drove. Beside him Donohue smiled faintly, dressed
in a pale gray suit. He never glanced at the
reporters shouting and snapping and pounding on
the car window, begging for a quote. Erickson
clutched the wheel, but Donohue kept his faint
smile, cool and unruffled.
  Cavanaugh said, “Is he always that cool?”
  “Yes.”
   Arnett was a better driver than conversationalist.
His was the first car behind the Mercedes, and he
kept the position effortlessly. The other Bucars
would trail unseen. Behind Arnett most of the
sound trucks and press cars boiled along, the messy
tail of the comet. Cavanaugh watched the back of
Donohue’s head. It told him nothing.
  They drove west into D.C., finally slowing at a
nondescript building on Georgia Avenue. Erickson
parked in a commercial lot and the entire
entourage jammed in after him. The attendant, a
middle-aged black man, evidently didn’t recognize
Donohue; he looked perplexed and alarmed at the
haphazard circus being made of his tidy rows of
parked cars.
  “You go in with him,” Arnett said, startling
Cavanaugh with his loquaciousness. “Stay close.
Take notes. I stay with the car and watch the front
entrances.”
  “Okay,” Cavanaugh said. Somehow they had
switched verbal roles.
  Erickson and Donohue got out of the Mercedes.
Erickson handed the keys to the attendant.
Donohue strolled casually toward the building.
Reporters shouted questions at him.
  “Dr. Donohue! What do you think of the heavy
FBI surveillance that led the press to you?”
 “Dr. Donohue! What comment do you have on
malaria reading?”
  “Hey! Mike! Did you kill all those people just for
the fun of it?”
   Not even the last question made Donohue lose his
faint, contemptuous smile, although the parking
attendants eyes went wide. Donohue strolled into
the building and waited for the elevator, still acting
as if he were entirely alone. And yet Cavanaugh saw
that he was very aware of the attention he
generated. Phrases from the Quantico profile rose
in his mind: “… imagines himself a powerful
behind-the-scenes figure, manipulating entire
bureaucracies—such as the FBI—into doing his
bidding…”
   Twenty-two people crowded into the elevator. A
sign inside said CAPACITY: SIXTEEN PERSONS.
The reporters continued their fruitless yammering
as the elevator groaned its way to the fifth floor,
which the floor posting identified as:



  SELENE FASHIONS, EXECUTIVE OFFICE
  CATHAY AUCTION HOUSE
  JENSEN & JENSEN, ATTORNEYS AT LAW



   Cavanaugh assumed Donohue was adding to his
legal team, but he was wrong. The noisy cavalcade
was stopped by a polite doorman outside Cathay
Auction House.
   “Do you have a bidding number, sir? Ma’am?”
No one had a bidding number, which, it turned out,
required advance reservation, but Cavanaugh had
his FBI credentials. He was the only one allowed to
follow Donohue inside.
   Cavanaugh had never been to an auction. He
read the catalogue of Chinese and Tibetan antiques,
one eye on Donohue, who sat two rows ahead with
his arm stretched negligently along the back of an
empty chair. Only a dozen people sat on the velvet
chairs. It was very quiet.
     From the Sung period, a crane carved
     in jade, showing the characteristic…
  “Welcome to Cathay Auction House,” a dazzlingly
groomed woman announced from the podium.
“Please remember that smoking is forbidden.” She
then went through the bidding rules and introduced
the auctioneer, who appeared to be her male clone.
     Ceramic bowl from the Tang period,
     6¼ inches in diameter. The
     thick-walled, single-color porcelain
     illustrates well the superb…
  Donohue didn’t bid on anything until Lot 39.
Cavanaugh read in the catalogue that this was a
small, early-Ming painted vase, seven inches high,
decorated with the elegance that had recently
replaced simplicity in landscape painting. He paid
close attention to the bidding. Donohue got the
vase, for two thousand.
  “… because this individual considers himself a
natural aristocrat, he will pride himself on his
superior taste in at least one consumer area…
earns between forty and sixty thousand… in some
area of aristocratic taste he will buy the best and
will be supercilious about anything less…”
   But did Donohue fit the profile so well because
the profilists knew their stuff? Or did he fit the
profile so well because the Bureau had looked for a
suspect who fit the profile, thereby justifying its
existence in the first place? Criminal profiles were
usually developed from evidence at the crime scene.
But in this case, the crime scene was all of southern
Maryland and part of Virginia, and the only
“evidence” was several million insects doing the
things insects naturally did: Breed. Feed. Bleed.
  So far Cavanaugh had seen nothing, been told
nothing, read nothing about Michael Sean Donohue
that convinced him this man had killed 597 people
by means of an unelegant, untasteful, unaristocratic
mosquito.



   The rest of the day produced nothing. Donohue
went home, still acting as if two dozen reporters,
eight tails, and a score of heckling citizens did not
fall within his notice. Curtains stayed drawn at the
College Park town house. An elaborate flower
arrangement, roses and sweetpeas, arrived from a
local florist. “Who’s sending him flowers?”
Cavanaugh asked Arnett.
  “Networks.”
  Courting, of course. An exclusive interview with
Michael Sean Donohue! A heavyset woman in a
faded dress opened the door a slit and refused the
flowers.
  “Donohue’s wife?” Cavanaugh asked. Arnett
nodded, having used up the hour’s allotment of
words.
  A sack of mail as large as a boulder and
apparently as heavy was dropped on Donohue’s
doorstep and ignored. Reporters salivated at it, but
apparently weren’t quite up to violating federal
postal statutes by opening the sack. Eventually the
heavyset woman dragged it inside.
   A representative from the National Inquirer
knocked on the door, probably to offer a story
contract. Nobody answered. The media all took
pictures of the guy knocking.
  By the time Cavanaugh’s shift ended, at 7:00
P.M., he was exhausted. How could he be so tired
when he hadn’t done anything except sit? But he
was.
   However, he perked up on the drive south, even
though the Beltway was the usual mess. Marcy
would be there. The Marcy of last night, scrubbing
pizza off her low-cut leotard, straddling him in
bed… the Marcy of the early years of their marriage,
laughing at dinner, cuddling on the sofa to watch
the news, telling him about her day in the corporate
wars. Marcy.
   He stopped at a florist near her building and
bought her a dozen yellow roses. She had always
liked yellow roses.
   “Why, Robert, how lovely of you!” She’d been
passing through the foyer when he turned his key in
her lock. Abigail bounded up, tail wagging
frantically. Home.
   Marcy hadn’t changed her clothes after work. She
wore a dark blue suit and white silk blouse, her
blonde hair twisted high in a French roll. She
looked so delectable that Robert immediately laid
the flowers on the hall table and put his arms
around her.
  She stiffened.
   Over her shoulder, he suddenly saw that the
living room was full of packing boxes.
   “Robert, please don’t,” Marcy said, disentangling
from his embrace. “I mean, last night was lovely,
and I’m glad I could thank you like that, but…
please don’t.”
 On top of the packing boxes sat his computer
monitor and squash racket.
  He got out, “Thank me? For what?”
   “For watching Abigail for me, of course.” She
looked at him blankly.
  “For watching Abigail.”
  “Yes. Oh, God, Robert, not even you could have
thought that I… that you…”
    “No, of course not,” Robert said. His chest felt as
if it had just been smacked with a sledgehammer.
  “Well, thank God for that, anyway.”
  “Yes. Thank. God.”
   “I’ve packed your things, since I knew you’d
probably have put in a long day on your case,” she
said, all crisp efficiency. “The boxes will all fit into
your car on one trip, won’t they?”
  “Yes.”
   “Then I guess that’s that.” She smiled brilliantly.
“I’d stay and have a drink with you, but I have a
date. But of course you can help yourself to drink or
dinner or whatever. Just lock the door behind you
and slip the key under the door.”
  “Yes.”
  “Well, then, I guess that’s it. Unless you want to
walk Abigail one last time.”
  “Walk. Abigail.”
   “Oh, don’t look so put-upon, Robert. You don’t
have to walk her. Richard and I will do it when we
get back. And thanks again for taking care of her
for me.”
  She gave him a brief peck on the cheek, waggled
her fingers at him, and was gone.
  Cavanaugh walked into the living room. He sat
down on one of the packing boxes. He had a strong
urge to laugh, or cry, or something. Maybe just call
himself names.
  Idiot, sucker, moron, sentimentalist…
  And where was he supposed to go with his neatly
packed boxes? Judy’s? Unthinkable. He’d jerked her
around enough for one day. A motel? Probably.
Until he could find another apartment.
  Stupid fool, icky romantic, easy mark,
dummkopf…
   Abigail trotted over and licked his hand.
Groaning happily, she curled herself at his feet. As
far as Cavanaugh could see, she was the only female
he’d succeeded in pleasing all day.
   Laughter won. At the tone of Cavanaugh s
laughing, Abigail stirred uneasily and peered up at
him.
  Sex. It would get you every damn time.
   But he took Abigail with him. Out of chagrin, or
anger, or maybe just pity that she should stay
behind with someone who didn’t care if a dog spent
its night bewildered and alone.



          DONOHUE MAY HAVE TAKEN
           PRIVATE POLYGRAPH TEST
                BY LIBBY TURNER
College Park, Maryland—Last night at
8:14 EST reporters staking out Michael
Sean Donohue’s town house in College
Park observed two men being admitted
inside. The Sun has discovered that the
car is registered to Stanley J. Osborne of
Washington, D.C. Osborne, formerly
employed at the office of Virginia
attorney general Lionel Davis, recently
set up a private polygraph firm. Also
present was Donohue’s lawyer, Stuart
Erickson.
Speculation runs high that Donohue is
preparing for a possible arrest by
arming himself with his own polygraph
results. Although neither Erickson,
Donohue, nor Davis has as yet issued a
statement on…



   DONOHUE SUBSCRIBED TO
  INTERNET MAILING LISTS ON
 MALARIA, GENETIC ENGINEERING
       BY JONATHAN KRAMER



New York—The Times learned last night
that Dr. Michael Sean Donohue, the
prime suspect in the creation of the
allegedly genetically engineered malaria
reading, subscribes to Internet mailing
lists on both malaria and genetics. The
mailing lists are closed, with scientific
updates sent only to subscribers. Clearly
qualified to receive the lists, Donohue,
who has a Ph.D. from Yale in
microbiology, was unable to be reached
for comment.
     “These lists are one way scientists keep
     up with the latest developments in their
     fields,” said Dr. Anna Weinstein,
     professor of microbiology at the State
     University of New York at Stony Brook.
     “They are a major Internet service.”
     Although the FBI Media Office
     cautioned that merely belonging to a
     specialized-topic list in no way
     constitutes evidence of having abused
     that knowledge, nonetheless…



                  ELEVEN

     Extremist groups worldwide are
     increasingly learning how to
     manufacture chemical and biological
     agents, and the potential for additional
     chemical and biological attacks by such
     groups continues to grow.
     —Gordon Oehler, Director of CIA
     Nonproliferation Center, Report of the
     Executive Committee on Special
     Material Smuggling, 1996



  “I just want to see him,” Melanie said, “Just
once.”
  “Why?” Krovetz said, biting into his Big Mac.
Special sauce ran down his chin. Nobody in
McDonalds was eyeing them, the interracial couple.
Melanie always knew.
  Krovetz swallowed. “What would you gain, Mel?
Donohue’s not going to lay eyes on you and
suddenly blurt out, ‘Yes, I did it. I engineered
malaria reading. In your presence, I must confess.’”
 “I know that. Give me some credit; I’m not
moronic.”
   “No. But the wish to see him is.” He took another
bite.
   Just watching him made Melanie queasy. She
couldn’t eat much anymore. She played with the
straw to her orange juice. “I don’t expect him to
confess. But I can’t help it. I just want to see him.”
  “You don’t even think Donohue did it.”
  “No, I don’t.” She pushed the orange juice away
and leaned forward. “Joe, did you ever read any of
the books or articles about the WHO theory of
HIV?”
  Krovetz looked at her in disbelief. “Oh, God, Mel,
not that garbage. Not from you.”
  “I’m not saying I believe it exactly.”
  “Then what exactly? A nut theory that the World
Health Organization had AIDS created in an
American laboratory—”
  “Not just any lab. Bethesda or Fort Derrick.”
  “—as a biological weapon and then deliberately
spread it around black Africans and gay Americans
through contaminated vaccines in the 1970s—”
  “Not necessarily ‘deliberately,’” Melanie said. “It
might have been accidentally. Through culture
contamination, or experimentally.”
   “Well, at least you’re not a total conspiracy
loonie. You’ve only let your imagination break into a
gallop.”
  “Joe, the Department of Defense did approve a
twenty-three-million-dollar appropriation for
bioweapons in 1969! You know that!”
  “Sure. Cold War stuff. But then they discontinued
the program and—”
  “Do you believe that?”
 “Do you believe WHO was into genocide as a
means of population control?”
   “Well, no,” she said, and heard that she sounded
reluctant. “I think the AIDS virus did come out of
the rain forest. But malaria reading is different,
Joe. This plague is deliberate.”
   “I agree. And more and more, so does everybody
else. You’re just too impatient, you know that?
People are coming to agree that P. reading was
engineered. But that doesn’t mean WHO created it,
for God’s sake. They’re the good guys, remember?”
   Melanie didn’t answer. Joe munched on French
fries; the smell of the food made her stomach lurch.
After a moment he said, with an all too obvious
attempt to change the subject, “Speaking of WHO,
have you heard the rumors about Farlow? No, of
course you haven’t. You haven’t been near your own
team, except for me, in three days.”
   “I’ve been in the field,” Melanie protested. “In
fact, after we finish this disgusting lunch, I have to
change and go on another call. What about
Farlow?”
  “Promotion. To second-in-command at WHO.”
  “In Switzerland? Do you think he’ll take it?”
  “Wouldn’t you?”
   “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Its a coup, of
course. But given everything, all the unresolved
issues about AIDS and even Ebola…”
  “Oh, god, not Ebola, too. Mel, Ebola is not a
manufactured disease. Outbreaks have been
recorded since the plague of Athens and—”
   “You can’t tell from ancient records what those
diseases actually were, and you know it. They didn’t
know anything! A hundred years ago most doctors
still believed that malaria was caused by ‘bad air,’
for God’s sake!”
  Her voice had risen. People at the next table
turned to stare. More than stare—purse their fat
redneck lips and look from her to Joe and harden
their pasty jawlines. Ignorant honlaes. She glared
back.
   “Melanie,” Joe said quietly, “you’re losing
self-control.”
  “Thank you very much, Dr. Krovetz.”
  “I mean it, Mel. You’ve got to chill out or
something will happen.”
   “Yeah? Like what? A brush with actual truth?
Excuse me, I’ve got work to do.” Suddenly she
couldn’t stand McDonald’s a second longer. “Bad
air.” She had to get out of there to breathe.
Standing up so abruptly that her chair fell over, she
marched across the street and put on her mourning
dress and hat for her next objectively scientific
epidemiological interview.



   She walked back to her car after the interview in
Faulkner, Charles County. It had clouded over; the
humidity must be close to 100 percent. Inside the
car, she turned on the AC, hiked up her dress, and
peeled off her panty hose. She threw her high heels
in the backseat and slipped on sandals. Her head
felt as if a vise squeezed her brain.
   It was always worse when it was a child. An
impish, grinning little boy. The mother had insisted
on showing her an entire photo album of pictures,
as if that could somehow bring her son back. Dead
at four years old.
  And yet she’d seen dead four year olds before,
hundreds of them, in her trips to Africa on
epidemic teams. Four year olds dead of malaria, of
typhus, of dengue fever, of all the horrible things
that went on tormenting Africa no matter what
anybody did. She’d grieved for those four year olds,
but not like this. Why not? Was it no more than the
crudest kind of nationalism?
  No. It was because despite what she’d said to Joe
at lunch, she believed the African epidemics were
natural. Heart-breaking, enraging, worsened by
callous political stupidity—but still natural. Not
engineered by human evil, as this was. So that even
with the death rate dropping— this was her first
case this week, and it was already Wednesday—the
death of a four year old by malarial cerebral stroke
was murder, with all the gut-twisting horror of
child killing.
   Suddenly, she had to get a look at Michael Sean
Donohue. Even though he didn’t do it. She just had
to look at him. There was a team meeting in an
hour, but she’d blow it off. Probably just the
announcement of Farlow’s move to Switzerland,
now that the epidemic was waning and the FBI had
the cause safely in custody, where he could do no
more harm to middle America. Yeah, right.
   Melanie headed the car north. The decision
finally made to see Donohue, she was suddenly
ravenous. When had she last eaten? Not today,
barely yesterday. Her stomach howled for food. She
drove into a plaza somewhere in Prince Georges
county and spied a Burger King. Well, okay—this
hungry, even fast food would do.
   It was evidently a black area: sisters and brothers
thronged both in front and behind the counter, the
lines sliced and resliced by children running amok
in their Burger King crowns. Melanie got in line
behind two teenage boys with partially shaved
heads and baggy clothes, and watched two tiny girls
in pink sunsuits chase each other between the
tables. They were having a wonderful time. The vise
in her head eased a bit.
   “A Whopper,” the boy ahead of her said to the
counter clerk, “and… and… oh, fuck…” He clutched
his head and collapsed on the floor.
   A woman screamed. The boy’s friend dropped
beside him, shouting “Cal! Gal!” The two little girls
stopped running by, petrified. One of them started
to cry. People crowded around the fallen boy.
 No, no, no. Not again. Not another kid, not here
—She couldn’t move.
   “Call nine-one-one!” somebody yelled, and there
was a stampede to the phone. The kid on the floor
lay still. His friend started to sob.
  “Let me through,” Melanie said, although she
didn’t know if any sound actually emerged from her
vocal chords. “Let me through; I’m a doctor—”
   The crowd parted. The sobbing boy abruptly
stopped sobbing and stared up at Melanie. His
expression changed. Before she could register what
that meant, the fallen lad leapt up from the floor
and both of them started laughing and dancing
around. “Got you! Got you all, suckers!”
  Melanie stopped cold. The entire scene froze for
her, as if she—or it—were encased in ice.
  “Got you!”
  Abruptly, the ice cracked.
   She tore forward and grabbed the boy by the
front of his T-shirt. “How dare you! How dare you,
you lousy little motherfucker! How dare you!” She
punched him in the face: once, twice, three times.
Even though he was three inches taller than she, he
didn’t hit her back. He stared, stupefied.
   “How dare you! How dare you…” She was
sobbing now, her voice jagged, her final punch
missing his face and landing on his right ear. But
her other punches had connected. The boy’s nose
bled, gushing blood over his chin, his shirt, her
hand.
  “Hey!” the boy’s friend finally yelled, and he
grabbed her from behind. He pinned her arms to
her side. Melanie kicked him.
  “That ain’t no doctor,” somebody said.
  “Kid deserved it. Doing us like that!”
  “Here come a cop…”
  “How dare you!” Melanie screamed one last time.
“With your own people dying for real—you
stupid-ass motherfucker! You imbecile!”
   A commotion behind her, and a babble of voices.
Melanie couldn’t distinguish anything; the ice field
was back, only this time it was freezing everything,
killing off all decency, all good, all compassion…
  The second boy’s hands released her, and
handcuffs clamped her wrists behind her back.
   “That’s enough,” the cop said. He was stern, and
disgusted, and white. “What happened here?”
   Immediately six people tried to tell him. He
listened to the babble, studying Melanie’s face.
Suddenly he said, “I know you. You’re that woman
on TV, on the malaria reading task force from
Atlanta. Dr… Anderson.”
  The crowd fell quiet, looking at her.
  “Did you attack this boy?”
  Melanie said nothing. The cop looked at the lad.
His nose still bled, and he was going to have a
purple-and-blue shiner. Her ring had torn open the
skin on his cheek, a raw, jagged laceration.
  “She done it,” the boy’s friend said sullenly.
“Bitch just went for him like a cat!”
   The cop looked at the crowd. Some turned away.
A few nodded. The cop’s partner came into the
Burger King from the patrol car and took out a
notepad. The first cop turned back to Melanie.
  “Ma’am, you’re under arrest for assault. You have
the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and
may be used against you…”



   She called the Weather Vane Motel from the
police station. The cops booked her, fingerprinted
her, took her statement. Across the room the two
teenage boys looked at her with hatred, a particular
punishment in itself. The cops put her in a cell by
herself, where she sat huddled and numb for two
hours until Farlow, accompanied by a lawyer, came
to pay her bail and get her out.
   The lawyer left in his own car. Farlow said
nothing to her until they sat in his. Then he turned
to her. “Where were you going that you ended up in
that Burger King?”
  “To College Park.” She was surprised at the
sound of her own voice, low and thin: She sounded
exhausted.
  She was exhausted.
  Farlow said, “To get a look at Michael Donohue.”
  “Yes.”
   “Jesus, Melanie.” He gripped the wheel, silent,
thinking. Melanie saw the minute he made his
decision.
  “I’m taking you off the team and sending you
back to Atlanta. For a vacation first, then for
reassignment.”
  “No, Jim… no.”
   “Yes. You’re lucky there was no press at that
Burger King, although they’ll have a field day when
they get to that kid. Besides, Melanie, you can’t do
anything else here anyway. The epidemic is under
control. USAMRIID disrupted the lines of
transmission, and all that’s left is the mop-up stuff.”
   “Not quite,” Melanie said. An epidemic wasn’t
officially over until a period of twice the disease’s
maximum incubation period elapsed from the date
of the last known case, without any new cases
reported in the interim. They weren’t there yet.
People were still dying.
  “It’s mostly over,” Farlow insisted. “But with the
political situation so hot… God, what came over
you? Never mind. I know.”
  “No. You don’t.”
  “Your arraignment is Monday. You can stay at
the Weather Vane until then, at CDC expense, or
you can go home and fly back up. I’d recommend
going home.” He let go of the steering wheel and
turned to face her. “This has been coming on with
you for a long time. We’ve all seen it. I should have
sent you back before this. It’s my fault.”
  Something was wrong with his tone, but she was
too exhausted and whipped to figure out what it
was. He looked at her, started to say something
more, stopped. Instead he stared out the front
windshield, and his mouth trembled.
  “Let’s go,” Melanie finally said aloud. They did.
   They drove in silence through the ugly suburban
sprawl. Melanie watched black children playing on
the steaming sidewalks, the ragged lawns, the
streets. Women sat on sagging steps watching the
children, as women did everywhere in the world,
caretaking and chatting. But here the caretaking
would have an extra desperate edge, and the chatter
would not be light.
  I’m not leaving Maryland for very long, Jim.
Not till it’s completely over. But that she did not
say out loud.



   Cavanaugh rode in the second car, with Dunbar
and two members of the evidence-protection team.
In the car ahead were Piloxzi and Arnett, an FBI
medic, and one of the Division Five agents, Bruce
Maloney. Two more cars followed with the scientific
team, the physical evidence team, a media
representative, and God-knew-who else. Twenty
unsmiling agents in four dark cars. If they turned
on their lights, they’d look like a funeral.
   Dunbar, officially the case agent, carried the
search warrant. “Can I see it?” Cavanaugh asked.
Dunbar gave him a hard look that meant, Don’t
start anything, Robert. Cavanaugh knew by now
that Dunbar disliked him. Cavanaugh minded, but
at least it made Dunbar, with his J. Edgar Hoover
sense of Bureau solidarity, bend over backwards to
be “fair” to Cavanaugh. He handed over the
warrant.
   It was thick, at least thirty pages, A copy had
been delivered to Donohue’s lawyer earlier this
morning. Cavanaugh skipped past the legal
formalities and the object-of-search section, which
he had already seen. It listed sixty-four categories of
items that could be seized from Donohue s town
house. These included “materials used for scientific
experiments;” “paraphernalia associated with
genetic engineering, blood drawing, storage, or
use;” “correspondence, books, or magazines
connected to genetic engineering, malaria, or
mosquitoes;” “hate literature;” and “equipment,
specimens, or instruments, or tools associated with
the breeding, altering, collecting, control, or
breeding of mosquitoes, especially but not limited
to Anopheles quadrimaculatus.” Oh, great. “Tools
associated with the… control… of mosquitoes.”
What if Donohue owned a fly swatter?
  Cavanaugh turned to the section on probable
cause.
   He expected, given Maloney’s presence, to see an
evocation of national security. The Supreme Court
had declined to comment on whether the Fourth
Amendment, which guaranteed “the right of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects,” applied in cases of national security.
However, the Court had said that whatever powers
the president had to dump the Fourth Amendment
in order to preserve national security should be
used very, very cautiously. In fact, they should be
limited to “instances of immediate and grave peril”
to the nation. Also, the search warrant should be
authorized directly by either the president or the
attorney general. Given the high profile of malaria
reading, Cavanaugh expected to see that this search
was in response to “immediate and grave peril” to
25 percent of the population of the state of
Maryland. He expected to see the attorney general s
signature.
  None of it was there.
  The warrant had been issued by a federal judge.
And although there was a nod toward a “serious
health emergency,” probable cause rested mostly on
the Hobbs Act and on information from informants.
Just like a routine drug bust.
   “The Hobbs Act?” Cavanaugh said out loud.
Immediately he regretted it. Dunbar looked even
stonier than usual, if that was possible. Cavanaugh
returned to reading.
   The Hobbs Act was certainly a safer, less
controversial choice on which to base a search
warrant than was national security. In fact, the
Hobbs Act was the FBI’s best friend. It prohibited
the use of interstate facilities, such as mail or
phone, to advance illegal activities, such as murder.
The Hobbs Act kept so many investigators off
unemployment that Cavanaugh had once referred
to it in a Bureau meeting as the Jobs Act. This had
amused no one.
   According to the warrant, the FBI had probable
cause to believe that Michael Sean Donohue had
used both mail and telephone to advance the
genetic engineering of Anopheles into a killer of at
least 917 people in at least three states.
   “Reliable informants” had stated that Donohue
had received packages from both scientific and
insect-supply houses. The supply house itself, in Los
Angeles, confirmed his order for six thousand
Anopheles mosquitoes.
   Donohue had opened a PO box in Bel Alton,
Charles County, Maryland, forty miles from his
home, and very near the epicenter identified by the
CDC. The mosquitoes from California had been sent
to this PO box.
  Two security guards had seen him illegally
remove a gene sequencer from his former place of
employment, Genemod, Inc. One of the guards had
also seen him carry out late at night “other
scientific equipment.”
  Citizen informants, deemed by the court to be
more reliable than criminal informants, stated that
on at least three occasions Donohue had expressed
“murderous contempt” for African Americans.
   Finally, and most damning, was a statement from
an informant named Curtis P. McGraw, of 658
Crestview Avenue, Chevy Chase, Maryland, and 841
Beach Road, Town Creek, Maryland. McGraw,
personally known to and deemed reliable by an FBI
agent, told the agent that Donohue had shown him
a “small cardboard box with holes covered with
cheesecloth.” In the box, visible through the
cheesecloth, buzzed live mosquitoes. McGraw said
that Donohue said, “These are instruments of death
like the world has never seen. And like nobody else
is smart enough to make.”
   Attachments to the warrant included signed and
sworn affidavits, invoices, bills of lading, PO
documents, correspondence. Cavanaugh went back
and read through the “probable cause” section
again. It was not illegal to order mosquitoes
through the mail. It was not illegal to order
scientific equipment through the mail. It was not
illegal to open a post office box in another city. It
was not illegal to sit around a bar and air your
prejudices.
  It was illegal to steal equipment from your
employer, but it was a state crime, not a federal
one.
   A magistrate who issued a search warrant was
supposed to take into account the “totality of
circumstance.” Still, most of this search warrant
depended on the affidavit of one informant, as
vouched for by one FBI agent. The whole thing
puzzled Cavanaugh.
  “All right,” Dunbar said, “lets go.”
   At the sight of four more Bucars, added to the
four surveillance vehicles already present, the
waiting media went crazy. They photographed, they
filmed, they climbed on top of vehicles for
wide-angle shots, they shouted. “Hey, Agent
Dunbar, you making an arrest?” “You doing a
search?” “Just one comment! Look this way,
please!” Dunbar ignored them all, and everybody
else followed Dunbar. A twenty-faced Mount
Rushmore, Cavanaugh thought. Only not as
cheerful.
   Erickson, the lawyer, answered the door. The FBI
filed in past him. Donohue sat in his living room,
reading a magazine. He barely looked up as Dunbar
ran through the formalities.
   Cavanaugh studied the town house. On this level
were a living/dining area, tiny kitchen, half bath,
another room with closed door that might be a den
or a small bedroom. Stairs led to the upper level.
Donohue;s furniture was clean-lined but a little
shabby, his pictures all prints or posters. The only
expensive item was a glassed and lighted display
case filled with Oriental bowls, vases, and small
statues. Some were painted, some lacquered, some
made of jade or stone. Even Cavanaugh, who had
studied art in college but barely knew what he liked,
could see that these were beautiful.
   The agents began their methodical work. “One
issue of Cell Biology, June 1998,” an agent
announced, putting it into a bag.
   “Noted,” said a second agent, recording the item,
labeling the bag, and starting a stack of seized
objects.
  “One large scientific beaker being used as a
planter for… um… plants.”
  Bird’s nest fern, Cavanaugh thought but didn’t
say aloud. He was technically still assigned to
Surveillance. Silently, he surveilled.
  “Noted.”
  “One book, paperback, titled Field Guide to
Insects, by John G. Barnaby, with handwritten
comments in the margins.”
  “Noted.”
  “One book, hardcover, titled Short Protocols in
Molecular Biology. Lots of drawings and stuff, but I
don’t see any handwriting.”
  “Noted.”
  Cavanaugh watched as the agent leafed through
the book. He caught words like “oligonucleotide”
and chapter titles like “Construction of Hybrid DNA
Molecules.” A full-color drawing looked like a lava
lamp in progress, but probably wasn’t. Donohue,
whatever else he might be, was a bona fide scientist.
They should all remember that.
  “Dr. Donohue,” Dunbar said, the medic beside
him, “the warrant specifies two vials of your blood.
Will you come into the kitchen, please?”
  Donohue looked at his lawyer, who nodded.
Cavanaugh followed. In the kitchen, agents pulled
cupboards apart, stacking skillets and dishes and
candles, granola and ketchup and chutney on the
counter. While the medic drew his blood, Donohue
gazed at nothing, smiling faintly.
  “Now a voice exemplar, please,” Dunbar said.
“Just speak clearly into this microphone.”
  “And what am I supposed to say?”
  “Anything you wish.”
  The lawyer said quickly, “Mike, just recite… oh,
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
   Donohue said, clearly and without hesitation,
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation is at present
dismantling my house. They are most thorough,
most intrusive, and most mistaken. Twinkle,
twinkle, agents blind, I wonder what you think
you’ll find. Up above the real so high, truth escapes
your misled eye. Twinkle, twinkle, agents blind.”
   Dunbar said tightly, “I advise you to be careful
with your name calling, Dr. Donohue. The FBI
already has evidence tying you closely to a white
supremacist hate group.”
   Cavanaugh hid his surprise. It wasn’t illegal to lie
in order to get a statement out of a suspect, but it
was unlike Dunbar. And Donohue wasn’t the kind of
suspect to crumble under accusations; Dunbar
must know that. The case agent stood stiffly, arms
rigid at his side, obviously controlling some
emotion.
  All Donohue said, one eyebrow raised, was, “Oh?
How interesting.”
   A sudden commotion upstairs. Two agents
clattered down the stairs, one carrying a cardboard
box. Inside were two insect carriers like the ones
Cavanaugh had seen in the insect-supply-house
catalogues. The agent flipped open the lids and
tilted the box toward Dunbar. Cavanaugh knew
what he was looking at. The bottoms of both cages
were piled with the dark brown, patchy-winged
corpses of Anopheles quadrimaculatus. Some of the
tiny dead bodies were tagged, just like the ones
Melanie Anderson had shown him at the CDC
temporary lab.
  The lawyer groaned. Donohue gazed blankly
ahead, faintly smiling.



   Cavanaugh drove south from College Park to the
Weather Vane Motel, where his peripatetic
belongings now sat in Marcy’s neat packing boxes.
It seemed as good a place as any to park himself
temporarily. Abigail hadn’t seemed to mind the
move, although Cavanaugh had already had one
complaint that she howled when he was away all
day.
  As he drove, Cavanaugh went over it all again
and again. Dunbar s strange, unidentified emotion.
Dunbar’s lying to Donohue. Most of all, the
discrepancy between what Donohue had said and
the informant had said he’d said. Not a discrepancy
of content.
  Of style.
  “These are instruments of death like the world
has never seen. And like nobody else is smart
enough to make.” That was one.
   “The Federal Bureau of Investigation is at
present dismantling my house. They are most
thorough, most intrusive, and most mistaken.”
That was the other, followed by the “Twinkle,
Twinkle Little Star” parody, without preparation,
right off the top of Donohue s head.
   Both the informant’s hearsay and Donohue’s
mocking description of the search used parallel
structure, true. But the hearsay statement just
didn’t sound like Donohue s balanced sentences.
And “like” was a preposition, not a conjunction.
And the awkward verb. Wouldn’t Donohue have
said something like, “These are instruments of
death such as the world has never seen, and such as
no one else is intelligent enough to create”? The
word “create” would fit with Donohue’s demeanor;
he’d sat among the scurrying, bustling agents like a
god among mortals.
  Or maybe he, Cavanaugh, was just reading too
much into diction and sentence structure. After all,
the informant, this Curtis P. McGraw, might have
simply paraphrased what he’d heard, in words that
he would have used. Especially if McGraw were
uneducated, or flighty, or on drugs. Or maybe he
had a tin ear for the cadence of English prose. Many
people did.
   Nonetheless, Cavanaugh worried the problem for
another ten miles. Then he pulled over and phoned
Dunbar at his home. Special Agent Dunbar, his wife
said in a voice as tight-assed as Dunbar s own, had
not yet arrived home. She would turn on the
machine so that Special Agent Cavanaugh could
leave a detailed message.
  He did, explaining about the parallel structure
and incorrect preposition, feeling every second like
more of a fool. He ended, lamely, “So there it is.”
  Pause.
  “For you to consider.”
 Pause. Then, lamest of all, “I was an English
major.”
  He drove on to the Weather Vane Motel and his
howling dog.



  INTERIM



   The woman took her jacket and skirt and hung
them carefully in the narrow locker. Jil Sander.
Who would have thought that she could ever afford
Jil Sander? Actually, she couldn’t. But the raise that
accompanied her promotion would come through
next paycheck, and anyway she deserved this suit.
She’d bought it in a haze of euphoria just yesterday
when the CEO himself had told her about the
promotion. “Outstanding qualities of leadership,”
he’d said. If that didn’t justify Jil Sander, what did?
  The noontime buzz in the locker room rose, but
the woman didn’t join in. She preferred to keep to
herself. She was going higher than all the rest of
these women and in the not-too-distant-future. It
wasn’t a good idea to form friendships that could
prove awkward later.
   Her euphoria lasted throughout the aerobics
class—fueled her, strengthened her. She had a great
workout. Afterwards, stripping off her sweaty
workout clothes in the shower booth, she couldn’t
stop grinning. Damn, but she felt good. She had to
restrain the impulse to sing.
  Soaping her arms under the stinging spray,
angling herself to keep her hair dry, she noticed a
small red patch high on her left shoulder.
  No. No. It wasn’t.
  But it was. She calculated rapidly. She’d worn a
white silk tank top to Wolf Trap two nights ago, and
they’d sat outdoors. Had she applied the insect
repellent high enough on the shoulder? She thought
she had. But here it was, a mosquito bite, and she’d
never even felt the goddamn little thing get her…
   Calm down, she told herself. Calm down. You
can handle it. Yes, she was sickle-trait positive, her
blood test early during the epidemic had confirmed
that. But the bite was only two days old. The
Plasmodium parasites took seven to ten days inside
the liver before they were released into the
bloodstream. That’s what the CDC bulletins said: on
TV, on posters, on the flyer in her briefcase. She was
still okay, as long as she went to the clinic
immediately. They’d had months of experience with
this thing; they’d learned what to do. Her next move
was simply to get herself to one of the epidemic
clinics, and they’d advise her from there.
  Quickly she dried herself, pulled on fresh
underwear, and ran back to her locker to put on the
new Jil Sander.



                  TWELVE

     Healing is a matter of time, but it is
     sometimes also a matter of opportunity,
     —Hippocrates, Precepts, fourth century
     B.C.



  Melanie sat numbly in front of the TV, its
flickering grays the only light in her motel living
room. It was six forty-five. The others had gone out
to dinner. They, or maybe just Joe Krovetz, had
knocked on her door, probably to ask her to join
them. She’d kept the curtains closed and the lights
off, and eventually they’d gone away.
  She was no longer a member of the malaria
reading team.
   It could have been worse, of course. Farlow could
have fired her. Instead she got a paid vacation, no
official reprimand, the chance to work on other
epidemics. It could have been much worse. All she’d
failed at was this one epidemic.
   Except that she, Melanie Patricia Anderson,
didn’t fail. Ever. She’d been summa cum laude at
Berkeley. She’d graduated fourth in her class at Yale
School of Medicine. She’d earned glowing
recommendations and universal trust during her
epidemiological work in Africa. Even when she was
doctoring in Mississippi, hating it, she’d been a
good doctor. Melanie Anderson did not encounter
situations she couldn’t master.
   Except, of course, she had. And though she’d
tried and tried to shame herself into recognizing
that, next to the brothers and sisters who were
dying, her own setback was pathetically minor—she
somehow couldn’t do it. All she could do was sit
numbly and stare at a newsman with carefully
moussed hair, grinning about the “favorable
developments” in malaria reading.
   “Only two deaths this week—a significant drop
from just last week, which was, in turn, a drop from
the week before. In a press statement this morning,
Dr. James Farlow, head of the epidemiological team
from the CDC, had this to say.”
   A picture of Jim flashed onto the screen behind
the anchorman’s left shoulder, then enlarged and
started talking. Farlow looked solemn. “The CDC is
convinced we’ve pinned down the major
components of this disease. The public-health
measures undertaken by Maryland and Virginia,
plus our new understanding of the biology involved,
make us feel pretty sure that the public-health crisis
is essentially over. The Health Service and the army
will remain in southern Maryland, but the CDC
team is ready to return to Atlanta and continue our
research there.”
   Back to the anchorman. “But for at least one
person, the crisis is not over. In fact, it may be just
beginning. Today FBI agents obtained a search
warrant for the town house of Dr. Michael Sean
Donohue. Twenty special agents combed every
inch—”
  “Melanie,” a male voice called, to vigorous
knocking on the door. “Melanie, you there?”
  Cavanaugh. Melanie watched a tiny version of
him on the TV screen, one of twenty men filing into
Donohue’s home, while the anchorman did a
voice-over and a larger Cavanaugh banged on her
door. Well, in a few minutes he would go away.
 “—carrying boxes of items to the FBI labs in
Washington for thorough analysis—”
  “Melanie? Melanie Anderson?”
  Why didn’t he go away? She didn’t want to see
anybody or talk to anybody, and if she did, it
wouldn’t be him.
   “—case agent Gerald L. Dunbar had this one
pithy comment— Dunbar, in a dark suit beside a
dark car. He looked even more solemn than Farlow.
He said stiffly, ”I’m convinced we have the man
we’re looking for.“
  “Melanie! Open up!”
    She walked to the door, unlocked and unchained
it, opened it. “What? Don’t you realize that when
someone doesn’t come to the door maybe it’s
because they don’t want to come to the door?”
  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said, unembarrassed. For some
reason, a dog trailed him. He held out a sheet of
paper. “This was in my E-mail just now when I got
home from work. It’s an internal memo for the CDC
team, copied to USAMRIID and the Health Service
and the Bureau. What’s it all about, Melanie?” He
handed her the paper.



     THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE
     CONTROL REGRETS TO ANNOUNCE
     THAT DR. MELANIE ANDERSON
     WILL BE LEAVING THE MALARIA
     READING TEAM IN SOUTHERN
     MARYLAND DUE TO PRESSING
     FAMILY CIRCUMSTANCES. HER
     WORK ON THIS EPIDEMIC HAS BEEN
     INVALUABLE, AND THE CDC WISHES
     TO COMMEND HER FOR HER MANY
     IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS. DR.
     ANDERSON WILL BE RETURNING TO
     WORK AT THE SPECIAL PATHOGENS
     BRANCH OF THE CDC IN ATLANTA
     SOMETIME NEXT MONTH.



   She held the paper, saying nothing, staring
bleakly at the heading. The E-mail transmission
time was 2:14 P.M. Farlow must have prepared the
press statement even before he bailed her out of the
police station.
  “Melanie, are you all right?”
   She said tonelessly, “Oh, yes, of course I’m all
right. I assaulted a teenage kid. I got fired off the
most important project of my career. Your precious
Bureau is doing a cover-up of attempted genocide.
But of course I’m all right.”
  “Assault?” Cavanaugh said. “Fired?”
  “Please leave.” She tried to shut the door on him.
He shoved past her into the room. The dog followed,
wagging its tail.
  “Melanie, just tell me what happened. Please.”
  “Why should I? It has nothing to do with you.
You guys ‘got the man we’re looking for.’ And
none—”
   “No, we don’t,” Cavanaugh said, but she was
trying to finish her own sentence.
    “—of you care that what’s going on here isn’t the
result of one hate-filled nut. There’s a group behind
it, and their goal is no less than African-American
genocide.”
  He said, “It’s not really genocide.”
  “What?”
   He explained to her. “This isn’t really ‘genocide.’
That word means killing total populations. Only
twelve percent of African Americans carry
sickle-cell trait, so even in a worst-case scenario,
only twelve percent could be killed. That doesn’t
qualify as actual ‘genocide,’ even in intent.”
   Melanie stared at him. “Not genocide? I suppose
you think Dachau and Auschwitz weren’t genocide
either, because some Jews escaped them?”
  “No,” he said patiently. “You don’t understand.
That was different because—”
   “It’s you who don’t understand! Not a fucking
thing!” Suddenly her numbness shattered. All her
rage, her hurt, her frustration rose in her throat
and vomited itself out on this one person who was
challenging all of it. “No, you sure the hell don’t
understand. And you know why you don’t
understand a fucking thing? ‘Cause you’re white!
  “You don’t understand what it’s like to visit a
house for an epidemiological interview where a
healthy four-year-old child has just died. Four years
old, beloved of his grandma and his mother and his
sobbing older sister… and murdered! That’s
genocide—of a whole family’s future, all the black
children that murdered black child might have had.
And their children.
   “But we don’t even need to take it to that level,
Agent Cavanaugh. No, we don’t. You don’t
understand a fucking thing at a much more daily
level. You don’t understand how a black woman gets
tailed by a security guard the minute she walks into
a pricey store because the assumption is that of
course she’s a shoplifter. You don’t understand how
a black man crossing a street, minding his own
business, of course causes all the car door locks to
click for half a block in either direction. You don’t
understand that black people riding in a Lincoln
Continental get stopped by the cops twice every
mile because the cops just naturally think they’re
drug dealers. It doesn’t matter if they’re dressed for
church on a Sunday with their kids in the backseat;
they get stopped anyway. You ever get stopped
because you were riding in a Lincoln Continental,
Agent Cavanaugh? I don’t think so.”
   She moved so close to him that her spittle landed
on his tie. He tried to move away, but she went
right with him. “You don’t understand why a black
woman with a medical degree from Yale has to
wear a suit just to check into a hotel because
otherwise they’ll assume she’s either a hooker or one
of the maids. You don’t understand how that same
black woman, even in her suit, is looked at and
talked to in the hotel bar by all the nice out-of-town
white businessmen with a little too much to drink.
‘Hey, brown sugar.’ ‘Nice ass, baby.’ ‘How much for
one hour, sweetheart?’ You don’t understand how
that same woman feels knowing that everyone in
the seminar she’s teaching is coolly appraising her
and thinking, ‘Did she really get here on merit, or is
it all affirmative action?’ You can’t understand
anything, Cavanaugh! And on top of what you don’t
understand ‘cause you’re white are all the things
you don’t understand ’cause you’re a goddamn FBI
agent!”
  “Calm down, Melanie.”
   “Don’t tell me what to do! Do you know what
your J. Edgar Hoover did to African Americans? He
targeted them in the sixties for special surveillance,
smear campaigns, harassment of leaders like
Martin Luther King. He used agents to deliberately
set civil rights groups against each other, until even
a Senate investigating committee concluded that
the FBI—and I quote—was ‘fomenting violence and
unrest’!”
  “Hoover’s dead,” Cavanaugh said. “He died in
1970, remember? The Bureau’s different now.
The—”
  “Oh, right! That’s why in the nineties your black
agents had to band together and threaten lawsuit
before the FBI would agree to promote some of
them to supervisor positions! Or didn’t they teach
you about that at Quantico? No, they fucking sure
didn’t! How you can stand there and say… and
say…”
   She was crying now, which was worse than
yelling. She hated it. She put her hands over her
face to hide the tears from him, but she couldn’t
stop sobbing, couldn’t get words past her throat to
tell him to get the hell out, couldn’t go on being a
member of the CDC team…
  He was patting her shoulder, fumbling in his
pocket for a tissue. She took it and swiped at her
eyes, but more stupid fucking tears came to replace
the ones she’d wiped away. She couldn’t stop crying
and now the tissue was soaked through.
  His arms went around her.
  Instantly she froze. And he must have been
encouraged by her sudden quiet, because he lifted
her chin and kissed her.
  She tore herself free. “You bastard. Get out.”
  He looked bewildered. “I only—”
  “I know what you only.” She barely recognized
her own voice, thick and quiet and deadly. “You
only thought your simple ass saw a way in, right?
She’s crying, she’s vulnerable, pat her a little, kiss
her a little, and you’re halfway to the bedroom and
a little black nookie to brag about to the other
agents, right? You make me sick. Get out.”
  “No, I—”
   “Get out. Before I scream rape and report you to
your tight-assed supervisor, Special Agent
Got-Our-Man Dunbar. And if you ever dare touch
me again… I don’t do white men, you got that, cop?
I wouldn’t let one of you hold my hand!”
  “I…”
  “GET OUT!”
   He went. The dog, whom Melanie had completely
forgotten, trotted out with him. Melanie bolted and
chained the door and then stood leaning against it,
panting as if she’d just had a fistfight. Stupid
bastard, opportunistic pussy-chaser, fucking white
cop.
  You’re losing it, girl.
   Slowly she slid to the floor, suddenly seeing the
whole awful scene with Cavanaugh from the
outside, as if she were watching it on TV, one more
newscast in the malaria reading plague. Her tears
stopped. For a long time she just sat there,
motionless, trying to understand what was
happening to her, trying to get a grip.
  A long time.
  Eventually she pulled herself up off the floor and
reached for the phone.
   “Mama? It’s Melanie. How are you? That’s good.
Uh, Mama, I have a few days off, and I was just
wondering… could I come home for the weekend?
Just to sort of wander around the old places and
just sort of… see you. And… everything. Would that
be okay? Mama?”
   Cavanaugh made his way to his own room at the
Weather Vane Motel, Abigail at his heels. And a lot
of good Abigail had been while Melanie berated
him. If she had thrown a frying pan at him, Abigail
would probably just have tried to fetch it.
  He sat on the edge of the bed, shaking his head.
  He’d only been trying to comfort her.
  Really? Then why had he kissed her?
   Male instinct. Testosterone. Distraction from the
afternoon’s misguided warrant search. Sexual
deprivation. General cluelessness about women.
  Judy. Marcy. Melanie. Strike three and you’re
way, way out. It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.
   The red light on his answering machine was
blinking. Not the Bureau; they’d call him on his cell
phone. Unless somebody wanted to talk to him
without having to actually talk to him. Answering
machines were good for that.
   “Robert, this is Special Agent in Charge Dunbar,
returning your call—” Such formal wording—not a
good sign. Well, so what. Dunbar the Human
Metronome always sounded both formal and stiff.
But all day today, it seemed to Cavanaugh, there’d
also been something more.
  “I’d like to see you in my office tomorrow at
seven-thirty A.M.” Pause. “That’s all.”
  Cavanaugh was left staring at the answering
machine light, now unblinking, an insectlike red dot
on the machine’s trim black case.



   He didn’t sleep much. At 7:22 he walked into the
Baltimore Field Office. Down the hall from Dunbar
s office stood a knot of agents, including Maloney
from Division Five and Borelli from Headquarters.
They all wore television-ready suits and carefully
knotted ties, and Maloney carried a sheaf of paper.
  They were going to arrest Michael Sean Donohue,
and Dunbar hadn’t included Cavanaugh.
  The agents stood carefully out of earshot of
Dunbar’s office. Only one looked directly at
Cavanaugh, and that one, even as he nodded,
seemed embarrassed.
  So it was like that. Cavanaugh knew now what
was coming. He just didn’t know why, or what he
was going to do about it.
   “Sit down, Agent Cavanaugh,” Dunbar said. “We
have something important to discuss. Did you, on
or about June 21, interview a Mrs. Hattie Brown of
Loveville, Saint Mary’s County, during the course of
your duties on the malaria reading case?”
   Mrs. Hattie Brown. As soon as he heard the
name, Cavanaugh saw her. A skinny, elderly black
woman dressed in jeans and a faded cotton blouse,
standing on her front porch in rural Maryland. A
tough, likable old bird.
  “Yes. I interviewed Mrs. Brown about the
Christian Crusade hate group.”
  “And did you reveal to her any information about
the case that you were not authorized to disclose?”
  “I don’t remember discussing anything
unauthorized.”
  “She does.” Dunbar opened the Baltimore Sun to
page 3.



      FBI ADMITS MUCH OF ITS WORK ON
        MALARIA READING DONE FOR
             POLITICAL REASONS
                BY LIBBY TURNER
     As long as well over a month ago, some
     segments of the FBI had doubts that the
     Bureau’s investigation of malaria
     reading was directed merely by
     law-enforcement or humanitarian
     objectives. A citizen interviewed by
     Special Agent Robert Cavanaugh, whose
     Resident Agency in Saint Mary’s City
     was the first to launch legal
     investigation of the epidemic, told the
     Sun that Cavanaugh had talked about
     much different motives. “They covering
     their ass,” was the way Mrs. Hattie
     Brown of Loveville reported the
     conversation to this reporter. However,
     Mrs. Brown insists that this colorful
     wording is not hers, but a direct quote
     from the agent himself.
     Mrs. Brown, along with several of her
     neighbors, was contacted about the
     Christian Crusade, a religious group
     that…
  “But you know what, son? People like Christian
Crusade ain’t the ones making this plague. They
too stupid. So why you wasting FBI time out here
asking about ‘em?”
  “Because my boss told me to.”
  She nodded again. “I see. FBI covering its ass?”
  “That’s about it.”
   “Ain’t it always the way. Be a whole lot of time
saved in this world if people warn’t made to waste
it covering their ass.”
  “I couldn’t agree more.”
  “Agent Cavanaugh?” Dunbar prompted.
  “Yes.”
  “Yes what?”
  “Yes, I said that to Mrs. Brown. But you have to
understand the context. We—”
  “No, I don’t have to understand the context.”
Dunbar rose behind his desk. “There’s nothing to
understand. The revised Bureau regulations that all
agents received a copy of, including you, are very
clear on this. ‘Disclosure of unauthorized
information is considered a serious exhibition of
faulty judgment, which calls into question an
agent’s ability and commitment. Such disclosures
are grounds for investigation and disciplinary
action.’”
   Cavanaugh’s stomach lurched. Dunbar had taken
time before this meeting to memorize the exact
wording. “Disciplinary action” at the FBI could
range from a letter of reprimand all the way to
dismissal, with a number of unpleasant options in
between. Probation, transfer, demotion, suspension,
request to resign…
   “In view of the serious circumstances
surrounding the entire case, and the many explicit
requests for confidentiality to all agents from the
director himself,” Dunbar said, still standing
behind his desk, “I am requesting the Office of
Professional Responsibility to begin an
investigation of your conduct. In the meantime, you
are removed from the malaria reading case, and
you are suspended without pay for a period of one
month.”
   Suspended. Not dismissed, not even forced into a
loss-of-effectiveness transfer. Suspended. That was
bad enough, and so was the OPR investigation, but
at least he was still an agent. For now.
  “Agent Cavanaugh, do you have anything to
add?”
  “No, sir.”
   “Then if you’ll excuse me…” Dunbar came around
his desk and walked past Cavanaugh. His gait was
stiff, even for Dunbar.
   Cavanaugh waited until Dunbar and the arrest
team had enough time to leave the building. He had
no wish to see them pretend he didn’t exist.
Nonetheless, he was more relieved than upset.
Much more relieved. He was still an agent.
  Thank you, J. Edgar Hoover Christ.
  Neither gratitude nor relief lasted through the
drive south from Baltimore.
   About twelve hundred agents were investigated
every year by the OPR. Offenses ranged from misuse
of Bureau cars for personal purposes (the most
common offense) to espionage against the United
States. Offenses also included lying to a grand jury,
sex with informants, taking a cut of drug sales, and
murder. And what had Cavanaugh done? Shared a
small joke with a likable old woman. Not exactly
treason.
   Of cases the OPR investigated, most resulted in
some disciplinary action. But he was getting
disciplinary action before the investigation. That
was allowed, but not usual for offenses like casual
unauthorized disclosure. Agents crabbed all the
time about the Bureau’s ass-covering, although you
weren’t supposed to indulge in that with a citizen
informant. Still… it wasn’t major.
  And another thing: OPR investigations averaged
seven months from beginning to final
administrative decision. It could take as much as a
year. During all that time an agent was under
suspicion within the Bureau itself. The outside
world wouldn’t know, but other case agents would
regard Cavanaugh as less than effective, working
under a cloud.
   Plus, after this month of suspension—“beach
time”—the malaria reading case would probably be
over. The death rate had already dropped to almost
nothing. The evidence against Donohue would have
gone to a grand jury, and thus have been turned
over by the FBI to the Department of Justice for
prosecution. Out of his reach.
  A suspicion began to form in Cavanaugh’s mind.
  To give the suspicion a better growth medium, he
pulled off the highway and parked in a mall.
Turning off the engine, he sat and thought it
through.
   He had been removed from the case for a minor
offense. But, it was a very public offense, thanks to
Libby Turner of the Sun, on a very public case.
   For the last week, Dunbar, the Human
Metronome, had been acting uncharacteristically.
Like a man under terrible strain. But, this case was
a terrible strain. Look what it had done to CDC
superepidemiologist Melanie Anderson. Dunbar
wasn’t black, but he was the case agent for an
enormity that had led to deaths, riots, vituperation,
countervituperation, and relentless public pressure
to get this thing solved.
   Dr. James Farlow, head of the CDC field team,
was suddenly being promoted to Switzerland, well
away from Washington. But, people got promoted
all the time. Farlow had done a good job, and from
what Cavanaugh had gathered, the World Health
Organization post that Farlow was accepting was a
plum.
   Dr. Melanie Anderson, the most outspoken of the
CDC people, calling malaria reading “genocide,”
had also been removed from the field team. But,
Melanie had assaulted a kid in a Burger King. The
assault had been all over the morning news, which
Cavanaugh had listened to on his car radio. Assault
was not the right public image for a CDC disease
fighter. Even though the kid allegedly had a long
history of causing trouble and pissing people off,
assault was still illegal.
  None of it really added up to anything.
  Cavanaugh sat and thought longer. Then he
pulled out his drawing pad. Doodling helped him
concentrate. He drew a teddy bear sitting on a shelf,
then added a tin soldier, a doll, a beach ball, and a
Frisbee. He gave the teddy bear a thought balloon
saying, “I wish I were a real avocado.” By the time
he labeled the drawing “STUPID TEDDY BEAR
DEPRESSION,” he knew what he was going to do
next.



   Seton wasn’t in their Leonardtown office,
although he’d left behind plenty of spoor: Pepsi
cans, Dorito bags, Snickers wrappers. Probably
Seton was in a bar near the Pax River naval base
“developing informants.” By now, Seton should have
everybody in Patuxent turning each other in for
federal crimes. Or at least have the navy well on the
road to sharing Seton’s alcoholism.
   Seton was a terrible agent. But he was clever
enough to have hoodwinked Dunbar, who hardly
ever saw Seton, and who was overly impressed by
the avalanche of correctly prepared paperwork that
rolled into Baltimore every month. Moreover, Seton
had a family, and he was very close to retirement.
Those agents in the field office who did know how
terrible he was would nonetheless protect him. Even
Director Broylin had admitted that marginal agents
were still tolerated more than they should be,
although usually they were stuck someplace doing
background checks on job applicants. Too bad
Seton was so good at churning out 302s.
  Cavanaugh wanted a look at those 302s.
   He didn’t have the password to Seton’s computer.
But he did have a key to the locked hard-copy
cabinets. Most agents didn’t keep hard copies once
the reports were turned in. Too much bother. But
Seton, so careful to impress his superiors, probably
had neatly filed hard copies of everything, just in
case he ever had to impress Dunbar the Book Man
in person. Cavanaugh started on the last cabinet.
   Not only filed, but cross-filed. It took Cavanaugh
all of ninety seconds to find the duplicate 302.



     On Tuesday, August 4, I met with
     informant Curtis P. McGraw, of 658
     Crestview Avenue, Chevy Chase,
     Maryland, and 841 Beach Road, Town
     Creek, Maryland. Mr. McGraw is the
     owner and CEO of McGraw Contracting.
     Currently this company builds
     condominiums and apartment houses
     along the eastern shore.
     Mr. McGraw told me that four months
     earlier, on April 2, he had met Dr.
     Michael Sean Donohue, of College Park,
     Maryland. They met at an evening
     seminar held by Tuchings. James, &
     Costain of Bethesda, Maryland, a private
     investment firm. (See attached seminar
     enrollment statement from Tuchings et
     al.) This seminar was held at the
     investment firm offices in Bethesda. Mr.
     McGraw and Dr. Donohue sat next to
     each other during the seminar and
     chatted during the coffee break. At the
     conclusion of the seminar they agreed to
     have a drink together at a nearby bar,
     Ramona’s.
     According to Mr. McGraw, the
     discussion that evening was about
     Chinese art. Both men collect it. Mr.
     McGraw told me, “I thought his
     collection sounded interesting, although
     not as good as mine. I had the
     impression he wasn’t particularly well
     off. But he was very knowledgeable, and
     his taste sounded good.”



   Cavanaugh looked up from the 302. Donohue
buying the little painted vase for two thousand
dollars at Cathay House. The lighted display cabinet
in his townhouse, filled with exquisite things.
     The following week, on April 7, Dr.
     Donohue visited Mr. McGraw at his
     residence during the evening, Mr.
     McGraw stated. No one else was
     present. On April 13, Mr. McGraw
     briefly visited Dr. Donohue at Dr.
     Donohue’s residence sometime during
     the afternoon. Business required Mr.
     McGraw to be in the area. Again no one
     else was present. Dr. Donohue showed
     Mr. McGraw his collection of Oriental
     art, which Mr. McGraw said consisted
     mostly of vases, bowls, and statues.
     According to Mr. McGraw, Mr.
     Donohue’s collection was
     “disappointing” and not as good as Mr.
     McGraw had expected. He expressed
     disappointment to Dr. Donohue. Mr.
     McGraw now says he can’t remember
     his exact words.
     But he does remember Dr. Donohue’s
     reply. Dr. Donohue allegedly said, “I
     have something that will impress you,
     Curt. Wait here.” Dr. Donohue then left
     the room. When he returned, he was
     carrying a small cardboard box with
     holes covered with cheesecloth. Inside,
     visible through the cheesecloth, were live
     mosquitoes, buzzing and flying. McGraw
     said that Donohue said, “These are
     instruments of death like the world has
     never seen. And like nobody else is smart
     enough to make.”



  There was the wording that had bothered
Cavanaugh in the search warrant. And Seton had
been the unnamed FBI agent responsible for
supplying it.



     Mr. McGraw does not remember his
     reply to Dr. Donohue. He says he left
     shortly afterward and did not contact
     Dr. Donohue again. “I decided he was a
     nut,” Mr. McGraw said to me. Dr.
     Donohue didn’t call Mr. McGraw again
     either.
     When the suspicion of Dr. Donohue was
     made public on television, Mr. McGraw
     came to me with his information. Mr.
     McGraw is personally known to me as a
     citizen informant. At one time I was
     investigating him for illegal activities
     involving buildings constructed by his
     firm at the Patuxent River Naval Air
     Station (see Southern Maryland
     Resident Agency, 302 Report Nos. 896,
     899, and 905). Since then, however,
     further investigation has cleared Mr.
     McGraw and established that reports of
     the alleged illegalities were engineered
     by a rival firm in the highly competitive
     contracting business (see Southern
     Maryland Resident Agency, 302 Report
     Nos. 1146 and 1147).
     Mr. McGraw is thus a citizen informant
     of good standing. His statement should
     be thoroughly investigated by the
     appropriate case agents.
     Special Agent Donald R. Seton Southern
     Maryland Resident Agency



  How long had it taken Seton to put this thing
together? Because it was put together. Concocted.
Assembled from bits of plausible fact into
something that had never happened.
  Why was Cavanaugh so sure of that? He didn’t
know. But it wasn’t just because he didn’t trust
Seton, or just because Cavanaugh had been
removed from the case. No. His former boss Marty
Felders had taught his agents to always follow up on
what Felders called “those old heebie-jeebies.” A
hunch, a suspicion, an epiphany. Felders was the
best agent Cavanaugh had ever seen, and before he
was an outstanding agent he’d been an outstanding
cop in New York. Felders was worth listening to.
Seton’s report gave Cavanaugh a major dose of
heebie-jeebies.
  Something was going on.
   This Curtis P. McGraw was being let off the hook
for federal construction fraud in return for
supplying “evidence” against Michael Donohue.
McGraw even came off looking like a patriotic hero.
Not hard to figure his motives. They went back to
Brutus.
   Nor were Seton’s reasons obscure. Retire with a
triumphant bang. Make up for all those “informant
reports” that seldom led to any concrete action.
   But Dunbar had bought this charade. So had
Bruce Maloney, from National Security Division.
So, for all Cavanaugh knew, had Director Broylin
himself. The search warrant for Donohue’s town
house had been based mostly on Seton’s report.
Although, Cavanaugh now remembered, it had been
issued by an ordinary federal judge, not the
attorney general. And the warrant had not claimed
any special intervention due to national security.
   Besides, the whole scam somehow was just too
grandiose for Seton. Seton stuck to the
inconsequential lie, the small cover-up, the petty
fraud. He was a petty man.
  This was not petty.
  So what was going on? Was the whole thing
merely a ruse to get in to search Donohue’s
apartment in hope that once the FBI got that far
more leads would present themselves? Such things
had certainly been known to happen in the Bureau.
But not on this scale, this publicly. And was it just
coincidence that Dr. Farlow was moving to
Switzerland, and Melanie Anderson was off the
malaria reading case, and ditto for Cavanaugh
himself, and Dunbar was acting as if he bore the
weight of civilization on his Hoover-uniformed,
soldier-rigid soldiers?
  If not coincidence, then who was covering up
what? And why?
  Cavanaugh had no answers. But his
heebie-jeebies clamored loud and strong.
  He copied Seton s report, returned the original to
the filing cabinet, and pulled out Seton s numerous
302s on Seton’s interactions with Curtis P.
McGraw. He started to read.



                THIRTEEN

     The FBI is a cruel organization in that it
     is highly bureaucratic, rule-oriented,
     rule bound. It’s cruel in the sense that it
     doesn’t treat its people very well
     sometimes.
     —Lee Colwell, former Associate
     Directorof the FBI, 1992



  “I see on Sixty Minutes that there’s doubt about
whether Donohue’s arrest will hold up legally,” Tess
Muratore said to Judy Kozinski over lunch at a
coffee shop. The two women sat in a booth at the
back, surrounded by a comfortable lunchtime
bustle. Tess, who only had an hour off duty, was in
her state trooper uniform. “The show said
Donohue’s lawyer is going to challenge on probable
cause. Although, of course, Sixty Minutes always
goes for the hysteria.”
  “I didn’t see the show,” Judy said airily.
  “Really,” Tess said.
  “No. I’ve been so busy with my new apartment.
Curtains, some new furniture… I want you to come
see it soon.”
  “Sure,” Tess said. “Has Robert called you?”
   “You know, this salad is really pretty good.
Especially for a coffee shop. I think the dressing’s
fresh.”
  “Stop trying to change the subject, Judy.”
  “The salad is the subject.”
   “No, you’re the subject,” Tess said. “Do you think
I’d give up a chance for a pepperoni sub in the
patrol car with my Neanderthal partner if I wasn’t
concerned about how you’re doing?”
  “I’m doing fine.” She speared an olive.
  “Okay, you’re fine. What about Robert? How’s
he? Has he called?”
   “No. And I don’t expect him to.” Judy ate the
olive, which stuck in her throat. Tess watched her
as she forced it down with an entire glass of water.
  “Uh, huh,” Tess said. “Did you see him on TV at
the warranted search of Donohue’s premises?”
  “Yes, it just so happened that I caught it.
‘Warranted search of Donohue’s premises.’ You
sound like a cop, Tessie.”
  “I am a cop.”
  “Well, stop investigating me.”
   “I thought we were talking about Robert,” Tess
said innocently. “He didn’t look good on TV. Sort of
pasty. And now this new allegation that he disclosed
unauthorized information to an outsider. Did you
just so happen to catch that news, too?”
   “Hard not to,” Judy said lightly. “The papers are
full of it.”
  “It’s bullshit. Robert was just working the
woman, getting her with him so’d she talk. If all
law-enforcement personnel who did that were
charged with misconduct, there’d be no cops left on
the streets. You see Arnfeld’s column about it in the
Post?”
  “Yes.”
  “You see where Robert’s boss, Dunbar, is going to
the International Law Enforcement Academy in
Budapest? He’s been named to head of the FBI
detail that’s there to train international police.”
  “Yes.”
  “Pretty nice. You see that announcement by
Donohue’s lawyer that Donohue had a private
polygraph test and it came out ‘no deception’?
That’s the highest rating. And now he’s agreed to let
the FBI give him a polygraph of their own. You
know about that?”
  “I know about it.”
   “Ah,” Tess said. “But you aren’t paying any
attention to Robert’s case. Oh, no.”
  “It’s not just ‘Robert’s case’; its public news
involving a genuine tragedy!” Judy flared. “And
whose side are you on, anyway—mine or Robert’s?”
  “I’m on your side. Always will be. But you aren’t
handling this as well as you think, Jude. Look at
you. You’re losing too much weight, you hardly
touched that salad you raved about, you cram your
days with busywork, you look terrible.”
  “Thanks a bunch!”
   Tess pushed away her sandwich and leaned
forward. She dropped her voice, which meant that
to hear her in the noisy lunch-hour rush of dropped
forks and human babble, Judy had to lean forward,
too.
    “You can’t run away from pain, Judy. It took me
two marriages to learn that. You gotta go through
it. It won’t help, in the long run, for you to pretend
Robert’s leaving doesn’t matter to you and you don’t
still love him. It does, and you do.”
   Judy said nothing. She gazed down at her
uneaten salad. Then, very low, “I feel like he reached
into my chest and tore my heart out.”
   “I know. I know you do. Just let yourself feel that,
just face it, and you’ll get through it. And maybe
he’ll call.”
   “No,” Judy said clearly. “I don’t want him to call.
I’m not clinging to somebody who treats me like
that. I clung and clung to Ben, and it only meant I
ended up putting up with shit nobody should put
up with.”
   “All right,” Tess said, “then let’s hope he doesn’t
call. I don’t care about him anyway—you’re my
friend. Oh, shit, look at the time. I gotta go—”
  “Take care, Tessie. And thanks.”
  “You take care, buddy. I’ll call you later in the
week.”
   Judy watched Tess swing down the aisle and out
the door. The olives in Judy’s salad still glistened,
but she couldn’t eat any more. Still, she’d do what
Tess said: face the fact that she missed Robert
terribly. Although she couldn’t let herself think too
much about him. About him reading the newspaper
and telling her how everybody should have done
everything differently. About his quotations of
nineteenth-century poetry and his quirky drawings.
About his dogged, graceless persistence in any task
he decided he was absolutely going to do. About
him in bed, doing…
  But she especially wouldn’t let herself think about
that. If she thought about sweet and hot lovemaking
with Robert, it would paralyze her for the whole rest
of the day, she’d miss him so much.
  Sex. It always did women in, one way or another.
Always.



   As soon as Cavanaugh finished reading Seton’s
302s, he left their office. He didn’t want to see
Seton. He went back to the Weather Vane Motel,
packed up his things, and moved them to another
motel, registering under one of the FBI alternate
identities so no reporters could locate him. This
motel, called for no visible reason “The Pines,” was
worse than the Weather Vane. Much worse: sagging
bed and torn shower curtain and cigarette-scarred
dresser. Also, the floor tilted at a definite angle. But,
then, the FBI wasn’t paying for this motel, and he
was suspended without pay. Besides, the place
allowed dogs.
  Abigail took this move with the same equanimity
she’d taken the last one. She sniffed the decrepit
furniture, lapped from the toilet, and settled with a
happy groan across the doorway to the bathroom.
Evidently, Abigail didn’t care where she lived as
long as Cavanaugh was there. She was happy.
   Cavanaugh, on the other hand, was getting tired
of living out of suitcases. Whatever he needed was
always in a different packing box in the car, even if
he thought he’d lugged it inside. With repeated
rummaging, Marcy’s neat boxes were becoming a
slovenly mess. And he missed his furniture, which
was in storage. He’d half hoped to see Judy the
Saturday he’d had it moved from the Rivermount
house, but she hadn’t been there. Eventually he’d
have to rent another apartment, probably in
Leonardtown, near his office. If he got to stay on as
an agent after the OPR made its final report.
   He dumped his suitcases in this new temporary
home, grabbed a bowl of stew (or so it called itself)
at the motel restaurant, and spent the rest of the
day on-line, the radio going at the same time. At
6:30, when the work day of the unsuspended was
over, he could finally make the phone call to Felders
at Felders’s home. Which, of course, unlike
Cavanaugh, he had one of.
  “Marty? Robert Cavanaugh.”
  He heard Felders draw a sharp breath. “Bob.”
   Despite everything, Cavanaugh smiled. Felders
was the only person allowed to call him “Bob.” This
liberty, which Felders had taken without asking,
suddenly seemed a good thing. Someone felt
comfortable with him.
  “Bob, what the fuck did you screw up?”
   Ah, Felders. Straight to the point. “I talked to an
interviewee. Joked, really. About the FBI covering
its ass.”
   “That’s it? There’s not more to it than the news
said?”
  “No. Yes. I mean, there’s a lot more, but it’s not
about me.”
  “Then what’s it about?”
   Cavanaugh explained. He told Felders all of it:
Seton’s 302s about Curtis McGraw. The so-called
“probable cause” in the search warrant. Donohue’s
diction patterns, habitual versus as reported in the
302, and the search warrant. Dunbar’s tense
behavior. Melanie Anderson’s stubborn insistence
that genocide was occurring, and her removal from
the malaria reading team. His own suspension.
Farlow’s promotion to Switzerland. And now
Dunbar’s promotion to Budapest, which he’d just
heard about on the radio news. Cavanaugh was
scrupulous; he also explained the evidence for each
of these events happening independently.
   When he finally finished, Felders said, “Pretty
thin.”
  “I know.”
  “If you know, why are you calling me?”
  Cavanaugh said, “Heebie-jeebies.”
   Felders laughed. To Cavanaugh it sounded like
the most unwilling laugh he’d ever heard. But, still,
it was a laugh, and Cavanaugh took advantage of its
presumed good will, however tenuous.
  “Marty, I need you to do something for me.”
  “Oh? And what’s that?” Felders s voice prickled
with wariness.
  “I need you to find out everything you can about
Fort Detrick.”
  “Fort Detrick? You mean because USAMRIID
was the CDC’s partner in the epidemic squashing.”
  “No. That’s not why.”
  Cavanaugh waited. It took Felders a minute to
put it together. When he did, he said, “My God,
Bob.”
  “I’m not saying I believe it. It’s just a hunch. But
everybody knows that Fort Detrick has a shady
past.”
  “Which is in the past. Yeah, at one time the fort
was used for developing biological warfare. It was
supposed to develop them—FDR himself gave them
the mission. And they did it. But that was forty
years ago!”
   “Closer to sixty. And, yes, Nixon ordered the
entire stock of bioweapons destroyed in 1970. But
when a Select Committee of Congress looked into
that, in 1975, the CIA director testified that, yes,
well, whatdaya know, bioweapons are still present
at Fort Detrick. Sorry about that. Along with some
germ-warfare microbes that had been moved to
commercial drug firms but were still accessible to a
very few— very few—top CIA types, who were the
only ones who knew about them.”
  Felders said, “And after that congressional
hearing, the stuff was destroyed.”
  “Really? Given the CIA’s overall record, do we
know that for sure?”
   Felders, however much he hated it, was fair in
arguments. “No, we don’t. So maybe—just
maybe—some of that old anthrax or whatever is still
on ice somewhere. Hoarding old bioweapons is still
a long way from developing new ones against direct
executive order.”
  “Granted. But—”
  “You’re blowing smoke, Bob.”
   “Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m asking you to get
together anything you can about Fort Detrick.
Anything covert, I mean. I have all the unclassified
stuff. Use whatever channels you have.”
  A long silence. And then Felders said, “No.”
  “No?”
  “No.”
   Cavanaugh closed his eyes. Felders was not an
ass-coverer. Not a misty-eyed Bureau worshipper.
Not a one-track thinker. And, above all, not a
coward. If Felders said no, it wasn’t because
Cavanaugh’s request was dangerous, disloyal, or
divisive. It was because Cavanaugh’s request was
ridiculous.
   “Give it up, Bob,” Felders said. “It’s so far in left
field it’s not even on this planet. I mean it.”
  “Your metaphors are mixed, Marty.”
   “Damn my metaphors! Listen, the FBI invested
thirty thousand dollars in training you. You’re a
good agent, no matter what the assholes in OPR
eventually decide. And in ten years you’ll be even
better. Don’t blow it for some paranoid nut theory
you’ve got no solid evidence for. Zilch. Nada. Snake
eyes. Don’t do it, Bob.”
  “You’re right. I haven’t got solid evidence.” He
paused. “Yet.”
  “Goddamn it, Bob—”
   “Bye, Marty,” Cavanaugh said, and hung up
before he damaged the only semigood relationship
he had left with someone who didn’t drink from a
toilet.



  After Melanie had spent three days back in Arlo,
Mississippi, which she remembered as one of the
most beautiful places on earth, she couldn’t stand it
any longer.
   Arlo was still beautiful. Distant from the great
river, and from everything else, there were no large
industries, highways, or suburban sprawl to spoil
the rural beauty. Trilliums grew in thick shade in
the oak-and-pine woods. Columbine, scarlet and
yellow, grew thickly up its own tough stalks. The hot
air smelled of thunder and rain and pine needles
and the thick, sweet, antebellum fragrance of
magnolia. Under the persimmon trees, the sad, cool
call of the mockingbird lingered in the stillness, just
as Melanie remembered.
    The people, too, were just the same. Melanie’s
grandmother, her old body fined down and twisted
but still strong, reading the Bible every morning
and going to church twice a week in a flowered hat
and white gloves. Her mother, who waitressed at
the Live Oak Inn, still pretty and still able to dance
till 3:00 A.M. at the one tiny black “nightclub,”
gyrations from the sixties that showed off her trim
figure. Her brother, successful and expansive at the
town’s one small factory, importantly overseeing the
manufacture of glass bottles. Her best friend, who
was the only one who’d changed. Coreen was
pregnant with her fourth child, whose father had
disappeared. She was defeated and bitter and poor,
and she refused to admit any of these things, which
made Melanie alternate between admiration and
despair.
  Except for Coreen, nothing in Arlo had altered.
But Melanie had.
   Still, she took long walks through the woods, well
slathered with insect repellent, and conscientiously
tried to manufacture the peace of mind that Farlow
had told her she needed to acquire. She ate the
sweet, sun-warm blackberries that tasted of her
childhood. She fished for bluegill. She picked
masses of bloodroot and arranged vases of them
around the house, until her brother claimed they
aggravated his allergies. She dutifully tried to dance
with her mother, flinging herself around the living
room in something improbably called the Mashed
Potato.
   She didn’t tell her mother that her mother’s
consciousness as a black woman was in a
sub-subbasement of a deep mine. She didn’t tell her
grandmother that Melanie didn’t believe in God.
She didn’t tell her brother that the way he treated
his women was sleazy and immature. She didn’t tell
Coreen that wallowing in anger and self-delusion
got you nowhere. Of all people, Melanie realized, she
herself had the least right to deliver that message to
anybody.
  And every day, every minute, she longed for
Atlanta. For Africa. Even for the Weather Vane
Motel.
  She had told her family no details of her
“vacation,” merely saying that she’d been working
too hard. If they knew more from the papers, they
didn’t say. What they did do was give her advice.
  From her mother: “You gotta get out more, baby.
Have yourself a little fun. Life too hard not to laugh
when you can.”
  From her brother: “Your problem, girl, is you
ain’t getting it. Find yourself a man and get you
some.”
  From her grandmother: “Turn to the Lord, child.
He always there when you need Him.”
  From Coreen: “You ain’t gonna get shit from your
CDC, Mel. Or from nobody else. They gonna get you
in the end anyways. But dragging your ass around
this sorry place when you got someplace else to
go—that be the worst. Get out while you still can.”
  So was she taking Coreen’s advice when she
called back East? Or was she just hitting bottom in
Arlo, like some cheap wino finally ready for AA?
God, she hated that thought.
   It wasn’t true, anyway. She called Robert
Cavanaugh because she owed him an apology.
When he’d kissed her, he’d only been trying to
comfort her (maybe). And she’d charged him with
all the crimes of J. Edgar Hoover, all the crimes of
every white man who believed black women were all
easy nymphomaniacs, all the crimes of
contemporary white America. Which was hardly
fair. She’d only missed charging him with slavery
because, in her distraught state, she hadn’t thought
of it.
   Melanie waited until the house was empty. She
billed the call to her phone card. “Robert? This is
Melanie Anderson.”
  “Melanie.” His tone told her nothing.
   “Yes. I’m calling to apologize. When I shouted at
you last week, I wasn’t… I wasn’t myself. I said some
harsh things, I know, and blamed you for some
things that weren’t your fault. I just want to say I’m
sorry.”
   “Where are you?” he said, which wasn’t what
she’d expected. Was he just going to brush aside
her apology? Did he—God, no—mistake an apology
for a come-on?
  But then he said, “Are you at the CDC?”
  “No. In Mississippi.”
   “Oh. Well, then, you need to come back. Listen to
this, Melanie. I think you were right about
Donohue’s being innocent, and also about a far
more dangerous thing for black people.” And then
he proceeded to talk for ten minutes straight about
his partner Seton, the FBI, Farlow and Dunbar,
USAMRIID, Fort Detrick, the CDC, Donohue, the
search warrant, and the CIA.
  When he finally finished, she was stunned. “The
CIA?”
  “You’re going to tell me you don’t believe the
government is targeting its own black citizens.”
  “No, I don’t. A cover-up, yes, I could easily believe
that. Foot-dragging because after all it’s only
blacks—I could believe that. too. But not that the
United States government is deliberately killing
black citizens… Robert, that’s major paranoid.
Somebody is targeting us, but it isn’t the United
States government. Even I’m not that paranoid!”
   “Well, that’s where the evidence points at the
moment. Although maybe there’s more to it. Come
back to Maryland to help me get to the bottom of
this, Melanie.”
  “Help you? What do you need my help for? The
medical aspects are solved, the epidemic is over,
and you have the entire FBI to ‘help you.’”
  “No, I don’t. I got removed from the case and
suspended from the Bureau. Don’t you read the
papers?”
  She hadn’t, since she’d arrived in Arlo. Not
conducive to Farlow’s dictate to seek “peace of
mind.”
  “What’d you get suspended for?”
  “Doesn’t matter. Something minor. They wanted
me off this case, and that’s significant, too. But I’m
not giving up. This is too important.”
  “Are you sure you aren’t just trying to prove the
FBI wrong for having the gall to suspend Robert
Cavanaugh?”
  “Don’t you want to prove the CDC wrong for
daring to suspend Melanie Anderson?”
  She felt punched in the solar plexus. Damn, he
wasn’t somebody you should mess with. She said
coldly, “I was not suspended. I’m here visiting my
family.”
   “Visit them some other time. This is important,
Melanie. I don’t have to tell you that. And I think we
can crack it. One thing about the military—if it is
the military—they do things by the book. There’ll be
a trail someplace.”
  “The CIA doesn’t do things by the book. That’s
why they’re the CIA.” Listen to herself—she was
actually getting sucked into this paranoid delusion.
  “We’ll see. Has anyone contacted you in
Mississippi?”
  “What sort of ‘anyone’?”
  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
 She said, “Not in Mississippi. And not about
malaria reading.”
  “Where then? About what?”
   God, he was persistent. She told him about the
hate tapes. Why? Because she hadn’t been able to
tell anyone else, except Joe Krovetz, whose calls
she’d been refusing since she arrived. Robert
listened, then said, “Bring the tapes with you.”
   “There is no ‘with me.’ I don’t believe your wild
tale, and I don’t think it’s worth the time and effort
to look into.”
  And then he said the one thing that could move
her. How did he know?
  “All right, Melanie, don’t come. But what else
better have you got to do with your two weeks’
nonsuspension?”
   Melanie closed her eyes. This house, her family,
the town closing in around her, suffocating her. And
then, when her “vacation” was finally done, the
sideways looks and too-hearty sympathy at the
CDC.
  “Okay, Robert. I’ll come. What’s your address
now?”
  He told her. She said good-bye and hung up. Her
brother stood there, grinning.
  “How long have you been eavesdropping on a
private conversation?” Melanie demanded.
  “I’ll just bet it’s private,” he said. “You goin‘ to
him? Good for you, girl. You finally gonna get
some.”
   She thought of correcting him, or slapping him,
or lecturing him. All of it would be wasted effort.
She turned on her laptop to go on-line and book the
earliest possible flight to Washington.



   Cavanaugh wasted a whole day trying to track
down Earl Lester, the Insect Boy of Rivermount
Junior High. The scrap of paper with Earl’s address,
which Marcy had written down from Judy’s
answering-machine message, had been lost
somewhere during Cavanaugh’s residential musical
chairs. He couldn’t call Judy. Or Marcy, who
wouldn’t remember it anyway. The secretary at the
junior high school said it was against school policy
to give out students’ addresses. From her tone, she
suspected that Cavanaugh was probably a child
molester. The principal was on vacation in the
Greek islands. The Lesters had no phone.
   He was finally reduced to driving to Rivermount
and accosting groups of junior-high-looking kids to
ask if they knew where Earl Lester lived. Cavanaugh
stuck to large groups of lads, so that the secretary’s
fears would not be duplicated. Despite the blazing
sun, high humidity, and temperature over ninety,
the kids all seemed to be outside: on basketball
courts, down by the river, strolling Main Street. No
one, however, gave him any useful information.
Either they didn’t know where Earl Lester lived, or
they didn’t want to say.
  He got back to The Pines motel at 4:00 P.M.,
sweaty and hot. The OPR investigators were waiting
for him.
   “Agent Cavanaugh? We represent the Office of
Professional Responsibility,” the older agent said
formally.
  “Hi, Miguel.”
   Miguel Sierra nodded and looked briefly at the
ground. Cavanaugh didn’t know him well, but he’d
seen him around the Baltimore Field Office. Except
for high-ranking officials charged with “allegations
of misconduct,” the OPR used local agents to
conduct internal-affairs investigations. An OPR
agent at Headquarters would assign specific
interviews and write the final report, but
Cavanaugh’s peers would do the legwork. Which
meant Miguel Sierra and the woman with him,
whom Cavanaugh didn’t recognize.
  “This is Agent Eileen Morgan.”
   Cavanaugh nodded at Eileen, a small, unsmiling
woman with the look favored by female trainees at
Quantico: short hair, no makeup, no jewelry,
conservative dark pants suit. They needed to strike
the old-boy-network as serious individuals, not
fluffy dating partners, and they knew it. “Come in,
Miguel, Eileen.”
   Abigail bounded to meet him, and Sierra unbent
enough to tousle her fur and run through the
inanities people reserved for large dogs: “Hey,
Abigail. What a dog. Yessir, she’s a dog all right, she
is!” Eileen Morgan looked as if she’d like to do the
same thing but found the cost in dignity too high.
Instead she eyed Cavanaugh’s motel room, which
looked even worse than yesterday. Housekeeping
either had overlooked him or didn’t exist. The bed
stood in all its unmade squalor, the paint still
peeled, the curtain still sagged. Eileen Morgan
pursed her pale lips. Cavanaugh was only glad his
laptop hadn’t been stolen. His gun and FBI
credentials were locked in his car, since he wasn’t
allowed to use them while on suspension. The
laptop, however, wouldn’t do well in the 140 degrees
of a locked car standing in the Maryland sun.
   “We have some questions to ask you,” Miguel
said, unnecessarily.
   Cavanaugh went through the incident with Mrs.
Hattie Brown yet again, sticking to the bare facts.
Miguel and Eileen asked a few questions. Everybody
already knew everything said, so the interview
didn’t last long. Cavanaugh was glad.
   When they left, Eileen with a last disapproving
glance at the unmade bed, Cavanaugh felt
depressed. He didn’t like living this way either.
Basically, he was an orderly man. “Methodical” was
the word he preferred, although Marcy had been
known to use “compulsive.” He liked having a home,
with cheerful fuzzy rugs underfoot and designated
drawers for different kinds of silverware and shared
meals and stuff stuck around the place. Female
stuff: flowers and pitchers of ice water and throw
pillows that matched the curtains. Even purple
knitted things that no one could tell what they were.
  Everything, in fact, that had irritated him when
he and Judy actually had it.
  He pressed Judy’s new number. He’d gotten it
over a week ago from the phone company.
  “Judy? This is Robert.”
  Pause. Then, neutrally, “Hello, Robert.”
   “How are you?” God, that sounded feeble. And
suddenly his heart was not behaving: beating too
fast and arhythmically.
  “I’m fine. And you?”
  “Fine.” They sounded like they were at a tea
party. Before he said something like Pass the
scones, would you? which would really piss her off,
he plunged into cold, deep water.
  “Judy, I’m calling to say I miss you. I know I
acted like a lunatic. I was wrong. Really, really
wrong, and I’m sorry. Marcy doesn’t mean anything
to me, I know that now—” Was that true? He didn’t
slow down to investigate “—but you do. You mean a
lot. I want more than anything to see you. To be
with you. Will you let me?”
  She said, “Are you asking me to marry you?”
   His breath imploded. Marry her? What was with
these women? They gave no quarter, took no
prisoners, showed no mercy. Melanie telling him he
was only following up on malaria reading to help his
OPR case. Marcy telling him he was more
expendable than Abigail, although not a bad lay.
Judy telling him to propose or disappear. Every
single damn one of them would have made a good
torturer.
  “Judy, I don’t think we’re… I mean…”
  “‘Bye, Robert.”
   He listened to the click of the phone, and heard it
in a door bolt sliding decisively shut.
  His depression deepened. He wasn’t hungry. It
was too early to sleep—only 6:00 P.M. He couldn’t
imagine himself going to a movie. He poured
himself a beer from his cooler. The ice had melted
and the bottles sloshed like so many
desperate-message carriers from an island
castaway. Cavanaugh turned on the motel TV. It
didn’t work.
   He listened instead to the radio, and learned that
Michael Sean Donohue had, according to the press
conference held by his lawyer, passed two separate
FBI polygraph tests, both with the most truthful
rating possible.



   The next day Cavanaugh drove back to
Rivermount. He’d been walking down Main Street
for five minutes when he saw Earl Lester.
  No, it wasn’t Earl. This kid was too small to be
Earl. But he looked just like him: hair, skin, and
eyes all the same color, a faded dun. Skin stretched
over sharp bones, and none too clean. The child
blinked twice as he stared back at Cavanaugh.
   Another miniature Earl Lester, female this time,
came out of Wal-Mart. Then another, a tall young
woman holding a tiny, skinny, faded-dun Earl in
diapers and Baltimore Orioles T-shirt. Cavanaugh
stepped forward.
   “Excuse me, miss, but are you Earl Lester’s… ah…
sister?”
  She blinked twice at him. “Yeah. So?”
   “Is he here with you? My name is Robert
Cavanaugh. I gave a lecture at Earl’s school in June,
and he asked some questions I finally have answers
to. Could I talk to him, please?”
  She said nothing, studying him, until she pushed
past him on the sidewalk and walked on. The three
small children followed.
  “Please, Miss Lester. It’s important.” She kept on
walking. Cavanaugh was reluctant to identify
himself as FBI because she might ask to see his
credentials. Cavanaugh was not allowed to carry
them, or his gun, while he was on suspension. He
was not supposed to be investigating this case, or
anything else. He was supposed to be repenting in
sackcloth and ashes, which was what Miss Lester
appeared to be wearing.
   He said to her retreating back, “I was hoping to
hire Earl to do some work for me. Work with
insects. At seven dollars an hour.”
  She stopped, turned around, and blinked twice.
“Seven?”
  “Yes.”
  “You come along.”
  Around the corner was parked a pickup with
several more Lesters of various ages in the trucks
bed. They all looked alike, and they all blinked twice
at Cavanaugh.
  Miss Lester said to the truck generally, “Earl, you
know this guy?”
  “Sure,” Earl said, without expression. “Agent
Cavanaugh. FBI.”
  She considered this information. “Then I guess
he ain’t no pervert. Okay, Earl, get out. He’s got
work for you killin‘ bugs. Seven dollars an hour. You
take my watch.”
   She juggled the baby, unstrapped an $8.99
Timex off her wrist, and handed it to Earl. All the
Lesters except Earl climbed on or remained in the
truck, Miss Lester and the baby in the cab. She
drove off. Earl and Cavanaugh were left staring at
each other on the hot sidewalk. Earl waited,
blinking.
   Cavanaugh said, “The work isn’t killing bugs. It’s
about bugs, but it’s not easy to explain because I
don’t understand myself what I need you to do until
I ask you a lot of questions. Why did you call me a
few weeks ago and show up at my house?”
   “Wanted t’offer help on the malaria case,” Earl
said. “Like I told you once before, insects tell us a lot
about everything. But you din’t get ahold of me.”
  Cavanaugh sensed a grudge. He said, “Well, I’m
ahold of you now. And I need your insect expertise.
Malaria reading—”
  “You said you got the whole NIH for insect
expertise,” Earl said, still expressionless. “Din’t need
me, you said. And anyways, the epidemic’s over.”
   Cavanaugh saw he wasn’t going to get off easily.
On the other hand, he didn’t really feel like
explaining his misconduct, suspension, and OPR
investigation to an accusing eighth grader. He said
testily, “Well, I need you now. Are you interested or
not?”
   Earl still waited. Cavanaugh started to repeat the
tactic that had moved his sister: seven dollars an
hour. Some instinct told him not to. Instead he
said, “This job will need insect equipment I don’t
have. But you tell me what you need, and I’ll buy it.
Afterward, you can keep it.”
   For the first and last time, Cavanaugh saw Earl
Lester’s eyes blaze. Without blinking. It was like
looking at a steady pale nova. The boy started
around the corner to Cavanaugh’s car.



  Cavanaugh faced his investigative team around a
table in Melanie’s motel room, which was
considerably nicer than his own motel room. After
one look at The Pines, she’d demanded a room for
herself someplace else. They’d found a nice
bed-and-breakfast two miles away. The room had a
working TV, Victorian escritoire, and Jacuzzi
bathtub. How much did CDC scientists earn? Never
mind; it wasn’t important.
   “What’s important here is to go back to the site
of the start of the epidemic and develop physical
evidence that’s been overlooked so far,” he said.
   His team stared back at him: Melanie
incredulous and Earl Lester expressionless, except,
of course for blinking twice. His surrogate FBI.
Hadn’t there once been a Children’s Crusade? He
knew better than to say this aloud.
   She said, “You’ve got to be kidding. Do you know
how thoroughly the Anopheles breeding sites have
been gone over? By us, by USAMRIID, by
infectious-disease researchers around the world, by
the media, by gawkers—Robert, there is no ‘physical
evidence that’s been overlooked so far.’”
   “There’s got to be something,” Cavanaugh said
stubbornly.
  “Like what?”
  “I don’t know. But something at the crime scene.”
  “The crime scene?” Melanie’s tone could have
boiled him alive. “The ‘crime scene’ is southern
Maryland and eastern Virginia! How do you expect
to search an area that size?”
  “Not the whole thing. The epicenter.”
   “The epicenter is exactly what’s been combed by
every infectious disease agency on three continents.
I myself ran into epidemiologists from Antwerp,
Brasilia, Porton Down, Geneva, and Walter Reed.
And I don’t even work on the vector end of an
epidemic.”
   “All right, then,” Cavanaugh said, “not the
epicenter. Somewhere out on the edges, where
something might have been overlooked.” He
sounded lame, even to himself. But something had
to be out there, somewhere. Something.
   “It isn’t done that way, Robert. And anyway, we
don’t have access to labs to analyze anything we do
happen to find. You need a scanning probe
microscope to identify small changes to malaria
parasites. They’re small. And if we did use
commercial labs, and your conspiracy theory is
right, we’d just tip our hand to these hypothetical
government criminals who left this hypothetical
biological evidence at your hypothetical crime
scene.”
   Cavanaugh started doodling. She sounded logical.
Nonetheless, the other evidence—none of which had
convinced her, either, nor even convinced
Felders—said to him that something was going on
here. He was going to find out what. And he
couldn’t think of any other place to start to which
he had actual access, except with the mosquitoes,
where everything else had once started. Once more,
from the top. This time with feeling.
   Yes, he was hanging on to this case with one
slipping finger, but he was still hanging on. Despite
Melanie Anderson’s logic.
  “Robert, you have to see—”
  “No, you have to be willing to explore—”
  “Not to explore totally silly—”
  “It’s only silly if it doesn’t yield—”
  “Don’t you see you’re completely dismissing—”
   This was getting them nowhere. To divert the
discussion, Cavanaugh cut her off in midsentence
and turned to Earl Lester, who had said nothing.
 “Earl, you’re the field expert on mosquitoes here.
What do you have to say?”
  Earl said, “When do we go buy the collecting
equipment?”



                   INTERIM

   The family lugged the picnic from the car and
plunked it down on a weathered wooden table set
under a grove of trees. Tupperware boxes of crab
sandwiches, potato salad, fruit, brownies,
lemonade. An ice chest with Tequila Sunrises in a
tall thermos. And for the grandfather, who would
drink nothing else, cold beer.
  “Can we go down to the water, Mommy? Can we?
Can we?”
  “I’ll go with them,” the mother said to her
husband.
  The three set off for the sandy shore, the children
running and shouting, the woman walking sedately
behind. The two men settled in at the picnic bench,
drinking in companionable silence.
   Suddenly the old man quavered, “Mosquito!” He
flapped one thin arm at the air.
  “It’s all right, Dad. The epidemic’s over.”
  “Eh?”
  The man raised his voice. His father was going
deaf. “I SAID THE DISEASE IS ALL GONE NOW.”
  “Maybe is, maybe isn’t.” His eyes filled with the
easy tears of the very old. “Why we here, Clarence?
Why we takin‘ a chance?”
  “BECAUSE IT ISN’T A CHANCE. WE WERE
TESTED. REMEMBER THE ARMY GUY WHO
DREW EVERYBODY’S BLOOD AT THE MALL?
AND WE’RE ALL SICKLE-CELL NEGATIVE.”
  “Why we here? We belong at home!”
  “THAT ISN’T EVEN AN ANOPHELES
MOSQUITO, DAD. I CAN SEE ITS WING
MARKINGS CLEARLY. AND THE PLAGUE IS ALL
OVER.”
  “When we goin‘ home? It ain’t safe in this here
park!”
   The man stopped himself from shrugging. He
had told Lorraine this would happen, but she’d
insisted on the picnic. They hadn’t done anything as
a family in a long while, the kids wanted to swim,
Papa would forget about the epidemic like he forgot
about so much else lately. It would be fun. She’d
promised everybody it would be fun.
   But not if his father kept this up all afternoon.
They’d have to take him home before he became too
upset, maybe even before they got to eat. The man
fished out another beer from the ice chest and
opened it.
  “HAVE ANOTHER, DAD.”
  The grandfather sucked appreciatively at the
brown bottle. The muscles of his gaunt face relaxed.
His son smiled out at the blue water, the blue sky,
the blue bathing suit on his wife’s shapely figure.
Lorraine could really wear the hell out of a bathing
suit.
   “Sometimes things you think be over, ain’t over
at all,” the old man said, with sudden calm, and
took another swig of his beer.
                F OURTEEN

      Every particle of an insect carries with it
      the impress of its Maker, and can—if
      duly considered—read us lectures of
      ethics or divinity.
      —Sir Thomas Pope Blount, A Natural
      History, 1693



   In the end they chose three sites. A patch of low,
scrub-wooded, freshwater marsh in Virginia, at the
far eastern edge of what had been the epidemic
area. A similar locale in northwestern southern
Maryland, on the border of Charles and Prince
Georges Counties at the western edge. And, over
Melanie s protests, the epicenter near Newburg.
which did indeed look as if it had been trampled by
a retreating army. Tire ruts crossed the fields.
Ecologically correct synthetic powder, designed to
kill Anopheles larvae but little else, floated on pools
of standing water. Litter dotted the ground: soggy
film boxes, soda cans, a pair of green plaid boxer
shorts.
   “Bet there’s a hell of a story there,” Cavanaugh
said, trying to lighten Melanie’s mood, but she
didn’t even answer. Cavanaugh would have
shrugged, but he was loaded down with the first set
of bug paraphernalia, all of which was awkwardly
shaped, large, heavy, or poisonous. Melanie and
Earl both wore sturdy boots, but Cavanaugh’s
sneakers squished with every step through the
muddy marsh. They also serve who only slosh and
stagger.
  Earl Lester was actually smiling. At least, it
might have been a smile.
  The bottom half of his pale, bony face lifted a
little at the sides, slightly pulling his mouth
upwards. He unfolded the first of the three Malaise
traps, which Cavanaugh had bought and paid for.
Along with everything else.
   This was an automatic collecting device for
daytime use. Green netting made a tall pyramid
over a tripod whose legs pushed deep into the mud.
On two sides of the pyramid, the netting touched
the ground. On the other two, it ended three feet
above ground. At the top of the tripod was a large,
elaborately mazed box impregnated on the inside
with potassium cyanide.
  Setting this up, Earl suddenly became talkative,
an event as startling as if he’d suddenly flown into
the Malaise trap himself.
   “See, insects, they tend to fly upward when they
encounter a barrier,” the boy said, sounding as if
he’d memorized some book. “So they’ll fly right up
into the killing jar on top. There are eight hundred
thousand species of the class Insecta, which is
about eighty percent of all the animal species on
this here planet. We’re after phylum Arthropoda,
class Insecta, order Diptera, family Culicidae, genus
and species Anopheles quadrimaculatus.”
  Melanie finally smiled. Cavanaugh hadn’t been
able to soften her, but the boy did. Well, as long as
something did.
  “See that there?” Earl pointed. “That itty bitty
orange bug on that leaf? That’s a Metrior
hynchromiris dislocatus. They eat plants, includin‘
crops. The Miridae are the biggest family of true
bugs. Bring along that light trap to the patch of dry
up-ground yonder, Agent Cavanaugh.”
   Cavanaugh obeyed. The light trap hung
suspended from a pole, which Cavanaugh
hammered into the ground under Earl’s direction.
The insects, attracted by the circular light, would
hit an upright baffle and drop into a pail of alcohol
below.
  “We gonna get a lot of moths and beetles in this,”
Earl said. “Can’t be helped none. But we want a
good cross-section of whatever’s flying here by
night, as well as by day. But we’ll get us some
mosquitoes. You know what a female potter wasp
does? Eumenes megaera. She constructs a little pot
out of clay on some branch to put her eggs in. Then
she fills the pot with a mess of paralyzed caterpillars
and seals it up. If you cut the bottom off the pot,
she’ll still put them caterpillars in it, even though
they’re all just fallin‘ out the bottom. Instinct. But
she only puts in so many, and then stops. Some
other species that do egg pots, they go on puttin’ in
caterpillars and puttin‘ ’em in and puttin‘ ’em in
until they die of exhaustion. E. megaera is right
smart.”
   “Unlike some people,” Melanie murmured, “who
just go putting evidence in leaky vessels until death
by exhaustion.”
   Cavanaugh ignored her. By now his socks were
completely sodden. Earl finished setting up the light
trap and turned to Cavanaugh.
  “Now for the fun part. You take that net, Agent
Cavanaugh, and you take this killing jar, Miss
Melanie.”
   Cavanaugh waited for her to say coldly, “Dr.
Anderson, please,” but she didn’t. She must really
like the kid.
  “Don’t you go breathing in that killing jar, now.
Potassium cyanide is serious poison.”
  “I know,” Melanie said, still smiling. She must
really like him.
   “I’m gonna take the water net and get us some
aquatic specimens,” Earl said. “Agent Cavanaugh,
Miss Melanie’ll show you what to do. Looky
there—a Papilio glaucus. Only one other butterfly,
swallowtail butterfly, got as much yellow at the base
of the front wing, excepting P. rutulus. Did you
know that if anything bothers them two butterflies,
they attack with a foul-smelling scent off’n their
heads?”
   For the next half hour Cavanaugh tramped
around after Melanie, helping to free bugs from her
net and dropping them into a succession of killing
jars. When that was done, the three of them beat
vegetation for a while, making insects drop onto
white drop cloths and then sucking them up with
aspirators before the bugs could recover. When that
was done, they set up pitfall traps and Berlese
funnels. Cavanaugh learned earwigs never actually
crawled into campers’ ears, that damselflies had
been seen settling on ships far out at sea, and that
brown-banded cockroaches liked to hang around
electrical appliances. Also that the male scorpion fly
brought a present of a captured insect to the female
he was courting.
   “Sensible,” Melanie said, who seemed more
relaxed dropping bugs into a killing jar than
Cavanaugh had ever seen her before. “I personally
would have a lot of trouble resisting a man who
brought me a nice juicy insect for a present.” She
grinned at Earl, who blinked twice and blushed.
   Each time more equipment was needed,
Cavanaugh trudged back to Melanie’s rental car.
His own car was still jammed with everything he
owned that wasn’t in storage. By the third trip his
wet socks itched, his insect repellent had failed, and
he felt as if a foul-smelling scent was attacking off’n
his head.
  When they finished at the epicenter, they
repeated the whole thing over again. Twice.
   It was late afternoon before they stopped at a
Wendy’s for hamburgers, then took the insects
gathered so far to Cavanaugh’s motel. At Melanie’s
trim place, several thousand extra bugs would be
noticed, whereas at The Pines they would blend
right in. Melanie and Earl immediately spread out a
batch of dead specimens on a white sheet on the
floor and began counting and analyzing. Abigail
watched with interest.
  This left Cavanaugh the car, where he played over
the tapes of the hate calls to Melanie. He didn’t
want Earl to hear. Or any other kid within earshot.
  The tapes were nasty, especially cumulatively. He
began to sense the land of tension Melanie had lived
under. When he’d played every tape, he started over
again, this time listening for any unusual
background sounds. However, his small tape
recorder couldn’t distinguish among the many
indistinct sounds.
  Finally Cavanaugh picked four tapes and slipped
them into a padded mailer. He wrote the note to
Felders by hand:



     Marty—
     I know you said you wanted nothing to
     do with my requests on this case. But
     this does not involve any other
     governmental agencies, although I don’t
     have the authority to order it myself. I’d
     really appreciate a psycholinguistic
     analysis of the enclosed tapes by Dr.
     Pritchard at Syracuse. The tapes are
     hate calls made to a young woman while
     she was in my jurisdiction. There are
     twenty-seven tapes, but these four have
     clear, inflected speaking and some
     background noise.
     Please.
     —Robert Cavanaugh



   Cavanaugh studied the note. A letter, rather than
a phone call, would give Felders more room to
decide if he was willing to help. This letter seemed
specific enough for Felders to comply—or not
comply— but general enough so that if anyone else
read it, Felders would not be implicated in
anything. Cavanaugh couldn’t think of any way to
improve the note. It would have to do.
   The FBI had worked with the Psycholinguistics
Center at Syracuse University since 1974, and with
Dr. Jonathan Pritchard since 1991. Pritchard was
astounding. He listened to a tape of a kidnapper, a
terrorist, or a bank robber, and then told
law-enforcement agencies the perp’s social class,
home state, state of mind, motivation, and probable
fate. He paid attention to the way phrases were
constructed, pronounced, stressed, and a half a
dozen other things. From the background noise,
Pritchard suggested locations and time of day
where the call might have been made. And if he
didn’t know these things, he was modest enough
(unlike the profilers at Quantico, Cavanaugh
thought) to not guess.
   From phone-call tapes, Pritchard had
successfully predicted two callers’ suicides, three
escapes, and a score of surrenders. He’d identified
innumerable locales from which perps had made
their calls. No other linguist came close to matching
his record.
   Cavanaugh mailed the package and strolled back
to the motel. It was full dark; he had to get Earl
back home.
  “You tie up that dog now, Agent Cavanaugh.
Otherwise she’s goin‘ to get into our bug piles and
mess ’em up good. Might even eat a few specimens.”
  “I’ll tie her in the bathroom,” Cavanaugh said.
Abigail would hate that.
  “She lay on them piles, all our work’s wasted.”
  “I understand.”
  “She so much as poke her nose at even one pile
and—”
  “Earl, I’ll tie up the dog. Now come on, your
family’s going to wonder what’s happened to you.”
   At Rivermont, Earl’s sister was outside before the
car came to a complete stop. “Eleven hours and
thirty-seven minutes. You got the money, Earl?”
  “Not yet.”
  “Mister, you pay him. We done made a bargain.”
   Cavanaugh forked over eighty-four dollars. He
offered it to Earl, but the sisters hand snaked out
and slurped it from midair. Earl blinked twice, and
Cavanaugh said hastily, “We aren’t finished yet,
Earl. Tomorrow at eight in the morning?” The boy
nodded, his face relaxing slightly. Cavanaugh was
starting to understand nonspoken Lester.
  Back at the motel, he sent Melanie home, tied
Abigail in the bathroom, and fell into bed,
surrounded by a white-sheeted sea of dead insects.



   “Something’s weird here,” Melanie said on the
fifth day. Three days of trap emptying, bug
collecting, and sheet spreading had been followed
by two days of counting and graphing. Cavanaugh
had helped with this, doing what he was told to do,
until Melanie and Earl said he was missing too
many anomalies and sentenced him to the sagging
armchair they’d moved into the bathroom, which
he shared with Abigail. Except for very narrow
walking aisles, the entire floor was covered with
piles of decaying bugs on white sheets, as were the
dresser, table, and, during the day, the bed.
Housekeeping had never so much as knocked at the
door. This was undoubtedly a good thing.
  Cavanaugh put down the book Earl had loaned
him: The Astonishing Ant. “What kind of
something is weird? About Anopheles?”
  “No,” Earl said. “‘Bout Toxorhynchites rutilus.”
  “Oh,” Cavanaugh said, trying to look intelligent.
  Melanie smiled at him, a first.
  “Elephant mosquito, Robert. Here, look at this
graph. It’s a projection backward of the elephant
mosquito breeding patterns. We took how many we
counted at the Virginia site. From that, plus their
known breeding and survival and area-specific
die-back rates, we figured out how many elephant
mosquitoes hatched over the last four months at the
Virginia site. That’s the blue line.”
   Cavanaugh studied her graph. “What’s the green
line?”
  “The numbers of elephant mosquitoes at the
other viable site, at the eastern edge of the epidemic
area. See, the blue and green lines start out nearly
identical.”
  “And the red line?” Cavanaugh said, just to be
sure.
   “That’s the epicenter site, near Newburg. But it’s
useless—the environment is too compromised. Look
at the blue and green lines. We know from the
mortality rate that the epidemic mostly spread
west. The blue-line site is west, the green-line site is
east.”
   Cavanaugh studied the graph. The two lines
stayed nearly identical until June 3—the day before
the day he’d interviewed Nurse Pafford about the
stroke rate at Dellridge Community Hospital,
Cavanaugh remembered. Then the number of
elephant mosquitoes at the Virginia site abruptly
and dramatically shot upward. It stayed higher
than the eastern site for the rest of the graph.
   Cavanaugh waited for somebody to tell him the
significance of this. Surely it didn’t have anything to
do with elephants, which were scarce in southern
Maryland.
   “This here’s a elephant mosquito,” Earl said,
picking a dead bug from one of the hundreds of
piles on white sheets and dumping it on
Cavanaugh’s palm. Evidently to Earl the concrete
fact of the bug’s existence was what mattered, not
its significance. Cavanaugh inspected the mosquito.
It had shiny metallic blue scales and a long, curved
nose. No, not nose—proboscis.
   Melanie took pity on him. “Elephant mosquito
larvae are predaceous. They feed on aquatic
arthropods, especially the larvae of other
mosquitoes. The adults feed on plant juices and
nectar, never blood. They’re easy to breed and raise
in large numbers in supply houses.”
 Cavanaugh still didn’t get it. “So? What does it
mean?”
   “It means that there have been experiments
done, some successful, to use elephant mosquitoes
to control other, more dangerous species by
releasing huge numbers of elephant mosquitoes in
epidemic areas. So they will eat the larvae of more
dangerous species. The graph means somebody was
trying to do that in Virginia to stop the epidemic,
before it even went public.”
  “Din’t work,” Earl said. “T. rutilus’ll breed this far
north, specially if it’s real hot, but they don’t like it
much. They’re happier in South Carolina and
Georgia and Florida.”
   Cavanaugh looked at the unhappy dead insect on
his palm. “You said they grow them in supply
houses?”
  “Yes,” Melanie said.
  “Which supply house?”
  “Undoubtedly more than one. The biggest one in
the east—”
  “I know. Stanton Supply, in Atlanta.”
  “Yes, but they don’t offer T. rutilus. I know that
because I know their insect catalogue practically by
heart. The CDC has an account with them. They
don’t find T. rutilus profitable enough. The
biological-control experiments are still very new,
and it’s easy to rear T. rutilus for ourselves when we
want a few. They thrive in Georgia.”
  South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. That’s
what Earl had said. But not necessarily Maryland.
“So where would somebody who was trying to
control malaria reading go to buy elephant
mosquitoes?”
   “I told you, it could be anywhere,” Melanie said.
Her eyes kept straying back to the piles of bugs and
graphs, which Earl had already returned to. Clearly
she was itching to get back to work. But first she
said to Cavanaugh, “Who do you think tried to
surreptitiously control the epidemic that early?”
  “I don’t know yet,” he said. This seemed obvious.
  “Well, to find the source for the vector, try
Baltimore. Fielding’s offers them.”
   Fielding’s. The moment Melanie said the name,
Cavanaugh remembered his previous trip to the
insect supply house. Catherine Clarke, the dumpy
amorous director who was a cop groupie. “We have
lots of Toxorhynchites rutilus. Used in biological
control of other species, you know, plus using the
larvae as fodder. Very versatile. We can produce
up to a million a day in our lab.… Or maybe some
Aedes taeniorhynchus?”
   He handed the dead mosquito to Earl, and a
piece of paper to Melanie. “Write down the
scientific name of the elephant mosquito.”
  “You going to Baltimore? You don’t look very
happy about it.”
  Catherine Clarke’s hand on his arm. “I’m not.
Just write it down anyway.” After a moment he
added, “And a phonetic spelling, too, so I can
pronounce it right.”
  “Tox-uh-rine-kite-eez roo-till-us,” Earl said from
the floor. He turned his bony, washed-out face up to
Cavanaugh’s. “Ev’rybody knows that.”
   “Somewhat deficient in social skills… which
unfortunately evokes a negative reaction from his
insecure peers,” the school principal had said of
Earl. Cavanaugh bit back the negative reaction on
the tip of his tongue. He didn’t want to look any
more insecure than he already felt.



   Catherine Clarke was icy. Clearly, she too
remembered their former meeting, and his
romantic rejection. Her flirtatious manner had
disappeared. She sat in her cluttered office, dressed
in what appeared to be the same rumpled brown
suit as before, and said formally, “And what does
the FBI need to know now, Agent Cavanaugh?”
  “I need to know more about mosquitoes,
Catherine.” He smiled, carefully leaving the Bureau
out of it. Catherine Clarke reacted to neither the
smile nor his use of her first name. Clearly he was
going to have to work harder. “Perhaps I could ask
you some questions over lunch?”
  “Lunch,” she said.
  “Yes. Are you hungry? I know I am.” He smiled
again, letting his eyes linger on her.
  She repeated, “Lunch.”
  “Or dinner. Dinner would be even better. Is there
some place you especially like, someplace nice with
good wine and—”
   “Agent Cavanaugh,” she said. Her tone could
freeze glaciers. “Fielding’s Scientific Supply is
always happy to cooperate with law-enforcement
agencies. Even when, as in this case, the agent is
temporarily suspended but still pursuing the case,
and the agent’s tactics are a disgrace to his
position. You do not need to pretend to a romantic
interest you do not feel. I want to see these
terrorists brought to justice as much as you do. Ask
me what you wish, but without the insincere and
unnecessary personal overtures.”
   Cavanaugh shriveled. She had kept her dignity,
displayed her intelligence, offered her disinterested
cooperation. Her quiet composure made him look
like a maggot, like slime, like an indiscriminate
predator. Not unlike the larvae of T. rutilus.
   Averting his gaze from her, he handed over the
slip of paper. “Do you offer these for sale?”
   “Toxorhynchites rutilus. Elephant mosquito. Yes,
of course. For a while there was a flurry of interest
in using T. rutilus to control nuisance mosquitoes,
culex and so forth. But the problem, of course, was
that you had to keep seeding the area with rutilus
larvae over and over, because as soon as rutilus
succeeds in controlling the other mosquitoes, they
run out of food and die off themselves. The whole
process is just too much trouble and expense.”
  “Who has bought a supply of rutilus from you in
the last four months? Especially buyers who don’t
usually order that mosquito?”
   “I’ll need to pull the records.” She turned to her
computer, brought up several screens, and frowned
at them. Next she walked over to a locked file
cabinet, unlocked it, and rifled through folders for
several minutes. Cavanaugh watched her. In profile,
she was much prettier. And her legs were lovely. Or
maybe it wasn’t that—maybe it was her calm pride
that was lovely, her valuing of herself enough not to
chase a man who wasn’t interested, but not to
punish him either. In fact, she was a very classy
lady. Now that he’d made it impossible, he wished
he were having dinner with her.
   She came back to her desk and sat behind it.
“We’ve had only eight orders for T. rutilus in the
last five months. Seven were standing orders from
universities; they use them in their graduate lab
courses. The eighth order was from a buyer with
whom we have a standing account, but who has
never ordered T. rutilus before.”
  She hesitated. Cavanaugh waited.
   “It’s a complex account, with one facility housing
a number of different organizations. Thirty-seven,
to be exact. Usually the order is billable to a specific
tenant organization, but this order was billed to
another entity at the same place, identified only as
‘Birthday Project.’”
  Again she hesitated. Again he waited.
  “The account is for Fort Detrick, Maryland.”



   He drove back to Maryland, drove Earl home,
forked over another sixty-three dollars, and drove
back to The Pines to tell Melanie what he’d learned.
  “Well, Robert, that’s good, but it doesn’t really
prove anything.”
   “I know it doesn’t prove anything,” he said,
irritated. “That’s not how it works. It’s just one
more piece. Collect enough of them, and you have a
case.”
   “Sort of like beer bottles,” Melanie said. But her
face was thoughtful. “Did you listen to the news on
your drive back?”
   “No.” He’d been too busy evaluating possibilities,
looking for connections, planning next moves.
   “The grand jury met. They didn’t find enough
evidence to indict Michael Donohue. Now the FBI is
standing there with egg on its face.”
  “It’s not the first time,” Cavanaugh said. Christ,
she could irritate him. “We’re not gods, you know.
And don’t say that we think we are, either.”
  “Okay, I won’t say it,” Melanie answered. “Aloud.
So tell me this instead: What is ‘Bevins v. Six
Unknown Agents’? Donohue s lawyer said in his
press conference that America should keep it in
mind.”
   Cavanaugh drew a deep breath and calculated
rapidly. Bevins v. Six Unknown Agents was the
legal precedent for a citizen to sue the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. Or, rather, not the FBI as
an entity, but individual agents who had violated a
suspect’s civil rights. Cavanaugh had been part of
the surveillance team on Michael Donohue and had
also been along on the warrant search… No, it
wasn’t enough. If Donohue actually sued anyone, it
would probably be only Dunbar and Pilozzi. Plus,
maybe, the FBI medic who’d drawn Donohue’s
blood. That would make the strongest case.
  “I’ll tell you at dinner,” he said. “I’m famished.”
  “Did you eat today?”
  “No. Did you?”
  “Of course I did, and I fed Earl. We take care of
ourselves. Let me just get my purse.”
  While she tiptoed through piles of bugs, the
phone rang. After a moment Cavanaugh
remembered that it was his room, not the insects‘,
and he picked up the receiver.
  “Bob, Marty Felders. Do you have a fax?”
  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said, although it was in the car.
There hadn’t been either use or room for it amid
the piles of graphs and bugs. “Give me three
minutes.”
  “Okay,” Felders said, and hung up. He never
wasted words when he had something.
  Did that mean Felders had something?
   Cavanaugh dashed out to the car and rummaged
in the trunk, flinging books and shoes and boxes
onto the parking lot until he found the fax machine.
He galloped back inside and got it hooked to the
phone line just seconds before it began to beep.
   “What is it?” Melanie said on a high, rising note,
but Cavanaugh was too busy reading the incoming
fax, line by line, to answer.



     FROM: SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY,
     PSYCHOLINGUISTICS CENTER
     TO: MARTIN FELDERS 178
     SYCAMORE LANE HYATTSVILLE, MD.
     (301) 555-6745



  Marty had had the report sent to his home, not
the Bureau. Good.



     RE: VOICE TAPE ANALYSIS
     FOUR TAPES WERE RECEIVED VIA
     U.S. MAIL ON AUGUST 9. ANALYSIS
     WAS CONDUCTED USING
     HIGH-RESOLUTION EQUIPMENT,
     INCLUDING PHRASING, DICTION,
     PRONUNCIATION, STRESS,
     INFLECTION, SPEED, CONTENT, AND
     BACKGROUND NOISE. ANALYSIS
     FOLLOWS:
     THE SAME SPEAKER TALKS ON ALL
     FOUR TAPES.
     THE SPEAKER IS A CAUCASIAN MALE
     BETWEEN THE AGES OF
     THIRTY-FIVE AND FORTY-FIVE. HE
     HOLDS AT LEAST A B.S. DEGREE
     (PROBABLY NOT A B.A.), BUT NOT A
     GRADUATE DEGREE. HE IS FROM
     GEORGIA ORIGINALLY, BUT HAS
     SPENT SIGNIFICANT TIME IN NEW
     ENGLAND WITHIN THE LAST FIVE
     YEARS. HE IS EXCITED BY WHAT HE
     IS SAYING, BOTH EMOTIONALLY
     AND SEXUALLY. HE IS PROBABLY
     NEITHER MARRIED NOR LIVING
     WITH A WOMAN. THE SPEAKER
     IDENTIFIES WITH TRADITION AND
     STRUCTURE, THE MORE
     STRUCTURED THE BETTER, AS A
     DEFENSE AGAINST A VERY CHAOTIC
INNER SELF. HE FEARS ANYTHING
THAT SEEMS TO HIM TO THREATEN
THAT TRADITION AND STRUCTURE.
BECAUSE HE FEARS BEING ALONE,
HE MOST LIKELY SPENDS TIME
AWAY FROM HIS JOB SURROUNDED
BY LIKE-MINDED INDIVIDUALS. HE
MAY PARTY A LOT.
ANALYSIS OF BACKGROUND NOISE:



TAPE #1: NONE DECIPHERABLE.
PROBABLY INDOORS.



TAPE #2: INDOORS. AMPLIFICATION
REVEALS A VIDEO GAME, PINBALL
MACHINE, CLINKING GLASSES, AND
A GREAT MANY
INDISTINGUISHABLE
CONVERSATIONS. SETTING IS
EITHER A BAR OR A LARGE PRIVATE
PARTY.



TAPE #3: PROBABLY SAME SETTING
AS TAPE #2, BUT WITH FEWER
PEOPLE PRESENT.



TAPE #4: INDOORS. ONE
DISTINGUISHABLE BACKGROUND
NOISE: MUSIC IN THE DISTANT
BACKGROUND, MUFFLED IN A WAY
CONSISTENT WITH FILTERING
THROUGH CLOSED WINDOW GLASS.
INSTRUMENT IS A SINGLE BUGLE,
PROBABLY RECORDED. MELODY
      IMPOSSIBLE TO DISCERN WITH
      COMPLETE ACCURACY, BUT NOTES
      THAT CAN BE IDENTIFIED ARE
      CONSISTENT WITH “RETREAT.”



      CONCLUSION: THERE IS HIGH
      PROBABILITY THAT THE SPEAKER
      SERVES IN THE UNITED STATES
      MILITARY.



      JONATHAN PRITCHARD, PH.D.
      SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY



  “Good Lord,” Melanie said, reading over his
shoulder. “The military. And the CIA has long and
deep ties with Fort Detrick. God, Robert, maybe
you are right about who created malaria reading!”
  “We don’t know that yet,” Cavanaugh said. She
was so emotional— as quick to conclude as she had
been to deny. That wasn’t the way it was done. The
way it was done was with persistent doggedness.
accumulating evidence drop by hard-squeezed
drop. He didn’t say this aloud. He’d heard the fear
and dread in Melanie s voice.
  Felders phoned a second time. “Bob, listen. One
more thing.” Felders sounded as unhappy as
Cavanaugh had ever heard him, and he hesitated
before going on.
  “I don’t like telling you this, and if anybody ever
asks me if I did tell you, I will deny it. Do you
understand?”
  “Yes.”
 “I called in every marker I was owed in
Washington, New York, and Virginia. Probably left
a talk trail that’ll set the OPR after me eventually.
Fort Detrick has the CIA, as you know, and the CIA
has a secret dirty-tricks unit stationed at the fort.
They don’t report to the commanding general,
except as a hidden part of the CIA. It’s possible he
doesn’t even know the unit is there, although not
likely. I couldn’t get names, duties, or even the size
of the unit. Probably small. But they’re there, and
I’m told they’ve pulled some nasties, although
nobody can give me specifics. Or won’t. And I didn’t
tell you any of this.”
  “Yes. No. Can you find out what ‘the Birthday
Project’ is? I know it’s something to do with Fort—”
  Felders hung up on him.
  “What?” Melanie said in a high, strained voice.
“What was that about?”
  He told her. She listened, expressionless, then
turned away.
   “Melanie, it’s not conclusive. It’s just one more
lead. One piece. As I told you—”
   “I know what you told me. Now let me tell you
something. I’ve been reworking that T. rutilus data
all afternoon. And I’ve got some thoughts about it.”
  “Go ahead,” Cavanaugh said.
   “Somebody tried to use T. rutilus to stop the
infected Anopheles even before the CDC was called
in or the epidemic became public knowledge. That
suggests to me that whoever started the plague
tried to stop it before it got out of hand.”
   This wasn’t consistent with her usual genocide
theories. Obviously she had put professional
objectivity in the forefront. Finally. Cavanaugh
listened more closely.
   “Now, by mid-June every infectious-disease unit
in the Western world was crawling over the
epicenter in Newburg. Most of them were only here
briefly, to get specimen samples and victims’ blood
samples to take back home. But a few stayed at
least a week—people from WHO and from Antwerp,
to name just two. They combed the place. Even
concentrating on A. quadrimaculatus, there’s no
way everybody could have missed the unusually
high numbers of T. rutilus, or not known what
those numbers implied.”
  “Go on. So?”
   Suddenly she put her purse down, straight onto a
pile of salt marsh mosquitoes. She didn’t seem to
notice. “So I don’t know yet. I want to check
something. Meet me at my bed-and-breakfast after
you go to dinner. I’m not hungry.”
  “Neither am I. I’ll stay with you.”
   “Robert, your stomach is grumbling. I can hear it
from over here, for God’s sake. Go eat and come
back after. I’ll be there.”
  He left her at the bed-and-breakfast, raced to a
McDonalds, and ate a Big Mac in the car on the way
back. A pickle spilled across his tie. The trip took
him sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds.
  Apparently it was enough time. Melanie’s
computer was turned off. She sat quietly at her
desk, her eyes blank, her mind someplace else.
  “Melanie… Melanie?”
  Slowly she focused on him. “Robert.”
  “What were you checking? What did you find?”
   “I was checking the weekly World Health
Organization report to the CDC. It’s just bald data,
a summary of what’s happening around the world.
Health-wise.”
   Melanie never used nonwords like “health-wise.”
She continued to gaze at nothing. Robert stepped
closer. “And what did the weekly report show? For
what week?”
  “I scanned six months’ worth of reports, by key
word. We have the software to do that. I looked for
malaria outbreaks. Of course, there were dozens.
Did you know that nearly three million people die
every year of malaria worldwide?”
  “No. Did you find any… anomalies?”
  “Yes. A set of data that graphs to an anomalous
epidemiological curve. In Africa. The Democratic
Republic of the Congo, that used to be Zaire. That’s
what they’re calling it now. There was a revolution,
you know.”
  “I know,” Cavanaugh said. She was rambling. “Go
on.”
    “The anomalous epidemiological curve shows a
much smaller number of infectees than usual. And
it just breaks off abruptly, as if it were brought
under sharp control very quickly. In a little over a
month.”
   “Maybe the public health service in Congo got
right on it. Like we did.”
  “There is no public health service in Congo,
except in name. There was one once, but it
collapsed during the corruption before the last
revolution. And nobody brings a malaria epidemic
under sharp immediate control in Africa. They
don’t have the resources. We only did it so fast here
because the army mobilized, with money and
expertise and manpower and supplies. The United
States isn’t Africa.”
  “Okay,” Cavanaugh said. “Then what did cause
their malaria outbreak to end so fast? And was it
malaria reading or a normal kind?”
  “There’s no way to tell from the data. Or from
here. You’d have to go to Congo.”
   Cavanaugh stared at her. Through his head
whirled a number of little pictures, like icons on a
demented screen saver: Visas. Vaccines. Languages.
What languages did they speak in Congo? He didn’t
even know. Money. He’d been spending too much
lately, what with moving house every fifteen
minutes, and he was suspended without pay. And
the Bureau had forbidden him to work on this case.
A visa to Congo was traceable… and what about
Fort Detrick. He needed to go there, follow up on
the voice analysis…
  “Melanie,” he said, “I can’t go to Congo to
investigate.”
   For the first time since he’d come in, he had her
full attention. She swept him a look of utter scorn.
  “Not you—what good would you be in Africa?”
she said. “Not you.
  “Me.”



                  FIFTEEN

     The climate of Zaire is especially
     conducive to germs, fungi, and carriers
     of numerous pests and diseases.
     —Compton’s Encyclopedia



  Africa could break your heart.
   Melanie stepped off the plane at N’Djili Airport
in Kinshasa and walked toward the cinder-block
terminal. The heat was no worse than summer in
Mississippi, but the quality was different. She
couldn’t put it into words: it was a combination of
smell, vibration, some ineffable sense of portent. It
was different. It was Africa.
   As soon as she walked through the terminal door,
the “officials” descended. They clamored in French
and broken English that she give them her tickets,
her luggage, her passport. Later they would demand
“fees” for the return of all these items. Behind them
came the fixers, with promises to guide a foreigner
through this maze of “travel fees”—for, of course, a
fee for themselves. Melanie waved the whole crowd
away, gripped her two carry-ons, and backed herself
into a corner to study the situation.
   Congo was between wars. The airport held
foreigners she judged to be businessmen, refugees,
even a few tourists. Or maybe they were mining
financiers. At its lowest points, Congo lost its
international financiers, its sole means to foreign
trade in copper, diamonds, cobalt, and manganese.
Like robins in an American spring, returning
financiers were a good sign.
   A television set high near the ceiling was actually
working, although only audio, which was in French.
The screen showed a fixed title: “Communiques et
Messages.” A few shops inside the terminal
displayed perfume, Belgian chocolates, and jewelry.
This was encouraging. The last time Melanie had
come through N’Djili Airport, with a CDC team, the
only things in the terminal were bayonet-carrying
soldiers and wrecked furniture.
   Kinshasa itself was less encouraging. After
expertly negotiating the upturned palms at N’Djili,
she took a taxi to Mama Yemo Hospital. The taxi
inched slowly and painfully over streets with broken
pavement and deep potholes full of fetid water.
Several times the taxi had to detour. Through the
cab’s open windows—it had no
air-conditioning—Melanie surveyed the capital she
had seen four times before, in various states of
functioning under various regimes in various
degrees of civil strife.
  Women filled the main market, selling cassava,
bananas, sugarcane. Business looked brisk.
  The zoo was still a charred rubble, the buildings
burned and the animals dead.
  The Intercontinental Hotel gleamed amid its
fountains and gardens, guarded by army soldiers, a
luxurious haven for the rich. A uniformed valet
parked Jaguars and Mercedes.
  At Lovanium University, students climbed briskly
up and down neatly whitewashed steps.
  Beggars thronged the edge of La Cité, Kinshasa’s
vast slum. Many looked sick or deformed. But they
didn’t all move with the terrible shuffling dullness of
misery and malnutrition that Melanie had observed
on her last trip.
 And even the beggars wore plastic shower thongs.
Mostly.
  The fishermen living in tin-roofed shanties by the
great river now possessed nets.
   Best of all, Melanie saw a woman in a bright
cotton dress on her knees, weeding a dozen stalks of
corn growing beside her hut. If corn could grow
that tall in Kinshasa, without being stolen or
vandalized, Congo had come a long way since the
last war.
   Mama Yemo Hospital, however, reminded her
that compared to the rest of the world, Congo’s
“long way” was measured in inches.
   There were still more patients than beds. Sick
people lay on flaking white metal beds, on sheetless
gurneys, on straw pallets, on the floor. Some she
could diagnose with one glance: that’s malaria,
that’s malnutrition, that’s gangrene, that’s
dysentery. She clutched her two valises and kept on
walking. The only medicines she had with her were
ones that any knowledgeable American could be
expected to carry for personal use: a few antibiotics,
first-aid supplies, the antimalarial prophylaxis
mefloquine, some Lomotil for diarrhea, which she
hoped to hell she wouldn’t get because Lomotil
cross-reacted with mefloquine.
  “M’sieu le docteur Ekombe Kifoto?” she called
loudly. No one paid any attention.
   She wasn’t here as a CDC representative or even
as a private doctor, which would have required
notifying half a dozen different agencies in and out
of Congo. She was here as an anonymous tourist.
She couldn’t help the suffering people jammed into
the stinking corridors. She kept on walking.
  “M’sieu le docteur Ekombe Kifoto?”
   Finally a Congolese nurse directed her to the
ward where Kifoto was administering chloroquine
to malaria patients. The minute he spotted Melanie,
he rushed over to her. “Melanie! Vous êtes ici!”
  “But where is ‘here’?” she answered in French.
“Hell?” An old joke from a previous epidemic, a
previous joint CDCAMTO-Zaire Health Ministry
campaign. During an epidemic, Ekombe Kifoto was
among the best.
   He led her to a tiny, vacant break room with
chairs and a small refrigerator, but no table. They
drank Primus beer while they caught up on old
friends, new epidemic. In Congo, you drank bottled
water or beer. You even brushed your teeth with
beer. Or with the equally ubiquitous Coke, which
somehow appeared everywhere on Earth even
during violent wars. If WHO were as efficient as
Coca-Cola. Melanie figured, antibiotics would turn
up in the deepest rain forest.
  “Ekombe, I need a favor,” she said, when the
social chat was finished.
  “Yes?” He watched her carefully.
  “I need to go into the rain forest. To a village
called Yamdongi, in Kinsangani Zone.”
   “Ah. Where the last malaria epidemic was. I hear
it was mercifully brief. But why come to me? The
CDC—”
   “I’m not here on behalf of the CDC. I’m unofficial
and alone. But I need a medical visa to get through
to Yamdongi without delay. And I need you to radio
both the Catholic mission in Lubundu and whatever
medical facilities remain in Yamdongi from the
epidemic.”
   “There remains a tent hospital and a physician
from Doctors Without Borders. Mopping up.”
During his work with the Americans, Kifoto had
delighted in translating American slang into
French, Bantu, and Tutsi. “But why, Melanie? The
epidemic is over.”
  “I know. Did you see the curves?”
  Kifoto shrugged. “You know how it is. So much
work here, always.”
  “I know. Please do this for me, Ekombe. Without
questions.”
   “I will. You know I will. Melanie—” He eyed her
valises. “Do you have medicines with you? We are
so short. No, of course you don’t. Not if you arrived
in Congo without official notice.”
  “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I couldn’t—”
  “I know. Do not concern yourself about it.”
  As if, surrounded by malarial and worm-ridden
children, that were at all possible.



   Armed with the papers from Kifoto, including a
medical travel pass that he’d gotten signed by the
new minister of health (now there was a hopeless
job), Melanie’s identity changed again. She was no
longer an anonymous tourist. Now she was a
doctor. The medical pass was the only thing that
allowed her to travel into the rain forest
unaccompanied by an “escort” of army officers
asking questions and demanding bribes and
intimidating villagers. A medical pass allowed you
to go anywhere, although not necessarily safely.
  She took another cab to N’Dolo, Kinshasa’s
smaller airport, and then took a very old,
much-painted prop plane to a small airfield in
Kinsan-gani, seventy miles from Yamdongi. She was
met by Sister Marie-Stephanie, a Catholic
missionary who had been in Congo for thirty-five
years, teaching three generations of Bantu girls to
sew, boil drinking water, and stumble through the
writings of Saint Theresa, the Little Flower.
Nothing could surprise Sister Marie-Stephanie. She
had witnessed epidemics, revolutions, paramilitary
bandits, crop failures, floods, famines, and witch
doctors. Her sun-creased face under its traditional
white coif sized up Melanie in thirty seconds and
kept the results to herself.
   After a night at the mission, Melanie was driven
by Land Rover to Yamdongi, which took eight
hours. The driver was the most cheerful person
she’d ever met. He whistled for the entire eight
hours, alternating atonal native tunes with
outdated American and British rock. Melanie
thought she recognized “Can’t Get No Satisfaction,”
but over the motor of the Land Rover it was hard to
be sure. Between songs, the driver kept his vocal
chords moist by sipping beer as he bounced and
bumped along rutted paths through the lush rain
forest.
   Maps in Congo were always a hopeful fiction.
Indicated roads did not exist, and never had.
“Highways” turned out to be rutted dirt that
flooded after each explosive rain. Bridges had been
washed away, or burned, or dismantled for the
metal.
   Throughout the trip, Melanie watched for
monkeys in the trees. Monkeys were a key economic
indicator. In good times, they swung and chattered.
In bad times, they’d all been eaten. This time,
Melanie saw monkeys.
   Eventually, just before her teeth felt about to be
rattled out of her gums, they reached Yamdongi.
“Hello! Dr. Spencer?”
  He came out of the tent hospital, smiling. “Dr.
Anderson?”
  “Yes.” Shakily she climbed down from the Land
Rover. The driver looked at her expectantly,
optimism undimmed. She gave him five American
dollars—a fortune—and watched his face light up.
He tossed down her bags and drove off, singing.
  Brian Spencer said, “Dr. Kifoto radioed that you
were coming. But the epidemic is quite over, you
know.” His accent said the north of England.
  “Yes, I know. I just have some follow-up
questions.”
   “Fine, fine. Glad to be of help. Possibly you’d like
to eat.”
   “Yes, thank you,” she said. He was very
young—twenty-six? Twenty-eight? Brisk, idealistic,
talkative. Over stew and beer he told her what he
could about the epidemic.
   “The usual thing, you know, except that the
victims died unusually quickly. Much tertiary
cerebral stroke, I rather suspect, although of course
we haven’t the resources for autopsies. Time,
mostly. And also, the epidemic ended quite
abruptly. Odd, that, but we were all grateful. At the
zenith we were giving three hundred shots of
chloroquine a day. No time to do more than that.
They were coming from as far away as Bienge.
Fortunately I had top-drawer Congolese nurses.
Only one left here now, Sebo Masemo. She and I
return to Kinsangani next week. I’ve put you up in
one of the other nurses rooms. Not luxurious, I’m
afraid, but tolerable.”
   “Thank you. Dr. Spencer, while the epidemic was
on, and especially just before it ended, did you
notice any unusual movements in the village or the
forest?”
  “Movements? Of what?”
  “Soldiers. Or resources for Anopheles control that
aren’t usually available here.”
  He lit a French cigarette. Melanie wasn’t
surprised. In Africa, even for doctors, future
emphysema looked better than present insects. The
smoke wreathed his head.
  “Dr. Anderson, there are no resources for
Anopheles control available here. Not for the last
epidemic, nor the one before that, nor the next one
to come.” Suddenly he looked much older.
  Melanie didn’t tell him that she’d joined her first
epidemiological team before he entered med school.
The less she gave away, the better.
  He said, “I expect you’d like to have a look at the
hospital.”
  “Please.”
   A small wooden sign outside the gray tent said
MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES. Inside were the
usual: wooden bedframes with palm-leaf
mattresses, an electric generator saved for times of
real need, autoclave and refrigerator, locked meds
cabinet. A “lab” with cultures and reagents to find
out what microbe you were dealing with, but no
electron microscope to really find out what you
were dealing with. Melanie didn’t see automatic
rifles, but they were probably here.
  This close to the equator, night fell at six o’clock.
Brian Spencer lit a kerosene lamp and walked
Melanie through the wards, of which there were
two, men and women. Children were in with the
women. The hospital was down to fewer than a
dozen people in each ward; there were beds for all.
  “Ça va, Mbuzu?” Spencer said to a woman, who
smiled at him weakly. To Melanie he said in
English, “Malaria. One of the last cases to fall ill.”
  Melanie smiled at the patient, who let her do a
quick examination. Enlarged and stiffened spleen;
hard, hot belly; face and neck emaciated. The same
symptoms Hippocrates had described accurately
two and a half thousand years ago. Still here.
  At the next bed, Spencer said, “Dysentery.”
  “Malnutrition.”
  “Malaria.”
  “Miscarriage.”
  “Malaria. Doing very well now.”
  “Broken arm.”
  “Dysentery.”
  “Malaria.”
  Spencer stopped at the last bed. A woman lay
motionless, both her arms chopped off just below
the elbows. The stumps were freshly bandaged, and
the woman looked sedated, although not so much
that the anguish had faded from her eyes.
   “I don’t know what happened here,” Spencer
said. “She staggered into the hospital alone,
although I think someone must have helped her get
this far. She speaks no French, and my nurse
doesn’t know this dialect.”
  Melanie knelt beside the woman’s bed and tried
each of the languages she sketchily knew. Finally the
woman murmured back.
  Melanie stood. “She said soldiers did it. Because
they wanted diamonds and she had no diamonds.”
  “Probably paramilitary bandits,” Spencer said.
“A few groups are still in the bush, although the
army is doing pretty well at finding them. You
speak several dialects, Dr. Anderson.”
   “Badly,” she said. The woman on the bed had
finally closed her eyes, as though the simple act of
telling someone what had happened to her could
bring sleep. Melanie watched, gut churning. Every
time she came to Africa, she was overwhelmed by
guilt. For not doing more for these people, for living
in America, for carrying around in her own
well-cared-for veins a dozen vaccinations against
diseases that killed Africans by the millions. Every
time she came to Africa, Africa pierced her heart,
and she couldn’t wait to leave so she could yearn to
come back again. Every time.
   “Even badly, speaking several African languages
is an achievement,” Spencer said. And then, “Maybe
you can do this job after all. Whatever it is.”
  Melanie said nothing. She’d been thinking just
the opposite.



   At sunrise she started, walking the short distance
to the village, which looked serene in the delicate
light. About four hundred people, Melanie
estimated. Maybe four-fifty. Goats grazed outside
the huts, which were a mix of timber and
mud-and-wattle, with thatched roofs. Gardens held
sweet potatoes, corn, cassavas. The women had
already kindled the morning fires in the communal
cooking area. Children fetched wood or water from
a small river. They stopped cold to stare at a black
woman in khakis, boots, and sun hat from Macy’s.
   “Hello,” she said in Bantu, which made them all
giggle. “Where is the house of”—she consulted
Spencer’s list of village family heads— “Kambidi
Mabalo?”
  More giggling, mouths hiding behind small black
hands. God, they were adorable. She wondered how
many were positive for sickle-cell trait.
  “Please, Kambidi Mabalo?”
   Finally one of the little boys said boldly, “He’s at
his second wife’s house.”
  “And where is that?”
   He pointed to one of the largest structures and
then suddenly they all fled, water sloshing from
their buckets, giggling as they ran. Within two
minutes, the entire village would know that a
foreign woman was seeking Kambidi Mabalo.
   The second wife let her in, listened silently to
Melanie’s speech about being a colleague of Dr.
Spencer’s, and inspected the gift Melanie had
brought. This was an electric flashlight, purchased
from Spencer. Melanie hadn’t been able to carry
many goods into the country, but she had carried
her checkbook. Spencer was leaving Yamdongi in a
week: money was easier to transport than goods
and always in short supply at Doctors Without
Borders. Melanie had purchased a few of
everything: flashlights, disposable razors, kitchen
knives, dishes, clothing, even empty water bottles
useful for carrying whatever liquids the villagers
wanted carried. She was well prepared with guest
gifts.
   Kambidi’s second wife nodded and indicated
Kambidi, who sat close nearby and had heard the
entire exchange. Nonetheless, Melanie repeated it,
from the necessary respect. Then came the ritual
drinking of “tea,” after which she could finally get to
work. Her Bantu was strong enough for this, but if
she had to, she would switch to French.
  “Elder Kambidi, have you ever had malaria?”
   “Did your father ever have malaria? Was he very
sick? Did he die? How about your father’s oldest
sister? What is her name? Was it a very severe
case? Now your father’s second-oldest sister…”
  She was constructing a genetic chart. The
method was crude, but blood tests were not
practical here. Anyway, Mendel’s laws held as well
here as anywhere else. With painstaking
questioning, and then cross-questioning of the
people named (if they were still alive), she would
end up with a complete kinship chart for, she
hoped, several generations. Bantu remembered
their ancestors.
   Sickle-cell trait was inherited. It protected
against malaria, at least enough to mitigate its
severity. By drawing the gene map of who had
experienced a severe case of malaria, who a light
case, and who none at all, even when an epidemic
raged, Melanie hoped to determine who carried the
sickle-cell trait.
  Then she would graph that onto the list of people
who had died of this last brief epidemic of malaria.
“Much tertiary cerebral stroke, I rather suspect,”
No kidding. If the epidemic that had “ended quite
abruptly… Odd, that…” had indeed been malaria
reading, then the only mortalities would be to
people carrying the sickle-cell trait.
   “Now your mother, Elder Kambidi. Did she ever
have malaria? Are you sure it was not the black
sickness? What about her mother?”
   Melanie talked to Kambidi Mabalo for two hours,
and then to his second wife for another hour. People
appeared at the door to gaze at her silently before
vanishing again. The life of the household went on
around her. She was taking a lot of these peoples
time; she hoped the magic of Dr. Spencer’s name
would keep everyone cooperative until she finished.
   Certainly, Third World villagers had valid reasons
not to cooperate with foreigners who said they were
there to control malaria. Too often, the foreigners
just didn’t have time to grasp the entire situation.
When WHO had sprayed the houses of Malayan
villages with DDT to eliminate Anopheles, it had
worked. But it had also eliminated wasps that lived
in the palm-frond roofs and ate caterpillars. The
wasps died, the palm-frond-eating caterpillars
flourished, and the roofs all fell down. WHO
retreated hastily, helped along by roofless and angry
Malayans.
  Now, at this moment, Yamdongi was grateful to
Médecins Sans Frontières. But gratitude could
wither quickly under the strong hot relentless sun.



  Gratitude held. After a week of so much
questioning that Melanie grew hoarse, she had her
answers.
   She also had mosquito samples. She’d paid the
village boys one makuta for each live Anopheles,
giving them homemade killing jars furnished with
carbon tetrachloride from Spencer’s stores. She’d
also paid them for live larvae, which she’d killed by
the simple method of letting the aquatic creatures
dry out. The boys took to this with wild enthusiasm.
When she had two huge piles of specimens, she’d
finally had to call in her hunters, who were dejected
that the great adventure was over.
  Melanie picked through the insects, choosing the
best preserved. That was all she could do in Congo.
The African malaria carrier was Anopheles
gambiae, not the American A. quadrimaculatus,
but the Plasmodium falciparum parasite was the
same. No way to tell if these particular mosquitoes
carried malaria until the samples were analyzed in
Atlanta.
  But the specimens were secondary, the genealogy
charts were what mattered.
   There were seven hundred highly inbred people
on Melanie’s chart, some living and some dead.
From their personal histories of illness, an
estimated 17 percent carried the sickle-cell trait,
but not the double gene that resulted in full-blown
sickle-cell anemia. In this harsh environment, the
latter seldom survived long enough to reproduce. Of
the people who had died in the latest malaria
epidemic, plus the few who had survived it, every
single one stood in a position on the chart to have
inherited sickle-cell trait from their parents.
Without blood tests on the dead, of course, there
was no way to be sure that they had inherited
sickle-cell trait. But they certainly could have. And
most of the people untouched by the recent plague
stood in a position where they could not have
inherited sickle-cell trait.
  It had been here. In Yamdongi. Malaria reading
had been here, and it had vanished with the same
abruptness that the U.S. Army had brought to
Maryland through the most efficient disease-control
methods in the world.
  But there had been no efficient disease-control
methods in Yamdongi. She had questioned
everyone closely about this, especially the children.
Congolese children, like children everywhere,
explored everything. They ran through the forest,
poked into strange objects, talked to strangers even
when warned not to. The children Melanie talked
to, sweetening her questions with various small
gifts, had all said the same thing. No strangers in
Yamdongi during the sickness, except hospital
people. No soldiers spraying in the forest (she’d
illustrated “spraying” with an old disinfectant bottle
filled with water). No powder floating on the
waters. Nothing new given to the villagers to put in
their houses.
  The malaria mini-epidemic in Yamdongi had not
been stopped by conventional disease-control
measures. So how had it been stopped?
  By whom?
  And why?



   Melanie lay awake most of her last night in
Yamdongi, worrying the data. Maybe there was
another way to explain it. She looked at alternate
scenarios, finally forced to reject each one because
of some major misfit with the facts. No, there was
only one explanation that fit the data.
  Whoever had loosed malaria reading in Maryland
had also loosed it here. And then had stopped it
abruptly.
   A double test—control and variable? But both
outbreaks of malaria contained the same variable:
this malarial parasite colonized cells with sickled
hemoglobin. The diseases were identical, at least as
far as she knew now. Maybe the CDC analysis would
show differences.
  A double test to see if one epidemic could be
ended, while the other ran its course? But someone
had ended both epidemics, with the same
abruptness.
   A laboratory escape? Mosquitoes, after all, could
fly out easily, and you’d only need a few escapees.
Under the right conditions, the disease would
spread quickly. But two identical lab escapes on two
continents six thousand miles apart? Not likely.
   So what? A practice run at genocide on two
different populations, African and American—the
two largest Negroid populations in the world.
  By whom?
  For what terrible purpose?
   She tossed on the hard bed, under her mosquito
netting, until after dawn. Then she got dressed,
finished packing, and said good-bye to Brian
Spencer and Sebo Masemo. Things had turned cool
between her and the young British doctor.
Professional courtesy demanded that she share the
results of her work with him. But she couldn’t. Not
this. Not yet.
  “Got what you wanted, then, Dr. Anderson?”
  “Yes. And thank you again for your hospitality.”
   “No need to mention it,” he said stiffly. “Good
journey.”
   She climbed onto the Catholic mission’s Land
Rover, which was driven by the same Bantu singing
the same dated rock for eight bone-jarring hours.
After one night at the mission, she flew back to
Kinsangani and then Kinshasa. In N’Djili Airport,
before her flight to Washington, customs officials
tore apart her valises, her handbag, her money belt.
It didn’t matter. The genealogy charts were just so
much foreign gobbledy-gook. And the intent,
corrupt officials were looking for something to tax
or confiscate or exact a bribe for. They never
suspected that between the double layers of Melanie
s long, loose, bright-cotton dress were sewn, each in
a separate tiny cloth bag, a hundred dead
Anopheles gambiae, plus a few dead larvae. The
specimens would stay there until she’d passed
through customs in the United States.
  She hadn’t seen a newspaper in ten days. The
plane had yesterday’s Washington Post. For the
first time all summer, malaria reading was not on
the front page, which brimmed with yet another sex
scandal of yet another congressman. It wasn’t until
page four that she found even a related story, and
then it was only poll results. The confidence of the
American people in the FBI, the poll said, had
dropped drastically due to both the mistaken arrest
of Michael Sean Donohue and the unfruitful failure
to arrest anybody else for causing the epidemic.
   Melanie put the newspaper on the empty seat
beside her. She was exhausted. But she didn’t dare
sleep; she might crush the layer of insects that
justified her, haunted her, swathed her like an
invisible shroud.



                  INTERIM

   The adjunct professor stopped by the faculty
room to pick up his mail. Colleagues sitting at the
broad center table nodded and went on with their
discussion. Beyond the window, the incoming
freshmen, who were here for a four-day summer
orientation to the strange rigors of college, trailed
nervously after an upperclassman, who waved at
buildings with giddy confidence.
   The mail was the usual. Notice of a faculty
meeting. A required paper three months late,
accompanied by a desperate plea from the student
author citing dire stress and enormous regret.
Flyers about a book sale, a blood drive, and a library
display. And a small envelope from the professor’s
insurance company.
  He ripped it open. As an adjunct, a gypsy scholar
who taught a few courses at a great many places, he
carried his own health insurance. It cost him a few
thousand a year in exchange for assurance that he
would not end up dying in his sister’s crowded
apartment untended by anyone who could dispense
pain-easing medication.



      Dear Dr. Marlin Scott:
      We regret to inform you that your health
      insurance policy with this company
      (Policy #4873 ) is canceled as of August
      31 due to a previously undisclosed
      preexisting condition: namely, sickle-cell
      trait. You will recall that your original
      policy required complete disclosure of
      all preexisting conditions.
      If you have any questions, don’t hesitate
      to call your policy representative,
      Sandra Scott at the number below:



   The professor read the form letter twice. A form
letter—that meant the bastards were sending them
out in batches. Dumping whoever they wanted,
including blacks too poor and too unschooled to
know the maneuver was illegal.
   The professor’s eyes gleamed. He loved a good
fight. With proper research, this one could be a
doozie. Class-action material.
  Carefully he folded the letter and put it in his
briefcase.



                  SIXTEEN

      CIA association with Fort Detrick
      involved the Special Operations Division
      of that facility. This division was
     responsible for developing special
     applications for biological warfare
     agents and toxins… Only two or three
     Agency officers at any time were cleared
     for access to Fort Detrick activities.
     —William Colby, CIA Director, testifying
     before Congress, 1975



  Cavanaugh liked bars, but not bars like this one.
   A good bar should have a selection of drinks,
both basic and exotic. A TV tuned to sports, but a
discreet TV, over the bar, not too loud. Local people
of different ages, including some pretty women.
Maybe a pool table. Quick service, light sandwiches,
a clean men’s room, and a bartender who observed
things and was articulate enough to report them
accurately to interested inquirers, such as, for
instance, FBI agents. That was what made a good
bar.
   The Bull Shift was nothing like that. Behind the
bar a huge TV screen blasted baseball and car
racing at the decibel level of a jackhammer. Any air
space left was filled with bells from the pinball
machine and waves of whiny country and western.
The menu consisted of greasy chicken wings and
greasier French fries. The men, all between twenty
and forty, wore identical jeans and cowboy boots.
The women looked like whores look everywhere. The
bartender, who said “Huh?” when he asked for a
vodka and tonic, was a busty redhead almost
wearing a turquoise blouse and tangerine shorts.
Cavanaugh suspected that if she’d ever overheard
anything of interest, it had been dissolved by the
fumes from her hairspray. He didn’t even want to
think about the men’s room.
  There was also a mechanical bull ride.
  Studying the room from his stool at the far end of
the bar, Cavanaugh spotted three possibles. A group
of five men at a table, two men talking to two
women by the far wall, and two more men playing
pool. All had the short hair, clean fingernails, and
ineffable wariness-plus-cockiness that went with a
certain kind of low-ranking member of secret
organizations. Not that that meant they were
necessarily with a CIA dirty-tricks unit. In the last
week, Cavanaugh had checked out a lot of men in a
lot of bars surrounding Fort Detrick. He was getting
sick of devoting his nights to semidrunks and his
days to scouring southern Maryland for a cheap
apartment that would allow a dog and that in no
way reminded him of Judy.
  Cavanaugh finished his beer and strolled casually
toward the jukebox. He figured he better start with
the two men chatting up the two women before all
four struck their deal and disappeared.
   He studied the music selection, which appeared
to have been chosen forty years ago: Hank Williams,
Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Loretta Lynn.
Ninety seconds into eavesdropping, one of the
hookers said pointedly, “Let’s move on, boys, away
from the cop.” She was pretty good, Cavanaugh
thought. Sharp. She’d make a better agent than,
say, Seton.
  And anyway he’d heard enough. Both men had
spoken. Neither had matched the voice on Melanie’s
tapes, which Cavanaugh had listened to over and
over. That was the other thing he did with his days.
Memorize a racist voice and a psycholinguistic
profile:



     THE SPEAKER IS A CAUCASIAN MALE
     BETWEEN THE AGES OF
     THIRTY-FIVE AND FORTY-FIVE. HE
     HOLDS AT LEAST A B.S. DEGREE
     (PROBABLY NOT A B.A.), BUT NOT A
     GRADUATE DEGREE. HE IS FROM
     GEORGIA ORIGINALLY, BUT HAS
     SPENT SIGNIFICANT TIME IN NEW
     ENGLAND WITHIN THE LAST FIVE
     YEARS. HE IS EXCITED BY WHAT HE
     IS SAYING, BOTH EMOTIONALLY
     AND SEXUALLY. HE IS PROBABLY
     NEITHER MARRIED NOR LIVING
     WITH A WOMAN. THE SPEAKER
     IDENTIFIES WITH TRADITION AND
     STRUCTURE, THE MORE
     STRUCTURED THE BETTER, AS A
     DEFENSE AGAINST A VERY CHAOTIC
     INNER SELF. HE FEARS ANYTHING
     THAT SEEMS TO HIM TO THREATEN
     THAT TRADITION AND STRUCTURE.
     BECAUSE HE FEARS BEING ALONE,
     HE MOST LIKELY SPENDS TIME
     AWAY FROM HIS JOB SURROUNDED
     BY LIKE-MINDED INDIVIDUALS. HE
     MAY PARTY A LOT… TAPE #2:
     INDOORS. AMPLIFICATION REVEALS
     A VIDEO GAME, PINBALL MACHINE,
     CLINKING GLASSES, AND A GREAT
     MANY INDISTINGUISHABLE
     CONVERSATIONS. SETTING IS
     EITHER A BAR OR A LARGE PRIVATE
     PARTY.
     TAPE #3: PROBABLY SAME SETTING
     AS TAPE #2, BUT WITH FEWER
     PEOPLE PRESENT.



   Cavanaugh moved on to the next group of
forty-year-old Caucasian males partying hard with
like-minded individuals in their traditional place
with clinking glasses and a pinball machine. This
was the group of five men at one table. Only three
were talking; the other two concentrated on
drinking. Cavanaugh found excuses to linger so long
beside the table that the noisiest guy started giving
him the go-away-you-fairy-or-I’ll-smash-your-face
look. Fortunately, before this could happen, the two
silent men ordered more beer. Both had Texas
accents.
  The two men playing pool were talkative enough,
but neither one was the voice on Melanie s tapes.
   Discouraged, Cavanaugh left the Bull Shift for his
car. The humid night settled around him like damp,
itchy wool. So far he’d tried thirty-four bars, an
average of six-point-eight per night, rounded off.
One more bar would bring it to a clean seven.
  By the cars dome light, he consulted his list. Next
was the Alligator, farther from Fort Detrick than
most, but maybe the drive would clear his head.
Better switch to club soda, except that these bars
weren’t the kind of place where you could order club
soda and not be noticed.
  Cavanaugh hadn’t even reached a bar stool when
he heard him.
   Not looking around, Cavanaugh sat at the nearest
table. He ordered a vodka and tonic, then turned
around to study the special sandwiches listed on a
blackboard. The voice on Melanie’s tape sat with
three other men. They all had a buzz on, but they
weren’t drunk. Cavanaugh turned back and sipped
his drink.
  “… so then Rollins says…”
  “Are you ready to order?” a waitress asked
Cavanaugh.
  “No… yes… a, uh, a roast-beef sandwich, please.”
  “… don’t even know how to…”
 “Would you like horseradish on that? Or
mustard?”
  “No.”
  “… but not before Mitchell gets to them first, see.
So then Rollins…”
  “How about lettuce and tomato?”
  “No!” Cavanaugh said, before she could absorb
more sound waves with mayonnaise, ketchup, or
hot sauce. She strode away, looking hurt.
   “… that’ll teach ‘em not to screw up like that
again!” All four men roared with laughter.
Cavanaugh waited, but another man picked up the
conversation, talking about a hot night with his new
girlfriend. Cavanaugh went to the men’s room,
closed a stall door, and activated the wire under his
shirt.
   When he returned, he took the chair closest to his
mark. The talk had turned to the NBA. Cavanaugh’s
man championed Larry Byrd over Michael Jordan.
Nothing said was explicitly racist, but it didn’t need
to be. Cavanaugh recorded until the tape ran out.
By then he had at least partial names for everybody:
“Mike Goodman.” “Tom Somebody.” “Somebody
Romellio.” Melanie’s baiter was “Ed Lewis.”
  Cavanaugh allowed himself to finish his vodka
and tonic.
   Back at his motel, he sealed the tape into a sturdy
mailer and addressed it to Dr. Jonathan Pritchard
at the Psycholinguistics Center of Syracuse
University. Next he wrote a letter, addressed to
Felders’s residence, explaining what he’d found and
asking Felders to check FBI records, plus his
clandestine CIA sources, for “Ed Lewis.” Also “Mike
Goodman” or “Somebody Romellio.” Cavanaugh
didn’t know whether Felders would do this, but if he
had to place a substantial bet, he’d guess yes. Before
anything else, Felders was a good cop. He might not
like the odor surrounding a genuine lead, but once
he smelled it, he’d follow through.
   Cavanaugh lay back on his lumpy motel bed,
staring into the unair-conditioned insect-humming
darkness. He felt very, very good.



   The next day he ate a huge breakfast, signed the
lease on an apartment in Leonardtown, arranged to
have his furniture brought there from storage, had
his car inspected, and generally acted like a man
who knew what he was doing.
   But how much did he really know? That question
needed concentrated thought. Cavanaugh sat on the
bed in his soon-to-be-vacated motel room. At his
feet Abigail chewed happily on a strip of molding
she’d torn off the dresser. Housekeeping never had
materialized. The room was a mess, although he
had swept up all the nonuseful bugs and thrown
them into the Dumpster. This act was witnessed by
the motel clerk, who merely shrugged. Cavanaugh
wondered what else that particular Dumpster had
held over the years.
  Not his problem. His problem was malaria
reading. Think it through.
  Evidence so far: Ed Lewis, with some undefined
connection to Fort Detrick and/or the CIA, had
made numerous hate calls to Melanie.
   Possible reason, judging by some of the content:
To persuade her to return to Atlanta, which would
remove a skilled and experienced expert from the
malaria team. Alternate possible reason: The guy
just liked making hate calls to attractive black
women.
  Evidence so far: Somebody had deliberately
engineered the malaria reading parasite. Even the
CDC and the FBI had finally agreed on that. Reason:
Unknown.
   Possible reason: To kill off as many blacks as this
particular genetic feat would accomplish. Alternate
possible reason: To test the parasite for possible use
elsewhere. Alternate possible reason: The parasite
had been inadvertently created in the lab and had
inadvertently escaped. (Melanie had said that
“inadvertently” creating a complex genetic
mutation this complex, where three separate genes
that worked together were the only ones altered,
was impossible. Cavanaugh wasn’t so sure. He
wasn’t a scientist, but he wasn’t a militant either.
Let the possibility stand.)
   Evidence so far: Whoever had created malaria
reading, it wasn’t Michael Sean Donohue. The
grand jury had found that every item seized in
Donohue’s apartment was “normal” to a
microbiologist, even a dismissed microbiologist
working on his own. That included the cage of live
Anopheles. Donohue was merely professionally
interested in the epidemic and so was examining
the microbiology involved. Defense had apparently
produced a dozen other respected microbiologists
to say they were doing the same thing.
   Of course, grand jury proceedings were supposed
to be secret, but reporters had literally camped on
the courthouse steps and investigated, interviewed,
and ingratiated themselves with every single person
who went in and out. No secrets were left, including
the fact that sixteen witnesses had testified that
Seton’s “informant,” Curtis P. McGraw, was a liar
and a cheat and ate babies for breakfast. Or
whatever else it had taken to discredit his affidavit
saying he been confided in by the defendant. Seton,
in the view of the FBI, had been misled by an artful
con man. Seton, in Cavanaugh s view, had
collaborated in a very public false report.
   Why would Seton do that? Seton wouldn’t, not
just before his retirement. Not unless he’d been
forced to agree to a false report. Forced how, why,
and by whom? Unknown at this time. But the point
was that the informant report, like the search
warrant based on it, were both padded shamelessly.
Which, in turn, led to the real point: Michael Sean
Donohue didn’t do it. Period. Even though the
Bureau had spent an awful lot of time and trouble
trying to prove he had.
  Why? Unknown. Possible reason: The FBI had
genuinely believed Donohue was guilty. Alternate
possible reason: The FBI had believed it until a
certain point in time, and then belief at the top had
weakened; but by that time the Bureau was into
Donohue so deeply and publicly, and under such
pressure to arrest somebody, that they had gone
ahead. It had happened before. It would happen
again.
  Evidence so far: A lot of people had been
removed, one way or another, from this case.
Moreover, they had all been removed in the same
short time span, as July turned into August.
Cavanaugh himself suspended for a trivial offense.
Melanie sent away for a “rest.” Farlow promoted to
Geneva, three and a half thousand miles away.
Dunbar promoted to Budapest, roughly ditto.
   Possible reason: Coincidence. People got
suspended or promoted all the time. Alternate
possible reason: Somebody very powerfully placed
had been conducting a cover-up. This person, or
agency, had brought into the conspiracy everyone
who had to be told: Farlow and Dunbar, for two,
and bought them off. No, that wasn’t right: Dunbar
was a man of rigid honesty, and from what
Cavanaugh had seen and heard, so was Farlow. So if
they had agreed to a cover-up, and to be removed
far from the place it was going on, they must have
some other motivation.
  What?
  Who wanted something covered up, and what
was that something? And how had a cover-up
become necessary in the first place?
   The cheap motel mattress sagged so much under
Cavanaugh’s weight that now his back ached. He
moved from the bed to the chair, which turned out
to be not much of an improvement. Abigail moved
with him. He went on thinking.
   Okay, take a stab at putting it all together. Pick
from all the possibles, combine them at will, and see
what kind of scenario you get.
  Start with facts: Fort Detrick had once been the
authorized center for army development of
biological warfare weapons. The program had been
located at Detrick since Franklin Delano Roosevelt
inaugurated bioweapon research in 1942. Somehow
the CIA had ended up with jurisdiction over
bioweapons. In 1975, CIA director William Colby
testified before Congress that all bioweapons had
not all been destroyed when they were supposed to
be, even though the president and the secretary of
state had both issued directives to destroy them
all—oops, Congress, sorry about that. Instead, the
CIA had maintained stocks of selected bioweapons,
some at the fort itself, some with private
pharmaceutical companies that Fort Detrick had
worked with extensively. Only a few—a very
few—people had known this. The list did not include
the president, the secretary of state, the attorney
general, or the director of the FBI. Colby had been
ordered to dump whatever bioweapons remained
and to stop developing new ones.
  These were facts. Facts a few decades old, yes,
but still facts. Did anyone believe the CIA had
complied with the second desist order when it had
ignored the first? Or that the CIA was now perfectly
open and honest with the president—especially a
Democrat president?
  Cavanaugh did not believe these things.
  Okay, now build on the facts. Possible scenario:
Fort Detrick was still experimenting with secret
bioweapons and still restricting this knowledge to a
handful of outsiders, probably CIA. Top elected and
appointed officials, maybe including all of
USAMRIID, did not necessarily know this. Secret
research had developed malaria reading for use in,
say, Africa, and had tested it in southern
Maryland…
   Cavanaugh’s mind stopped. He didn’t believe it.
Yes, they might well be constructing bioweapons at
Fort Detrick in the name of national security. But
sub-Sahara Africa—mostly poor, mostly
disorganized, mostly struggling—was simply not a
threat to the United States. Or to anyone else in the
world of smart missiles and satellite surveillance.
For the United States, bioweapons against Africa
just didn’t make national security sense, not even as
a deterrent. And testing them on its own
citizens—no. He just didn’t believe his government
had, or would, do that. Yes, there were racist
individuals who would do that—millions of them,
maybe—but the CIA had nothing to gain and too
much to lose by coming to public light in such a
way. No, that wasn’t what had happened. Back up
and start over.
   So say that Fort Detrick was developing the stuff,
for unknown reasons, and it had escaped
inadvertently somewhere near Newburg, Maryland.
Fort Detrick, or one of its tenant organizations,
knew it. They’d tried to stop the epidemic before it
became public. They’d tried using elephant
mosquitoes, T. rutilus, ordered off the usual
bookkeeping from Fielding’s in Baltimore. That was
“Project Birthday.” The elephant mosquito larvae
were supposed to eat the Anopheles larvae and wipe
out the parasite vector. But it hadn’t worked.
Anopheles had flourished anyway, and the
Plasmodium reading parasite had spread, and the
epidemic had swung into full force. Meanwhile,
Senator Malcolm Peter Reading had died, thrusting
the whole problem into public light. Fort Detrick
was in trouble.
  So then they’d tried an alternate plan: the old
hide-in-plain-sight. They’d let the CDC call in
USAMRIID, and as a patriotic duty, the U.S. Army
had cooperated in wiping out the malaria that the
CIA had created. Did USAMRIID know that the
rescuer and the villain were both housed in Fort
Detrick, side by side? Maybe not. USAMRIID, like
other military operations, worked on a
need-to-know basis. Colonels Colborne and Sanchez
did not need to know where a biological threat
originated in order to fight it. Possibly both officers
had driven in and out of Fort Detrick every day, not
knowing that one of its windowless, triply secure
facilities housed the actual enemy.
  Cavanaugh shifted in his uncomfortable chair.
Until Abigail barked, he didn’t even hear the knock
on the door.
  So USAMRIID and the CDC, trying to keep turf
wars to a minimum, had cleaned up the medical
mess. But there were still problems for the CIA: the
CDC on-site team and the FBI.
   The CDC team knew too much about the
manufactured nature of this disease, and at least
some team members were all-holy-hell bent on
finding out who had done the genetic engineering.
The scientific community was a close one, and
geniuses in it, as everywhere else, were rare. There
was a chance the CDC could trace the biological
trail back to Fort Detrick.
   Meanwhile, the FBI was in hot pursuit, getting
hotter as the press dumped fuel on the very public
blaze. No one in the FBI knew about the
bioweapons at the fort, but the FBI was damn good
once it focused its full, all-resources-available
attention. It was focusing now. There was a good
chance the FBI might focus and focus and focus
until they caught sight of the CIA. That, too, had
happened before.
  So the CIA had made a decision.
  More knocks on the door, more barking from
Abigail. “Mister? You in there?” called a female
voice.
  “No,” Cavanaugh called back.
  Say that at that point the CIA, backed into a
corner, decided to cut off both investigations at the
source. They brought in the head of the CDC and
the director of the FBI and told them what had
happened (whatever it was). They explained that
national security was at stake, that national
security demanded public secrecy. National
security, they said. National security, NATIONAL
SECURITY, NATIONAL SECURITY. Director
Broylin believed in the importance of national
security; you weren’t picked to head the FBI
otherwise. Cavanaugh didn’t know about the head
of the CDC, a Dr. Saul Wentzel, but he did know the
scientist had once been in the military. A soldier.
  “Open up, Mister! I know you’re in there!” A
female voice.
  “Go away. I’m busy.”
   What next? Broylin and Wentzel had called in
Farlow and Dunbar, who were leading the actual
investigations. And told both of them why the
investigations had to be stopped. Neither man had
liked it—witness Dunbar’s uneasiness the day of
Michael Donohue’s arrest, which he had known was
a charade to pacify press and public. That’s why the
arrest warrant had not evoked national security.
That would mean express authorization by the
attorney general, who didn’t know what the CIA was
doing. And Dunbar had quieted his
conscience—mostly—by telling himself that
Donohue would be released by a grand jury anyway.
There just wasn’t enough evidence.
  Then both Dunbar and Farlow had been
promoted to Europe, where their uneasiness would
not be connected to this case.
  A key turned in Cavanaugh’s lock.
   He sprang up and flung open the door. A massive
woman in a dirty apron stood beside a cart with
cleaning supplies. “Housekeeping, Mister.”
  “Now? You haven’t come all week!”
  “I got sick,” she said flatly. “I’m back now.”
   “Well, you’re too late. I’m checking out.” He
closed the door, put on the chain, and returned to
his chair.
  Dunbar and Farlow safely removed to another
continent. And the two most unruly team members,
himself and Melanie, likewise removed: Cavanaugh
for a minor transgression; Melanie for caring so
much, and so aggressively, that she lost self-control.
The cover-up leaders must have been ecstatic when
she’d slugged that cruel punk in Burger King. Before
that, some renegade CIA member had tried to scare
her off by using the vicious Ed Lewis, of the
dirty-tricks section (or whatever they called it) to
make hate calls. They thought the calls would make
her leave town. They didn’t know Melanie
Anderson.
   And that was it. All the evidence explained, the
scenario complete. Except for two crucial details:
Why was malaria reading created? How did it get
loose? Without those answers, all Cavanaugh had
was a lot of fancy conjecture.
    After all, there were other possible scenarios.
Here was one: The epidemic had been created not
by the CIA but by a foreign or domestic terrorist
group, one with both money and malice. They
didn’t need a logical reason because even at the best
of times these groups weren’t very logical. They
loosed the disease in southern Maryland, which was
25 percent black and poor enough that the malaria
might get firmly established before it was really
noticed. Poor blacks dying is not news. But a U.S.
senator at an outdoor family party happened to get
it. You can’t plan everything. The CDC and the army
stopped the epidemic, the FBI made an honest
mistake in arresting Donohue, and Farlow and
Dunbar were promoted because they were valuable
men. Dunbar was uneasy because his wife was
having an affair, or his kid was on drugs, or he had
hemorrhoids. Ed Lewis had seen Melanie on TV,
saw that she was a babe, and jerked off to making
kinky tapes that, in his mind, degraded her.
Cavanaugh was removed because he’d violated a
legitimate rule, and Melanie was ordered to take a
vacation because she clearly needed a vacation. And
he, Cavanaugh, was an overly imaginative ass.
  He needed proof. Of anything at all.
   He picked up the phone. It had gone dead. He
unlocked his door to head for the pay phone in the
motel office, but the cleaning woman still stood
blocking his path, smoking a cigarette, as immobile
as a rooted thorny tree.
  She said, “Check-out time’s in twenty-two
minutes.”
   “Right,” Cavanaugh said. Now she had become
time conscious. Well, the office pay phone was too
public anyway. So was his—or any— cell phone.
Cavanaugh went back into his room and threw his
increasingly disorganized belongings into his always
disorganized car. Abigail squeezed on top of a pile
of blankets, shirts, and a VCR. Cavanaugh left The
Pines to find a working, private,
noncleaning-woman-haunted phone.



  “Officer Tess Muratore, please.”
   “Who do I say is calling?” The Maryland State
Police dispatcher sounded bored. But apparently
Tess was physically present, a break Cavanaugh
hadn’t expected. He’d expected to leave a request
for her to call him back, which she might not have
done if she didn’t remember who he was. They’d
only met at a few parties.
  “My name is Robert Cavanaugh.”
  After a few moments, which Cavanaugh spent
reading the unoriginal graffiti in the phone booth,
Tess spoke. “Yeah?”
  “Tess, this is Robert Cavanaugh. Judy’s friend.”
  “Not from what I hear.”
  She did remember him. What had Judy told her?
  “I’m with the FBI, and—”
  “Not at the moment, you’re not.”
  “You probably read in the Post that I’m on
temporary suspension. It’s minor. What isn’t minor
is malaria reading, and I’m trying to—”
  “I’m not interested in talking to you,” Tess said.
“Bye.”
   “Wait! It’s important. Just meet me somewhere
for five minutes, Tess. It’s about malaria reading. I
really do have something!”
  “Not if you had the Hope diamond.” She hung
up.
  Not a successful call.
  Cavanaugh fished out another quarter and called
Felders. Maybe Felders had found out something
about the connection between Ed Lewis and Fort
Detrick.
  “This is the Felders residence. Well be away from
the Washington area until August 23. You can leave
a message here with or for Tom, the housesitter.”
   Cavanaugh hung up. Felders didn’t want anyone
to know his house was empty. There was no “Tom.”
And there was no way to reach Felders until he
returned from vacation.
  Not a successful call.
  “The Victorian Roses Bed and Breakfast. May I
help you?”
  “Melanie Anderson, please. She should have
checked back in this morning.”
  “I’m sorry, Dr. Anderson is scheduled to return to
us today, but she hasn’t arrived yet.”
  “Thanks. I’ll try again later.”
  Not a successful call.
  “AT&T, Customer Service.” A female voice, lilting
and perky. “May I help you?”
   “Yes. This is Robert Cavanaugh. I’m calling to see
if phone service has been turned on yet in my new
apartment in Leonardtown, Maryland. The landlord
was going to let your people in. My customer
number is 4678K.”
  “Let me look. Are you Mr. Cavanaugh?”
  “Yes.”
  “Robert Cavanaugh?”
  “Yes!”
  “There’s been a slight delay. The installation crew
will reach your area next Tuesday.”
   “Next Tuesday? You promised me it would be
this week!”
  “I’m sorry, sir, there have been unavoidable
delays. Can I help you with anything else?”
  “You can get me my phone!”
  “We’re working on it, sir. Thank you for calling
AT&T.”
  He had his mobile phone, of course, but anybody
with simple equipment could listen in on it.
  The universe was not cooperating.



  “And then what did he say?” Judy said.
  “I already told you twice,” Tess answered.
  “Tell me again.”
   Tess rolled her eyes. The two women, Tess still in
uniform, sat in Judy’s new living room, which she
had declared to represent a brand-new start to her
life. The apartment was as minimal and hard-edged
as she could make it, while retaining most of her old
furniture. The chintz sofa had been recovered in
sleek white parachute nylon, accented with red
Mylar throw pillows. The sofa shared an area rug in
shades of red with two white, steel-framed directors
chairs. Judys old coffee table held two wineglasses,
a gleaming bowl of red flowers, and an abstract
white stone sculpture. The only other furnishings
were plain white curtains, a poster of Edvard
Munch’s The Scream, and an enormous red-leaved
plant in what appeared to be the chassis of a
miniature UFO.
  Tess said, “What I like about this apartment is
that it’s so… airy.”
  “Tess, forget the apartment. Tell me again what
Robert said.”
   “He said he ‘really had something’ about malaria
reading. He said he wanted to meet with me for five
minutes. He didn’t think I’d remember him. He
described himself as ‘Judy’s friend.’ Jude, I don’t
like how much you’re investing yourself in this
totally dumb conversation. The man’s a jerk. Forget
him.”
  Judy said nothing.
  “Only you can’t, can you? Judy?”
  “No,” Judy said, very low. “It seems I can’t.”
  “But you’re trying, right? You keep busy? You
date other men? You see your girlfriends?”
   “In the last two weeks I’ve had three dates with
three different men. I also had two lunches with
friends, two movies out, and dinner with my old
college roommate. I wrote seventeen thousand
words of science copy, some of it quite good, and
mended clothes ripped four years ago. I also joined
a gym, signed up to tutor inner-city kids on
Wednesday afternoons in September, and started
two avocado plants and a lemon tree from seed.
Tess, don’t twist around so on that sofa!”
  “It’s too slippery,” Tess complained. “I liked the
old upholstering better.”
   Both women fell silent, contemplating Judy’s
sofa.
   Finally, Tess said slowly, “You know what it is. By
our age, most people are married, or they’ve
decided they don’t want to be. If you’re a single
woman and you want a serious relationship, you’re
like someone walking through a potato field in
November. You search over the potatoes that the
harvest missed, but they’re mostly shriveled or
wormy. So you wait in the middle of the empty field
for some other woman to decide she doesn’t want
the potato she picked after all and to throw it back.
You’re just waiting for that, which is humiliating.
And meanwhile, you’re developing a vitamin-C
deficiency and getting scurvy.”
  Judy just looked at her.
   “Okay, you don’t like that theory. Here’s another.
Women still don’t have equal say in this fucking
world. We’re not the choosers; we have to wait to be
chosen. We’re like merchandise on a shelf—say,
glassware. And some are cheap plates and some are
Wedgewood and some are chipped or whatever.
And some—like you and me—are high-quality,
oven-tempered, hand-painted casseroles. But
hand-painted earthenware is a minority taste. It
doesn’t appeal to everyone. It also needs the right
handling and other care. So the chipped plates get
taken and the flashy wineglasses. Rich guys buy the
Wedgewood. And the hand-painted earthenware
just sits there.”
  “Let me get this straight,” Judy said. “You’re
saying we’re casseroles with scurvy?”
  Tess considered. “Yes.”
  “Well, I’m not! And neither are you! We’re not
begging for anybody else’s potato or sitting on a
merchandise shelf. Tess, you don’t really believe all
that.”
  “Sometimes I do.”
  “Well, don’t. I’ll bet nobody else wearing that
uniform has ever come up with such pathetic
theories.”
  “Don’t bet on it.”
  Judy laughed, then stared deeply into her empty
wineglass. “Tess, I want you to see Robert.”
  “Oh, Jude, it won’t help you with him. He—”
   “I don’t expect it to help me. You don’t even have
to mention me. In fact, I prefer you don’t. But
Robert’s a good agent, even if he knows subzero
about women. If he says he’s got something
important on malaria reading, he does. If he says he
needs some input from you, he does. See him.”
  “You really want me to?”
  “Yes.”
  “Okay,” Tess said, reaching for the wine bottle.
“But I won’t like it. He treated you really badly,
Judy.”
  “He’s still a good FBI agent.”
  “And that matters to you. Still.”
  “Yes,” Judy said. “So agree to see him, Tess.”
  “All right,” Tess said. “I will.”



 By Saturday, Melanie still hadn’t returned to
Washington.
   Where the hell was she, Cavanaugh worried.
From a pay phone he called his FBI voice mail, the
CDC, her mother’s house in Mississippi, Melanie’s
apartment in Atlanta, and the airline she’d been
booked on, to see if there’d been an accident. There
hadn’t. Nobody had seen Melanie. Mississippi
informed him that she was in Atlanta, and Atlanta
informed him she had gone home to Mississippi.
  Where was she? And doing what?
   The FBI voice mail, to his great surprise, did have
a message from Tess Muratore. He met her at a
coffee shop near D.C., after spending his second
night in a sleeping bag on the floor of his bare
apartment. It was the first time he’d seen Tess in
uniform. She looked much different than the
attractive, midthirties party goer in bright dresses.
  “Weekend shift?” he asked pleasantly, as he sat
down opposite her.
   “Look, Robert, I’m not here to make small talk.
I’m only here because Judy asked me to, and only
on business.”
   “Judy asked you to?” His breath tangled around
his tonsils.
  Tess scowled. “I’m not going to talk about Judy.
Tell me what you want, or I’m out of here.”
  “Okay.” He settled firmly in the booth, still
surprised that the mention of Judy had affected
him so strongly. “I’ve gone on investigating malaria
reading. I think I’ve got something, but—”
  “You ‘think’? On the phone you were sure.”
   “—but I need some help. I need to know if there
were any vehicle accidents near Newburg reported
to the state or local police during the week that the
CDC has established as the first seeding of the area
with altered Anoph—”
  “Shit, Cavanaugh, every reporter in the city has
gone over and over the vehicular accident records,”
Tess said, with disgust. “They’re open to the public.
You mean the FBI doesn’t know that?”
   “Of course the FBI knows that.” Cavanaugh kept
a tight rein on his irritation. “We’ve checked out
every police report within twenty-five miles. What
I’m talking about is a vehicular accident that didn’t
make it into the record.”
  “If a cop shows up at the scene, a report is filed.”
   “Not if it’s a military vehicle carrying top-secret
classification.”
   For the first time, Tess’s expression changed
from contempt to something else. Cavanaugh didn’t
know what it was, but it was definitely something
else. She said, “A military vehicle? What type?”
  “Unknown.”
  “Regulation or unmarked?”
  “Unknown.”
  “From where?”
  “Fort Detrick.”
  “Registered to whom?”
  “Could be anyone, but it would finally belong to
the CIA.”
  “Going where?”
  “Unknown.”
    Lines rucked Tess’s forehead. “Could happen. But
if there was no report filed, there’s no report for me
to find.”
   “I know. But you can find out who in the state
troopers or county sheriff or local police was on
duty those nights—”
  “For an entire week? Everybody was on duty.”
   “All right. Narrow it to May 2 or 3. The CDC says
those are the most likely seeding dates, judging
from the resulting epidemiological curves. Once you
find out who was on duty, you can discreetly talk to
them, see if anything happened.”
   “Don’t tell me to be ‘discreet,’ Cavanaugh. I don’t
need tutoring from you. And why should anyone at
the scene of a military vehicle accident talk to me? I
don’t have jurisdiction, and I don’t know the locals.
And in case you never noticed, a lot of southern
law-enforcement types don’t like the whole idea of
women troopers on principle—let alone ones who
poke into their jurisdiction. And even if I found the
right officer, he or she might have put together the
malaria connection by now and be too scared to
talk. Or maybe just be uninterested in talking to an
FBI agent who arrested the wrong perp.”
   Cavanaugh said, “I know it’s a long shot. I’m just
trying every lead I can, looking for the one that will
crack it. You know how that is, Tess.”
  Her face said she did, although she resented his
assumption of colleagueship. Cavanaugh held his
breath.
  Finally, she said, “I do have a second cousin in
the Charles County Sheriffs Office…”
  “Yes. Please. That’s one reason I asked you. Cops
always seem to be related to other cops. I
appreciate your help a lot. And, Tess, while you’re
here… how is Judy?”
  Tess stood. She tossed fifty cents on the table,
even though they hadn’t ordered yet.
   “She’s doing terrifically. Dating a lot, very busy. If
I get anything, I’ll call you. If you don’t hear from
me, assume I came up with zip.”
  “But about Judy—”
  Tess didn’t even look back as she strode out the
door.
  “Doing terrifically… Dating a lot… Very busy…”
   Well, that was good, wasn’t it? It sounded as if
Judy was happy. Cavanaugh wanted her to be
happy. She deserved to be happy. Even if he felt
like—
  “You ready to order?” the waiter asked him.
  Cavanaugh raised his head. “No,” he said. “It’s
way too late.”



                SEVENTEEN

      Within the next five or ten years, it
      would probably be possible to make a
      new infective organism which could
      differ in certain important aspects from
      any known disease-causing organism.
      —Charles Poor, Acting Assistant
      Secretary of the Army for Research and
      Development, testifying before a
      subcommittee of the Committee on
      Appropriations, House of
      Representatives, 1969
  Mellanie spent only seventeen minutes in the
Baltimore-Washington airport. Running as fast as
she dared with over a hundred insects sewn into her
dress, she reached the gate barely in time to make
her connecting flight to Atlanta. She’d booked the
connection from midair, 35,000 feet above the
ocean, on her way back from Kinshasa.
   In Atlanta she took a cab directly to the CDC. It
was Friday evening; practically no one was there
except security staff and, waiting for her
impatiently in a level-one lab, Joe Krovetz. That
call, too, she’d made from the plane, saying as little
as she could. Plane phones were not secure.
   Melanie knew she was not a lab specialist. She
could, of course, use the standard techniques,
including the scanning tunneling microscope, to
identify a microbe. But she could not identify
minute changes in minute structures on minute
parasites. Nor could she isolate genetic changes in
DNA. That was very specialized microbiology, and
Melanie had been trained as a physician, a general
practitioner. At the CDC, she’d functioned as a top
field investigator, not a research specialist. She
needed someone who could examine at the
subcellular level the specimens she’d brought back
from Congo. Someone trained, careful, and good.
  Gary Pershing would have been her first choice.
He was among the best in the world at extracting,
sorting, and analyzing DNA. But Pershing had
never really liked Melanie or her wilder ideas. Was
that because of her personality, because she was
female, or because she was black? Also, despite his
great talent, Pershing was basically a politician. He
might very well be hoping to move up into Farlow’s
vacated position. If so, he wouldn’t want to rock too
many orthodox political boats.
  That left Krovetz. He was young, but his training
was recent, thorough, and in the right area. And no
ideas were too wild for Joe Krovetz.
  He was waiting for her in the lab. He’d started a
beard, probably in an attempt to look older. It made
him look like an underage Hollywood-style thug.
  “Mel, you look like shit. When did you last sleep?”
  “Doesn’t matter. I have samples we have to
analyze, Joe. Right now. All weekend.”
  “Samples? From where?”
  “Africa. Kisangani Zone, Congo.”
  Krovetz’s eyes brightened. “Tell me.”
   She did, as she wriggled out of her loaded dress.
Even though she’d finished the long explanations
standing in sandals and a black slip, Krovetz didn’t
ogle her. He listened intently, but his eyes and
fingers were already busy cutting open the tiny
pouches in the dress and carefully extracting the
precious samples.
  When she’d explained everything, and had
handed him her genealogy charts from Yamdongi,
Melanie left Krovetz working at the lab bench. She
covered a cold lab table with a blanket from the
supply closet and lay down. Within thirty seconds
she was, finally, asleep.



  Felders didn’t call Cavanaugh, didn’t mail him,
didn’t leave a message with his landlord. Instead,
Felders showed up.
   Cavanaugh had been unpacking his possessions,
which had finally arrived by truck from storage, in
his Leonardtown apartment. This was a problem
because there were more possessions than there
was apartment. He’d already stuffed his allotted
four-by-six basement storage cubicle so full that
he’d had to ram his shoulder into the door to get it
closed. He’d stored his grandmother’s dishes, which
were too fragile to use and too family to discard, on
the top shelf of the bathroom closet. In the tiny
kitchen, frying pans, pot holders, and wineglasses
surged over the minuscule countertop and frothed
over onto the floor. Abigail, worn out from tearing
apart a twenty-pound bag of dog food, slept on
Cavanaugh’s winter parka. When the doorbell rang,
Cavanaugh felt relieved.
  “Marty! I thought you were still on vacation.”
  “I’m back.”
  “Well, come on in.”
  Felders prowled around the living room, stepping
over spilled dog kibble. “Love what you’ve done with
the place.”
  “The apartment doesn’t like me.”
  “Already? Add it to the growing list. Isn’t your
suspension pretty much over?”
   “No,” Cavanaugh said. Felders would remember
to the day how long the suspension lasted.
Something was up.
  “Listen,” Felders said, which meant the real
conversation was ready to start. Also, the more
important the topic, the more peripatetic he always
became, and now he paced from window to
bookcase to galley kitchen, crunching kibble
underneath. “Listen, Bob—three things.”
  “Shoot.”
  “When Dunbar leaves for Budapest, I’m heading
the Baltimore Field Office.”
  Cavanaugh felt his smile almost break his jaw.
Once again he’d report to Felders. Felders was the
best agent Cavanaugh knew. Felders would drive
the field office until it ran like a Corvette. Felders
would get him out of southern Maryland. Felders
would—
   “You’re not supposed to know this second thing,”
Felders said. “Hell, I’m not supposed to know it
either. But the OPR has finished its report on your
case and—”
   “Finished?” Cavanaugh said. “That’s impossible.”
It had only been three weeks. The OPR never
finished in three weeks. There had to be interviews,
follow-throughs, a preliminary report from the field
to Headquarters, more follow-up, a final report
written by the OPR investigators themselves…
Three weeks was impossible. Not unless somebody
very near the top was pushing very hard…
   Felders said bluntly, “Loss-of-effectiveness
transfer, to be implemented immediately. To the
Resident Agency Singleton, North Dakota.”
  Cavanaugh sank onto a chair. Singleton, North
Dakota. J. Edgar Hoover used to banish agents to
Butte, Montana, but this was much worse. At least
Butte was a city. Singleton was a pockmark on the
prairie.
   “Third thing,” Felders said—he didn’t believe in
sympathy—“about Ed Lewis. He’s not at Fort
Detrick; he’s an equipment maintenance mechanic
at a place that makes cardboard boxes. But he lives
in Frederick, as close to the fort as a civilian can
get. Was rejected for army service at eighteen due
to severe lordosis. Born in Georgia, engineering
degree from Georgia Tech. Until two years ago
worked in Bangor, Maine, as a plant engineer for a
textile factory. Not married, lives alone, spends a lot
of time with Goodman or Romellio at bars or sports
events.”
   “The profile that Pritchard drew,” Cavanaugh
said. Singleton, North Dakota.
  “Your other two guys, Mike Goodman and Jack
Romellio, do work at Detrick all right. Fort logs
show them signing in and out daily. Goodman and
Romellio are on the CIA payroll. Low level. They
won’t know anything about anything. But the
Payroll Division is interesting: ‘Special Projects.’ I
couldn’t get any more on that. Heavily classified,
and the CIA doesn’t much like sharing even
unclassified knowledge with us.”
  An old story. But Felders’s ferret expression said
there was more. Cavanaugh waited, watching his
almost-again-boss grind dog food into powder on
Cavanaugh’s new carpet. Felders jingled the change
in his pocket as he paced, harmony to restless
melody.
   “It gets better, Bob. Goodman and Romellio are
clean, of course, but Lewis has a police record. He
left Bangor because he was fired as plant engineer
for harassing an employee. A black woman.”
  “Well, well,” Cavanaugh said, although he knew it
came out a little hollow. Singleton, North Dakota.
  “Lewis has been arrested once, for stuffing hate
propaganda into mailboxes. Suspended sentence.
But the interesting thing is that he refused to say,
even under oath, where the mail originated. For
that he got an additional three months for
contempt.”
  “You’re not suggesting—”
   “Of course not, Bob, stay real. The CIA’s on our
side, remember? The hate mail was from a white
supremacist group. What’s interesting is that Lewis
served his whole sentence without spilling any
beans, to anybody. A close-mouthed kind of guy,
Lewis. Loyal in his own peculiar way, racist,
underemployed, loves the paramilitary. A perfect
guy for a dirty-tricks section to use on outside jobs.
Cash under the table, no paper trail to the fort, no
random gossip.”
  “All conjecture,” Cavanaugh said.
   Felders shot him an amused look. “Of course it’s
all conjecture. Do you think they’re going to send
me a notarized affidavit that Fort Detrick hired Ed
Lewis to scare off Melanie Anderson? Bob, Bob,
Bob. I thought I’d taught you that cases got built
brick by intermittently conjectural brick. And don’t
look so gloomy. You’re not going to Singleton, North
Dakota.”
  “I’m not?”
  “Not if you can turn conjecture into fact. You’ve
got one more week.”
  “Very funny.”
   “Not really.” Abruptly, Felders stopped pacing
and jingling. “Your career rides on this one; we
both know that. But also a whole lot more. For the
first time I think you’ve got something, although I
still don’t know what. But there are just too
goddamn many coincidences here.”
  Cavanaugh stood. “Felders, I need you to—”
   “You need me to get the Fort Detrick transport
logs through eastern Charles County on the dates
around the beginning of the epidemic. But I can’t,
Bob. Not without a subpoena, which I doubt I could
obtain. And even if I could, it would alert the CIA
that we’re looking; and even real coincidences
would be buried deeper than the Mariana Trench. I
was hoping you had some sort of unofficial
bread-crumb trail.”
  Cavanaugh said slowly. “I might.”
   Felders’s bright eyes turned brighter. “Aha. And
from the look on your face, is this a bread crumb
with lipstick?”
  “Two bread crumbs with lipsticks.”
  “Two? You never learn, do you? Well, follow your
bread-crumb trails before the end of next week.
And remember what happened to Hansel.”
  “Gretel saved him from the witch’s oven.”
  “Just barely,” Felders said. “And not before he
got his balls singed. Be careful, Bob. And be quick.”
Felders left.
  Be quick. Great. But how does one be quick with
no phone calls from either Melanie or Tess? Until
both women reported back to him, there was
nothing Cavanaugh could do.



  Melanie woke stretched out on the metal lab
table, still in her slip. All her bones ached; she was
too old to be sleeping on lab tables. At the other end
of the room Krovetz worked quietly. Light streamed
in the window.
  “What… what time is it?” She struggled to sit up.
Her joints groaned.
  Joe said, “Noon. Melanie, come look—”
  “Noon? On Saturday? Good Lord, I slept
fourteen hours! Have you worked straight
through?”
  “Pretty much. Come look at this, Mel.”
   With difficulty she slid off the table, keeping the
blanket wrapped around her. Not that Krovetz
would notice, or care if he did. The tone in his voice
said something else gripped his mind, and Melanie
felt an answering surge of adrenaline. Joe held out
magnified microscope pictures.
  “Look, Mel. These are dead red blood cells from
your dead mosquitoes and larva. The cells have
been colonized by Falciparum reading, all right.
Only the cells with Hb S.”
  “So it was malaria reading in Yamdongi.”
   “Of course it was. You already knew that. But
look at this data.”
  More papers. Melanie studied them, blinking in
the light from the window, her blanket slipping off
one shoulder.
  “Joe, I’m not up on this end of things, but this
seems to say—”
  “That this batch of Plasmodium reading has all
the same DNA alterations as our old friend, the
parasite carried by A. quadrimaculatus in
Maryland and Virginia. The altered surface
peptides bind only to sickled cells. The knobs
adhere preferentially to vascular endolethium of
brain tissue. The protein expression drops nitric
acid levels. Its the same genetically engineered
mutant, all right, only this time in A. gambiae.
  “But look here, Mel, at this picture. It’s typical of
the samples you brought home.”
   Melanie looked. The picture, like the others, was
a magnified photo from the scanning tunneling
microscope. It showed P. reading in the sporozoite
stage, the way it lived in the salivary glands of
anopholine mosquitoes. But instead of showing the
familiar long, asexual threads, these sporozoites
looked like they’d been through a violent war. Torn,
burst fragments littered the slide. Those not torn
apart were misshapen. Tiny specks dappled the
background like spent shrapnel.
  “What is—”
  Joe thrust another picture at her. “Look at this
version. I stained the sample.”
  As soon as she saw the second picture, with its
various components stained in conventional colors,
Melanie knew what she was looking at. “A virus!
The parasite was killed by a virus!”
   “Yep. In the asexual sporozoite stage, in the
salivary glands of the mosquito. Apparently the
virus didn’t harm the mosquito at all, as far as I can
see. Of course, all your samples are dead—”
  “Carbon tetrachloride,” Melanie said swiftly. “I
gave the kids killing jars. Did you allow for that?”
   “Of course I did. I worked all night, Mel, testing
your mosquitoes for Plasmodium reading and then
concentrating on the ones that carried it. I figured
that since adult female Anopheles feed on blood,
anything we’re looking for that didn’t kill the
mosquito outright would probably show up in the
mouth area. That way it starts in the mosquito and
goes into the victim, or starts in the victim and goes
into the mosquito, or— most likely—goes both ways
after the first transmission.
  “So far I’ve looked at eighty-six of your
mosquitoes and tabulated them into three groups:
those free of all Plasmodium parasites, those
carrying the usual Plasmodium falciparum, and
those carrying Plasmodium reading. Then I
examined the last two groups. I looked not only for
mangled Plasmodium, but also for fragments of
RNA, protein markers— all the usual indicators of a
viral presence. Next, I put some of the saliva
through the centrifuge, just to be sure the parasites
and the viruses did indeed separate out at different
densities. And they did. Here’s the tally.”
   He thrust a chart at her, hand drawn but very
clear in Joe’s block letters:


  Melanie stared at the data for a long time.
  There it was.
    There it was. Proof that the epidemic of malaria
reading in Yamdongi had not been stopped by
normal mosquito-control methods. Nor by running
its natural destructive course. Nor by Doctors
Without Borders administering humanitarian aid.
Proof that someone, or some group, had
deliberately intervened with another genetically
engineered organism, a virus that killed
Plasmodium reading but not the mosquito carrying
it. And it had worked. Somebody had come up with
engineered biological control of malaria reading,
and it had killed over 93 percent of the parasites.
Furthermore, the cure had appeared within a few
months of the disease, an impossibly short time to
create a new organism on the DNA level if you were
starting from scratch.
   Therefore, whoever had created the disease had
also created the virus that cured it, in advance.
   She, Melanie, was not crazy. Malaria reading
was a deliberate experiment in genocide. An
experiment to see if black people could be killed at
whim by releasing infected Anopheles, and then if
black people could be saved by releasing the virus
that killed the disease. The black victims, in the
United States and in Congo, had been guinea pigs
for a controlled experiment: guinea pigs for the
disease; guinea pigs for the cure.
   And if Robert Cavanaugh was right, the trail for
this monstrous act led to Fort Detrick.
  Blindly, she reached out and groped for Joe, and
the next thing she knew, she lay numbly against his
chest. Not sobbing, not crying, not moving. She felt
paralyzed by the horror of what she’d just deduced,
and she reached for the warmth of another human
being—any human being—with no more volition
than a frost-gripped plant trying to reach for
sunlight.
  “Joe…”
   “I know,” he said, patting her back. “I know,”
although of course he didn’t. Not really. He wasn’t
at risk. He was white.
   “Mel, listen to me. There’s another piece here we
haven’t gotten yet. The virus in Congo moved from
the vector to the victim, or vice-versa, and once the
mosquito bit someone else, the mosquito was no
longer a vector. The virus saw to that. The mosquito
would give the virus to the human, of course, but
let’s presume that the virus is harmless to humans.
That’s logical. The next mosquito who stings that
human will get the virus. But only if it stings a
human who’s already been stung once. That’s not an
efficient enough way to spread the virus to
ninety-three percent of the parasites. No, there’s got
to be more here.”
  His logic calmed her a bit, focused her away from
the horror and toward the logical problem.
   “So listen to this,” Joe went on. “I think the virus
had to be put first into the human population of
Yamdongi. But how? How do you infect an entire
village with a blood-borne virus without attracting
attention? You need a method that the villagers are
already accepting without question.”
  “The vaccine,” Melanie said slowly.
  “The vaccine, yes. The vaccine serum must have
carried not only whatever chloroquine derivative
they’re trying out now, but also the engineered
virus. I’ll bet that now everybody in Yamdongi
carries the virus in their bloodstream. Sick people,
healthy people, everybody. And I’ll bet more: that
the virus, when we take it apart, will carry a full
battery of ways to elude the human immune system
as long as possible, so it would stay in the villagers’
bloodstream long enough to infect a lot of other
villagers. God, I wish we had blood samples from
Yamdongi! Do you know where the vaccine serum
came from?”
  “Brian Spencer said it was given to Doctors
Without Borders by the World Health
Organization.”
  “By WHO! Then it could have originated in any of
the WHO signatory countries, and WHO must have
records of—”
 Behind them, the lab door opened. “Oh! Excuse
me…” A hasty slam.
   Melanie whirled around, too late to see who it
had been. She’d still been leaning against Joe. Her
blanket had slipped past her hips, exposing her in
her black slip. Joe’s arms had been around her.
Both their hair mussed, hers from sleep and his
from the lack of it…
  “Who was it?”
  Joe said, “Suzanne Dreyfuss. A lab tech.”
  “Oh, God. And us standing here like… like… Does
she gossip?”
   Joe shrugged. “They all gossip. Don’t worry about
it.”
   “‘Don’t worry about it?’ Joe, do you have any idea
at all how hard I’ve worked not to appear… shit,
shit, shit!”
  By Monday this Suzanne Whosit would have it all
over the CDC. And I walked right in on them
Saturday afternoon in Lab 6 and she was wearing
only a… SHIT.
  Joe stared at her, his downy brow wrinkled.
“Calm down, Mel. It’s no big deal.”
   He didn’t get it. He never would. And, come to
think of it, that was one of the reasons she’d always
felt comfortable with Joe: he didn’t “get” the usual
social barriers and so walked right through them. It
made things so much fairer. Melanie calmed down.
   “What I want to know now,” Joe said, “is the
mechanism the virus uses to destroy Plasmodium.
Maybe it jams the reproductive machinery or
disrupts Plasmodium’s food-transport tubules.
Stanford is producing some good work on that.
Damn! We need live, infected P. reading, we need
blood samples, we need—Mel? Are you listening?”
  No. I’m pondering the virtues of insensitivity.
“Yes. Just take me over the data one more time.”
   He did, and she stood there in her slip, nodding
as Joe took her deeper into his data, losing herself
in the terrible and fascinating knowledge unlocked
from the dead mosquitoes of Yamdongi village,
Kisangani Zone, Democratic Republic of the Congo.



                 INTERIM

   The boy set the glass jar on the kitchen
countertop. He rummaged in the cupboard, looking
for peanut butter, jelly, and bread. When he found
them, he began to make himself a sandwich,
humming the tune from Star Wars. The jar buzzed.
  “Hey, Amy-Balamy. How ya doing?”
   Amy, not quite two, made no answer. She toddled
to the table and reached for the jar with the
interesting noise. The boy, his back to her, didn’t
notice.
  “You want half a sandwich, Amy-Mamy? You
want—oh, God, what you do? You little bitch! Oh,
baby, don’t cry, you done cut yo’self…”
   He pulled the wailing baby back from the broken
glass on the floor. Blood smeared her hand.
Mosquitoes buzzed around the kitchen.
   The boy forced himself to think. What did Mama
do when somebody got cut? Wash it. Yeah, wash it.
He picked up Amy, carried her into the bathroom,
and balanced her between his body and the sink,
bending his knees a little to take her weight. This
close to her, he could smell that she’d shit in her
diaper again. As soon as she saw the cool water run
from the tap, she stopped crying and started to
splash. The cut wasn’t deep. The boy wrapped a
clean sock around it and taped the sock to the
baby’s hand.
   Now what? Clean up, yeah. And catch more bugs
for his school project. But what else for Amy? What
a pain in the ass she was. He scowled at his little
sister, now sitting on the bathroom floor happily
chewing on the sock.
  The boy went very still. That.
  Should he call Mama at work? No, the boss didn’t
never like it when he did that. Mama said. But he
couldn’t do nothing, this was serious.
  He dialed 911.
  “I got emergency! My sister—”
  “What’s your name, honey? Do you know your
address?”
  The white ‘ho thought he was a little kid! Fuck
her. The boy said, making his voice as deep as he
could, “My baby sister got herself bit by a mosquito.
Send a ambulance in case she done got this new
malaria!”
  The white voice changed. “She got bitten by a
mosquito? Just now? Is she showing any allergic
reactions?Trouble breathing, or anything like that?”
   The boy peered into the bathroom. Amy was
stirring the water in the toilet with her bandaged
hand.
  “No. She look okay.”
  “Then you have nothing to worry about, honey.
Malaria reading has been over for several weeks.
But if you give me your name and address, I’ll—”
   The boy slammed down the phone. He pulled
Amy out of the toilet and smacked her, not hard.
Now he would have to put a whole other sock on her
hand, change her shitty diaper, clean up the broken
glass, and collect a different batch of bugs. All
before he dropped Amy off at the sitter on his way
to school.
  But he didn’t got nothing to worry about. Nah.
Nothing at all. The white lady done said so.



                EIGHTEEN

     As we seek to reach the issue of
     accountability in a secret agency, we are
     left repeatedly with a record that is
     utterly beyond understanding.
     —Sen. Walter Mondale discussing the
     CIA,
     Select Committee to Study Government
     Operations with Respect to Intelligence
     Activities, 1975



   Cavanaugh finally bullied the phone company
into installing his phone on Saturday morning.
When the telephone installers left, grumbling, he
blanketed Maryland and D.C. with brief messages
giving out his new number. Two hours later, the
phone rang for the first time. When Cavanaugh
heard Judy’s voice, he both tensed and loosened.
His neck tightened and his knees loosened, although
it would have felt better the other way around.
  “Judy?”
  “Yes, it’s me. I have a message for you, Robert.”
   A message? Her voice was cool but not cold.
Professional. What did that mean? He sat down on
his just-cleared-off living room chair. Moving
boxes, unshelved books, and crumpled paper still
littered the living room. Abigail rooted under his
chair for spilled kibble.
   “I’m listening, Judy.” He tried to make his voice
as warm as possible. Maybe hers would absorb
some of the heat.
  It didn’t. “The message is from Tess’s second
cousin in the Charles County Sheriffs Department.
He tried to reach Tess but she’s away for the
weekend, so he called me. There’s another deputy
sheriff on his way to your new place right now. His
name is Ray Keller.”
   “Right now,” Cavanaugh repeated, to keep her
talking. “Why right now?”
   “Well, to me he sounded like one of the guys who
stews and broods over a situation until he can’t
stand it anymore, and then, to relieve his mind, has
to act right now. You know the type?”
   “Sure,” Cavanaugh said. “Wouldn’t you say Karen
Saunders was like that?” Maybe mentioning mutual
friends would remind Judy of all the good times
they’d had with their friends. The picnics, parties…
  “Ray Keller says he really needs to talk to you,
Robert. I hope it’s useful information.”
  “I do, too. If you want, I could call you later to let
you—” But she’d already hung up.
  Cavanaugh threw the packing boxes and most of
the crumpled paper out of the living room and into
the bedroom and closed the door. Judy hadn’t said
where Keller was driving from or when he’d started.
And come to think of it, how had Judy known the
address of his new place to give Keller? She must be
keeping herself aware of his moves. Maybe that
meant she was also aware of—Abigail barked and
Keller arrived.
   He looked about twenty-five, and not as nervous
or brooding as Judy had indicated, although there
certainly was a controlled tension in his stance, in
the cords of his neck, in the way he gripped his car
keys. Blond crewcut, sunburned face, wary eyes.
Cavanaugh could easily imagine Keller in the
uniform of a deputy
  “I’m Ray Keller. You Agent Robert Cavanaugh,
FBI?”
  “Yes. Come in.”
  “Can I see some ID, please?”
   Cavanaugh suppressed a smile, revised his
estimate of Keller’s age a few years downward, and
brought his credentials from a locked desk drawer.
Abigail sniffed at Keller, who relaxed just enough to
rub her ears.
  “Okay,” Keller said, handing back Cavanaugh’s
creds. “I work with Jack Cordaro, who’s kin to Tess
Muratore. I have something to tell you. Outside, in
my car.”
   The kid was afraid the apartment was bugged.
Cavanaugh doubted this, but he followed Ray Keller
to his own car, a three-year-old Escort, much
cleaner than Cavanaugh’s vehicle. Before they got
in, Keller patted him down for a wire. Cavanaugh
permitted it.
  He sat quietly beside Keller, giving the deputy the
chance to tell it in his own way.
  Finally Keller said, “I was in the military.
Marines. Four years. I just got out seven months
ago. We learned to respect the chain of command.
We also learned to respect our country.” Abruptly
he looked away, frowning suspiciously through the
side window at nothing in particular.
  Now Cavanaugh had a handle on the situation.
He said, almost casually, “And that’s your dilemma
now.”
  “Yeah.”
   Another long silence. Outside the car, two
teenagers dawdled past, licking ice cream cones. A
gaggle of tourists strolled toward the war
monument on the grassy island in the middle of
Leonardtown. A cat stalked by. Cavanaugh thought
regretfully of New York City informants, who talked
at New York City speed.
   Finally, Ray Keller let go. “On May 2 of this year,
at three twenty-seven in the morning, I witnessed a
vehicular accident on Route Three-oh-one, Charles
County, Maryland, while I was on duty. A four-door
1997 green Chevy Lumina hit a deer. I saw the
entire accident. I was heading north on 301 and the
Chevy was heading south. The deer, a full-grown
buck, bolted from the woods and ran right in front
of the Chevy. It hit him head-on. The deer was
thrown onto the shoulder and the car swerved, did a
one-eighty, bounced into and out of a ditch, and hit
a tree with the rear half of the vehicles right side.
The right rear door and fender were smashed in.
The rear windshield and taillights shattered. The
rear seat dislocated and was driven upward at
approximately a forty-five-degree angle, and that
wrenched the trunk open.”
  Keller had been over and over it in his mind,
Cavanaugh saw. This stilted wording was the report
Keller hadn’t written at the time the accident
happened. Why not? He prompted, “Was anybody
hurt?”
   “Only bruises and minor cuts. The occupants
consisted of two Caucasian males in their forties, in
civilian clothes. After ascertaining that neither was
hurt, I asked to see driver’s license and registration
for the vehicle. The driver then asked to speak to his
companion alone. I refused to allow that until
identification had been produced, at which point
the two men exchanged glances and produced
military credentials.”
   Suddenly Cavanaugh could see it: the deserted
highway, bordered for long stretches by heavy
woods close to the pavement. The only illumination
the headlights of Keller’s County Sheriff car. The
oncoming high beams of cars traveling in the
opposite direction, not slowing down just to see one
more speeder caught in the predawn. The
headlights would cast shifting shadows on the stern
faces of the two men, on the much younger Keller in
his almost-brand-new uniform, on the wrecked car
half thrust into the shadowy woods, its trunk
yawning wide. And on the warm night air, the smell
of blood from the deer.
   Keller continued, “Their ID said they were both
colonels, stationed at Fort Detrick. They showed me
official orders that said they were transporting
Special Compartmented Information Materials to
the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren,
Virginia. They said that in the interests of national
security, I should not file an accident report about
hitting the deer. They gave me a phone number to
call on my cell phone to verify that.”
  Cavanaugh said swiftly, “Do you remember that
number?”
   “Yes, but it doesn’t do any good. I know because
I… I called it again. A month later, when all that
malaria reading stuff hit the news. I just wanted
to… The vehicular accident occurred in the
township of Newburg, about half a mile from the
Potomac River Bridge. On television they said the
plague started in Newburg, so I thought… although
I didn’t see any mosquitoes fly out from the twisted
boxes and stuff in the car trunk.”
  No, Cavanaugh thought, Keller wouldn’t have
seen any mosquitoes. They’d all have been gone by
the time he parked his car, ran across the highway,
and made sure the people inside the wrecked car
were unhurt. The mosquitoes would have flown into
the woods, dispersed in the dark to the undisturbed
ravines and the scattered barns and the quiet pools
of stagnant water thick with scum to nourish newly
hatched larvae.
   Keller said, “When the CDC and the Health
Service people issued all those guidelines for not
getting sick, and the army started the insect
spraying, I called Fort Detrick. The switchboard
told me that the two colonels weren’t stationed
there. They just didn’t exist.” Keller’s voice changed.
“They’d showed me fake IDs.”
  Cavanaugh said, still casually, “And you resented
that.”
   “Yeah. I mean, I was a Marine. We know enough
to comply with national security concerns, without
being lied to. I didn’t file any report. And then after
the plague got started, I wasn’t sure that… I
thought…”
   Cavanaugh said, “You weren’t sure what was the
right thing to do.”
  “Yeah. And I wanted to do the right thing. I still
want to.”
   “You are, Deputy Keller.” Cavanaugh tried hard
not to sound like a school principal. Judy had been
right. This boy, no more than twenty-three or -four,
was caught in a vise that had squeezed presidents
and attorney-generals. Proper legal procedures
versus national security. No wonder Ray Keller had
been feeling mangled for almost four months. Keller
stayed silent, looking away, so Cavanaugh tried to
help. “You saw the FBI getting involved, and all the
epidemic victims dying, and you didn’t know if
what you’d seen had any connection to the
epicenter of the outbreak. You didn’t think so, but
when Tess’s cousin started asking about unreported
vehicle accidents during the first week of May, you
suddenly weren’t so sure.”
   “I was never sure,” Keller said, surprising
Cavanaugh with his vulnerable honesty. “But I told
Jack no, and then thought about it for a week and
then I called the number Jack was giving out. An
answering-machine message said that anyone with
information for Tess should call her friend Judy
Kozinski. Who sent me to you.”
   “Which was the correct action. In fact, your
information may be tremendously important to the
FBI, which is also concerned with national
security.” Maybe that would make Keller feel
slightly better. “I have some more questions, Ray.
First, what were the aliases the two men gave you?”
   “Col. Eugene Willis Thompson and Col. David
Edward Broderick.” Neither name meant anything
to Cavanaugh—not surprisingly, if they were indeed
aliases. Questions jostled each other in his mind. He
chose carefully among them, trying to get to the
important ones first, before Officer Ray Keller lost
his personal indignation, or decided his conscience
was satisfied, or otherwise changed his mind about
adding to Cavanaugh s case against the government
of the United States.



   He waited impatiently for Melanie to call,
walking up and down his apartment, Abigail
trailing at his heels. When he caught himself
jingling his pocket change, he stopped instantly.
Jesus, he was turning into Felders. He planted
himself in a chair and tossed Abigail’s tennis ball
for her to fetch. Across the living room, through the
archway to the kitchen, bounce off the wall above
the countertop, roll back toward the living room
until the dog snatched it up. When he broke a water
glass on the kitchen counter, he stopped that.



  The phone rang. Cavanaugh snatched it up.
Somebody wanted to sell him life insurance.
   By four o’clock in the afternoon, he was reduced
to cleaning the apartment. By five, everything was
unpacked and put away. By six, the moving boxes
were torn down, bundled, and tied for recycling. By
seven, Abigail had had a bath, which she hated. By
seven-thirty, the bathroom sparkled. At 7:52,
Melanie rushed through his door. She looked like
she’d been through a tornado.
  “Melanie! Why the hell didn’t you call? I’d have
picked you up at the airport!”
  “I drove. Didn’t want to stop to phone. Robert, we
got it. We got it.”
  “Tell me.”
   “The vaccine that the Doctors Without Borders
gave to everybody anywhere near Yamdongi was
deliberately contaminated with virus. The virus
attacks P. reading—and only the reading strain of
Plasmodium. It kills—what’s that smell? Like
coconuts?”
  “I gave the dog a bath. Go on.”
  “You bathed Abigail with coconut-perfumed
shampoo?”
  “It was all I had. It was Judy’s. Go on!”
   “The virus kills the sporozoites in the Anopheles
salivary gland. Probably also in human blood, in the
brief time before the sporozoites burrow into the
liver. Any Anopheles that then bites a vaccinated
human is made free of P. reading. That’s why the
epidemiological curve drops off so suddenly. In
Congo, the epidemic was stopped by the virus in the
vaccine. In Maryland, it was stopped by
USAMRIID, using conventional procedures.
Whoever created the epidemic didn’t dare test the
virus antidote in the U.S.A. Every infectious-disease
facility in the world had people in southern
Maryland taking field samples and analyzing blood.
The virus would never have stayed secret.”
  Cavanaugh nodded slowly. “That fits… that fits.”
   “Fits what? Robert, have you got anything to eat?
I don’t think I’ve eaten since yesterday.”
  He didn’t even hear her, thinking deeply. Melanie
went to the kitchen, grimaced into the refrigerator,
and hastily slapped together a cheese sandwich.
  “I’m back. Fits what?”
  He told her about the accident with the deer on
Route 301 on May 2.
  Melanie put down her sandwich, uneaten. “From
Fort Detrick.”
   “Yes. Maybe. The names were aliases; that could
be falsified as well. But it supports the theory that
the epidemic wasn’t supposed to happen here. The
infected mosquitoes got loose by accident.
  “And then the army, or the CIA, or whoever,
couldn’t risk using the virus antidote. They’d lost
half their bioweapon; they didn’t want to risk
exposure of the other half. And the U.S. has the
resources and manpower to contain malaria by
conventional means, so they did that.”
   “But Africa doesn’t have those resources,”
Melanie said. “So to fight against any black nation,
you just vaccinate your own black troops and then
let loose batches of malaria-reading-infected
vectors. Within a few months at most, a substantial
percentage of your black enemy has died of cerebral
stroke.”
  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said. He couldn’t look at the
pain on her face.
  “And the world would probably never even know
you violated the Geneva Convention. After all, in the
middle of a war on a continent full of malaria
anyway, who’s going to do parasite-strain research
on dying soldiers? Bury them and get on with the
war.”
  Cavanaugh said nothing.
   “And we created that. The United States. Created
it and tested it in Yamdongi; and incidentally, if
those ‘coloreds’ ever get too uppity again near
home, well, nobody wants to think of that. The
blacks are good citizens of course, but if those
niggers do get out of line—we’re ready for ’em all
right.”
  “Stop that,” Cavanaugh said. To his surprise, she
did. Instead she looked directly at him and said
tonelessly, “So what are we going to do? Do you
have a plan?”
   “Yes. No. I mean, it’s not sturdy enough to call a
plan.” The best-laid plans of bugs and men… “But
we’re going to do it anyway.”
  “Tonight?” Same colorless tone.
  “No. It has to be Monday morning, when people
are back at work. I need your help, Melanie. You’ll
be taking risks with your career.”
  “Like I care anymore. Work for a government
that can do that? I’ll emigrate to Africa.”
  Cavanaugh couldn’t tell if she meant it. Her voice
was so expressionless. And her personality was so
volatile. Militant, brilliant, paranoid, idealistic,
emotional, angry as hell underneath. Not a person
that you could count on to stay on your side
through an entire strategy.
  As if he had a choice.
 He told her what he intended them to do on
Monday morning.



  He didn’t sleep well Saturday and Sunday nights.
Abigail snuffled and twitched on the floor beside his
bed. It reminded him of Judy’s soft snoring.
   The dog opened one eye when Cavanaugh got up,
cocked her ears when he pulled on jeans, and
bounded into activity when it definitely began to
look like walking might occur. Cavanaugh left her
off her leash. If anybody was around at four in the
morning to object, too bad for them. He and Abigail
slipped past Melanie, lying on her stomach on
Cavanaugh s sofa. Melanie snored, too, but it just
wasn’t the same.
   He’d never seen Leonardtown at this hour. It was
beautiful. Maybe it had always been beautiful, and
he’d just disliked the place too much to notice. He
still disliked it, but now, a few hours away from
decisions that could blow apart his life plus a great
many others‘, Cavanaugh’s sharpened senses took in
the town as if he were seeing it for the first time.
   The main street, Washington, was divided by
oval, grassy islands and surrounded by stately
buildings. In the fading starlight they looked like
ghosts from the past, which they were. The
courthouse, red brick and tall white columns, in the
style of antebellum plantation homes. The
ceremonial cannon, brought from England in 1634
for the “defense of Saint Mary’s City.” The original
jail, now a tourist attraction, where once prisoners
were held for execution for such offenses as “rifling
a trunk of lace while the mistress of the house lay
dead in childbirth.” The bottom of Washington
Street sloped steeply toward the Potomac, where
once “His Majesty’s ships of war” had dropped
anchor. Yes, Leonardtown was beautiful, but it was
the bellicose beauty of three-and-a-half centuries of
conflict.
  God, was he doing the right thing? Was he?
  It was generally not a good idea, Cavanaugh
thought, as he sat on a pristine white bench in the
courthouse garden, to take on one’s own
goveminent. One stood a good chance of losing, of
course. The government held all the aces. But that
wasn’t the real danger as far as Cavanaugh was
concerned. The real danger lay in discovering how
that government had played its previous aces.
  Cavanaugh knew he was an idealist. He’d seen
that clearly as long ago as Quantico, during initial
training. Cavanaugh had looked at his fellow
trainees and realized that they wanted to become
agents for various reasons. Carrera’s family had
been cops for three generations; the Bureau was the
upscale version. Johnson had been in the air force;
she liked risk and action. Williamson admitted he’d
been influenced by movies about the Bureau.
Moreno liked the government benefits and
government pension.
   Cavanaugh was different. English major, fugitive
from the corporate world, lapsed Methodist, he
actually believed in the law, in its necessity, its
function, even its saving grace. Without law,
Cavanaugh believed, humanity would otherwise
turn not only “red in tooth and claw” but probably
in brain as well. Law was humanity’s last, best hope
of checking its own natural savagery. Law
might—and did, constantly—fail in specific
application. But at heart American jurisprudence
was sound, and it kept sound at heart the
government for which it was the scaffolding.
Specific corruption might grow, but law ensured
that it could not grow very long or deep without
eventually being exposed and condemned. That was
why Cavanaugh had become an FBI agent—to do
what had to be done to protect the concept of law.
  He’d learned to be careful about whom he
admitted this to.
   But it was true. Cavanaugh loved being an FBI
agent, and not for family tradition or movie
glamour or risk or action or a good pension. He
simply liked fighting on the side of law. He liked
nailing the bad guys.
   But what if the side of law was also the side of
lawlessness? What if the government that, despite
its frequent falls from grace, he still basically
believed in, what if that government was the bad
guy? Killing for experimental purposes, seeding
American and African villages with bioweapons just
to see what would happen, perverting the law as a
matter of course to carry out and cover up its own
murders? “Well, of course,” many people would say
(Cavanaugh’s ex-wife among them), “what do you
expect? Governments are like that, and American
democracy is no different. Look at Watergate, for
example.”
   But Watergate was not mass murder. In fact,
Cavanaugh had always felt reassured by Watergate.
Minor corruption, major condemnation. Malaria
reading embodied just the opposite—if it had been
deliberately conceived by, manufactured at,
dispersed by, and exported by a group or groups at
Fort Derrick. Major corruption, minor
condemnation. By, among others, the FBI that
Cavanaugh believed in.
   The real danger of taking on the FBI was finding
out how rotten its soul might be. And then deciding
if you could still bear to be a part of it.
  “Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy
politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.”
King Lear.
  Was Cavanaugh seeing a thing that “dost not”?
Or was he seeing, all too accurately, what was?
  Abigail, tired of sniffing at flower beds and
peeing on the sundial, nuzzled Cavanaugh’s feet and
whined. He stood and walked on. Maryland
Historical Society, grocery store, pharmacy,
barbershop, Bettys Custom Framing. The air
smelled of honeysuckle. Sometimes it seemed to
Cavanaugh that all of Maryland smelled of
honeysuckle.
   Maybe he should just let sleeping dogs lie.
Sleeping jackals, sleeping vultures, sleeping carrion.
What did it matter? In a hundred years they’d all be
dead anyway. Him, Melanie, “Colonels Thompson
and Broderick,” Director Broylin, all the relatives of
malaria reading victims. Dead and forgotten. And
the world would roll on anyway. Who was
Cavanaugh to presume to affect its course? Hubris,
pure hubris.
  Cavanaugh realized he must have been walking
longer than he’d thought; the sky had lighted and
the stars had disappeared. Abigail trotted toward
the grassy island in the middle of the street, which
held that mandatory southern town centerpiece, the
Civil War monument. Cavanaugh followed.
   But it wasn’t a Civil War monument. It had been
erected November 11, 1921, to Leonardtown soldiers
killed in World War I. GLORIA PRO PATRIA
MORI. Well, maybe in 1921 the phrase had been
less hackneyed and more heartfelt. There were two
separate lists of names.
     COLORED
     Raymond G. Biscoe Pvt, 16th Co., 154th
     Dep Brig. Died Camp Meade 10-7-18
     Joseph H. Branson Pvt., Co. A, 333d
     Labor BN A.E.F. Died France 9-23-18
     Thomas Briscoe Pvt…
  Ten names, total.
   WHITE. Seventeen names. All the “Colored,”
shunted off to their own list, had been privates. The
“Whites” had ranged from private to first
lieutenant. All were equally dead.
  Cavanaugh hoped like hell that Melanie didn’t
wander down from his apartment and see this
monument. He didn’t want to listen to the
explosion.
  But the monument sealed his decision.
  “Abigail! Come on, girl! Here, Abigail!”
   The dog loped to him. Cavanaugh walked back to
his apartment and into the day.



                NINETEEN
      It is the right of the American people to
      know what their government has
      done—the bad as well as the good.
      —Senator Frank Church, Select
      Committee to Study Government
      Operations with Respect to Intelligence
      Activities, 1975



  “Ready?” Cavanaugh asked Melanie. She’d
showered, dressed in a conservative blue suit, and
sat drinking her third cup of strong black coffee.
  “Ready.”
   Cavanaugh turned up the phone volume so that,
if he held it slightly away from his ear, she could
hear both sides of the conversation. He punched in
the first of the numbers on his list.
   “Good morning, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Can I help you?” Cavanaugh didn’t recognize the
mature female voice. Possibly it belonged to one of
the Betty Bureaus who’d married themselves to the
FBI decades ago. In that case, he already knew the
script.
  “This is Agent Robert Cavanaugh. I’d like to
speak to Director Broylin.”
   “I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting right now. Have you
discussed your concern with your special agent in
charge?” Meaning: Why are you violating the
chain of command?
  “That’s not possible. I need to speak to Director
Broylin.”
   “If you’d like to leave a message, I’ll see that he
gets it.” Meaning: At the bottom of a huge stack of
irrelevancies. If you had anything interesting, it
would come through your SAC, and Director
Broylin is too busy for trifles. Betty Bureaus were
fiercely protective of their bosses. They had a bad
time during administrations with accessible,
open-door directors, but that didn’t describe
Broylin.
   “I would like to leave a message, yes. Please tell
Director Broylin that I have some important
information about Project Birthday.”
  “I’ll give him the message.” Meaning: You’re
bothering him about a birthday party?
  “He’ll know what I mean. It’s a top-clearance CIA
project.” Cavanaugh gave his phone number.
   “I’ll tell him.” And now her voice said, A nut in
the ranks of agents? If he’d been a common citizen
reporting a stealth UFO landing on the White
House roof, her tone would be more respectful.
Prophet in his own country. But at least he’d upped
the chances that she’d actually tell Broylin. Betty
Bureaus were as protective of the FBI’s reputation
as of their bosses’ time. Cavanaugh repeated his
phone number.
   Melanie poured herself yet more coffee. Usually
Cavanaugh would drink anything with caffeine, but
now he turned his eyes away from the stream of hot
coffee cascading into Melanie s mug. His stomach
roiled.
  The director of the CIA and the commander of
Fort Detrick were also in meetings. Their
receptionists also took messages.
  “Now we wait,” Melanie said.
  “Now we wait,” Cavanaugh agreed. “And forgive
me for asking, but why are you suddenly so calm
and poised, when all through this you’ve been…
been…”
   “A raging lunatic,” Melanie said calmly. “But that
was when I thought nobody would do anything.
Now somebody will have to.” She took another quiet
sip.
  Cavanaugh wished his anxiety worked that way.
Obviously it didn’t. He circled the tiny room, pacing
and jiggling, feeling like Felders.
  Forty-three minutes later, the phone rang.
  “Agent Cavanaugh, please.”
  “Speaking.”
  “This is Assistant Director Arnold Sutton. I
understand you have a message for the director.”
  “Yes, sir. The message is that I must meet with
him today. It’s urgent.”
   “A meeting is not possible, Agent Cavanaugh.
The director’s calendar is completely full. And I
think you already know that your request is in
violation of proper Bureau procedure. Please tell me
the nature of your concern.”
  “My concern is about Project Birthday. And I—”
  “There is no such project in the FBI.”
  “Yes, sir, there is. I’m sorry, sir, but there is. It’s
top clearance.”
  “I repeat, Agent Cavanaugh, that I know of no
such project within the FBI.”
  “No, sir, you don’t. But the director does. And I
have vital information about it.”
  “Vital information obtained how?” Sutton asked.
   “I’ll reveal that only to the director. But please tell
him that I’m not the only one with this information,
sir. Dr. Broylin needs to know that.”
  “Aren’t you on OPR suspension, Agent
Cavanaugh? For unauthorized disclosure?”
  “Yes, sir. But the information I have for Dr.
Broylin is independent of my status with the
Bureau.” Both true and not true. It was getting
harder to tell the difference.
  Sutton said, “You’re out of line, Agent
Cavanaugh. I’m taking due note of that fact. Please
remain in your present location, keeping your
present phone number free, until you hear from me
again.” The phone clicked sharply.
  Melanie said, “What does that mean?”
   “It means he was told to call me by Broylin.
Otherwise, an assistant director who may or may
not have heard of Project Birthday wouldn’t call me
directly. And he had my Bureau record right there
in front of him. Broylin’s taking me seriously.”
  “And the others? The CIA and Fort Detrick?”
  “He’ll check with them, or has checked with
them, depending on who he needs to talk to and
where in the country they are. But they’ll stay in the
background, let Broylin handle it. He’s the one in
hot water. I’m one of his.”
  “And now—”
  “Now we wait.”
  “Okay,” Melanie said, with her new unnerving
serenity. “Want some coffee?”
  Cavanaugh shuddered.



   There were 642 books on his shelves, counting
paperbacks. Two hundred ten medallions on the
bathroom wallpaper. Six packages of food in his
freezer. Four ants in his kitchen. Thirty-one dollars
and forty-six cents in his wallet. Twelve stamps left
on the roll. Melanie shifted to lemonade and spent
most of her time in the bathroom. Serenity took
odd forms.
  The phone rang at 1:30 P.M.
   “Agent Cavanaugh. This is Grace, Dr. Broylin’s
secretary. A car will pick you up in approximately
twenty minutes. Please remain inside your
apartment. Dr. Broylin will see you when you arrive
in Washington.”
  “And my colleague. There will be two of us.”
  A sharp intake of breath. “The director is
unaware of a second person.”
  “The second person is Dr. Melanie Anderson,
Epidemic Intelligence Service, Centers for Disease
Control. Background already on file. Please tell Dr.
Broylin that Dr. Anderson is fully aware of
everything I know.”
  “I’ll inform Dr. Broylin,” Grace said, not warmly.
  Melanie said again, “Now we wait.”
  “Now we wait.”
  There were twenty-two CDs in Cavanaugh’s
collection. Seventy-three tapes. Immigration had
occurred in the kitchen; the four ants were now
nine.
   Cavanaugh didn’t know either of the agents in
the Bucar. Probably they belonged to the director’s
security detail. Everybody exchanged credentials.
Throughout this, Cavanaugh couldn’t shake a
feeling of unreality—weren’t they all on the same
side?
  Were they?
   The Hoover Building, possibly the ugliest official
structure in D.C., didn’t lessen the unreality.
Watched by his escorts, Cavanaugh signed in. As a
field agent, he no longer had a Headquarters pass,
and he’d never had the electronic code for the
directors suite. Melanie signed in with him and
submitted to a weapons search without even a
protest. Cavanaugh didn’t know if that was a good
or bad sign. Their escort took them up in the
elevator to the directors suite and punched in an
electronic code.
   Peter Broylin sat behind his desk, facing him.
Sixty-three years old, thin and fit and mostly bald,
he followed a spate of younger, more liberal
directors who all had, one way or another, been
media disasters. Too concerned with the field at the
expense of Headquarters, too concerned with
Headquarters at the expense of the field, too
flamboyant, too cautious, cheated the press, hogged
the press, ran a sloppy ship, the ship engaged in
piracy… Broylin had avoided most of this criticism
by being honest, firm, and mostly invisible. He gave
few speeches and fewer press conferences. Instead,
he occupied himself with running the FBI through
his chain-of-command, and running it well.
Respected by both his agents and the general
public, Broylin projected the personality of a stealth
plane: powerful, finely tuned, and difficult to be
sure of.
  “Sit down, Agent Cavanaugh, Dr. Anderson.”
   They sat. The security detail, on cue, left the
room. Cavanaugh knew they’d be watching, but not
listening. Although that didn’t mean that others
might not be hearing whatever transpired here. The
director’s office included side doors, and Cavanaugh
doubted that they all led to bathrooms.
  “Thank you for seeing us, sir.”
   Broylin’s much-praised efficiency included not
wasting meeting time. “What do you want to tell me
about a birthday project?” Cavanaugh heard the
deliberate lack of quotes or capitals. Broylin was
giving nothing away. Cavanaugh had about two
minutes to establish his own credibility.
   His throat suddenly went dry. Before he could
swallow, Melanie said calmly, “We know that the
Birthday Project is a bioweapons project funded by
the CIA, created at Fort Detrick, and deliberately
tested in Congo. And that some of the Anopheles
quadrimaculatus genetically altered for the project
escaped in a car accident on Route 301 near the
Potomac River Bridge the night of May 2. Those
infected Anopheles began the—”
   “I addressed my question to Agent Cavanaugh,
Dr. Anderson. We’ll get to your information in due
time.”
   “Fine,” Melanie said, unruffled. But her eyes
glittered.
   Cavanaugh said, “Dr. Anderson is essentially
right, sir. But I’d rather explain it by starting at the
beginning of my personal involvement in this case,
and following through. If you’re not taping this
conversation, I’d like to suggest that you do so.”
  “Go on,” Broylin said expressionlessly.
   As he told the story, step by step, Cavanaugh
realized all over again how well all the pieces
interlocked. The CIA car hitting the deer. The
timing of the epidemic. The failed attempt to use
elephant mosquitoes to unobtrusively end the
plague. The targeting of Michael Sean Donohue, a
credible decoy, to deflect public attention while
USAMRIID and the CDC stopped malaria reading
by conventional containment methods that aroused
no suspicion. The uneasiness of Jerry Dunbar and
Jim Farlow when they were told, as they had to
have been, why certain facets of the investigation
had to be kept secret. Both men’s willingness to take
promotions in other countries. The removal of
Cavanaugh and Melanie, the two investigators too
stubborn to quit and too low level to be brought
into the cover-up. The hate calls to Melanie,
indirectly traceable to Fort Detrick, to discourage
her from staying in Maryland and expounding her
genocide theories. The paper trail of unprecedented
purchases of Anopheles to Fort Detrick. And, finally,
the parallel epidemic in Africa, and the—
  “I’ll tell this part, Robert,” Melanie said, and
Cavanaugh found he was willing to let her. He
wished he had a glass of water. Broylin had not
changed expression. No skepticism, no disgust, no
anger, no contradiction. He looked like a man
hearing information he already knew.
  It was real, then, as real as all the trash cynicism
about government: the movies, the bad TV series,
the routines of stand-up comics. The United States,
which Cavanaugh had sworn to support and defend,
had casually killed innocent people in order to test a
weapon to kill more innocent people. “The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The
ceremony of innocence is drowned…”
   “… part that can’t be explained away,” Melanie
was saying, “is the vector samples. The CDC now
has samples of mosquitoes whose salivary glands
show clearly what’s been going on here. One set of
genetically altered Anopheles to infect
people—mostly blacks—with malaria reading.
Another set of genetic alterations to vaccinate
against the first. Human blood samples from Congo
would confirm that to any lab in the world that
cares to do so. The epidemiological curves are also
hard data, Mr. Broylin. Not—what do you call
it?—‘circumstantial evidence.’ Someone started that
epidemic in Congo. Someone ended it. Both trails
led to Fort Detrick. And if you think—”
  “You have made some leaps to unwarranted
conclusions, Dr. Anderson,” Broylin said dryly. “As
Agent Cavanaugh can—and should—have told you.”
  “Oh? Like what?” Melanie’s eyes glittered again.
  “Please wait here for a moment. Don’t leave.”
Broylin stood and vanished behind one of the side
doors.
   They waited. For what? Cavanaugh didn’t know.
Maybe he’d never actually known anything anyway.
About anything. Maybe everything he’d thought
he’d known had been wrong, or incomplete, or
falsified. Or maybe there wasn’t anything really to
know, to be sure of. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon
the world…”
   The side door reopened. Broylin came back in,
alone. He resumed his position behind the desk.
  “You present a very interesting problem, Agent
Cavanaugh. So do you, Dr. Anderson. Who else have
you told about your investigation and your
conclusions?”
  Melanie said quickly, “A few others. In writing.
So if anything happens to us, those—”
 “Who, Agent Cavanaugh?” Broylin said, as if
Melanie hadn’t spoken.
  The two men’s eyes locked and held.
  “No one, sir. We’ve told the whole story to no one.
Although a few people know parts of it, such as
Special Agent in Charge Martin Felders and CDC
epidemiologist Dr. Joseph Krovetz.”
  “Goddamn it, Robert!” Melanie cried.
  Broylin nodded slowly.
  “I see,” he said. “And I think you see, too.”
   “Yes,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re an interesting
problem because you have so many choices about
Melanie and me. You can keep us from going to the
press, by threats or bribes or whatever. Or you can
let us go and then do everything the Bureau is
capable of to discredit what we say. Or you can try
to convince us we’re wrong about what we’ve
uncovered. Or you can tell us the real truth, and risk
everything on our voluntary silence.”
  Broylin said, without any flattery whatsoever, “I
see we almost lost a good agent in Maryland when
the OPR recommended transfer to North Dakota.
Tell me, Agent Cavanaugh, which of those choices
am I going to make?”
   Melanie said bitterly, “You’re going to try to
silence us,” and finally Broylin turned his attention
to her. “You mean, Dr. Anderson, that you think the
FBI is going to kill you. Or arrange for a ‘fatal
accident.’ Or immobilize you under Thorazine in
some institution. Don’t you?”
  “Yes! I wouldn’t put anything past a government
that would do what you’ve already done!”
  “And you, Agent Cavanaugh? Do you think that
the FBI is going to assassinate you two?”
  “No,” Cavanaugh said slowly, “I don’t.”
   “Then what?” Broylin sat back, waiting.
Cavanaugh thought he’d never seen eyes so
observant. Broylin, he remembered, had started out
as a prosecuting attorney in white-collar crime,
where instead of bodies stuffed in auto trunks, you
got educated, smooth-talking men who gave
themselves away in the details.
  “No,” Cavanaugh said. “You tell me ‘then what.’
Not the other way around.”
  “All right,” Broylin said. He placed his hands flat
on the desk in front of him. The fingers were long
and thin. “I’m not going to threaten or bribe
you—or Dr. Anderson. Implicit threats have already
been tried, and neither of you gave up your
investigation. Nor would you now, I think.
   “Nor am I going to discredit you with the press.
This isn’t the Hoover FBI anymore. And the press
isn’t the respectful lackey it usually was in 1955
either. They’d jump all over this story, and you’ve
uncovered enough truth that you’d stay credible
anyway.”
  Melanie drew in a sharp, short breath.
   “Nor am I going to attempt to convince you that
what you’ve found is wrong, because it’s not. As far
as it goes, anyway.”
   Melanie said, “It’s true. It’s… true…” Cavanaugh
glanced at her, but she’d caught herself before she
reached either explosion or tears.
   “I said, ‘as far as it goes.’ Which is not far
enough. So of all your choices, Agent Cavanaugh,
I’m going to tell you the truth. The rest of the
truth.”
  Cavanaugh got out, “And then…”
   “And then you two will be the ones with a choice
to make.” Broylin opened his desk drawer and drew
out an unmarked green folder, but didn’t hand it to
Cavanaugh. “What I’m going to say, I have
authorization to tell you. But only because the
circumstances are so unusual.”
  Melanie demanded, “Authorization from whom?”
   “Wait,” Broylin said. “The facts first. Fact one:
There are people, important people, who disagree
violently with the decision to tell you what I’m going
to tell you. Fact two: You would never be told this if
you hadn’t pushed the Bureau to this point. Fact
three: What I am going to tell you could,
conceivably, place you both in physical danger,
although not from the FBI or the CIA. Shall I go
on?”
   “Yes!” Melanie said. “You’re only trying to
intimidate us!”
   “No, I’m not. Those are facts. Here are more. The
infected Anopheles mosquitoes that began the
malaria reading epidemic were in fact en route
from Fort Detrick to a location in Virginia when
they were released by the car crash. However, they
were not developed at Fort Detrick. They were there
because a Counter-intelligence team, a joint
FBI/CIA effort, had captured the mosquitoes in an
intelligence operation conducted against a foreign
government that was working within the borders of
the United States.”
  “Oh, right!” Melanie said. “What foreign
government?”
   For the first time, Cavanaugh saw a sign—a very
little sign—of anger in Peter Broylin. The director’s
left hand tensed, and his wedding ring slid slightly
along the tautened flesh of his ring finger. That was
all.
   “Please wait, Dr. Anderson. The Anopheles
captured by the FBI and CIA were analyzed and,
yes, bred at the army’s Medical Research Institute
at Fort Detrick. Access to the project was highly
restricted, as you can imagine. But labs take up
physical space, as you well know. Many people knew
something was going on in those restricted labs,
although they had no clear idea what. With any
operation of any size, there are always fringe people
who are not included but think they should be, and
some of them make shrewd guesses. One of those
people—we now know who—ran an unauthorized
dirty-tricks cell of nonarmy personnel. One of those
made the hate calls to you, Dr. Anderson, a fact that
has only come to light in the last week.”
  Melanie said nothing, but her face told
Cavanaugh she believed none of it.
   Broylin continued. “At Fort Detrick, the Medical
Research and Development Command used the
captured and bred Anopheles to develop a virus
that would counter malaria reading. They couldn’t,
as you surmised, use it in Maryland. Too many
visiting scientists. The virus would instantly become
the public property of the international scientific
community, and its value as a counterweapon
would be gone. The CIA reasoning, of course, was
that if one nation could discover how to genetically
alter malaria to fatally attack sickle-cell
hemoglobin, so could other nations. The United
States needed to hold the vaccine as a secret
counterweapon in case we ever needed it.
USAMRIID knew nothing about the vaccine.
Colonel Colborne assured us that USAMRIID could
stop the epidemic in southern Maryland using
well-applied vector-destruction techniques, and the
FBI/CIA Counterintelligence force let them go
ahead and do it.”
   Broylin looked directly at Melanie. She said,
reluctantly, “They succeeded. But not all nations
can afford ‘well-applied vector-destruction
techniques.’”
   “My point precisely. The vaccine should be saved
for locales or conditions where vector destruction is
impractical. Jungle terrain, impoverished nations,
battlefield conditions. So we didn’t use it in
Maryland.”
   Melanie said, “But you did in Congo! You killed
so you could test!”
  “No, Dr. Anderson. We didn’t.”
  Broylin finally pushed the green folder toward
Cavanaugh. He opened it. Copies of a half-dozen
short CIA documents, each stamped with highly
restricted clearances, each paper slashed with
blacked-out words, sentences, phrases. Cavanaugh
began to skim.
  Broylin said, “We didn’t start or end malaria
reading in Congo, Dr. Anderson. Someone did, yes,
but it wasn’t us. It was another nation.”
  “Bullshit! You said you captured the infected
Anopheles from an enemy nation and you developed
the vaccine at Fort Detrick—and that nobody else
had it yet! It was your little secret!”
   “That’s true. We developed it, and we kept it
from the scientific community for reasons I’ve
explained. The ‘enemy nation’—”
  “Developed the same vaccine, just by sheer
coincidence? I don’t believe it, Broylin!”
   “I was going to say, the ‘enemy nation’ is the
error in your reasoning. No enemy nation developed
the vaccine. Nor do any know that the United States
has it.”
  “Then what the hell is going on?”
  Broylin didn’t answer. He looked at Cavanaugh,
who had finished skimming the thin sheaf of
documents. He wished he could have time to study
them more closely, but he knew he wouldn’t get the
chance. He would never see these particular papers
again.
  He was surprised at the steadiness of his own
voice. “The same nation both started and ended the
epidemic in Congo, Melanie. And, yes, it was a test.
They had the genetically altered mosquitoes
because they had created them. And they had the
vaccine because we gave it to them.”
  “What?” Melanie said.
  Cavanaugh looked not at her, but at Broylin. “We
gave the vaccine to them because they’re not an
enemy nation at all; they’re one of our allies.”
  “Oh, my God,” Melanie said. Broylin said
nothing. He wasn’t going to confirm or deny,
Cavanaugh realized, at least not yet. Broylin was
going to let Cavanaugh do what the FBI had hired
him to do in the first place: put things together.
  He put it together.
   “The FBI does counter-intelligence against
foreign agents within our borders. That’s why the
Bureau was working with the CIA when the team
busted the original lab that created malaria
reading. The other country was creating it here
rather than abroad because… because…”
  Despite herself, Melanie came to his aid.
“Because in the United States there’s more
equipment, more talent, everything much easier to
hide. Scientific equipment can be openly ordered,
with no comment, from thousands of different
sources.”
   “Yes,” Cavanaugh said. “And we caught one of
our allies at it, right under our noses.” God, the
accusations and counteraccusations that must have
gone on behind locked doors. Over secure hotlines.
In diplomatic pouches. It must have been a zoo.
  Cavanaugh continued. “So the United States
appropriated the infected Anopheles, sent them to
Fort Detrick, bred them to research and create a
vaccine… Where were the mosquitoes going when
that car hit a deer near the Potomac River Bridge?”
  Broylin said, “I can’t tell you that.”
  Pharmaceutical house, Cavanaugh guessed.
Historically, Fort Detrick had contracted out some
phases of its bioweapons work. Or maybe the
mosquitoes had been going to another military
installation. It didn’t really matter. This particular
batch of bugs never got there.
  “Go on,” Broylin said, and Cavanaugh did.
  “Detrick created the vaccine. Just before or after
malaria reading got loose. They couldn’t use the
vaccine here, but they didn’t need to. However, the
other nation knew the U.S. must be working on a
counter-weapon. Nothing else is logical. The other
nation wanted the counterweapon, whatever form it
took. We didn’t trust them—”
  “Surprise, surprise,” Melanie said bitterly.
  “—so they forced our hand. They started a second
malaria reading epidemic where the scientific
community wouldn’t really notice anything strange
unless they were looking for it. In Congo. Where
malaria reading could easily spread horrifically
unless the United States supplied the only existing
way to stop it. The vaccine.”
  “This is an ally?” Melanie demanded. “Who is it?”
   Cavanaugh concluded simply, “So in order to
stop the deaths in Africa, we gave our ally the
vaccine. Because we had no choice. If we went in
and administered it ourselves, it would have to be
through the CDC, who’d certainly notice its effect
on the epidemic curves. And who would then tear
every atom of the vaccine apart. They’d want to use
it everywhere in the world, blowing its use as a
counterweapon. And the ally nation would end up
with the vaccine anyway; they’d just analyze the
villagers’ blood samples. So we let our ally have it,
and they administered it through Doctors Without
Borders, who are too damn overworked to analyze
anything.”
   “Who?” Melanie said. “It has to be one of the
signatories of the World Health Organization, Brian
Spencer got his meds from WHO. Israel? Germany?
One of the South American nations? Malaria is
endemic in South America!”
   No, Cavanaugh thought. Not South America. Not
Israel, not Germany.
  “Who?”
  “I can’t tell you that,” Broylin said. “Not now, not
ever. Information here is given on a need-to-know
basis. You know enough already to understand what
happened, and why, and the position in which
you’ve put the United States internationally.”
  Ireland, Cavanaugh thought.
   Michael Sean Donohue had IRA connections, a
fact that had never hit the press. They’d been too
busy jumping on his part-black ancestry. The key
was the level of evidence.
   Melanie thought the FBI had enough hard
evidence—“not just circumstantial!” she’d cried—to
convict in a court of law. But Melanie wasn’t a
lawyer. Neither was Cavanaugh, but like all agents,
he’d picked up a fair amount of law. The U.S.
government lacked the hard evidence to convict the
terrorists. That meant this investigation was still
going on, and it was probably a joint effort of the
American and Irish governments, maybe even the
Brits as well, against a common enemy within
friendly borders.
   It had been some radical branch of the Irish
Republican Army that had created malaria reading.
And it had been the Irish Republican Army that
Broylin had meant when he’d said “… could,
conceivably, place you both in physical danger,
although not from the FBI or the CIA.”
   The IRA, whose savage tactics—if not ultimate
aims—were condemned by even the Irish
government. The IRA, who had always enjoyed rich
backing among Irish-Americans. The IRA, who
hadn’t hesitated before this to kill off civilians in its
quest to break Northern Ireland free of England.
Who, of course, knew how fast the immigrant
population of London was growing. Cavanaugh
suddenly saw, as clearly as if it had been included in
Broylin s green folder, his own initial reading about
sickle-cell trait. From an on-line encyclopedia:



  IN ANCIENT TIMES, VEDDOIDS CAME FROM
THEIR HOME IN INDIA ACROSS THE RED SEA
LAND BRIDGE INTO AFRICA. WITH THEM THEY
CARRIED THE GENE THAT CODED FOR AN
ABNORMAL FORM OF HEMOGLOBIN: THE
SICKLE-CELL GENE. SICKLE-CELL TRAIT IS
STILL VERY COMMON IN CERTAIN SECTIONS
OF INDIA…



  And in Indians who immigrated to London.
   But, wait—wasn’t London too cold to support
malaria mosquitoes? Cavanaugh remembered more
of his reading. London had been plagued with
malaria every summer, right up until the
midnineteenth century. The disease came in the
spring on sailing ships, flourished all summer, and
died off in winter, only to sail in again next spring.
Oliver Cromwell had suffered from malaria all his
life. And Oliver Cromwell’s London wasn’t the urban
heat sink that the great city was today. Over one
summer, malaria reading could create enough
death and panic in London to bring down the
British government. Which was, in fact, what it had
been created to do.
   Malaria had not been created to destroy blacks,
after all. It had only been tested on them, in order
to force the United States to share the vaccine. And
the test site was Congo only because in that vast
rain forest of disease and poverty and isolation,
more death would just blend right in. It was as
cold-blooded an action as Cavanaugh and Melanie
had feared all along. A monstrosity, an
abomination.
  But not by the United States.
  All this tore through Cavanaugh’s mind in an
instant, almost before Broylin had finished his last
sentence. Cavanaugh couldn’t reply. He sat, mute
and dazed by the gut-loosening shock of relief.
   Melanie repeated, “Who? If you think we’re going
to buy your concoction without even being told who
created the epidemic… Besides, all you’ve really
given us is an alternate set of possible
circumstances! You haven’t given us any good
reason to believe the alternate set is the truth.”
  “I’ve given you everything I can,” Broylin said.
“Except this. Watch.”
  He pressed a button. A very large projection
suddenly appeared on a blank wall to their right. A
world map, in colors that did not correspond to
national boundaries.
   Broylin, still seated behind his desk, said, “Light
green indicates areas where virtually none of the
population is positive for sickle-cell trait. Dark
green indicates roughly three to ten susceptible
individuals per hundred square miles. Blue, a
concentration of susceptible individuals that could
cause personal suffering but not political
disruption. Red, a population in which an
unchecked epidemic of malaria reading could cause
considerable economic disruption, political
consequences, and human suffering.”
  Cavanaugh stared at the projection. The FBI
didn’t do this kind of international forecasting. The
map had CIA woven all through it. London was red.
  Melanie shot back, “An epidemic wouldn’t cause
that much disruption if we stepped in with the
vaccine for everybody.”
  Broylin said, “There are places on earth where
that just isn’t feasible.”
   Cavanaugh followed Melanie’s gaze. She stared at
Africa. Africa, where no vaccination program, no
matter how well planned, had ever succeeded
against the poverty, the tribal conflict, the shaman
resistance, the rain forest and desert and isolation.
Yamdongi had been only one small village, carefully
targeted. In a city like Kinshasa, malaria reading
would be more than politically devastating; it would
be an unstoppable apocalypse.
  Cavanaugh said carefully, “But there are places
where it is feasible to efficiently administer
vaccines. The United States, as we’ve already seen.
Or London.”
  Broylin didn’t react. “Yes. The largest risk, as Dr.
Anderson well knows, is to Africa.”
 Melanie said, in a different voice, “Who created
malaria reading, Dr. Broylin?”
   “As I said before, I can’t tell you that. But I can
tell you this: The United States knows who it is, and
so do at least two of our allies. We’re working with
them to trace the disease all the way back to, not
only its creators, but to its funding on two
continents. We need time to get them all, and
enough evidence to convict under the laws of two
different nations. It’s an international effort being
carried out by very high levels of the governments
involved. And I’ll promise you this, Dr. Anderson. If
the investigation isn’t finished one year from today,
you will sit again in that same chair in this same
room, and I’ll personally tell you who created
malaria reading. Until then, your government needs
your silence.”
   Broylin turned to Cavanaugh. “You told me
before, Agent Cavanaugh, that I had to make a
choice about you and Dr. Anderson. Now it’s you
two who must make a choice: go to the press or stay
silent. If you go to the press, two things happen.
First, our investigation is compromised, perhaps
fatally. Second, every nation in the world will know
that malaria reading is a bioweapon and that a
counterweapon exists. They’ll start working on
duplicating it immediately. That may force the
original developers of the disease to use it now for
their own political purposes, if they’re going to use
it at all. Thousands could die. Or millions. Possibly
tens of millions, if Africa is again the target.”
   Melanie cried, “But I don’t even know if your
story is true!”
  Broylin said, “You know as much as I can tell you.
You have to make your choice from that. Both of
you, taking into account the needs and national
security of your country.”
   That last, Cavanaugh realized, was intended for
him, even though Broylin continued to look at
Melanie. So Broylin didn’t have every angle covered
after all. He’d misjudged Cavanaugh. He’d expected
that patriotism would ensure Cavanaugh’s silence,
once Cavanaugh understood the danger to his
country. Patriotism, loyalty, national security.
  But Broylin was wrong. The Director belonged to
another generation. He’d gone through Vietnam,
Watergate, Nixon. Patriotism wasn’t a given to that
generation; you had to convince people of it,
through logic and argument. Maybe even Melanie
thought that way.
   But Cavanaugh was thirty-two. The United States
didn’t have to earn his loyalty. He wanted to be
loyal, to believe… in something. To hold Robert
Cavanaugh, all the United States had to do was to
convince him that his country was not a monster.
   And it was not. The United States had not
created malaria reading; it had only created the
antidote. And it had released that antidote to save
lives in Congo.
  “Agent Cavanaugh?” Broylin said. He touched the
button a second time and the map disappeared.
  But… Broylin was an Irish name.
 No. No. That level of paranoia wasn’t justified,
must not be allowed to exist. At least, not in him.
   But… he had no hard evidence of an
American/Irish/British investigation, except the
CIA documents in the green folder, and those had
so many key words blacked out that they could, just
conceivably, apply to another situation entirely.
  No. More paranoia.
  But… another year would allow much more
development and testing of the deadly parasite…
   No. Everything Broylin had said fit with the
information Cavanaugh and Melanie had
uncovered. Broylin’s explanation felt solid and true.
  But… how had Michael Sean Donohue passed an
FBI polygraph if Donohue had known about malaria
reading?
  For a second, the room spun and almost
shattered.
   No, it could be explained. Donohue had definite
IRA ties, but that didn’t mean he knew about every
single campaign the IRA ran. The IRA, like the CIA,
operated on a need-to-know basis. Donohue’s
concocted arrest could have been an FBI
diversionary tactic, a plausible suspect brought into
custody both to placate a panicking public and to
mislead the IRA into thinking the FBI/CIA knew
less than it actually did. If Donohue had known
nothing about malaria reading before the date of
his polygraph, he would have tested clean.
   Broylin still stared at him. Cavanaugh had to
choose. On the basis of incomplete evidence, with
reasonable doubt, without any guarantees about the
future. He still had to choose.
   Slowly he said, “You have my promise of total
silence on everything connected in any way with
malaria reading.”
  “Your country thanks you. Dr. Anderson?”
   She still stared at the piece of wall where the map
of Africa had been. Cavanaugh knew he would never
tell her about Michael Sean Donohue’s IRA
connection. Her concern was all for Africa, which
she still thought was the main target. It was only to
protect Africa that she would agree to silence.
   She said, “One year? In one year from today you’ll
either conclude your investigation or tell me who
anyway?”
  “One year,” Broylin said.
  “Then…” She swallowed, tried again. “Then, yes. I
won’t tell the press. Or anyone else.”
  “Thank you.”
  There was a long pause, thick with unspoken
words, complex and twisting as DNA. Melanie
finally broke the silence. “So now what? We’re free
to leave?”
   “You were always free to leave, Dr. Anderson. You
haven’t been charged with anything, and this is not
a police station.”
   Melanie snorted, and the strange, thick
atmosphere dissolved. “Right. Do we sign anything
first?”
   She was a scientist, after all. As if any of this
would ever be put in writing by the Bureau—or by
the CIA or the White House, if they were involved,
which Cavanaugh rather doubted. It wouldn’t be
the first time a president had been left out of a CIA
loop.
  “No signatures are necessary, Dr. Anderson.
Agent Cavanaugh, your own car is in the employee’s
garage, brought here at my request.”
  And searched, no doubt. Bugged? Maybe. It
didn’t matter. He was due for a trade-in anyway. He
took the gamble. “Am I going to need that car in
Singleton, North Dakota?”
  “No. You’re being reassigned to the Baltimore
Field Office.”
  Baltimore. Under Felders. It wasn’t a bribe.
Cavanaugh had already agreed to silence. A reward
then. Or a sweetener, to remind him of how much
he’d almost lost.
  The center had held, but the edges were as frayed
and soiled as ever.
  “Well, then, let’s go,” Melanie said, not very
graciously.
   In the elevator her ungraciousness turned to
pensiveness. But she waited until they were seated
in Cavanaugh’s car, pulling out of the parking
garage, to say, “Robert.”
  “Yes?”
  “That’s the first meeting I ever saw you sit
through without doodling.”
  It was true. Doodling hadn’t even occurred to
him.
   She added, in another tone entirely, “How many
lives did we save today?”
   He glanced at her rigid face and said gently, “A
lot, Melanie. A very lot.”
  “Is that true?”
  “I believe it is, yes.” On the basis of incomplete
evidence, with reasonable doubt, without any
guarantees about the future. He pulled onto
Constitution Avenue.
  “But do we believe it because it really is true, or
because we so badly want to believe it?”
  But he knew he couldn’t answer that one, and he
didn’t even try.



                    TWENTY

      The whole of science is nothing more
      than a refinement of everyday thinking.
      —Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality,
      1936



  Melanie parked in her usual spot at the CDC. As
soon as she left the car, the Atlanta heat seeped into
her nostrils, her clothing, the spaces between her
hair shafts. God, it must be over ninety, and it was
only eight-thirty in the morning.
  Inside, air-conditioned cold. The abrupt contrast
made her sneeze. Her office was in a basement,
which, due to the eccentric building design that
added levels by building them down the slope of a
steep hill, was well above ground level. This
“basement,” like every other floor of the CDC, was
jammed with freezers: old freezers, new freezers,
upright freezers, horizontal freezers, freezers that
barely managed minus ten Celsius, freezers
superchilled by liquid nitrogen. All of the freezers
held biological samples, the frozen lifeblood of the
CDC. They also all hummed. Melanie squeezed
around a Forma Scientific blocking a third of the
corridor and headed to the lounge for a cup of
coffee.
   As soon as she entered, the knot of people by the
Mr. Coffee stopped talking. One blushed. Another
said, too heartily, “Hi, Melanie. How are you?”
   “Just fine,” she said. What had they been
discussing? Her slugging that lad in the Virginia
Burger King? Her getting sent home for a
“vacation”? Her and Joe Krovetz caught in a clinch,
she in a black slip?
  She said, “So much gossip, so little time,” got her
coffee, and left.
   “Hey, Mel, you see this?” Joe, her cogossipee,
waited in her office, looking blessedly unaware that
he should feel embarrassed. He thrust a newspaper
at her. The article was on page one, even though it
was clearly an editorial.



       FUTURE PUBLIC DEFENDERS NOT
      TRADITIONAL LAW ENFORCEMENT
      FBI DOWN, CDC & USAMRIID RIDING
                   HIGH



     The past few months should make us all
     aware that something important has
     shifted in the political universe. Our
major enemies may still be other people,
but our major defenses are no longer
traditional law-enforcement agencies.
Now, the people who defend us best are
those trained to detect and counter the
highly sophisticated weapons of modern
technological guerrilla warfare.
Cops are out. Scientists are in.
A wealth of evidence supports this
startling statement. The Federal Bureau
of Investigation mobilized all its vast
resources to search for the people
responsible for the recent malaria
reading epidemic that caused the deaths
of 1,012 citizens. The FBI came up
empty. So did the police forces of two
states. So did the unofficial investigators
of the press, who occasionally in the past
have dug up leads that have broken
cases baffling official law enforcement.
But not this time. Despite excellent work
by such reporters as Libby Turner of the
Baltimore Sun, the fourth estate didn’t
protect us from anything worse than
having to wait for the six o’clock news to
hear the latest death statistics.
Not so the Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta and the United States Army
Medical Research Institute for
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick,
Maryland. Working alongside the
United States Public Health Service, the
CDC and USAMRIID protected us
through excellent and immediate
programs for blood testing, prophylactic
medicine, and mosquito control. They
solved their part of the mystery, through
the CDC’s brilliant field and lab work to
identify the genetically altered parasites
     and their vector. And they taught us
     how to protect ourselves, through both
     organizations’ clear, concise, and widely
     distributed guidelines. Together,
     USAMRIDD and the CDC saved
     countless lives. Unlike the FBI.
     This suggests that, in a future
     increasingly dominated by the biological
     breakthroughs, the real protectors of the
     American public will be not the
     gun-toting G-men, the Eliot Nesses of
     popular legend. Instead, quiet and
     bespectacled scientists will…



  “Take it away,” Melanie said. “God, the trash the
papers get away with.”
  “Well, aren’t you in a sweet mood,” Joe said,
without rancor. “I thought you’d be pleased. We
come off pretty good.”
   “Yeah. So?” Melanie wished she could tell Joe the
truth. Although she recognized that he didn’t really
need it. Joe’d been curious about who had
engineered the parasite, but not as curious as he
was to unravel the DNA manipulation that had
gone into it. Without Melanie’s prodding, he would
drop the cause aspect, as he had almost done before
she burst in on him fresh from Africa. Joe cared a
lot more about how disease worked than about why.
And now she couldn’t tell him that Plasmodium
reading was still out there. Someplace. At the
whimsical disposal of someone. To, undoubtedly, be
used sometime, on more innocent people.
  “So nothing,” Joe said, folding up his newspaper.
“We have a meeting at ten. Did anybody tell you?”
   “We returned exiles get told nothing. What kind
of meeting?”
  “With Farlow’s replacement. Probably just a
get-to-know-you gabfest.”
  “I can hardly wait.”
  “See you then,” Joe said, out the door. “And, oh,
Mel—don’t drink that coffee. Your present mood
will shatter the cup.”
  “Hahaha. You should have gone into show
business.”
  “That’s what my mother says, too.”
  And she, Melanie reflected, should have gone into
plumbing. Something where you got to deal with
hard, cold pipes that delivered water, instead of
hard, cold people who delivered diseases in order to
grab or keep power.
   She closed her office door and put her head in
her hands. I can’t do this. I can’t putter around my
office doing diddley, can’t go to another pointless
meeting, can’t study malaria statistics knowing
that each could be undiagnosed P. reading. I can’t
—
  If not this, then what? What can I—
  Abruptly Joe was back, bursting in without so
much as a knock. “Mel! Mel! The meeting’s moved
up!”
  “And this causes your joyful rudeness, Dr.
Krovetz?”
   “Not that, you blockhead! Listen, there’s dengue
fever in Gabon!”
  “Dengue fever?”
   “Massive outbreak. Must have come in by ship or
by infected carrier. And the first teams for dengue
are already deployed in Manila and Brasilia. The
head is asking for volunteers, preferably people with
field experience in malaria.”
   Both mosquito-borne. Although malaria was
Anopheles and dengue was carried by Aëdes. Still,
Melanie could see where the experience might
transfer. And Gabon. She spoke both Bantu and
French, and she picked up local dialects fast.
Dengue was a fascinating parasite, with multiple
strains…
  “Is it break-bone or hemorrhagic?” she
demanded.
   “Hemorraghic. Even some septic shock, sounds
like.”
  “Aëdes aegypti or Aëdes albopictus?”
   “Unknown. But from the diseases aggressiveness,
I’d guess albopictus. ”
   The Asian tiger mosquito. That meant the
parasites could be transferred to and from an array
of other warm-blooded hosts, including rats. In
1981, dengue fever carried by A. albopictus brought
down 10 percent of Havana.
   Joe said, “I’m going to plead and grovel and
reason and bluster and generally convince the head
that I should go to Gabon. But you don’t have to do
all that. They asked for you specifically.”
  “For me? Who asked specifically?”
  “I don’t know. But you’re on the dengue team, if
you want it. You want it? Stupid question, look at
you smiling again.”
  “I’m not smiling. I’m just wondering why all of a
sudden I’m a favored daughter.”
  Joe looked at her keenly. “You sure you don’t
know? Anyway, since you have all this new-found
weight, will you throw it around on my behalf?”
  “Of course. You think I’d go to Gabon without
you?”
  “Then let’s go tell the head how indispensible I
am.”
   Melanie said suddenly, “We’re ghouls, you know.
As much as… as anyone else. We depend on
disease.”
  “Yeah,” Joe said. “I know. Come on!”
   They walked as fast as possible to the new
director’s office, dodging freezers and colleagues,
trying not to break into an unprofessional run.



   Cavanaugh ripped open yet another cardboard
box and pawed through it. Damn it, where were his
ties? All right, Abigail had chewed up the blue one
with red books on it, and he’d gotten mustard on
the brown one. Mustard, the dry cleaner had
informed him in a tone that said he should already
know this, didn’t come out. But that still left eight
or nine ties somewhere. On this, his first day at the
Baltimore Field Office, he wanted to wear a suit and
nice tie.
   Hopelessly he opened another suitcase and then
another cardboard box. Everything had arrived in
Baltimore from Leonardtown only yesterday. The
suitcase held winter sweaters. The box held dish
towels, a mismatched pair of sheets, candy-striped
throw pillows he swore he’d never seen before, and
his high-school yearbook. God, this was the worst
move yet. Where were his ties? Where were his
spaghetti kettle and his bathrobe? And whose throw
pillows were these?
   Giving up, he threaded his way among boxes,
books, Styrofoam peanuts, and Abigail’s chew toys
to the front door. He would have liked to check his
e-mail and make a cup of coffee to take with him,
but the mouse had somehow become separated
from his computer and as yet the refrigerator held
no milk. In fact, the refrigerator wasn’t turned on
yet. Just as well. There were probably boxes in it,
possibly containing somebody else’s ties.
   The one thing he could find—could always find
because there was such an abundance of it—was a
letter from Earl Lester. The boy wrote him three or
four times a week, letters full of information about
obscure insects. Obviously the kid had adopted
Cavanaugh, who hadn’t even known he was on the
market. He answered Earl when he could, but
Cavanaugh knew he was not a faithful
correspondent. Still, he seemed to have acquired,
somehow, some responsibility for Earl. Maybe the
simplest thing to do would be to just drive down to
Rivermount on Saturday and set the boy up with
some kind of secondhand computer. Then they
could do e-mail. And Earl could research bugs
on-line, which would give him a lot less time in
which to write Cavanaugh.
   Of course, at the moment Cavanaugh couldn’t
even find all the components of his own computer,
let alone set up somebody else with one. Not to
mention finding his ties.
  He fled to the orderly serenity of the Beltway at
rush hour.



  The size of the cream-colored brick building that
housed the Baltimore Field Office delighted him.
The throngs of agents in the hallways delighted
him. The fact that none of them was Seton
delighted him. He reached Felders’s office.
  “Well, well. Six minutes late on the first day. A
new job and you couldn’t wear a tie?”
  “I tried a—never mind. Good to see you, Marty.”
  “We’ll see. It’s too bad you’re late because you
have a team meeting in fourteen minutes, which is
barely time for you to do your paperwork, find your
vehicle, and hear about the case.”
   “A case? I have a case?” Cavanaugh said. “What
is it?”
   “Big. Bank robbery in Baltimore last night, three
million dollars. But that’s not the juice. There are
links to heists in other states, organized crime,
maybe even the unions… Big. And hot.”
  “Very hot. Am I—”
  “Hot stuff yourself? So it would seem. Here, Bob,
I’m supposed to give you this.”
  He handed Cavanaugh a piece of paper. Thick,
creamy paper with a decorative border and raised
FBI seal. Even before he read it, Cavanaugh knew
what it was: a special commendation for
undercover FBI activity.
   So that’s the way it was going to be.
Commendation. Big cases. And probably other
sweeteners, direct and indirect, coming down
discreetly from the top. Was Broylin rewarding
Cavanaugh for his patriotic silence, or merely
increasing the odds that it would be maintained?
  No matter. That was how bureaucracies worked.
   Felders sat on his desk, crossed his legs, and
jiggled his left foot. “So—are you holding out on me,
Bob? Did I call in all those markers over Fort
Detrick for nothing—or not?”
 Cavanaugh looked levelly at Felders. “Don’t ask
me, Marty.”
  “‘Don’t ask me.’ All right. I won’t. You hear about
Seton?”
  “What about Seton?”
  Felders switched to jiggling his right foot.
“Retiring early. Big party next week.”
   And that also, Cavanaugh realized, was how
bureaucracies worked. Seton had undoubtedly been
given a choice: Which do you want? An OPR
investigation into this huge pile of falsified 302s
you’ve submitted? Or allowing your name to be
signed to a bogus report about an informant who’s
also having an investigation dropped if he signs the
same bogus report? Seton had chosen the latter.
Although, being Seton, the deception probably
hadn’t bothered him as long as nobody outside a
handful of FBI agents knew the truth. Seton was
retiring with a nice party and a full pension, his
long record marred publicly only by one bad
judgment about an informant. Could happen to
anybody.
  However, Cavanaugh knew, as Felders did not,
that Seton’s reprieve was only temporary. When the
government finally went public with its full case
against the IRA, the journalists would dig into every
detail of everybody’s actions, including Seton’s.
Then they’d flay him alive. Almost, Cavanaugh
could feel sorry for Seton. Almost.
  Felders said, “Now your meeting is in nine
minutes. Conference room.”
  “I’m on my way.”
  “And get your ass over to our house for dinner
tonight.”
  Cavanaugh smiled. “Got it, Chief.”
   He found his cubicle, signed in his password on
its computer, and checked it by calling up his
e-mail. In two minutes he was back in Felders’s
office. “Marty? Could I take a rain check on dinner?
In fact, could I leave right after the case meeting?”
  “Leave? Why?”
   Cavanaugh thought of saying, I have to unpack;
they’re all these boxes and I can’t even find my
ties… but a good look at Felders’s face changed his
mind. He and Felders had always been honest with
each other. And Marty was—had been—could be
again—his friend.
   “It’s Judy. Yesterday I sent her flowers and a
letter, but she just sent me an e-mail, and…” Men
didn’t talk to each other like this, even men who
were friends. Judy’s e-mail had said, Thanks for the
roses. Don’t call me.
  “Judy?” Felders said. “She fucking you over?”
  “No. More my fault.”
  “I always thought she was too good for you.”
   “Yes,” Cavanaugh said simply, and the two men
stared at each other. Then Felders shrugged. “Go
after her then. But after the meeting. You can work
the weekend for the time you’ll miss. And if you do
get lucky, I don’t want to hear about it.”
  Which meant, Cavanaugh knew, Good luck.



  After the meeting he raced to Judy’s new
apartment. It was in an acceptable but not upscale
part of D.C. She came to the door in shorts and
T-shirt, her red hair frazzled from tugging on it,
which meant she’d been writing. She went still.
  “Robert.”
   “Judy. You look wonderful,” he said, which was
true. Thinner, more toned, glowing. What had she
been doing to herself? Or someone to her? Behind
her, the apartment looked different from Judy’s
other places, too. Stripped-down, minimalist. Not a
knitted doohickey in sight.
  “Thank you,” Judy said. “I just sent you an e-mail
asking you not to call me.”
  “I know. I got it. But I’m not calling; I’m here.
Can I come in?”
   “I don’t think so. I’m on a deadline for a big
science article.”
  “I won’t stay long.”
  “You won’t stay at all. We don’t have anything to
say to each other, Robert.”
  “Not true,” Cavanaugh said. “I have something to
say.”
 She studied him. “You look different, Robert.
More… I don’t know. Just different somehow.”
  “Good. Because what I have to say is different.
Judy, will you marry me?”
   She went white, then red. But the chromoscape
lasted only a moment. Afterward she said calmly,
“Don’t you have to wear a tie to work anymore,
Robert?”
  “Yes. Will you marry me?”
  “No.”
   Despite his shock—it had always been she who
pushed, he who refused—Cavanaugh didn’t gape at
her. He shifted his weight, planting his shoes more
firmly on her threshold. Still, his startlement must
have showed; Judy smiled faintly.
   “Surprised you, huh? I’m sorry, Robert. It’s not
that I don’t… still…” Her voice broke and he took a
hopeful step forward. But she held up a warning
hand. “No, don’t. You don’t understand, Robert. I
need to be able to trust my husband. Trust him not
to disappear, not to be unfaithful, not to generally
treat me like an albatross around his neck. I had all
that before with Ben, and I don’t want it again. You
just aren’t trustworthy. You appear, you disappear,
you move back with your ex-wife, you reappear
when you want to. No, no. I don’t want that. I’m
sorry.”
  She closed her apartment door.
   Robert knocked on it again. Nothing happened.
He said through the hollow-core metal door, “Judy,
please open up. I have something else to say. Please
open.”
  “No.”
   “Then I’ll say it through the door.” He stopped to
think, to say it right. “I made a bad mistake, letting
you go. I didn’t want to have to…” What was the
word those talk-show shrinks used on the radio?
“Commit.” He didn’t want to use it; Judy deserved
better than radio psycho-jargon. “… to choose. But I
choose now.” On the basis of incomplete evidence,
with reasonable doubt, without any guarantees
about the future. “I choose a life with you.”
  Some muffled words from beyond the door.
Curses? Maybe, but maybe not.
  “I want to marry you, Judy. Please open the
door.”
  He waited. The door didn’t open. But from
behind it she said, clearly this time, “Oh, damn it,
Robert…”
  “Will you marry me?”
  “No. I don’t know. I can’t believe you’d ask me
now. No. Maybe.”
  Robert drew a long breath. From maybe it wasn’t
ever that far to yes. Not if you stuck with it.
  “I’m leaving now, Judy. But I’ll be back after work
tonight. Okay?”
  “What time?”
  He calculated rapidly. “Six-thirty. Count on it,
sweetheart.” No answer. But it was okay. She’d be
here.
  Cavanaugh drove back to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in Baltimore to get down to work.



           EPILOGUE:
       SIX MONTHS AFTER

   Melanie walked wearily out of the makeshift
Nigerian hospital, which was the usual
polyester-tent-and-wood-hut misalliance, toward
the river. It fell here abruptly into a waterfall. The
air at the top was clean and sweet, with the fresh,
living scent of water. Melanie drew in deep, great
breaths and rubbed the back of her neck.
   Lassa fever. And at the beginning of an epidemic
this far from even a moderate-sized town, forget the
protocols; everyone did whatever was necessary to
fight the epidemic. She’d been moving patients all
day.
  A small Nigerian boy scampered toward her.
“Miss! Miss!” he called, obviously glorying in his
English, which had a strong British accent. “Some
person rings you by this telephone!”
   He actually held Dr. Duchamp’s portable phone
in his hand. Marveling that Duchamp would let it
out of his sight—it was their only quick link with
the rest of the world—Melanie took the phone from
the interested boy.
  “Hello?”
  “Melanie? Robert Cavanaugh. Have you seen the
New York Times?”
  The New York Times. Here, on the far edge of
nowhere, in the midst of an epidemic. Ah, Robert.
  “They’ve broken it, Melanie. They’ve made the
arrests on malaria reading. In Ireland.”
  “Ireland?”
  “Yes. I couldn’t tell you before, but Broylin…” The
connection filled with static.
  “Robert? Robert?”
  No use. The connection didn’t clear. Maybe the
satellite was out of range. Was that how these
phones worked? Maybe she’d heard wrong. Ireland?
How could that be?
   “Miss, miss, come, come! The mother of my
mother!” Another child, looking anxious. Another
victim.
  Melanie pushed malaria reading to the back of
her mind. She was burning to know what had
happened. But Ireland was far away, and America
even farther. Lassa fever was here and now.
 She followed the child to the mother of his
mother.



  The End