Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
"Please." I took her arm, planting my feet.
"I hate being afraid of things. I really hate that worse than anything..." She pulled away and kept going. I could suddenly see why she was a great sports player, and why her father was reluctant to let her have her car out here. She had a reckless streak. Someone could punch her and knock her down, or she could spiral into a bad mood while driving and crash the car into a tree.
But no one was behind the bramble. There
was
a trail back there, though I hadn't heard any sneaker tread running or any twigs cracking.
Aleese? Mrs. Kellerton?
"Let's just go back to the house," I said.
"Whatever." Rain took my arm and walked beside me. I resisted the urge to look back. I resisted the urge to run, too, though my instincts told me to get inside to safety.
SHAHZAD HAMDANI
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
NOON
HIS BEDROOM
I
HAVE ASKED TYLER
to surf for "tularemia" again and see if he comes up with any more suspicious deaths. But he lacks my experience in looking past horrific news for what information bits might be helpful. He grows distracted easily. He copes by reading Cora Holman's blog for the umpteenth time.
He finally comes away from his own terminals and into my room only when he hears the rooster crowing from my dog-leash program. We see that VaporStrike is online, but he idles, waiting for someone else.
Tyler spouts impatiently, "Cora hasn't written in her blog in a couple of days. Think she's okay?"
"I can find out from Hodji ... if you wish. He told you not to get obsessed. We did our best to save them. Now we don't need heartbreak if one of them doesn't make it. We have to think of us, he says."
"Yeah, but ... we're geeks and totally boring," he complains.
Even now, I do not understand his obsession with Cora Holman. I am prone to the other, as we do not see many yellow-haired women in Pakistan, and I find her so interesting to gaze at pictorially. As well, I shook Miss Rain's hand once, and her charm and charisma ran up my arm like electricity. Miss Cora had been too ill to meet me.
"Maybe we are not so boring these days," I say as Omar logs on. "Though I am confused. They should not be meeting so soon."
Omar and VaporStrike exchange in Spanish, with which I am familiar, and we can almost translate aloud.
OmarLoggi:
I have only one location left before I will become recognizable in one of these cafés. What on earth is it?VaporStrike:
I have been on the phone with Chancellor. I think you will be unhappy with him, though he is quite pleased with himself. He said to tell you he created ten thousand milligrams of FireFall. With one milligram, he was able to kill your remaining three monkeys.
Tyler adds quickly, "At least they haven't killed any people. Yet. Can I throw up anyway? I like monkeys."
I am more taken by this player, Chancellor, who must be a fellow scientist as well as a financial backer. So far, Omar is the only scientist we have ever known of in ShadowStrike. Hodji will be pleased with us when we send this.
OmarLoggi:
You idiots. What of the monkey corpses? How do you plan to dispose of them? Didn't your mother teach you never to play with fire? I wish you had waited until I could cross over and come to you.
"
Whoa!
" Our voices clatter with more exclamations, and I bang my fists victoriously on the desk. Tyler makes the victory dance in the middle of my bed.
Cross over and come to you.
He puts truths together aloud. "VaporStrike is in America. How the fuck did he get back in? Did he swim?"
"He is with this Chancellor person..." I watch carefully, thinking he will spill his whereabouts. He does, but in such an indirect way it only creates more frustration.
VaporStrike:
I took care of the corpse disposal.OmarLoggi:
I can't wait to hear.VaporStrike:
I double bagged all three. Two I buried by the water's edge. However, it created an odor that permeates many miles. For the other, I decided to contact you to see what you wanted me to do.
"They're near water," Tyler murmurs. "Lake? River? Ocean? C'mon..."
OmarLoggi:
Keep to your job, my little assassin, and let me keep to mine. I told you this fire will cook a man from the inside out. Do you think it will not eat through garbage bags? Where is your mind?VaporStrike:
What's done is done. Chancellor is not concerned. He said if anyone finds the remains and is stupid enough to handle them much, we will have another test subject. There. It has started.OmarLoggi:
Do you really think a babe in arms like Chancellor will force my hand? Don't let him play with fire again. You need to put the remaining corpse inside a steel drum. Do not bury it. The ground will smoke orange. You need to find a dumpster where the trash men are coming tomorrow.VaporStrike:
All of this nonsense I will do for you. In return, I expect you will give a go-ahead on Colony Two. The germ is fully operative.
They idle long. I search the chatter for any details of where VaporStrike may be. I wonder if my word "water" is a bad translation. VaporStrike has used the word
marea,
and the normal word for water is
agua. Marea
is more often associated with coasts and
tides.
I explain this to Tyler, who gets a jolt of revelation that causes him to clamp on to my scabby shoulder. "Lab monkeys? Don't you have to have a
lab?
Didn't Roger tell us while we were in Beth Israel that they hadn't found Omar's local Trinity Falls lab after the raid? Aren't there all sorts of barrier islands down that way?"
I will look on a map directly, but chatter appears.
OmarLoggi:
Do not pressure me. If you want to assassinate, go find me some v-spies instead of killing my lab monkeys.
He exits, and Tyler makes some "bring it on" banter, reminding me of the USIC agents' belief that he had a death wish and suicidal tendencies. That was all before he turned in his mother as a spy, which seemed to calm him somewhat. I think now he has only a reckless streak, which could also get us killed if we are not careful.
He settles down finally and asks, "So ... you're thinking that VaporStrike is on an island in New Jersey?" Before I can answer, he makes a stinging point. "
We're
on an island, buddy.
Long
Island. New York is not that far away. And Long Island
was
the home-away-from-home for VaporStrike back in March, back when he was using the Trinitron Internet café to launch his dirty secrets."
When I was brought here from Pakistan, it was to v-spy on VaporStrike and other operatives from inside Trinitron, where I could use the café's intranet system to quickly cache their screens and translate. VaporStrike and others had launched their experiment on Trinity Falls from less than a mile from here. They scattered to the winds or were captured down at Trinity.
I shake my head, trying to sort out the confusing issues. If they are using the Jersey lab, VaporStrike would not travel three hours to his former jurisdiction simply to get rid of a deadly, telling steel drum. Unless, of course, he can't find weekend trash collection in New Jersey but he can in New York. Still, New York is huge, and VaporStrike would be stupid to return to a place where police and USIC agents have photos of him and would recognize him instantly. I do not feel unsafe, despite Omar's encouragement to have us found. I feel more concerned about what else—or who else—might wind up suffering some hideous death before USIC can catch the lot of them.
SCOTT EBERMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
12:10
P.M.
PARLOR
I
FELT LIKE A VAMPIRE
who'd had his first red meal. If intelligence were blood, I would have grown fangs after my eavesdropping session in the basement. I parked myself on the parlor couch facing the hallway, waiting for Mike and Alan to either sneak off to their third-floor hangout and talk some more or take a cell phone call, of which I could hear one end.
Jersey cities with convention centers right across from amusement piers.
I played eenie-meenie-minie-moe with Wildwood, Asbury Park, and Griffith's Landing. My problem was that, like most New Jersey natives, I could name the barrier islands in order from north to south, but I couldn't tell you what cities on the mainland were behind each one. I had no idea which barrier isles lay in front of me, but Omar's main lab is somewhere within driving distance of the strike. I didn't know whether to laugh or be stunned.
I pretended to read, though it was like pretending to sleep when burglars are in the house. Finally, Mike Tiger left in his car, heading back to Manhattan for some meeting, and the goodbye comments let me know he'd either be spending the night with his family in North Jersey or he wouldn't be back until late tonight. Alan went to the kitchen to talk to Marg. I could hear his car keys rattling in his hand, which meant he was leaving, too.
Damn.
Cora and Rain came back from a walk outside, huffing and looking not thrilled about something. Rain went for the sound of her dad's voice, and Cora came in to me, finding her smile.
"You're still up," she said.
I was working on my second slushy and was starting to feel okay to talk.
"You're winded," I noted.
She didn't answer, though I knew well the way her eyes darted when she got nervous about something.
"You meet up with the Jersey Devil out there?" I swallowed a gulp of slushy orange. "You shouldn't be running. Not on all these blood thinners."
She rolled her eyes. "I wish I could say I was running to get this winded. We were walking quickly. It's ... Jersey Devilish. I really don't think you want to hear."
I moved my feet to make room for her, and she sat on the couch, but not like she usually sits when I'm around—like she's ready to jump up again. She sank down on the cushions, laid her head on the backrest, and shut her eyes with a huge exhale.
I watched her from between my knees, not sure I was up for the usual Cora games—i.e., trying to drag information out of her. I went back to my pretend reading, my ears ready to hear Alan's cell phone ring. He was responding to something Rain must have been whispering. I couldn't hear a damn word of it.
Time to play the game. I toed Cora in the leg. "What happened?"
"Nothing."
"Right." I toed her in the ribs, in a tickle spot, which made her squirm sideways and almost smile. Then I crossed my ankles on top of her so she couldn't get away until she confessed. I had pinned her down like this once at St. Ann's, just to torture her, when I was reading on the couch in the lounge. I'd actually spent very little time with the three of them at the hospital. I knew everyone in the place and did everything from answer phones in the ER to clean the break room when I felt good. That day, I hadn't been feeling good, and misery loves company. She got so jumpy from being held down that the game was over in about thirty seconds.
I figured I could squirt an answer out of her by trying it again. She merely dropped a hand onto my sweat sock and lay there with her eyes shut.
Alan's voice rose so slightly that I figured only my tuned-in ears would catch it. "Cora shouldn't be afraid of that—"
"Don't talk to her now," Rain whispered. "Not while..." and I could hear no more.
Cora was sitting under Mrs. Kellerton's portrait—the one that looked at you no matter where in the room you were. She opened her eyes and kinked her neck so that for a moment she was looking at the portrait upside down. I was four feet to the left and five feet under the woman, and I still felt those eyes were watching me. I always wondered how painters did that.
Cora dropped her head again and started talking in the calmest of monotones. "I had the best time with Henry. You have to get to know him. He's an excellent photographer. He's going to give me copies of his prints so that I can try to get the same shot, same lighting ... He reminded me of everything I forgot about developing old-fashioned film."
Obviously there was some big secret going on, and Henry Calloway was the diversionary topic.
Whatever.
A part of me wanted to leap up and hear what Rain and Alan were whispering about, but Cora was absently picking lint off my sock, and it kept me grounded. She rarely touched me. I had touched her a lot—a swat on the head on my way past, a nudge with my foot in therapy sessions, which could get her to spill some secret if she halfway decided she was going to anyway. I'm a touchy-feely guy. She's a kind, sensitive, sympathetic ice cube.
"Tell me about him."
"Okay ... He helped Mrs. Starn and the historical society write the grant to convert this place. He knows a lot about grants from being a professor. His department only gave him a five-hundred-dollar budget for research last year because it was his first year, and he drew another ten thousand in government grant money. He wants to exhume one of the bodies of the Kellerton children to prove they had diabetes."
She turned to me at that point, knowing that exhuming bodies would be of interest to me. She glanced up at the portrait again, but this time with a slight grin that looked excited.
"Because Mrs. Kellerton kept such accurate records of all their symptoms, he says he can publish a report on an herb called pitasara that she sent for from India, which seemed to help. Mrs. Kellerton wrote that she felt it kept her youngest two children alive for an extra two years."
"So ... this pitasara could be helpful to diabetic patients with an intolerance to synthetic insulin."
"Correct. If he can prove it was diabetes."
Interesting. Totally. I wondered if Henry would let me read his research to pass some time, maybe help him out a bit. I almost said as much, but something stirred up my gut instincts—maybe stirred them up for the second time, and the first time I had been too distracted by Owen and by the memory of the speaking tube down in the basement.