Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
To my amazement, he didn't back away, shake me, or holler defensively. He gently took hold of my arms, which were trembling violently over the shock of my words. "Listen. Some of the worst mistakes made in the history of mankind were made for what was perceived as the greater good. That's not an excuse. We're not making excuses. And I have no idea if we can save Scott Eberman's life at this point. But Tyler and Shahzad ... that loss got under Alan's skin very much. He says he'll do anything—
anything
—to keep another kid from going down."
I could imagine he would feel that way but wasn't clear on what he was saying. I asked.
"We're going in there to talk to Scott right now."
"
Talk
to him?" I repeated. "I'm not sure I could accurately describe the amount of pain he is in. Voices, they're like cannons—"
"He's on that morphine drip," he reminded me, and I shut my eyes again. "The nurse approves. Alan wants to know if you would come and be there, too."
Such a rapid-fire exchange took place in my head that I had no time to think about its weirdness.
"
Go!
" Aleese said.
What if he slips away right in front of me?
"
So, don't look. Go, and don't be a baby. When are you going to grow up?
"
I love him.
"
No, you don't. Get rid of the thought. I've got plans for you. Now, GO!
"
"Look," Mr. Tiger said. "Maybe he'll still snap out of this, in spite of the lapse of time. Maybe it's just a nosebleed. If he's actually hemorrhaging, you'll see that bleeding out you saw in your mother—mouth, ears, etcetera. It would take about half an hour. You don't have to stay."
I got up, mostly because I was afraid Aleese would actually show herself and put one of the hiking boots she always wore in my backside. I floated to the bottom of the stairs, where Mr. Steckerman was standing and staring at us. I barely realized that Mr. Tiger still gripped my hand, and I pulled it from him and began climbing the mountain of steps.
SCOTT EBERMAN
SUNDAY, MAY 5, 2002
8:20
A.M.
HIS BEDROOM
O
WEN AND I ARE IN TROUBLE AGAIN
for jumping on the couch. He's just jumped on my head and is still laughing, despite that my skull plays like an accordion. And Mom's yelling, and as usual, it's at me. The oldest always takes the blame.
"
Scott. Do. Not. Jump." She towers over me, holding her hands up in double-stop motion.
"
Owen jumped on my head! Why don't you yell at him for once?
"
"
Do. Not. Jump," she repeats, the deaf mute as always when I defend myself.
This time weirdness erupts ... blasts of smoke turn Mom from the 2D character of dreams into a 3D life form, with weird steam or white smoke or clouds roaming through her. She's more real, not less real. I can see both my new room at the Kellerton House and my old living room all at once, and she permeates both images, telling me something that made sense in both worlds.
"
Do. Not. Jump.
"
I gripped the clicker in my right hand. I'd been arguing with myself about it all night. I gave in finally, clicked the button for maybe only the tenth time, and the pressure in my head went
psssssssssssttttt
again. Hot air went out of the balloon.
I know she'll catch me if I jump. But she'll be disappointed.
Instead of jumping, I sort of free-fell. I was in a USIC meeting. The agents were watching me ... whispering so low that I couldn't hear them ... I could only see their lips moving in the morning light. Marg was standing there, opening one curtain, which is why I could see lips. It wasn't blinding.
"What is it?" I asked. "Speak up."
"You can tolerate low voices?" Alan asked.
I nodded, held up the clicker, and let my arm flop back down. It weighed a hundred pounds. "Morphed out..."
"We're about to do our dailies. That's what we call our morning meeting," Mike said. "You want to be counted in?"
Ah ... some line of music I'd been waiting to hear.
I let out a laugh, which made me cough, which would probably start my nose bleeding again, but what the hell. "Who's on drugs? Me or you?"
"You. We're quite sober and very serious. You wanna work for us?" Mike asked.
Someone was wiping my nose. I smelled Cora. I fumbled my clicker hand around her wrist and glanced up. She looked like she'd walked through an eggbeater. Too bad. I was in a good mood, a morphine mood.
I said, "Great exit line last night."
"Will you not go there, please..." She looked annoyed. Or like she might cry. "Do you want these men to be here?"
I nodded, taking the tissue from her and blinking at it. One drop. I wasn't nearly dead yet.
"We'll just talk to each other and you can listen," Mike suggested. "If you have any questions, just ask."
I still thought this might be a joke ... or a bunch of unimportant truths, so I listened as well as I could for treachery.
Tiger: "Only two things I can share today. First, VaporStrike has been in New Jersey."
Steckerman: "Mm. Maybe we should have had this meeting in private. You're kidding."
Tiger: "Unfortunately not. Imperial says we have good people watching the borders carefully, but we don't have enough ID and the photos are grainy."
Steckerman: "How did USIC find this out?"
Tiger: "Apparently, one of the last things Tyler Ping and the Kid did before dying was send an e-mail to Hodji Montu. It said that VaporStrike was here."
The Kid was ... sick or dead? Was I asleep or awake?
"Back it up," I slurred. They gave me the lowdown on the house fire. I hadn't let go of Cora's arm, I realized, and I let my hand slide down to find her fingers. Those e-mails had rolled around my head all night. She must be devastated. I felt my anger starting to mushroom, to the point where it would be dangerous if I let myself think about it. I tried to listen without smoldering.
Steckerman: "I only met the Kid that one time, at St. Ann's. I never met Tyler Ping, but it seems they were both devoted to the New York squad."
Tiger: "Ping and the Kid were either devoted to them or 'addicted' to them, as Montu used to joke. I hear Imperial allowed it to be released to the media as a suicide, but does this sound like a suicide to you, Alan?"
My eyes shot open and shut again quickly. Suicide.
The Kid and Tyler Ping committed suicide?
Impossible. The e-mails...
"USIC reported it as a suicide? That's vicious," I croaked. "God. Give 'em a hero's exit."
Steckerman: "The point is, Washington couldn't have been certain what happened by the time the TV crews showed up. Those boys were extremely ill, which means not in the best state of mind. When USIC isn't sure, our policy is to roll with what looks closest to the truth, and Tyler Ping's nickname with some of the agents had been 'Death Wish.' I'm just guessing here that it looked like a suicide, but there may have been another option—one that could jeopardize national security if it were known. It could have been an assassination. It's just not my or Mike's department. This happened on Long Island, and we're the Jersey guys. If the Long Island guys feel like we need to know for some reason, they'll tell us. They haven't yet."
Dead ... dead.
It didn't ring horribly with me. It's like Ping and the Kid had been standing to my left and suddenly they were standing to my right.
I remembered hearing the words "Beth Israel." Sickness? Suicide? Confusing. "What'd they have? They drink our water?"
"No ... they were attacked. Ulceroglandular tularemia..." Some wild tale about being scratched in the face, and the stuff was under the guy's nails.
I groaned, pictures of tularemia pox floating through my head. Unpleasant. But not really killers. A few pox ... it wasn't like smallpox or even chickenpox. I must have said something like that.
"This was a waterborne mutation. A dozen times more potent," Mr. Tiger said. "They looked like chickenpox victims. Only the doctors were experimenting ... gave them too much steroid at first, which explains why they allegedly still looked like hell."
I let out a louder groan, an image forming in my head of skin closing over festering pustules.
"Sorry," Tiger whispered.
They'd have looked like a couple of beanbag chairs after that early screwup. I wondered what they'd looked like at the end. He brought the convo back to business, and he and Alan talked again like I wasn't there but could listen if I wanted to.
Tiger: "Alan, all that was said at the New York meeting is that they died of smoke inhalation, and Hodji Montu is taking a grief leave. You're only supposed to get that for family members, but he was ready to turn in his badge and walk away from the whole damn thing. Shahzad, the Kid, was like a son to him, so this morning they coughed up the grief leave rather than lose him for good. Hodji's got reason to be pissed. He suggested faking their deaths for security purposes. I was at that meeting. It went over like a lead balloon. No votes in favor, save Montu's. Not even mine."
"I think ... I might have voted in favor," Mr. Steckerman said.
"Not if you knew these boys. The Kid we could help without any problems. Tyler Ping? He was very unstable. Son of a spy ... he didn't exactly come from a background that teaches the virtue of loyalty. There were drug problems, credit card theft, one of the psychological illnesses—obsessive-compulsive disorder, I think. Hodji says it's probably all related to his mother, that Tyler was an ace until he was forced to live with her shenanigans, and then he started getting confused. But the cause is not the problem, if you know what I'm saying. The other agents felt we would have spent a fortune weed-whacking at policy, finding them a new place, and supporting them for months, and Ping would have announced whatever he felt like, wherever he felt like it. Besides, even if his mother is a complete pig, stunts like faking deaths have a way of working against you. If the media ever found out, how do you explain to every parent in America that you lied to a mother and told her that her minor son was dead? Even if she's in jail, that doesn't look good. In fact, it would give her a sympathy vote with the public that might eventually get her some parole—"
"What happened that made them think Tyler might not have done this?" Steckerman asked.
"Hodji was in the middle of a phone call with his son, Twain, when he started getting beep-ins from Tyler and Shahzad. It was like, you know, one of the only phone calls in the world he couldn't interrupt. If you can believe this, his son stayed pissed and finally hung up on him, after all that. Hodji was on one of those external runway delays when an emergency call arrived for him via the captain. Their nurse said the house was on fire. He had the pilots turn the plane around and drop him back at JFK. But by the time he got to where the kid was staying, the firemen, cops, and even the TV crew were already there."
"It's very coincidental timing for a suicide, I agree," Steckerman said. His sigh sounded far off. "I was correct last night. We've got blood on our hands."
"I don't think our actions—or lack thereof in the past few days—could have prevented this, Alan. There's still a chance it was Ping setting off that pong bomb in a dry, rickety old house. Some agents said they pegged him as suicidal. And again, there's still a chance it was an accident."
"Tragic loss ... tragic, tragic loss to Intelligence." Alan was back to whispering. They were quiet for so long that I floated back into the center of it.
"Where's this VaporStrike now?" I asked, seeing what I could get away with. I hadn't detected any insincerity yet. In fact, it felt like information overload, considering how morphed-out I was.
"We don't know," Alan said. "We do know that Omar had a sizable lab in South Jersey somewhere. We haven't located it yet. But it's still active."
I knew that already. But still. This was like having won a shopping spree at Best Buy. I could pick out whatever I wanted.
"Omar might try to get to the lab?"
"Yes."
"What's he got in there?"
"A new strain of tularemia Omar was playing with back in March."
"Worse than what the Kid had?"
"About twenty times worse. Some dead animals turned up in Griffith's Landing last night that looked like experimental lab monkeys."
I flipped my eyes to him slowly.
Rain and the strange not-quite-a-snakebite.
I brought it up.
"We have no reason to feel it's related," Alan said, and added quickly, "though if we did—if let's say we realized Omar's lab was in this neck of the woods—we would move you kids in a heartbeat. They've no interest in you, but we wouldn't risk anything like you getting in the line of fire of any experiments they might dream up to try on animals."
I watched him and decided he was being very sincere.
"We believe Rain and Owen about the bones and the bell, and we think Owen just can't quite remember where it was. There
is
a goat missing, the Professor, as Mrs. Starn calls him, and there used to be as many as six, back when the school kids used to visit the place for field trips. But these goats have free rein. There's no fences, and it's not out of character for them to wander a mile or more before heading back. That's how the missing goat sparked the concept of the bells. He's a runner. We're thinking at this point that Rain sustained a bee sting. Godfrey's got her blood. Nothing weird is showing in it. He's far more worried about the antivenin and what it could do to her liver. He's watching that carefully. As for you? You did a great job, kid. You're worth your weight in gold around here."
I told myself it was a good thing it hadn't happened an hour or two later, when I was so desperate to get out of my pain that I was manipulating morphine out of people. Cora cleared her throat and I turned. She really did not look good. I reached my limp arm up until my hand found her face. Burning up.
"Go lie down," I told her.
"I'm fine, thanks."