Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
"We were e-mailing with Cora and waiting and pissing ourselves, and we heard the front door downstairs being jiggled. We called out to Miss Alexa, but she never answered. Scariest fuckin' five minutes of my life. Hamdani and I just stood there in the dark, not knowing what to do. VaporStrike is a trained assassin. He could probably do a lot worse to us than scratch us in the face."
The agents stayed quiet. Tyler threw his hands in the air with a very serious expression for once. "Excuse me for not being Rambo. I was scared, okay? On the spur of the moment, I figured if he was down there, maybe I could drop half my house on top of him and kill him. Or ... maybe it would stun him enough to give us a better chance of getting out."
Hodji said, "Police report said they were suspicious a downstairs window had been broken from the outside before the explosion. They thought it was a neighborhood kid trying to vandalize the home of a spy. Nobody was around. They don't call them ShadowStrike for nothing." There was a long pause before he went on. "Alexa Vandecamp heard the explosion from her car two blocks away. Thank god she wasn't driving just a little bit faster. She might be a hostage at this point, or she might be dead from having the top floor of the house landing on her."
"And you were not going to lecture him?" Shahzad said, as Tyler's head pitched backwards and he sighed at the ceiling. "You know that he loves his nurse. And if you don't mind I should say so,
you
were on a delayed flight to check out intelligence we had fed you without being paid, without any protection, without telling us where you were going..." He reverted to Punjabi, and sympathy overwhelmed me. Keeping up with their conversation was difficult even before they reverted from English. But no one needed to say that he was in a country he didn't know, halfway across the world, where he'd already been attacked by a terrible germ.
"What's Hodji saying?" Scott looked down on Tyler as Hodji's tone got even angrier.
Tyler shrugged and took what appeared to be a guess at a translation. "'Those fucking bureaucrats'?"
"Look, guys." Mr. Steckerman reached over and made a swiping motion between them. "Put it in neutral. What intelligence did you gather, and do you have scripts? James Imperial is coming tonight. You'll be asleep when he gets here. But this is your chance to get your ducks in a row."
Shahzad looked weary, slumping back beside Hodji, and Tyler began again. "Until this afternoon, it was an endless online comedy of them celebrating our deaths. They quote-unquote 'knew' they had caused two v-spies to squirt in their shorts and push the
OFF
button before they could behead us. To them, it was definitely a suicide and not an accident. In four different chat rooms they reveled in how badly they had scared us. Then this morning, they started to speculate about whether or not this was the Kid. I've got hard copies. You can see them. We got, like, six new log-in names for you. But if you've had any worries about us, the truth is, we spent the past twenty-four hours slapping our thighs and drooling with laughter onto the keypad."
The way Shahzad stared at his roommate, I think Tyler was being more courageous than accurate.
"
Write a book on these boys' lives.
" I knew Aleese was after me again, and for the first time in my life, I felt comforted by her presence instead of annoyed.
"Where are the hard copies?" Mr. Steckerman asked.
"Trunk of the Audi." Tyler reached into his pocket, brought out keys, mentioned which outbuilding they had hidden it in, and Mr. Steckerman went out and returned with a bulging laptop case.
The conversation continued in such a graphic tone that I was amazed to find myself drawn to it. I still felt numb, but not so numb that I wished to get away.
"What we sent Cora yesterday was just the start of it. It was an encryption program that we would need later—if we could hack into a certain hard drive. I e-mailed a copy to myself, and around four o'clock, the shit hit the fan on my laptop," Tyler said. "We got the big break."
He turned slowly in his chair and looked at me. I grew silently rigid under the weight of his grin. Everything was fine when energy was being thrust everywhere else in the room.
"You're awfully quiet," he noted, which shut my throat entirely.
"That's just Cora," Mr. Steckerman said. "All input, only the necessary output."
"She's okay to hear this? It's bad. It's scary."
"I'm fine," I said. I didn't know where on earth it came from, as the situation was suddenly so real that Aleese evaporated entirely.
"Okay. You know how dogs don't return to their vomit?"
Mr. Steckerman froze.
"Well, these dogs return to their vomit. I kept trying to think of ways these guys would be different from bomb makers and your basic terrorist mustard-gas thugs. The fact is, they're scientists. They want data. They want any records of success and failure they can get their hands on with how medicine works
against
what they've done. They've been in this house. They've been into the Trinity Four's medical files. Their entire drug protocol was on the hard drive. They had pictures..."
The eyes I saw through the bramble across the pond.
My hand went to my heart.
Tyler took a photo out of the front pocket of the computer case and held it up to me.
"Do you know where this was taken?"
It was a far-off shot of Rain picking up the goat's bell on her pinkie. I nodded. "It's the trail in the woods on the other side of the pond. I saw somebody back there watching us earlier in the day. We thought it was a journalist or a local drunk."
The agents all reached for the photo, and it ended up with Mr. Steckerman.
"The site is right where Owen said it was," Mr. Tiger said, studying the picture closely. "They must have killed the goat, planted the corpse where the remaining she-goat would be sure to attract one of the kids' attention. Sonofabitch. They were hoping one of you guys would touch it..."
"It gets worse," Tyler said. "They've conducted a couple of experiments already, using you guys as guinea pigs. They were calling you 'swans,' and it was all highly coded, so we were just making guesses at what they were doing to you."
He handed a series of e-mails over to Mr. Tiger while Mr. Steckerman turned as red as I've ever seen him. He said nothing.
"Luckily, they weren't interested in killing anyone," Tyler went on, "though they wouldn't have cared much if they had. We found an e-mail address for the log-in Chancellor, and we were able to break into Chancellor's hard drive. It's the first hard-drive break we've ever gotten on any of these guys. He had pictures and data," Tyler said, pulling out a set of hard copies. Mr. Steckerman took them but passed them to Hodji, apparently unable to do much more without losing all control.
"Consider, this could be a woman," Tyler went on. "It's Shahzad's little theory that just as men's and women's voices sound different in real life, they sound different in writing, too. He says he can tell the difference, especially in the Middle Eastern languages, and he says this voice sounds gender neutral. There were a lot of files saved by dates, simple Word 6.0 files."
"Marg?" Scott muttered, his head down and turned. I may have been the only one to hear it. I thought of her out on the grass, talking on her cell phone right at the same time a ShadowStrike operative was destroying the evidence of having planted an infected animal for Rain to touch. It was hard to conceive of another ShadowStrike member getting so insanely close to us. But Scott's instincts had never told him something was wrong when it wasn't, as long as I'd known him. My chest turned to hot liquid as I thought of how many meals she had served to us.
Tyler read: "'The four victims are responding all too well to the antiretroviral, but that can be rectified. If we commit our next mutation to three degrees hotter, culminating at a hundred and one degrees instead of ninety-eight degrees, the antiretroviral will lose fifty percent of its efficacy. We can finish what we started without modern-day medicine prevailing.'"
Mr. Tiger all but snatched the hard copy, then remained silent. I felt certain the agents were taking this news as personally as I was, but Aleese was suddenly alive and well again, holding my hand away from my throat, where it loved to be lately. She wasn't laughing at me yet, but I felt exposed.
"Oh. Chancellor took some pictures as well," Tyler noted. "Cora. Did you see anybody around when this was shot, or did they sneak it when you thought you were alone?"
He'd spun it to the room first, probably from having their attention so well, but he flipped his fingers automatically and it faced me. It was the very picture Henry took of me out in the woods, the one he had framed for me.
Not Marg.
I felt Scott looking over his shoulder, and he suddenly stopped, his head down, facing the floor. It was up to me to speak for myself this time, while every last crumb of strength just left my body. Aleese said nothing.
CORA HOLMAN
TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2002
1:00
A.M.
HER ROOM
I
LET DOWN MY "PROFESSIONAL GUARD" UTTERLY
, giving the agents a taste of what Scott, Rain, Owen, and friends had put up with daily—only it was worse. I sounded like a three-year-old choking on a green bean, sending the guttural echoes of my stupidity, of having betrayed every person in this room, out in some great seizure. Everyone in this important meeting suddenly knew "Cora's boyfriend" was the betrayer. I wanted to make a mad dash for the door, but the room was shifting sideways.
It must have looked slightly less serious than it was, because Mr. Tiger stood up, too calmly, and said, "Cora, maybe this is too much for you."
I'm being kicked out.
Scott still had his back to me, staring at the floor, obviously embarrassed for me, by me, and he had every right to feel that. He had sensed there was something wrong around here. The fact that he pegged Marg instead of Henry seemed small in comparison to what I'd allowed myself to think and feel for the man. When I shot past Scott, the swelter in his feelings of betrayal washed over me.
"I'm done..." Tyler stood up quickly. "Shahzad, finish."
I stumbled for the stairs, and Tyler suddenly had my arm over his shoulders, serving as a second railing, and he helped me up to the second floor. He'd either guessed about Henry and me or somebody'd muttered it so that I couldn't hear, like gossip in school corridors.
"Listen," he whispered as the door downstairs closed again. "One time my junior year, this totally hot girl called me every night for a week. We went out twice, and then I realized she was on a hundred-buck bet from four of her friends."
Okay, but had his interest jeopardized national security? Or the lives of great friends? I just kept crying. He tried again.
"Cora, I bet he zeroed in on you because you're the sweetest and the most innocent."
That surely didn't help.
"And because, even with the paleness thing going on with you guys, you're absolutely stunning ... perfecto."
Oh, bullshit.
The only thing I could manage to do to show my gratitude was wipe my eyes on his shoulder and leave snot there in the process. He didn't seem to notice.
"Hey. Haven't you ever heard the rape victims being told loudly,
'This isn't your fault'
?"
But it
was
my fault. Because if it wasn't,
where was Scott?
I listened intently behind me for that door to open again, to hear the tread of his footsteps coming to me. All was quiet.
I threw myself on the bed, and all I could think to say was, "Damn you, Aleese! Go back to your little hell and quit trying to stew me also!"
"Who's Aleese?" Tyler sat down facing me.
"My mother."
"That's right. She died?"
I could argue that. "She's hateful. She's worse now than when she was alive."
And as that would make no sense to him, I could barely believe it when his hand came down to pet my hair instead of him bolting out of here to join the sane-and-normal club downstairs.
"You wanna swap mom horror stories?" he asked enthusiastically. "My mom's in jail for treason. She stole secrets from her office in North Jersey and sold them to the North Koreans. For cold cash."
With that, I stopped. He seemed to like when I rolled to my side to stare, and he stroked my hair less hesitantly. His face was so scabby. And yet he was smiling. Or trying to. The smile wandered around his face and trembled worse when he added, "I turned her in."
I had forgotten about his mom.
I reached for his hand, though mine was a shaky, snotty mess, and I sent all my sympathies into lacing my fingers awkwardly through his. He squeezed my hand, his scabs leaving sandpapery feelings on my palm and between some fingers.
"Your turn," he said.
"I ... she..." If it was hard to talk about her under normal circumstances, this was impossible. I finally managed, "Morphine addict."
"Ouch."
"She hated me."
"I bet not."
"No, she did. You've no idea. And now she's haunting me"
He nodded, trying, I think, not to look blown away. He rattled our hands a little and said casually, "Is she in here right now?"
I looked over to the other side of the bed. I didn't dare answer that. Or I thought I didn't, until he shrugged. "Sometimes in the middle of the night, I hear my mom wailing at me, screaming in these fits of betrayal. Her voice just rolls into the wind from federal prison and finds me, forty miles away, across a river and a harbor. Nobody would believe me, but it wakes me up."
I'd almost forgotten who he was, how important he was, how talented and incredibly brave he had been. He was so honest, so ready to be humble. But it was hard to look at his sore face and forget for more than a moment. I wanted some control over my answer so I wouldn't appall him, but I couldn't find any, and the truth just splattered out.
"Yes, she's in here."
"Where?"
"She's lying on the bed beside me, crying into my pillow." I didn't dare look. I knew she was there. "She does everything I would not expect, and right now, she's got the audacity to try to make me feel sorry for her, when she has spent weeks playing these horrid tricks—"