Bioterror

by Tim Curran

  DCI Pershing said, “If we can. We’ve got riots out there, Mr. President. We have quarantined hospitals. We have a populace gripped by fear and a lack of faith in their leaders.”

  The last was a cheap shot, but the President lifted his hand when several at the table rose to his defense. He’d had Pershing’s number from day one. Like he often told Gus Costello, “Bob Pershing is strictly a front-and-back man. If he’s not trying to suck my dick he’s trying to stab me in the back.

  “Gus,” the President said. “Get Homeland Security on the phone.”

  Costello picked up his encrypted sat phone and called Maddie Hughes. “It’s time,” he said. “Initiate Yankee Alert. Repeat: Initiate Yankee Alert…”

  CHICAGO: CHINATOWN

  11:44 A.M.

  Harry Niles decided it was time to play a little game and test the level of his paranoia (which was deepening by the hour). He had left the Chevy Tahoe parked well away from Fong’s on Cermak where they were hiding out in an upstairs room, courtesy of the always exotic and mysterious Kathy Ling. It was parked out front of an acupuncture shop and herbal remedy hut on South China Place. It would have been easy enough to walk a few blocks over there and pick it up…but Harry was not quite that naïve. He was not about to underestimate those who were hunting him.

  What he needed was an acid test.

  But he wasn’t about to use himself as bait.

  Just do it the way you did it in the old days, he told himself. Find some perfectly innocent bystander and let them take the heat for you.

  “Good idea,” he said under his breath.

  It was a matter of simply choosing the appropriate sucker. What he needed was somebody a little down on their luck…yet, someone fairly trustworthy. The sort of person who would not scam him while he was scamming them.

  He cruised West 22nd and Archer, searching high and low.

  When he found the mark, he’d know it. Unless his instincts were totally dead after all these years, when he saw the right person the old light bulb would go on in his head. But it took patience so he bided his time, merging with the crowds on the sidewalk, trying to look like another tourist peeking into Chinese bakeries and gift shops, doing plenty of window shopping. He edged his way north up towards South China, lingering on Princeton Avenue which was the cross street. The Tahoe was only about a block or so away from him.

  That’s when he spotted the grungy dude playing guitar and panhandling for money. Just a kid with dirty feet and probably a habit judging by his eyes.

  Harry dropped some coins in his can. “How’s it going, man?”

  The dude shrugged. “Not my best day. Not yet. You wanna hear something?”

  “No. I want to hire you.”

  “Cool. What kind of gig is it?”

  Harry smiled. “It’s the kind of gig that pays forty bucks. Twenty now and twenty when it’s done, and it only takes you ten minutes.”

  “Hell, I’m up for that.”

  Harry explained that his Tahoe was parked up the street and his leg was bad; he’d never make it that far. “Here’s the keys and a twenty.” He handed them to the kid. “I can trust you… can’t I? You won’t steal my ride?”

  “It’s cool, man. I’ll have it back here in a couple minutes.”

  The dude took his guitar, blanket, and coin can with him. Obviously, Harry was supposed to trust him, but that didn’t go both ways. Harry waited until he had faded into the light traffic on the walk. Then he went after him. He got within half a block of the Tahoe and watched his test subject waltz right over there. With the guitar and blanket over his shoulder, he looked like he should be hanging out in a Mexican cantina.

  Harry secreted himself at a newsstand. He paid for a Hong Kong newspaper which he could not read and was probably three or four days out of date. He lingered about and read it.

  The kid went up to the Tahoe.

  He opened the door.

  And the trap was sprung. Four guys in dark suits came out of a waiting van and seized him, throwing him up against the Tahoe and handcuffing him while he shouted out his innocence.

  I knew it, I fucking knew it.

  Harry got out while the getting was good.

  BALD CAW, ARKANSAS

  12:33 P.M.

  When the kids started disappearing, everyone pointed their fingers at Iver Coxswell. Everyone but Willis, that was. Willis was the county sheriff and he wasn’t about to instigate some godawful Medieval witch-hunt or old-fashioned lynching party. Besides, Willis was the guy who found Massy McQueel hanging from the light fixture with the belt around her throat, face green as moss on a well-rope, that can of Raid still clutched in her stiff, dead hand. The Raid was the kind that killed hornets and wasps only Massy had used it to kill what was lying on the floor—a worm. It was one hell of a worm, too. About four-feet long, the size of a big copperhead, and corpse-white…although, by the time Willis found it, it was getting a little gray and slimy.

  The county coroner—that asshole Steebs—said it looked to be some type of Trematoda, or flat worm, but he had no idea how it got so damn big. But he did know what killed it: Raid. That worm was saturated with Permethrin, which was a neurotoxin and the active ingredient in many household bug-killers. Steebs sent the worm carcass away yesterday to the state lab.

  Probably be weeks before they heard anything.

  But people in Bald Caw didn’t care about Massy McQueel because she was a crazy old whore and they figured that worm had crawled out of her privates and they would have been surprised if it was living up there alone.

  Goddamn people here in the Caw sure are a sympathetic lot, Willis got to thinking as he drove out to Iver Coxswell’s place. No, they surely didn’t give a damn about Massy McQueel and her worm. All they cared about was Iver Coxswell. There were three kids missing and that was enough to incense anyone, Willis figured, but the fact that Coxswell was A), black, and B), had a criminal record that included statutory rape and child endangerment, was the deciding factor. Willis told them that Coxswell’s conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice (he enjoyed saying that). When he was seventeen, he knocked-up his sixteen-year old girlfriend. There had been no rape or endangerment involved and it had all been purely consensual, but the fact that Coxswell was black and the girl was white made her daddy pressure the D.A. who put Coxswell away for five years (of course, Willis’ predecessor, Luke Kingly, had admitted to Willis that the girl’s daddy was not only a bigot but a hypocrite because it was common knowledge that he was banging his pretty eighteen-year old black housekeeper that he had imported from Botswana and that girl was so black, coal-black, that she made Coxswell look Norwegian).

  But people in the Caw were not interested in that.

  They wanted Iver Coxswell investigated.

  That they hadn’t put on the white sheets and gone after him with shotguns and a good stout length of horse-rope was testament to the fact that those of the Caw were either more tolerant than anyone suspected or just too damn lazy to go to the trouble.

  Willis found Coxswell’s house out on Point Sipp Road easily enough being that it was pretty much the only one out there. It was tall and ramshackle, upstairs windows boarded over and the downstairs mostly broken from local kids pegging rocks at them on dares. It looked pretty much like a traditional haunted house and driving past it, Willis couldn’t help but feel a cheap illicit thrill much like the rock-throwing kids themselves must have experienced.

  He pulled the cruiser into the yard by the big sweetgum tree and stepped out, listening to the drone of August and feeling that wet-dog heat falling over him now that he was out of the air-conditioning.

  Shit and shit. Sweat stains had already blossomed under the arms of his uniform shirt after he had knocked for a good two or three minutes.

  “Mr. Coxswell?” he kept calling out. “I got a warrant and I’m coming in.”

  The door was open so Willis stepped inside, wondering if he shouldn’t have brought Barnes and Mirce with him after all. He hadn’t only
because they were both such insufferable bigots and he didn’t want to elevate this beyond where it currently stood…which was nowhere, the way Willis was thinking. The judge had issued the search warrant pretty much on hearsay and Coxswell’s criminal record. Willis really had no choice but to execute it.

  The stink that blew out of the opened door was black and hot and rancid. It near brought tears to his eyes. He knew something was dead in there, it was only a matter of finding it. Lights didn’t work so he had to go back out to the cruiser for a flashlight.

  Then he began his search.

  The light beam was filled with dust motes like bubbles in champagne as he moved around in that dirty old house. Rugs on the floor were filthy with boot-tracks, grimy handprints on the walls. The ceilings were water-stained and drooping, the furniture well-nibbled by mice. Yes, a real pearl of a haunted house. No wonder it drew kids like flies to a cow-flop. He checked the living room, the kitchen, a bedroom piled with newspapers and cardboard boxes. He examined holes in the walls and rat droppings in the corners, the smashed mason jars on the floor in the kitchen.

  “Mr. Coxswell?” he said, knowing he had to. “You here? It’s me. Sheriff Willis. Got some questions for you and I gotta search the place.”

  There was nothing but his own voice echoing out in the stillness, nothing alive in the house. In fact, he was so certain of it that had a voice answered him back he would have jumped clear of his skivvies. He paused at the stairwell. The smell was stronger up there and he could feel it coming down at him in a black, festering pall that stirred his stomach up.

  Up there then. That’s where the goodies would be.

  Willis hesitated, then forced himself up the narrow stairwell. He felt like a kid on a dare himself. No cop in his right mind liked poking around houses for corpses, and this house and being alone didn’t help matters much. The stairs were old like they had been in the house in Little Rock where he grew up. And like those stairs, these creaked behind you like someone or something was following you.

  Quit that shit, you idiot. Jesus, you’re fifty-years old.

  Right. Act like a cop.

  The heat up there made the water run from him. His uniform shirt was sodden, sweat beaded his face.

  He stepped into a dusty hallway and in the first room he checked, he found a corpse. It was pushed up in the corner between the bed and the chest of drawers. It was blackened near down to a skeleton, the walls to either side dark with soot and smudged with smoke, the bed half-burned up. It was hard to tell whether the corpse was male or female with that degree of oxidation, but Willis figured it was Iver Coxswell himself. It was lucky the house hadn’t burned to the ground. Though he would never know the chain of events, it looked like Coxswell had sat in the corner, emptied the metal can of gas over himself, then lit a match. The can was still there, black as coal, but a gas can, all right. The corpse’s jaws were sprung like it had died screaming, eyes boiled right out of its skull. The little nodules on the floor must have been teeth. Sometimes when a body cooked real hot, he knew, the teeth would pop like corn kernels.

  Enough of that.

  Willis checked the other rooms and saw no evidence of kidnapped children so he went back downstairs. He was smelling that rotten stink again. His nose led him into the kitchen. It was thick as lace in there. The refrigerator. Sure. Using a hankie, he opened it and the smell almost put him on his knees. Milk that had gone solid. Meat and cheese that were furred green. The only other thing in there was a mason jar like the ones smashed on the floor. Funny, that. Putting his flashlight on it, he saw that there was a label on it: DO NOT OPEN, it said. Oh boy. That was the problem with being a cop: you went in places you’d rather not go and looked into dark corners where there were things you’d rather not see.

  He found a hand towel and lifted out the jar and put it on the counter. He wiped perspiration from his face with his arm. It felt like his skin had been sprayed with cooking oil. It took some doing, but he got the lid off the jar. The liquid in it was murky. It smelled like vegetable rot. There was something in there, though. Using a carving knife he gripped with the hankie, he dug around in there.

  Dear God, please tell me there’s nothing in here that’s gonna give me nightmares. I don’t want to find some kid’s heart in here.

  He kept digging with the knife, trying to get the mysterious object up and out of there but it was like trying to dig a pickle from a jar with a butter knife.

  Hell is that?

  There. Got it.

  He brought it up into the flashlight beam. It was white and segmented. Just like that worm Massy McQueel killed with the Raid. Except…except this one was alive. It moved and the bulb on the end opened and a sweet stink filled Willis’ brain. After that, he wasn’t aware of much. Surely not putting the jar away and shutting the refrigerator. And certainly not that sweet smell like golden honey flooding his brain and his hand gripping that pale white worm and feeling its grasping hooks digging into his palm or the warm, sour taste of it as it slid between his lips and moved thickly down his throat, gagging him.

  There was some pain.

  But it didn’t last.

  CHICAGO: CHINATOWN

  1:17 P.M.

  When Harry got back, Shawna was sipping tea and watching the little TV Kathy Ling had brought for them. “Hurry up,” she said. “There’s about to be an emergency presidential address.”

  Harry stumbled past her, grabbed her cigarettes and lit one. He sank on the bed next to her. His face was pinched, eyes squeezed shut. It looked like someone had just given him a good shot to the kidneys and he was gritting his teeth against the pain.

  “Harry… are you all right.”

  “No… not really.”

  “What happened?”

  So he told her his merry little cat-and-mouse tale and while he told it, he would not look at her. He told her about getting the kid to fetch his car on South China and the suits that moved in on him. About his run, hiding out in junk shops and Chinese emporiums, laying low in a Malaysian restaurant eating fish head soup and shrimp paste on noodles. And as hideous as it sounded, it was quite tasty, he admitted, even though his appetite wasn’t much. The men in suits were everywhere suddenly. And after a while, it was like something out of Hitchcock: surreal, claustrophobic, and paranoid. He had never noticed before how many men dressed in suits there were in Chinatown.

  “It seemed that they were all watching me,” he told her.

  “There couldn’t have been that many.”

  “No, but after a while my common sense abandoned me.”

  He looked quite near tears and that’s what made Shawna shrivel white inside. He was scared. Really fucking scared. And though part of her wanted to, needed to, fly into hysterics, she knew that now was not the time. She held onto him because never had he looked like he needed her as much as he did then. It was gone. All of it: his smug, arrogant, breezy façade. It had been stripped free like a mask and he was shivering. Actually shivering.

  “I think I fucked-up,” he said.

  “How?”

  He shook his head. “With all this. Christ, Shawna, I’m too old for this. That’s the problem with this game. You keep getting older but those bastards always seem to get younger.”

  “I think you’ve done a good job taking care of us.”

  “I’ve tried. But, hell, these guys…whoever they are…they must have unbelievable resources.”

  Shawna sighed. “How could they have found the SUV? I don’t get it. Unless your friend…”

  “No, Kathy wouldn’t do that. Besides, she didn’t rent the Tahoe under her name. She had some third cousin or something rent it and leave it in the garage. They’d have a hell of a time tracking it back to her. Her family tree is an absolute maze.”

  “Maybe the cousin talked.”

  “No, it’s nothing that simple.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know…maybe some sort of targeting system. Maybe they marked every vehicle that came out of t
he garage that night. Something that could be tracked.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Of course it’s possible.”

  On the TV screen, the President stepped up to the podium in the East Room of the White House. He was markedly grim. “Good afternoon. Today I stand before you and ask for your help. I ask for the help, the resolve, the bravery of every American. The time has come, once again, for us to stand together as one, hand-in-hand and shoulder-to-shoulder. The time has come to put aside religious and ethnic disparity, to breech party lines and become one people united against a common enemy. For, my friends, that enemy is here and now.”

  Shawna felt a chill run up her arms. This was like 9/11 again but without the pyrotechnics.

  “It can come as no surprise to any American that events are occurring in this country that are seemingly beyond our control. There is rioting and civil unrest, spiking incidences of violent crime. Quarantine procedures have been enacted at many of our hospitals. Yes, this great nation is under attack from within.”

  Harry and Shawna looked at each other.

  “For many years now we have been warned by our own security forces and intelligence networks—and most particularly by the Department of Homeland Security itself—that there still exists the threat of domestic terrorism. 9/11 was the most heinous and cowardly attack this great nation has ever witnessed, but I now say to you it is not the last. Nor did we expect it to be. Even the death of Osama Bin Laden was no guarantee that our enemies would not mount a second and deadlier attempt to bring down this great nation. And now that has happened. Foreign subversives and terror agents have let loose a parasitic infection amongst us that is communicable and deadly.”