Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  “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 Sheriff’s 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 vehicle’s right side. The right rear door and fender were smashed in. The rear windshield and tail-lights 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 a
way, 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 dro
pped 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 government. 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 glamor 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.”