Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  And it was not. The United States had not created malaria reading; it had only created the antidote. And it had released that antidote to save lives in Congo.

  “Agent Cavanaugh?” Broylin said. He touched the button a second time and the map disappeared.

  But … Broylin was an Irish name.

  No. No. That level of paranoia wasn’t justified, must not be allowed to exist. At least, not in him.

  But … he had no hard evidence of an American/Irish/British investigation, except the CIA documents in the green folder, and those had so many key words blacked out that they could, just conceivably, apply to another situation entirely.

  No. More paranoia.

  But … another year would allow much more development and testing of the deadly parasite.

  No. Everything Broylin had said fit with the information Cavanaugh and Melanie had uncovered. Broylin’s explanation felt solid and true.

  But … how had Michael Sean Donohue passed an FBI polygraph if Donohue had known about malaria reading?

  For a second, the room spun and almost shattered.

  No, it could be explained. Donohue had definite IRA ties, but that didn’t mean he knew about every single campaign the IRA ran. The IRA, like the CIA, operated on a need-to-know basis. Donohue’s concocted arrest could have been an FBI diversionary tactic, a plausible suspect brought into custody both to placate a panicking public and to mislead the IRA into thinking the FBI/CIA knew less than it actually did. If Donohue had known nothing about malaria reading before the date of his polygraph, he would have tested clean.

  Broylin still stared at him. Cavanaugh had to choose. On the basis of incomplete evidence, with reasonable doubt, without any guarantees about the future. He still had to choose.

  Slowly he said, “You have my promise of total silence on everything connected in any way with malaria reading.”

  “Your country thanks you. Dr. Anderson?”

  She still stared at the piece of wall where the map of Africa had been. Cavanaugh knew he would never tell her about Michael Sean Donohue’s IRA connection. Her concern was all for Africa, which she still thought was the main target. It was only to protect Africa that she would agree to silence.

  She said, “One year? In one year from today you’ll either conclude your investigation or tell me who anyway?”

  “One year,” Broylin said.

  “Then …” She swallowed, tried again. “Then, yes. I won’t tell the press. Or anyone else.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was a long pause, thick with unspoken words, complex and twisting as DNA. Melanie finally broke the silence. “So now what? We’re free to leave?”

  “You were always free to leave, Dr. Anderson. You haven’t been charged with anything, and this is not a police station.”

  Melanie snorted, and the strange, thick atmosphere dissolved. “Right. Do we sign anything first?”

  She was a scientist, after all. As if any of this would ever be put in writing by the Bureau—or by the CIA or the White House, if they were involved, which Cavanaugh rather doubted. It wouldn’t be the first time a president had been left out of a CIA loop.

  “No signatures are necessary, Dr. Anderson. Agent Cavanaugh, your own car is in the employees’ garage, brought here at my request.”

  And searched, no doubt. Bugged? Maybe. It didn’t matter. He was due for a trade-in anyway. He took the gamble. “Am I going to need that car in Singleton, North Dakota?”

  “No. You’re being reassigned to the Baltimore Field Office.”

  Baltimore. Under Felders. It wasn’t a bribe. Cavanaugh had already agreed to silence. A reward then. Or a sweetener, to remind him of how much he’d almost lost.

  The center had held, but the edges were as frayed and soiled as ever.

  “Well, then, let’s go,” Melanie said, not very graciously.

  In the elevator her ungraciousness turned to pensiveness. But she waited until they were seated in Cavanaugh’s car, pulling out of the parking garage, to say, “Robert.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s the first meeting I ever saw you sit through without doodling.”

  It was true. Doodling hadn’t even occurred to him.

  She added, in another tone entirely, “How many lives did we save today?”

  He glanced at her rigid face and said gently, “A lot, Melanie. A very lot.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I believe it is, yes.” On the basis of incomplete evidence, with reasonable doubt, without any guarantees about the future. He pulled onto Constitution Avenue.

  “But do we believe it because it really is true, or because we so badly want to believe it?”

  But he knew he couldn’t answer that one, and he didn’t even try.

  Twenty

  The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

  —Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality, 1936

  * * *

  Melanie parked in her usual spot at the CDC. As soon as she left the car, the Atlanta heat seeped into her nostrils, her clothing, the spaces between her hair shafts. God, it must be over ninety, and it was only eight-thirty in the morning.

  Inside, air-conditioned cold. The abrupt contrast made her sneeze. Her office was in a basement, which, due to the eccentric building design that added levels by building them down the slope of a steep hill, was well above ground level. This “basement,” like every other floor of the CDC, was jammed with freezers: old freezers, new freezers, upright freezers, horizontal freezers, freezers that barely managed minus ten Celsius, freezers superchilled by liquid nitrogen. All of the freezers held biological samples, the frozen lifeblood of the CDC. They also all hummed. Melanie squeezed around a Forma Scientific blocking a third of the corridor and headed to the lounge for a cup of coffee.

  As soon as she entered, the knot of people by the Mr. Coffee stopped talking. One blushed. Another said, too heartily, “Hi, Melanie. How are you?”

  “Just fine,” she said. What had they been discussing? Her slugging that kid in the Virginia Burger King? Her getting sent home for a “vacation”? Her and Joe Krovetz caught in a clinch, she in a black slip?

  She said, “So much gossip, so little time,” got her coffee, and left.

  “Hey, Mel, you see this?” Joe, her cogossipee, waited in her office, looking blessedly unaware that be should feel embarrassed. He thrust a newspaper at her. The article was on page one, even though it was clearly an editorial.

  FUTURE PUBLIC DEFENDERS NOT

  TRADITIONAL LAW ENFORCEMENT

  FBI DOWN, CDC & USAMRIID RIDING HIGH

  The past few months should make us all aware that something important has shifted in the political universe. Our major enemies may still be other people, but our major defenses are no longer traditional law-enforcement agencies. Now, the people who defend us best are those trained to detect and counter the highly sophisticated weapons of modern technological guerrilla warfare.

  Cops are out. Scientists are in.

  A wealth of evidence supports this startling statement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation mobilized all its vast resources to search for the people responsible for the recent malaria reading epidemic that caused the deaths of 1,012 citizens. The FBI came up empty. So did the police forces of two states. So did the unofficial investigators of the press, who occasionally in the past have dug up leads that have broken cases baffling official law enforcement. But not this time. Despite excellent work by such reporters as Libby Turner of the Baltimore Sun, the fourth estate didn’t protect us from anything worse than having to wait for the six o’clock news to hear the latest death statistics.

  Not so the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Working alongside the United States Public Health Service, the CDC and USAMRIID protected us through excellent and immediate programs for blood testing, prophylactic medicine, and mosquito control. They s
olved their part of the mystery, through the CDC’s brilliant field and lab work to identify the genetically altered parasites and their vector. And they taught us how to protect ourselves, through both organizations’ clear, concise, and widely distributed guidelines. Together, USAMRIID and the CDC saved countless lives. Unlike the FBI.

  This suggests that, in a future increasingly dominated by the biological breakthroughs, the real protectors of the American public will be not the gun-toting G-men, the Eliot Nesses of popular legend. Instead, quiet and bespectacled scientists will …

  “Take it away,” Melanie said. “God, the trash the papers get away with.”

  “Well, aren’t you in a sweet mood,” Joe said, without rancor. “I thought you’d be pleased. We come off pretty good.”

  “Yeah. So?” Melanie wished she could tell Joe the truth. Although she recognized that he didn’t really need it. Joe’d been curious about who had engineered the parasite, but not as curious as he was to unravel the DNA manipulation that had gone into it. Without Melanie’s prodding, he would drop the cause aspect, as he had almost done before she burst in on him fresh from Africa. Joe cared a lot more about how disease worked than about why. And now she couldn’t tell him that Plasmodium reading was still out there. Someplace. At the whimsical disposal of someone. To, undoubtedly, be used sometime, on more innocent people.

  “So nothing,” Joe said, folding up his newspaper. “We have a meeting at ten. Did anybody tell you?”

  “We returned exiles get told nothing. What kind of meeting?”

  “With Farlow’s replacement. Probably just a get-to-know-you gabfest.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “See you then,” Joe said, out the door. “And, oh, Mel—don’t drink that coffee. Your present mood will shatter the cup.”

  “Hahaha. You should have gone into show business.”

  “That’s what my mother says, too.”

  And she, Melanie reflected, should have gone into plumbing. Something where you got to deal with hard, cold pipes that delivered water, instead of hard, cold people who delivered diseases in order to grab or keep power.

  She closed her office door and put her head in her hands. I can’t do this. I can’t putter around my office doing diddley, can’t go to another pointless meeting, can’t study malaria statistics knowing that each could be undiagnosed P. reading. I can’t—

  If not this, then what? What can I—

  Abruptly Joe was back, bursting in without so much as a knock. “Mel! Mel! The meeting’s moved up!”

  “And this causes your joyful rudeness, Dr. Krovetz?”

  “Not that, you blockhead! Listen, there’s dengue fever in Gabon!”

  “Dengue fever?”

  “Massive outbreak. Must have come in by ship or by infected carrier. And the first teams for dengue are already deployed in Manila and Brasilia. The head is asking for volunteers, preferably people with field experience in malaria.”

  Both mosquito-borne. Although malaria was Anopheles and dengue was carried by Aëdes. Still, Melanie could see where the experience might transfer. And Gabon. She spoke both Bantu and French, and she picked up local dialects fast. Dengue was a fascinating parasite, with multiple strains …

  “Is it break-bone or hemorrhagic?” she demanded.

  “Hemorrhagic. Even some septic shock, sounds like.”

  “Aëdes aegypti or Aëdes albopictus?”

  “Unknown. But from the disease’s aggressiveness, I’d guess albopictus.”

  The Asian tiger mosquito. That meant the parasites could be transferred to and from an array of other warmblooded hosts, including rats. In 1981, dengue fever carried by A. albopictus brought down 10 percent of Havana.

  Joe said, “I’m going to plead and grovel and reason and bluster and generally convince the head that I should go to Gabon. But you don’t have to do all that. They asked for you specifically.”

  “For me? Who asked specifically?”

  “I don’t know. But you’re on the dengue team, if you want it. You want it? Stupid question, look at you smiling again.”

  “I’m not smiling. I’m just wondering why all of a sudden I’m a favored daughter.”

  Joe looked at her keenly. “You sure you don’t know? Anyway, since you have all this new-found weight, will you throw it around on my behalf?”

  “Of course. You think I’d go to Gabon without you?”

  “Then let’s go tell the head how indispensable I am.”

  Melanie said suddenly, “We’re ghouls, you know. As much as … as anyone else. We depend on disease.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “I know. Come on!”

  They walked as fast as possible to the new director’s office, dodging freezers and colleagues, trying not to break into an unprofessional run.

  Cavanaugh ripped open yet another cardboard box and pawed through it. Damn it, where were his ties? All right, Abigail had chewed up the blue one with red books on it, and he’d gotten mustard on the brown one. Mustard, the dry cleaner had informed him in a tone that said he should already know this, didn’t come out. But that still left eight or nine ties somewhere. On this, his first day at the Baltimore Field Office, he wanted to wear a suit and nice tie.

  Hopelessly he opened another suitcase and then another cardboard box. Everything had arrived in Baltimore from Leonardtown only yesterday. The suitcase held winter sweaters. The box held dish towels, a mismatched pair of sheets, candy-striped throw pillows he swore he’d never seen before, and his high-school yearbook. God, this was the worst move yet. Where were his ties? Where were his spaghetti kettle and his bathrobe? And whose throw pillows were these?

  Giving up, he threaded his way among boxes, books, Styrofoam peanuts, and Abigail’s chew toys to the front door. He would have liked to check his e-mail and make a cup of coffee to take with him, but the mouse had somehow become separated from his computer and as yet the refrigerator held no milk. In fact the refrigerator wasn’t turned on yet. Just as well. There were probably boxes in it possibly containing somebody else’s ties.

  The one thing he could find—could always find because there was such an abundance of it—was a letter from Earl Lester. The boy wrote him three or four times a week, letters full of information about obscure insects. Obviously the kid had adopted Cavanaugh, who hadn’t even known he was on the market. He answered Earl when he could, but Cavanaugh knew he was not a faithful correspondent. Still, he seemed to have acquired, somehow, some responsibility for Earl. Maybe the simplest thing to do would be to just drive down to Rivermount on Saturday and set the boy up with some kind of secondhand computer. Then they could do e-mail. And Earl could research bugs on-line, which would give him a lot less time in which to write Cavanaugh.

  Of course, at the moment Cavanaugh couldn’t even find all the components of his own computer, let alone set up somebody else with one. Not to mention finding his ties.

  He fled to the orderly serenity of the Beltway at rush hour.

  The size of the cream-colored brick building that housed the Baltimore Field Office delighted him. The throngs of agents in the hallways delighted him. The fact that none of them was Seton delighted him. He reached Felders’s office.

  “Well, well. Six minutes late on the first day. A new job and you couldn’t wear a tie?”

  “I tried a—never mind. Good to see you, Marty.”

  “We’ll see. It’s too bad you’re late because you have a team meeting in fourteen minutes, which is barely time for you to do your paperwork, find your vehicle, and hear about the case.”

  “A case? I have a case?” Cavanaugh said. “What is it?”

  “Big. Bank robbery in Baltimore last night, three million dollars. But that’s not the juice. There are links to heists in other states, organized crime, maybe even the unions … Big. And hot.”

  “Very hot. Am I—”

  “Hot stuff yourself? So it would seem. Here, Bob, I’m supposed to give you this.”

  He handed Cavanaugh a piece o
f paper. Thick, creamy paper with a decorative border and raised FBI seal. Even before he read it, Cavanaugh knew what it was: a special commendation for undercover FBI activity.

  So that’s the way it was going to be. Commendation. Big cases. And probably other sweeteners, direct and indirect, coming down discreetly from the top. Was Broylin rewarding Cavanaugh for his patriotic silence, or merely increasing the odds that it would be maintained?

  No matter. That was how bureaucracies worked.

  Felders sat on his desk, crossed his legs, and jiggled his left foot. “So—are you holding out on me, Bob? Did I call in all those markers over Fort Detrick for nothing—or not?”

  Cavanaugh looked levelly at Felders. “Don’t ask me, Marty.”

  “‘Don’t ask me.’ All right. I won’t. You hear about Seton?”

  “What about Seton?”

  Felders switched to jiggling his right foot. “Retiring early. Big party next week.”

  And that also, Cavanaugh realized, was how bureaucracies worked. Seton had undoubtedly been given a choice: Which do you want? An OPR investigation into this huge pile of falsified 302s you’ve submitted? Or allowing your name to be signed to a bogus report about an informant who’s also having an investigation dropped if he signs the same bogus report? Seton had chosen the latter. Although, being Seton, the deception probably hadn’t bothered him as long as nobody outside a handful of FBI agents knew the truth. Seton was retiring with a nice party and a full pension, his long record marred publicly only by one bad judgment about an informant. Could happen to anybody.

  However, Cavanaugh knew, as Felders did not, that Seton’s reprieve was only temporary. When the government finally went public with its full case against the IRA, the journalists would dig into every detail of everybody’s actions, including Seton’s. Then they’d flay him alive. Almost Cavanaugh could feel sorry for Seton. Almost.

  Felders said, “Now your meeting is in nine minutes. Conference room.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “And get your ass over to our house for dinner tonight.”