Vector

by James Abel

  “Just females are infectious? Not the males?”

  Dr. Cardozo had graduated from Duke University and smelled of Irish Spring soap and grew his own mint for tea. They’d met in a modest cream-colored villa on the outskirts of Rio. And later, in Porto Velho, Dr. Cardozo said, “No metal detector can detect an insect. No dogs can sniff them. By the time the Americans figure it out, thousands will be infected.”

  Tom had started to grow excited.

  “Tom, right now our enemies see mosquitoes as you do, as a nuisance. When they realize what is happening, they will come after you with everything at their disposal. They will turn their country upside down to find you, and finding you,” Cardozo said, “they will kill you.”

  “Inshallah.”

  “The Americans have a peculiar expression: weapons of mass destruction. I’ve never understood it. They mean nuclear weapons or chemicals. But isn’t a plane that drops bombs and destroys villages a weapon of mass destruction? A machine gun that mows down civilians? They play with words! Well, we will give them a new weapon of mass destruction. It will be something they see every day.”

  Tom frowned. “But what if the insects get into a plane that flies to an Islamic country?”

  “They will spray their planes to prevent this.”

  “What if an infected American flies overseas?”

  “That might happen, but only a few times. Once the panic starts, they’ll close their airports. I’m surprised you didn’t ask the other question. About you getting sick.”

  “If you want me to stay on the island for weeks, and work with the insects, you have a way to protect me.”

  “Very good! An existing drug prevents infection, and you will take it. But there isn’t enough of this drug to go around. You see? The panic?”

  “I want to watch it up close.”

  Dr. Cardozo poured more tea and showed genuine sympathy. “After what happened to you, I understand.”

  • • •

  “You on the bike,” the cop ordered Tom. “Pull over!”

  It was too late to turn around. He cursed himself for letting his thoughts drift as he approached the Brooklyn bridge, and not seeing guards sooner. They never stopped bikers and pedestrians on the bridge, but six of them watched him approach: two Army Reservists with M4s, two uniformed cops, and two auxiliary cops in wilting white shirts with stupid-looking gold badges, looking more like office workers dressed for Halloween. The auxies were inconsequential because they did not carry arms. One cop selected passersby and sent them to a folding table on the bridge bikeway, manned by the second cop, who examined bags. The reservists, weapons unslung, stood watching, probably pissed off to be standing in ninety-degree heat, in what they regarded as one more useless terrorist drill.

  Dismounted, Tom moved one step sideways as if to turn away, but saw one reservist nudge the other. Riding off would run him into the spotter cop. Or they’d get on their radios.

  Three people waited in front of him in line.

  Two. At the moment the table cop was arguing with a hefty German tourist who objected to his opening of her box of lingerie.

  Stupid, arbitrary catch! All kinds of other people flowed around the table, allowed to pass. Three kids who looked like gangbangers walked by, laughing. Their pants were worn so low at the hips that Tom saw the crack of underwear beneath their jeans. A man with his face wrapped in gauze passed. He looked ten times more suspicious! A trio of Muslim women in head scarves. Two fat guys drinking from bottles in paper bags, but the cop had stopped a bike messenger! He didn’t care about illegal drinkers today.

  “Next!”

  The bombs, but not bombs were in a canvas messenger bag, hung around his shoulder. Tom’s frayed cap showed the New York Mets logo. The David Wright jersey was identical to ones worn by thousands of fans. The bike was a thirteen-year-old Cannondale hybrid, with thicker tires for traversing rougher streets. Like many messengers, Tom carried a thick steel chain around his neck, and a heavy bike lock. He could kill with them in several ways. If he had to attack, he’d go for the reservists first.

  Allah, make the police wave me on so I can do your bidding.

  “Sir, open up your camera case, please.”

  “Ma’am, please unzip the portfolio.”

  “So! Bike messenger! What’s in the tubes?”

  • • •

  The cop looked young, black, fit, and ready.

  “Open it up, please.”

  “I’m not supposed to do that. They’ll fire me.”

  “Well, one of us is going to open it. So! You or me?”

  Tom saw the face with special clarity. He reached back, touched the heavy chain, judged he could take out the cop with the first swing. But there would be witnesses. And the soldiers. The tube was on the table now.

  I will go down fighting. I will take as many of them with me as I can.

  He pulled the chain off his shoulder, as if the weight bothered him.

  The cop popped the metal tube top, peered inside, holding the tube up to catch the light. Tom had the Sig Sauer behind his back, under his shirt. If things went bad there would be a hundred witnesses, photographs, descriptions. Sweat broke out in his armpits. The cop began inching the rolled-up lithograph out. It was a cheap copy of an old Spanish drawing of two galleons anchored off a Guyana jungle beach. The poster was too short to take up the entire tube length. The tube had a false compartment on the bottom. Packed with insects.

  The cop pushed the drawing back in and closed the cap. “You know why we picked you, Mets?”

  “No.”

  The cop grinned suddenly, like it was a big joke. “Go Yanks,” he said.

  Tom resisted the urge to swing the chain in the man’s stupid face. “Screw the fucking Yanks,” he said.

  “Testy, testy,” the cop laughed. Tom mounted up and pedaled past the men and onto the wide walkway taking him over the East River. One Police Plaza and the great towers of Manhattan were ahead, the afternoon sunny, traffic normal, and he thanked Allah for safety, reaching the island itself.

  • • •

  First stop was a shut-down gas station near Elizabeth Street, off Canal, closed for remodeling, where a row of discarded snow tires leaned against the rear brick wall, filled with rainwater.

  Two stories above that were the open windows to one of the city’s premier Chinatown restaurants. Many famed athletes ate here, as did politicians, entertainers, and fashion models. Around the corner was a street where hordes of tourists passed each day, shopping at open-air stands. More than five thousand people would pass this spot at dusk each day.

  He shook out a bag filled with larvae into the water in the tires. He shook out eight hundred adults.

  • • •

  Next stop, Midtown, and an open trash Dumpster beside a new hotel under construction, a block from Times Square. The Dumpster had two inches of water on the bottom. He mixed in a bag of adults and then opened a tube of larvae and shook it out. The larvae would mature in one to three weeks.

  • • •

  Third stop, the Upper West Side and the busy 96th Street IRT station, which fed up to 40,000 passengers a day into the red line that traversed the length of the borough. He carried the bike onto the platform. After a train passed and no one remained on the platform, he tossed an open ziplock over the side, into rainwater on the tracks. New Yorkers were pigs who used the tracks as trash cans. The baggie fell with a splash, and he watched a mosquito emerge. In two hours, at dusk, a little swarm would rise out and buzz and fly onto the bare arms and legs above the tracks.

  • • •

  For the rest of the afternoon he and a thousand real bike messengers traversed the city; over the Queensboro Bridge to Astoria, where he left a deposit in a quiet eddy in the East River, a hundred yards from a public swimming pool that several thousand people visited each summer week, mo
stly kids. The pool stayed open at dusk.

  He was exhausted by late afternoon, and taking a break in a bodega, buying iced tea, he saw a Channel One News broadcast: Terrorism drill is over. The subway was clear now. He rode the One train up to Riverdale, a pricy suburban neighborhood in the Bronx. The streets here were shaded by oaks and lined with well-kept Tudors, ranches, and split-levels. Here was the old Dodge Estate and several private schools catering to the sons and daughters of the city’s elite. Getting off the elevated train, he rode the bike to a low-income home for the elderly on busy Riverdale Avenue: a faded yellow brick final stop for the men and women who sat staring at passing traffic in cheap folding chairs outside, forgotten by their families.

  Dr. Cardozo had told him, “The cameras will go wherever outbreaks occur. Spread it everywhere. Make none of them feel safe. Once the panic begins, a single mosquito in a subway, a house, a park . . . will set them off. Go with God.”

  EIGHT

  She stirred as her ancestors had as far back as forty-six million years ago, at dusk. Her food source then was dinosaurs. Now it was mammals. But food was still blood.

  One by one, she and her sisters rose into the air from the pond, a shadow mass, each unit so small that in fading light it was almost invisible to the crowds streaming into New York’s Central Park. FREE PHILHARMONIC CONCERT TONIGHT!

  Sheep Meadow was filling with people. Already seven thousand early arrivals for the 7 P.M. start claimed lawn space with blankets or planted flags, or flew colorful balloons so their friends could find them in the crowd. They opened wines and champagnes, unwrapped cheese, put out grapes and breads and hummus and cold cuts, their Zabar’s picnic baskets filled with food.

  Expected crowd tonight: twenty-three thousand. This was New York at its finest, where the high and low mixed; the superrich, from townhouses off 5th Avenue, and illegal immigrants; kids from Harlem beside kids from Park Avenue; Wall Street titans and Bowery vendors; whole extended families; parents and kids, cousins and grandparents, five blankets to a party. Here to eat. Talk. Listen. Lie out on a hot night.

  She wobbled along on air currents formed by heat rising off baked pavement and breezes off the rivers. Her compound eyes were covered with tiny lenses called ommatidia, which could pick up the slightest movement. The eyes, atop the head, were photosensitive and could detect changes in light so minor that if a hand came swatting toward her, she’d flee. She took in oxygen through slits in her abdomen. Her antennae, long and feathery, contained receptors capable of locating a human breath, a single plume of carbon dioxide, 110 feet away. She was a hunter who tracked sweat, perfume, or cologne, and she approached her victims using two sets of wings, large ones for buoyancy, and mini-wings for direction, giving her a busy appearance, four wings moving at different speeds.

  Her saliva contained an anticoagulant, to keep blood flowing in victims, and natural painkiller, to keep victims from realizing she’d just poked a serrated needle, called a proboscis, into their skin.

  She would keep feeding, going from victim to victim, until her abdomen was full.

  Below, a record crowd poured into the park from 5th Avenue on the East Side, Central Park West on the other, coming out of the subways, getting off busses. Beneath a rising quarter moon, as the violins warmed up, she dropped and landed on an arm, sensed a slap coming, rose away, circled, returned. Blood flowed into her as an infectious protozoan swam out, and into the dangling arm.

  A woman’s voice nearby said, “You’ve lost contact with Joe and Eddie, in Brazil?”

  A man protested, “I’m doing the best I can, Chris.”

  The arm jerked violently. Dislodged, she flew off, and, still hungry, landed on another person’s ankle.

  Hundreds of people were being bitten as the stirring notes of the 1812 Overture began to play. Candles glowed. The moon rose higher. The night was perfect, or so the audience believed.

  • • •

  The encore—An American in Paris—ended at 10 p.m. The music had been sublime, the orchestra playing at a level that exceeded even their normal five-star skills. The temperature had been hot but not oppressive. The park smelled of trees and grass. The traffic on normally busy 5th Avenue had even cooperated, fewer horns sounding, and the passing busses had been quiet hybrids, not the old diesel models. The crowd oozed from the park in ten directions, hailing cabs, getting on subways, strolling along the East Side’s tree-lined streets.

  Among the randomly infected were a Deputy Mayor, a fifth grader from a Chelsea day school, a pregnant thirty-year-old from Greenwich, Connecticut, who had driven in with her husband to meet old college friends. A knee replacement specialist from the hospital for special surgery had been bitten. So had a former high school football star and OxyContin addict who’d fallen asleep before intermission, the CEO of a Paris-based perfume company, the Congresswoman who had introduced the orchestra to the audience, and an Albanian doorman from the Bronx.

  Honey, you have bites all over the back of your neck!

  Back home, a few of the bitten smeared on soothing calamine lotion.

  Those little buggers seem to like your cologne, Ed.

  It would take a day or two before the fevers hit, and joint pain, the squeezing in the intestines, then the sudden convulsions, the black urine, and the quick deaths.

  It was just a few mosquitoes, honey. Stop complaining. Don’t be a baby. The itching will stop.

  NINE

  The double-deck ferry rode so low that only four inches separated the gunwale from the Madeira. Like other passengers, Rooster and I strung hammocks from hooks in the ceiling for the open-air trip. Every foot of deck seemed crammed with families, chickens, crates, and hammocks. The once-a-week boat, Rooster said, stopped at jungle landings, rubber-tapper outposts, and fazendas, remote cattle ranches. The schedule had us arriving in New Extrema at dawn, eight hours from now, but we were already late.

  And now I had a bad feeling that I had just been recognized. A heavyset ferry crewman stared at me from across the deck, and turned away quickly when he realized I looked back. He sped up the stairs from the lower deck to the pilot house. This river boat trip was turning out to be the slowest rescue mission in history. A gamble that Eddie would even be on the other end, still alive.

  “It was smart not to go back to the hotel, Joe,” said Rooster, from his hammock.

  “No roads lead to New Extrema, Joe. No airplane strip.”

  The sand flies were out, biting. Some would carry leishmaniasis. The mosquitoes had subsided slightly after the sun went down. The pilot steered by floodlight, sweeping it in an arc, then shutting it off for some nutty reason, chugging us into a dark so thick that we seemed to be floating. On. I saw something big and alive churning up brown/yellow water off port. Off. On. I saw silhouetted trees crowding both banks and the pink dainty hands of a sloth in top branches, where the creature blinked back.

  “Joe, if we would have hired an outboard, it would be faster, but we might have put ourselves in the hands of the same men who take the sick miners. Bad idea.”

  No help was coming from Washington. I’d called Ray by sat phone to beg for any aid at all; satellite shots of New Extrema, pressure put on local authorities, FBI files on drug smuggling or terrorist connections in western Brazil.

  “Ray, you asked us to look for a training camp. This might be it,” I said.

  “No, I asked you to pay attention to potential terrorists. Not to missing gold miners. I’m very sorry about Eddie. I really am. But I have a meeting now.”

  If it had not been for the Indian, Cizinio, last night, we might not have even gotten this far. We’d avoided Anasasio and the police when Cizinio paddled us off in a dugout. Then I’d kept my promise to him, forced my worry for Eddie from my mind, gone with Cizinio and Rooster to the public hospital, a humid, ill lit but surprisingly clean place. Visiting hours were over but the nurses admitted a foreign doctor. Nine-year-old Ab
ilio Karitiana—Cizinio’s son—lay twisted like a polio victim with eight other pain-racked children in an isolated ward, coughing up bloody sputum, vomiting, legs twisted with pain. A crazy combo of symptoms: chests filled with fluid, like pneumonia; intestines racked with spasms, like food poisoning; dark urine hinting at kidney failure; hearts galloping at dangerous rates.

  One boy had died an hour before, the night doctor, a young guy named Bracamonte, had told me.

  “How are you treating them?” I asked.

  “The penicillin isn’t working. It may be a bad batch. Sometimes we get counterfeit drugs. Which is why we ask patients for money, to buy the real thing.” Dr. Bracamonte sighed. “I spend half my salary on medicines. The patients think we keep the money for ourselves.”

  I judged him honest. He showed a familiar helplessness that I’d seen in dedicated professionals elsewhere in the poorer world, men and women hampered by bad bureaucracy or lack of supplies. Wilderness medicine meant assisting doctors saddled with out-of-date instruments, expired pills, busted X-ray machines. Rooster kept translating as I interviewed Abilio. The boy was underweight and shivered with fever and gripped his father’s hand as though if he let go, he would die.

  “Abilio, thank you for talking to me. Did you eat or drink anything before you got sick? Maybe something tasted wrong to you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  The head shook weakly. The eyes were huge with fright but the voice remained steady. “We ate fish from the river. We ate tapir, but it was cooked. We ate rice that we got from FUNAI, the Indian agency. It all tasted fine.”

  “Something you drank, then?”

  “Just water, boiled, like doctors said.”

  “Maybe you went somewhere new. A mine. A ranch,” I said, wondering if the kids had been exposed to a chemical used for deforestation, construction, mineral processing.