Vector

by James Abel

  “In normal traffic, seven minutes.”

  “And in this?”

  A shrug. Jamal mercifully shut the siren off.

  “Could be thirty, could be fifty.”

  At least Ray Havlicek finally answered his phone.

  The head of the national manhunt to find the attackers was in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. He was two blocks west of the campus of Northwestern University, off Lake Michigan, on Lincoln Street. He was crouched behind a Bureau car, outside a private home surrounded by FBI and Evanston police. He wasn’t the on-the-ground commander, or he wouldn’t have picked up.

  “Turn on CNN if you can,” Ray said.

  On Eddie’s iPhone I saw it from a network copter; the leafy oak-lined street, the target, a two-story-high yellow Victorian home, with its wraparound porch, gables, and turrets. A bird feeder on an upstairs porch. The stupid ceramic gnome on the front lawn. The snipers lying on the roof of the brick colonial home across the street.

  “Who’s inside the house, Ray?”

  “The house is divided into apartments, evacuated except for one. Two males. Chemistry majors from Belgium. Looks like the big break, Joe.”

  “Is that you, Ray, behind the black car?”

  “Damnit! I told my guys to move the cameras back!”

  I saw Ray, crouched, looking around, shouting orders.

  Then he was back. “Talk fast, Joe. Your message said important.”

  FBI tracks malaria threat to Illinois, said the rolling banner crossing the bottom of Eddie’s mini-screen. Foreign students threaten to blow themselves up.

  “Does CNN have the story right, Ray?”

  “For a change, yes. What do you have for me?”

  “How’d you find the students?”

  “They made a mistake. They made a threat call to someone in D.C. last night.” I envisioned Kyle Utley. “They mentioned things they’d only know if they’re involved.”

  “Like a refugee camp named Tol-e-Khomri?”

  Silence. I heard sirens, and a bullhorn in the background. But I couldn’t hear the words. Ray’s breathing came over the line, quick and hard.

  “Where’d you hear that name, Joe?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Do not mention it to anyone! Say you hear me.”

  “How about the man with the gap in his teeth? Is he in that house, too?”

  Ray’s anger came across the line as a sharp, sour buzzing. “Damnit. If you’re trying to impress me, congratulations. Talk fast. What do you want?”

  Taken beside the array of firepower in Illinois, the story I told sounded flimsy even to me, my alleged evidence thin. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe the folk art shop in Brooklyn was nothing more than a store. That the men in Illinois had barricaded themselves in a house was proof that they were involved in something. All I had was a story about ceramics coming into the country without any record at Customs, and a vague sketch from Brazil, a face.

  “That’s it? The whole thing?” said Ray, unimpressed.

  “His name is Tom Fargo.”

  A sigh. “Fine. We’ll put it on the list of five thousand other names we’re checking out.”

  “We’re heading over there now.”

  Ray said, “Good. Wait! Something is happening!”

  Jamal broke free of traffic, moved thirty feet forward, and braked behind a smoke-belching appliance truck with cartoon elves on the rear door. SAME DAY SERVICE. Izabel Santo was turned from the front seat, staring at the screen in Eddie’s hand. I saw the angle suddenly shift. Instead of the FBI at the house, I saw a pack of newspeople, across the street, grumbling, leaving. Ray had ordered the cameras turned away from the house.

  “They’re about to assault,” Eddie said.

  The aerial shot went sideways as the news copter left.

  I heard the magnified sound of bullhorns ordering the men inside to come out, hands up.

  “Sound diversion,” Eddie said.

  I imagined SWAT guys moving in through a rear garden. I imagined them with a battering ram and assault rifles, moving onto the front porch. Over the iPhone came the faint but unmistakable snap-snap of M4s firing.

  Then one of the cameras showed the house again, only from a straight-on angle. The camera crew must have talked their way into a house across the street. Eddie and I had assaulted homes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and my heart was in my throat for the safety of the attack team. We heard the muffled report of an explosion. The camera violently shifted to show a carpet. The FBI must have realized they were being filmed and found the cameraman. No, wrong, because the shot adjusted and I saw the house again, from across the street. The front door was open, and flames erupted from inside. A black-clad FBI agent lay on the lawn. A figure appeared in the doorway, singing, right hand up, holding something, torso bundled up under his shirt. His thumb is pressed to a detonator.

  He blew himself up just as shots drove him back.

  “Ray?”

  Ray had hung up.

  The front doorway was now gone, a jagged oval of hanging wood bits and plaster. The upper windows had blown out.

  Eddie sighed. “Well, Ray got ’em. Should we turn around and go back, Joe?”

  “I hope you’re right. But we keep going.”

  We crawled forward and reached the source of the two-mile-long traffic jam. The chanting demonstrators blocked all lanes but one. Their waving signs read, GOVERNMENT LABS KILL OUR CHILDREN WITH DISEASE; RELEASE SPRAY SUPPLY; MAYOR DOESN’T CARE; TEAR DOWN WALL STREET; and FUCK THE RICH. Six-lane Flatbush Avenue was clear ahead. We finally sped up.

  “Six, seven minutes,” Detective Jamal al-Azawi said.

  Aya called, on the way, with news.

  • • •

  “Joe, I did what you said. I tried to get anything more I could find on a Tom Fargo.”

  “Did you sleep at the Bureau again last night?”

  “Don’t start with me. Mom asked the same thing. She’s still in Newark and no one else is home so who cares where I sleep as long as I do? You said that a good investigator never gives up. You said it! Gives one hundred and one percent!”

  “They go home at night after that.”

  “Did you go home last night? I bet you didn’t.”

  Actually, I’d gone to Izabel’s apartment, so this line of reasoning was counterproductive. I heard my own testy voice, as demanding as Ray Havlicek’s, short-tempered and exhausted. I wasn’t her father. I don’t know why I felt responsibility for her. I calmed and asked, as if speaking to any adult researcher, “What did you find out, Aya?”

  “That’s better! I found an address!”

  “For the shop? You already gave us that.”

  “No. Different! Maybe where he lives!”

  I sat up straighter. We were on Flatbush now, moving at a brisk clip toward Park Slope. “How?”

  “Well,” she said, bragging now that she had my attention, “first I had his social security number. From his passport. So I cast the net, went to all databases.”

  Which, at the FBI, she’d have wide access to. “And?”

  “And it turns out he bought a car when he went back to visit his mother last year, in Denver, after he was overseas. So he needed to register it. His car is a six-year-old yellow Subaru. I have the VIN number. Colorado license plates are green and white and they show the Rockies, but don’t have a slogan.”

  I was smiling. “No slogan.”

  “Don’t make fun of me! Maybe you want me to stop.”

  “Sorry.”

  “He got a ticket! A parking ticket, in New York! I have this friend, see? Her name is Grace? She moved to Washington from New York when her parents divorced? Well she told me last month that there are all these stupid parking laws in New York, like, you can’t leave your car on blocks for more than two days in
a row, like, because they clean streets. Like, if you don’t move your car or sit in it double-parked for like hours you get these expensive tickets, over a hundred dollars. And he got one!”

  “He got a ticket,” I repeated, very alert now.

  “The ticket doesn’t say his name, because the person writing the ticket wouldn’t know that? But it has the license plate? And the address where the car was? So I thought, last night when you wanted me to waste time sleeping, that maybe the address will turn out to be where he knows someone, or even where he lives?”

  “Didn’t your mother tell you not to make statements like they’re questions?”

  “You sound like Mom. You should date her. You have a lot in common. Like telling me what to do. If you want to be my stepfather, marry Mom. Otherwise stop it!”

  “I give up.”

  “Anyway, LIKE, I decided to check the address, and it turns out that address is a co-op building.”

  Aya gave me the address of the building.

  “I got a phone number for the building.”

  “I told you specifically not to make phone calls, Aya.”

  Sweetly, she said, “I didn’t. Don’t I always do what you say?”

  “Yeah. Always.”

  Aya giggled. “Okay, now I’ll go get some sleep; that is, if a certain someone thanks me for all the effort.”

  “Thank you, Aya. I mean that.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and hung up.

  Izabel Santo mused, “Maybe that whole thing in Chicago is a . . . How do you say it? A trick? A diversion!”

  We looked at each other.

  “I have no idea. Keep going,” I told Jamal.

  • • •

  The folk art shop was closed, even on a weekday morning at 10 A.M., even though the HOURS OPEN sign on the grated-in front door said opening should have been half an hour ago.

  “Other shops on this block are open,” Eddie said.

  Across the street, I saw a hole-in-the-wall diner, a leather goods shop, a Thai restaurant, a candy store/newsstand, a shoemaker. Next door to the art shop on one side, a Comfort Sofa shop, showing couches in the window. On the other side, a drugstore, Duane Reade.

  As Izabel waited at the art shop, Eddie and I split up and visited the other stores, asking questions and hearing the same answers that I got from a cranky, mustached man named Ian Crossgate, manager of the convertible sofa store.

  “Do you know where Tom Fargo lives?”

  “Is that his last name? I know Tom’s the first name, but I never knew the last.”

  “Do you know where he is this morning?”

  “He was there when I got in at eight, getting a delivery. I guess he went somewhere after that.”

  “A delivery from where?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Did he have a car here?”

  “I had a car and got sick of paying tickets! The Mayor wastes our taxes and then sends fascist ticket agents to steal more, ticketing our cars! No! I didn’t see any car! Tom’s probably too smart to own one.”

  I pulled out the blowup satellite face shot that Kyle Utley had provided. “Is this man Tom Fargo?”

  “Him? That guy has a beard, and Tom doesn’t.”

  “Pretend there’s no beard.”

  “Pretend? Whaddaya mean? The whole shape of the face is different. And this guy is Muslim. I can see from the hat. Tom’s Christian. And Tom has a scar on his face, I think.”

  I frowned. “A scar?”

  “Wait. Does he have a scar? Lemme think. Hey, Ivan! You know that guy Tom next door? Does he have a scar on his face? Or was it the guy who used to run the place?”

  Ivan didn’t remember any scar.

  I thanked the manager of the sofa shop. I thanked the manager at Duane Reade. Eddie thanked the people at the diner. None had helped. Izabel was leaning against a parked station wagon when we got back to the art shop, shaking her head. No Tom. At 11:50 A.M., the shop remained closed.

  “Let’s try the condo Aya told us about,” I said.

  Detective Jamal reminded me that I was supposed to be at Cornell Medical Center giving another talk, in half an hour.

  I sighed. “Cancel it.”

  • • •

  The building in front of which Tom Fargo’s car had been ticketed turned out to be a onetime pretzel factory converted to lofts. The brick had been sandblasted, a glass lobby added. The remodeling was stylish, and residents would have a great view of the Brooklyn Bridge. The co-op sat down a cobblestone street from one of New York’s premier restaurants, the River Café, on a barge, which offered a five-star view of the Manhattan skyline.

  We had to wait a few moments in the lobby while the doorman chatted with a short, sweaty Hispanic woman who—from the talk—appeared to be a cleaning lady, and was complaining about broken air-conditioning on the A train. She was headed upstairs to “Mister Greg’s apartment.”

  When the doorman turned his attention to us, his polite expression became more animated.

  “I recognize you! My God! You were with the President on TV! I have a cousin who lives in Barrow, Alaska. He said you stopped an outbreak there two years ago!”

  His name tag read MAURICIO. The lobby seemed quiet and had potted palms under an old blowup photo of Ebbets Field, onetime home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I’d noticed outside that signs posted on poles warned drivers that streets here were cleaned on Mondays and Wednesdays between 9 and 11 A.M. Move your car during those times.

  “We’re trying to find an old friend of mine, a man named Tom Fargo,” I said.

  Mauricio shook his head, disappointed that he could not help. “Sorry. There’s Tom Wilson in 4B, across from Greg’s. No Fargo.”

  “Wilson, huh?”

  “Nice man. He runs an art shop.”

  “Do you mind looking at this photo? Recognize him?”

  Mauricio’s open expression became worried, concerned, even before he glanced at the photo. “Does this have something to do with the malaria?”

  “Not at all. It’s a personal visit.”

  Mauricio looked at Eddie’s face, and at Izabel Santo. He had an intelligent face, but even someone with limited intelligence would have seen through my lie.

  Mauricio studied the photo carefully, held it far from his face, pulled it close, frowned, looked sick.

  “Why is he screaming?” he said.

  “He lost a loved one.”

  “He has a beard. And that hat is different. The only thing like Tom Wilson is the little space in the teeth. I can’t say if this is him.”

  “Is Tom home now?”

  “He’s not an old friend of yours, is he?”

  Detective Jamal held up his shield. Mauricio said, at once, “I didn’t see him leave this morning, but I can call up to see.”

  “How about if we just go knock?”

  “I have to call first. Rules. Sorry.”

  Jamal shook his head. “No, you don’t have to call up.”

  We were moving across the lobby when the elevator door opened and the Hispanic woman—the cleaning lady—rushed out, screaming that there were two dead bodies in Señor Greg’s apartment. That Señor Greg and Rebeca were up there in a back bedroom, lying by a roaring air conditioner, their blood soaking carpets, their blood on floors and walls.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Every mile heading inland took Tom Fargo farther away from safety, a harbor where he could steal a boat, the border to cross into Canada. Pittsburgh—site of the next release—lay five hours west, he reckoned, as the Subaru cruised smoothly along Interstate 80, through Allegheny Mountain passes and the Delaware Water Gap.

  Soft targets. Targets filled with people who are just as guilty as the politicians and generals.

  The vectors slept in their travel cups, inside the doors. National forest r
ose on both sides of the highway. Tom felt as if his vehicle formed a protective capsule of inevitability around him. He was aware of other cars yet felt invisible to their occupants. These people had wound him down like a spring. They’d worked on him for years. His actions now were the natural consequence of their casual, endless brutality.

  Emergencies are always like this. In one city, panic. In the next, a few miles away, people eat ice cream cones and laugh at comedy movies. Pittsburgh tonight, next stop tomorrow. I have enough supply for one last release after that. The best one.

  He was in a clock running backward, having scouted the infection route months ago, zigzagging through America’s heartland, appraising parks, lakes, ponds. Here an Iowa state campground, where thousands of people gathered in summer, eating cotton candy or watching draft horse pulls, feeling safe. Here a quiet eddy beneath a Mississippi River bridge, by a beach where people lay in the sun. Hobart Haines had helped him pick the targets. Tom wanted these people to fear the very air they breathed. Hobart had said, Make them think that TODAY might be their last one. You’ll get people to do what you want.

  But Tom’s confidence turned bitter as he recalled that for all his progress he was crippled in his mission. Back when he’d scouted the land, he’d assumed he’d have a regular supply of vectors. And that other attackers would be ranging through the South, hitting other targets.

  Now there was just him and three thousand remaining insects BECAUSE OF JOE RUSH.

  I can still make them think there are many attackers. Billions of mosquitoes live along the East Coast. The Americans will fear that my mosquitoes will breed with theirs. I will make them pay.

  Pittsburgh, eighty miles.

  The CD broadcast a sermon, recorded by another American he’d met overseas, a convert who had seen truth and gone over to the right side also. “Fight for the sake of God those who fight us, but do not attack them first.”

  Tom said, out loud, “I did not attack first. They did.”

  “God does not love the aggressors.”

  “All I wanted was to be left alone.”

  • • •

  The GETOUT app had made New York departure easy, directing him from Brooklyn to Eastern Parkway and the Jackie Robinson, avoiding the silvery Whitestone Bridge. “Heavy NYPD action there,” the message warned. “Try the Throgs Neck Bridge instead.”