Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  Would innocent civilians die? Maybe. He hoped not, but he hoped even more for a way to stop Karl.

  He avoided making eye contact with God.

  seventeen

  For a man of letters, Jeff Hunter found himself often thinking about numbers. On his mind at the moment: six. That was the average number of work-related questions or suggestions he fielded during his morning journey from the doors of the New York Times building to his desk on the third floor. More than the hellos or the great-story-yesterdays. No, what he could count on hearing was something like, “That drug dealer didn’t really tell you that, did he?” or “I heard from a source that you got that detail wrong,” or—the winner by a mile—“I’ve got a great story for you, Jeff!” Six times on average. Once, the day after his Pulitzer nomination, twenty-eight people suddenly had brilliant story ideas Jeff just had to pursue. Twenty-eight. Only a dozen had congratulated him.

  Today the lobby security guard scored number one: “Hey, Mr. Hunter, that story you did on college hazings? I was wondering, my nephew—”

  “Can I get back to you about that, Tom? Kinda in a hurry.” He didn’t slow down. To the elevators, push the button. Janet from HR evened things out: “Hi, Jeff. Are those new glasses?” Then she blew it: “If you have a minute, I thought of something you should write about. You know EQ—emotional intelligence quotient? I just heard of this test—”

  As if he needed ideas.

  He arrived at his cubicle, having fielded five opportunities for distraction. Not bad. But then he checked his e-mail—not part of the morning’s count, but with a scoring system all its own. Forty-four new messages, even with a kick-butt spam blocker and his own kill filters that automatically deleted e-mails containing such obnoxious words as “idea,” “lawyer,” and George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” He tended to get a lot of messages with at least one of those nasty seven. At least he used to, prior to creating the kill filters.

  One wife. Three kids. Two mortgages. A salary just over six figures.

  Numbers. Maybe I should have been an accountant.

  Except he loved being an investigative reporter. Corruption, greed, abuse of power—what could be better than uncovering these deeds and exposing the perpetrators? In Hunter’s book, nothing.

  He started sorting through the e-mails. Delete. Delete. Delete.

  He came to one with the subject line, “The story of the century”— a slight twist on the usual “Story of the year!” He opened it and was surprised to find it blank. Some story. Then he noticed the attachment, something called “First_Strike.xls.” A spreadsheet. Or, more likely, a virus.

  “I don’t think so,” he said out loud and hit the delete key. He’d gone through a dozen more e-mails when he thought about the spreadsheet again. What if it really was a big story? The blank message was a deviation from the norm; most people didn’t seem to know how to stop once they started typing a message to him.

  He opened his trash folder, then double-clicked on “The story of the century.” He checked the return address. It was an anonymous e-mail resender he recognized. He received at least a few nasty-grams a week with return addresses that were untraceable, thanks to web sites that believed in a person’s right to anonymity. In his experience, anonymity over the Internet meant trouble. Then again, Deep Throat

  went nameless for thirty years. Most whistleblowers preferred it that way. He eyed the icon that represented the attached file. If it was a virus, the company’s computer guys could take care of it. And his computer backed itself up every evening, so he wouldn’t lose much, in a worst-case scenario. He selected the file and opened it.

  His monitor displayed a list of names, addresses, and, on most records, what appeared to be social security numbers. He scrolled down. The list went on and on. He hit the button that jumped him to the last entry. Exactly ten thousand.

  Scrolling back up, he recognized some names—politicians, celebrities, business leaders. Of course, these could be average joes who only shared the names of famous people. There was also a large number of names he didn’t recognize. What did any of these people have in common? Why were they on this list? Why was he sent the list, and who sent it? The social security numbers bothered him. The list could have come from one of the stolen data files that made the news every week—hacked credit card companies, hospitals, schools. Hardly the story of the century.

  There was only one way to piece this puzzle together. He chose a name at random, opened an Internet phone directory, slipped on his Telephone headset, and let his computer dial the number.

  The car, sleek, black, and low, roared through the streets

  of Paris at dizzying speeds. It plunged into a traffic tunnel, slalomed between pillars, and zipped past slower cars.

  “This is where Princess Di crashed,” Bobby Waddle said. His eyes darted like Geiger counter needles as he assessed approaching dangers and opportunities to skirt them. He risked a quick swipe at his nose and wiped what came away on his jeans. He sniffed hard to avoid another such distraction.

  Next to him, Cole Martin scrunched his nose. “Who?”

  “She was going to be queen of England. Mom liked her.”

  Bobby’s car left the ground as it came out of the tunnel onto Pont de l’Alma. Biting pavement again, the rear tires spun with unfocused power and caused the back end to skitter into the side of a taxicab. Sparks flew, and the speedometer instantly dropped ten miles per hour. He was doing only eighty-five now.

  He glanced at the rearview mirror and didn’t like what he saw: another sleek sports car, this one red, gaining quickly. He pushed a button and released a thick stream of oil onto the roadway. His rival spun out of control and crashed into a bus.

  “No fair!” Cole yelled.

  “The oil was an upgrade I picked up on the last lap,” Bobby said, laughing. He coughed and reminded himself not to laugh.

  Cole threw down his controller. On the lower half of the television’s split screen, his car was on fire. Words flashed over it—Respawn: HIT BUTTON A.

  “Come on. It’s no fun by myself,” Bobby said. His eyes never left the screen. His fingers moved over the controller with robotic efficiency.

  “You always win!” Cole complained.

  Bobby set the controller in his lap and turned to his friend. He coughed. His chest felt tight, and it hurt. “I’ve been playing longer than you. You want me to let you win?”

  “No. I just … I don’t know. I don’t like this game anymore.”

  “Wanna play Halo?”

  Cole shook his head.

  “Quake?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “How about Nerf-gun tag?”

  That sounded good. They’d been on the Xbox for about an hour, as long as his mom allowed him per day.

  “It,” he said.

  “You’re always it.”

  “All right, you be it.” He turned off the TV and dropped the wireless controllers into a drawer. As they were heading out the back door, the phone rang.

  Bobby’s mother yelled down the stairs: “Bobby, could you get that, honey?”

  “Aw, Mom!” But his words weren’t as loud as he thought they should be. His lungs just couldn’t push them out. He decided it was easier to answer the phone than to argue.

  “Hello?” He watched Cole pick a Nerf gun out of the toy box on the deck and check it for sponge bullets.

  “May I speak to Robert Waddle, please?” A man’s voice.

  “Who is this?”

  “Jeff Hunter, from the New York Times.”

  “We already get a newspaper.”

  “I’m not calling about a subscription. Is Robert Waddle there?”

  Cole was waving at him to come. He waved back.

  “That’s me, but nobody calls me Robert. Just Bobby.”

  “You live in Castle Creek, right? New York?”

  “It’s next to Binghamton.”

  There was a pause. “I
s your dad also named Robert?”

  “His name was Philip. He’s dead.” He was getting annoyed.

  “I’m sorry. Did he die recently?”

  “When I was a baby.”

  “When you were what? I’m sorry.”

  “A baby. I have a cold.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Ten. I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  Cole had jumped off the deck and was making his way toward the woods at the back of the property. Bobby wanted to play around the house, but Cole thought because Bobby wasn’t there, he got to choose the rules. Dang it.

  “That’s right, you shouldn’t. But let me just ask one thing. Has anything unusual happened to you lately?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. An accident, or has anybody—”

  “Bobby, who is it?” His mom whisked into the kitchen and held out her hand for the phone.

  “Some guy …” He placed the handset into her palm, glad to be done with it, and bolted toward the door.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” his mother said. She raised a finger to tell him to hold on. “Who is this, please?” She listened for three seconds, then hung up. “I don’t have time for salesmen. Did you sweep the garage like I asked?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re so good. Come here.” She touched his forehead. “Still warm. How do you feel?”

  “Stuffy. Tight right here.” He patted his chest.

  “Worse than this morning?”

  “A little.”

  “That means a lot. Don’t stay out too long, and stay out of the brook.”

  “Aw, Mom.”

  “Do you want to not go out at all?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay, have fun.” She slapped his bottom, and he ran out the door. Cole was nowhere in sight.

  A kid. What was it Alice said in Wonderland? Curiouser

  and curiouser. Jeff Hunter typed a note on the line that contained Robert Waddle’s name. He scrolled down a ways and selected another.

  “The lobster cakes and Dom Perignon sound lovely,”

  Gretchen Gaither told the woman sitting beside her on the couch. Her smile faltered slightly. “But they’re out of our price range.”

  The woman touched Gretchen’s hand. “For your fortieth anniversary? Why not splurge?”

  She thought about it. It would be nice. Just this once. She knew Jim would go along with it … and then quietly work a few weeks of double shifts to pay for it. She couldn’t do that to him.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said. “What else do you have?”

  The woman looked disappointed—or disgusted. She leaned over to a large volume of menus and photographs on the coffee table, flipped a few pages, then a few pages more. “Bruschetta and Torciano Fragolino? Fourteen dollars a bottle.”

  Gretchen nodded. Jim would have hated this meeting with the caterer. It would have reminded him that things hadn’t turned out the way they had dreamed. Still, he had always provided for their needs and had found a way to put their two children through college. It had been a little easier when she worked as a substitute teacher. But two years ago, her arthritis had grown too painful to ignore or sufficiently medicate. And an already tight budget became even tighter. She’d told him that their anniversary needed no special commemoration, other than their own remembrances of the happy times they’d shared. But he had insisted: “Ask the kids to come, invite some friends. Let’s have a little party—catered, because the guest of honor shouldn’t do the work.”

  “How many people?” the woman asked.

  “About thirty, with the kids and their families.”

  The caterer looked around the small living room. “Have you thought about renting a banquet room? They can be had for a very reasonable price.”

  “Our backyard has hosted many a birthday party,” Gretchen said, smiling at the memories. “I think it’ll do for this.”

  The phone rang and she excused herself.

  She found the cordless handset on the dining room table. “Hello?”

  “Gretchen Gaither?”

  “Yes?”

  “Jeff Hunter, with the New York Times. Do you have a few moments?”

  After speaking to the Gaither woman, Hunter disconnected

  with a mouse click. Retired schoolteacher. No recent problems with financial institutions or anyone else that she could think of. Seemed like a sweet lady. He could tell his call had spooked her. He hoped she didn’t follow up with a call to the news desk or, worse, to the police. He wasn’t ready to answer questions, and he wasn’t ready to let the list go.

  Andrew Wallenski looked at the wall of the boys’ restroom

  and shook his head. Kids these days. To know such words in middle school was bad enough, but to actually spray paint them on a public wall! No respect. Not for property. Not for the people who had to clean up their messes. If they were his kids, they’d show respect, that was for sure.

  He opened the can of white latex paint and poured it into a pan. He’d tried scrubbing graffiti off the walls before. The wall paint had come off with the spray paint, and he’d had to recover the entire wall anyway. Waste of time. Waste of paint. Fool kids. He draped a drop cloth over the tops of the urinals and had run the roller up three feet of wall, dulling but not obscuring a big letter S, when the mobile phone in his back pocket jangled.

  A dozen calls later, Hunter had nothing. He’d spoken to a mother in Denver whose infant son was on the list; a sixteen-year-old girl in Dallas who was late for her waitressing job and didn’t want to talk; a father in Chicago who wanted to know why a stranger was asking about his seven-year-old daughter; and two women and three men, all of whom had no clue why they’d be on a list sent to a news reporter. Of course he’d encountered wrong, unlisted, and disconnected numbers; busy signals; unanswered calls; and answering machines. But none of those counted. No journalist worth his press pass let that stuff deter him from a story. Problem was, he wasn’t sure he had a story. Just a list of names.

  He had called a Times entertainment reporter in LA to ask about the celebrities on the list, but she had nothing to report. Biggest news was that the workaholic director Lew Darabont, also on Hunter’s list, had failed to show up for a script read-through—the first time in his career. A studio publicist announced that Darabont was suffering from exhaustion and would take a few days off.

  Hunter then reached a senator at his Washington office. No news there, except that he was furious over a narrowly defeated tort reform bill he had helped draft. He ranted for three minutes, then apologized, saying he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. “Fighting a cold,” he’d explained. “It’s got me down, and I think it wants to be the flu.”

  That was another thing Hunter had discovered. There seemed to be a high percentage of people with colds. Hunter didn’t know when cold season was and wondered if it was at different times of year in different parts of the country. He made a note to check it out.

  He’d talked about or to five kids and twelve adults, nine males and eight females, six well-known people and twelve nobodies. Scattered around the country. No rhyme, no reason. No story.

  A cub reporter appeared at his desk. The kid was helping him research a story on transit cops making a sport of beating up vagrants in the subway tunnels. He was excited about interviews he had conducted and wanted Hunter to listen to the MP3 files. Hunter took a last look at the mysterious list of names. He closed the document. Just another WAS story—wait and see. He had eighteen others like it.

  eighteen

  Julia Matheson checked into a downtown motel under her married sister’s name and paid cash. It was the kind of place that didn’t ask for identification or a major credit card, and couldn’t care less who you were or what you did in the room, as long as you didn’t destroy the property and you paid in advance. She requested a room on the back side of the building, out of sight of people cruising the boulevard.

  The room
had brown indoor-outdoor carpeting, a chipped Formica table bolted to the wall next to the bed, a threadbare bedspread, and a hand-printed sign on the back of the door that read NO cooking in room. The smell of fried hamburgers tinged the air.

  Julia dropped her purse and laptop case on the bed, along with a big bag from Wal-Mart containing a change of clothes, a gym bag, and other items. She went to the window and opened it, then fell onto the bed beside the bags. Most of the acoustic spray had come off the ceiling, probably a little here and a little there for the past thirty years. There was a big brown-rimmed water stain in one corner. She tried identifying the other splotches: ketchup, coffee, a smashed insect. She sighed and closed her eyes.

  What was she doing here? She should have been back in her duplex in Atlanta, cleaning up the dishes, helping her mother to the tub. She needed to call her. It wasn’t that her mother’s MS rendered her completely helpless, but more that she’d be worried. Julia rarely came home late, and when she did, she always called first. She didn’t know what she’d say. Not anything that would make anyone tapping the phone decide to stake out the house and wait for her or anything that would give away her location.

  Listen to her: tapping the phone!

  But that was her reality right now. Someone with loads of intelligence and highly sophisticated technical capabilities had attacked them and killed Goody and Vero. They had intercepted the SATD signal, which this morning she would have said was impossible. And Goody had recognized one of the assailants, an undercover cop. What did that mean? Was a government agency involved in the hit? A rogue director? Or was the guy freelancing?

  Now that Vero was dead, was it over? She didn’t know, but she remembered something Goody had said during the investigation of a serial killer: “There’s no end to evil.”

  She wondered if Jodi Donnelley knew that her husband was dead. Probably Edward Molland, the LED’s director of domestic operations, had told her. Julia wanted to be there, to hold her, to comfort the boys. At the same time, she wished there was no reason to comfort Donnelley’s family. She opened her eyes, turning her mind away from what she wished. It all hurt too much. She needed to keep her head straight, her thoughts on the problem.