by Nancy Kress
Cheap and lunatic philosophical maundering. This idiot was somehow connected with a deadly plague?
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT Contact
Tessa—Where are you? Things are growing critical.
Contact me now.
Maddox
For a lunatic moment the similarity between the two emails made a rising bubble of hysteria in Tessa. She fought it down. At least this time Ebenfield had spared her any more Biblical references. On a translation site she looked up each Arabic word of Ebenfield’s new sign-off, remembering that Arabic was read right to left. She got “dog” and “first.” Dogs first?
Before she left the booth, Tessa also Googled Ebenfield’s previous citation, 1 Kings 21:23:
“The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.”
Beautiful.
She stayed in the booth another fifteen minutes, researching. Then she made herself eat a tasteless and overpriced hamburger. In a stall in the ladies’ room, she wrapped her Smith & Wesson in the take-out food bag, padded with half a dispenser’s worth of paper towels. Regretfully she shoved the gun into the trash. For the second time this morning, she dialed the British Air ticket counter, pitching her voice high and flustered. “Hello? Hello?”
“Yes, ma’am, how may I help you?” One of those cool English voices that said I’m unflappable and you’re not.
“It’s my daughter! She’s on the way to the airport—she has to go to London—her husband is British and his mother is ill well not ill exactly she fell down a flight of stairs and broke every bone in her body practically the doctor says—”
“Ma’am? How may I help you?”
“My daughter has to go to London! I want to buy her ticket over the phone on your next flight—she just called on the cell phone she’s parking the car I thought it might save time if I—”
“One ticket on British Air flight 0043. The passenger’s name, please?”
“Ellen Blakely. But the ticket will go on my credit card, that’s a different name she—”
“Yes, ma’am. Please spell the passenger’s last name.”
Tessa did, then held her breath. She wasn’t sure where the no-fly list was actually checked, at ticket purchase or at the gate.
The clipped English voice said, “And the name on the credit card, please?”
“Tessa Sanderson. S-A-N-D-E-R-S-O-N.”
“And the number?”
The card cleared. Five minutes later Tessa walked to the ticket counter, produced Ellen’s passport, and claimed the ticket.
“Luggage to check?”
“No. Just a carry-on.”
“International Departures are from—”
“I know. Thank you.”
She cleared Security, her breath tangled in her throat, her face displaying nothing, and was the last passenger aboard the plane. It was half-empty; most people preferred overnight flights to Europe. Salah always had. Tessa sank into a window seat, leaned her head against the cold glass of the window, and tried to organize her thoughts for London.
She might get no farther than Heathrow. Maddox might have her picked up at the gate. Or he might have her followed, hoping she would lead agents to something even more interesting. Or Maddox might conclude that he had had it wrong and that the Bureau had made a massive, humiliating mistake with her.
Certainly it had happened before. Aldrich Ames had sold out the CIA to the Russians, and Robert Hanssen had done the same to the FBI. Tessa, Maddox might figure, had been lured into suspect activities through love of her husband, and Salah Mahjoub had indeed been a very clever, until-now undetected terrorist.
And there lay the heart of the question.
The American public thought that either you were a terrorist or you were not. But in reality, it was never that simple. A terrorist organization, large or small, is still an organization. Like any other organization, it needs supplying from the outside. Is the man who sells arms to a terrorist group, knowing its purpose, a terrorist himself? Yes. But what of the humble man who sells it blankets, or fish, or stone to build a hut in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria? Is he, too, a terrorist?
And what of the man who supplies information?
The Mideast was rich in information brokers. All kinds of brokers, all kinds of information. If you sold information about an oil refinery to what you thought was simply the refinery’s business competitor, and later a terrorist group blew up that same refinery, did that make you, too, a terrorist? What if you were merely the person who’d sold the information to the person who sold the information?
Ruzbihan al-Ashan’s family dealt in copper. They had powerful international business connections, including in Africa. A lot of copper came from West Africa. And a lot of copper was, presumably, sold in North Africa, and not only in Ruzbihan’s native Tunis. Also in Rabat, in Algiers, in Cairo.
What did Ruzbihan know? Did his firm deal with the World Bank, where Salah had worked? And what—oh, God, she hated herself for even thinking this question!—had Ruzbihan been able to convince Salah to do?
“Please fasten your seat belts and return your tray tables to their upright positions,” said a dazzlingly handsome young flight attendant. “We’ll be taking off in just a few moments. We thank you for flying British Air, and we hope your trip is a pleasant one.”
» 37
Ed Dormund got the call right after he and Cora had another fight. There was no bread for sandwiches and Cora was too chicken to go out and buy some. “There’s dangerous dogs out there!” she said. “You go!”
“Like I don’t already do everything around here while you sit on your fat ass and cry,” Ed snarled. Christ, being cooped up with her like this was driving him nuts. He couldn’t go to work because if he left Tyler the fascist government wouldn’t let him back in, and then where would he go? It wasn’t like he had money for luxuries like motels. Cora spent all his money on her so-called therapy and her depression drugs and her stupid crafts.
“Hey, Ed,” Dennis Riley said on the phone, “they get your dogs?”
“No. I set them free.”
“Good for you,” Dennis said, and Ed felt a flush of pleasure. It had been ingenious, the way he’d figured out how to lift the gate latch without leaving the house. He’d duct-taped together the broom handle, mop handle, and vacuum-cleaner extension and had thrust the whole thing through an open window. Jake and Petey and Rex had rushed right out. Now at least they had a fighting chance. Dennis’s praise helped push down the thought that he should have just shot the animal control goons demanding his dogs, but then the authorities would have arrested Ed and his Samoyeds, and what good would that do?
Dennis said, “They got my Lab, Ninja. I wasn’t home and Barb gave him up, she didn’t know what else to do. I don’t blame her, but Ninja didn’t have no plague and there’s a bunch of us that don’t like this god-damn government thinking they can get away with seizing private property without even warrants.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Dennis’s voice dropped several tones. “A bunch of us are going to do something about it, Ed. Are you with us?”
Ed drew a deep breath. In the next room he could hear Cora, moaning again. Rage rose in him, the rage he felt so much nowadays, for just about everything: for Cora and his lousy job and the economy and the government that never did anything to help people like him, only took away everything it could in taxes and fees and penalties and speed traps. And now even dogs.
“Yeah,” Ed said, “whatever you’re planning, count me in.”
» 38
Jess stood in the lightly falling snow beside Rick Carlin, a nineteen-year-old whom Jess had known since he was an infant. Jess and Billy had gone to high school with Rick’s parents. If things had turned out differently, Jess thought as he checked his rifle, this could be my son. Sophomore year he had dated Linda Carlin, who was then Linda Nellis. Why had they broken up? He couldn’t remember. Although he had a vague idea
that Linda had dumped him.
Okay, you all have your assignments, let's do it," Don DiBella said. “Everybody clear?”
No one was unclear, or at least no one said anything. Men and women began to disperse, the town teams more lightly clad than the countryside ones. The town teams would search street by street for the shit-brown terrier with milky white eyes but no sign of aggression, while other volunteers began a telephone tree to ask if anyone had seen the dog. Jess and Rick, a countryside team, drove to the last place the terrier had been seen, the woods behind the Animal Control building.
“Do you think we’ll find him?” Rick said. Jess glanced over. The boy looked excited, nervous, and self-important, all at once. Nineteen.
“Dunno, Rick.”
“What does it mean if we do?”
“I’m not sure of that, either, except that Dr. Latkin thinks it may speed up finding a cure or a vaccine or something.” This sounded vague even to Jess, but he didn’t understand the science here. Increasingly, he thought that he didn’t understand much of anything.
“Dad said there are dog packs still hunting out here. Packs you were supposed to catch but didn’t yet.”
It sounded like an accusation but Jess knew it wasn’t. Rick’s voice had grown thick, and he stared determinedly out the passenger window. Jess said gently, “You have a dog missing, Rick?”
“Zorro. Our Bernese mountain.”
Who had done its best to attack Jess earlier that morning. He didn’t say this, or anything. The terrier was hunting with that pack. The countryside search teams had orders to shoot any dog they saw except the terrier. Rick shouldn’t be out here, but there was no way he could send the boy back now. That would only make it worse for him. Damn, Jess needed Billy. Billy, unlike Jess, could put a bullet cleanly wherever he chose.
Jess parked the car and they started into the woods on foot. It wasn’t hard to follow the pack, which had gone barreling through the brush, breaking twigs and leaving footprints and marking territory. A light snow began to fall.
When they came to Black Creek, here a wide, shallow swath murmuring over icy stones, Jess lost the trail. He looked at Rick. “Any ideas?”
The boy scanned everything carefully, and Jess had a powerful image of Rick’s father Buddy at this age. Buddy Carlin had been a wonderful tracker, back when Tyler had been smaller and sleepier than it was now, with no commuters, no Wal-Mart, no plague.
“I think they went up the bank,” Rick said. “That way.”
They climbed the bank, steeper on this side of the creek than the other, and headed west. If dogs were going to escape the Tyler township limits, this was the direction they were going to do it. At the top of the bank the woods were mostly white pine, birch, and oak, miles of them spreading toward West Virginia. Somewhere out there were supposed to be Maryland Guardsmen, preventing dogs from escaping Tyler. Yeah, right.
“They were here,” Rick said, pointing to a pile of half-frozen turds under a bush. Jess would have missed it. He sighed.
They walked another forty minutes before he heard baying, so faint he had to strain to catch the sound.
“Northwest,” Rick said. “But look over there, Mr. Langstrom.”
“Jess,” he said automatically. And then, “Bear.”
The brush had been raked back as the bear dug for mast. Jess saw signs of acorns, too. Lately bears had been wandering in from West Virginia with greater frequency. Female bears would be denned with newborn cubs; this was probably a male, newly up for the too-early spring, scrounging for food. Hungry.
Rick said, “Dad told me once his dogs ran a bear for ten miles before he shot it.” He glanced at Jess’s face and said, “Not here, of course. Somewhere it was legal. A long, long time ago."
Jess said nothing. The dog pack bayed again, closer.
He followed Rick through the forest. As they ascended steep ground, the trees thinned a little, letting the light snow drift lazily onto Jess’s shoulders. He wasn’t in as good shape as he should be, and he tried to keep the boy from noticing that his breathing had become labored. Rick climbed lightly, constantly gazing around, determined to miss nothing.
But it was Jess who first spotted the blood. A few drops, brownish-red on the lighter brown pine needles. Then more. When he stooped to examine it, his chest tightened. “Not bear.”
“Uh-uh,” Rick said. The few hairs matted in the blood were short, wiry, shit-brown.
They found the terrier a hundred yards on, after more blood. The little body was mangled so badly that at first Jess wasn’t even sure it was the terrier. A foot lay in one direction, a haunch in another. Slowly Jess examined each piece, not touching them, until he was sure.
“Bear,” Rick said.
“Yes.” And not a male. This was the thorough work of a female with cubs nearby. “We need the head, Rick. With the brain.”
They hunted for thirty minutes, but didn’t find it. Shit, shit, shit.
The dog pack burst from cover before either of them was aware of it. Four of the five that had brought down the doe early that morning. The dogs stopped and circled, growling. Among them was the Bernese mountain.
Jess and Rick stood back to back, rifles raised and cocked. The dogs continued to circle. It would be the Doberman, Jess decided; that was the leader. He put the dog in his sights and fired.
The Doberman dropped. The other dogs scattered, howling. Jess aimed at the German shepherd, fired, and missed. Behind him a second shot sounded, echoing off the side of the mountain as if reluctant to end.
Then silence.
Jess turned slowly. At the edge of the woods, almost back in the safety of its cover, lay the Bernese mountain. Zorro. The dog had been fleeing, no longer attacking. Rick stood with his rifle still raised, his young body completely motionless, taut as piano wire. He stayed that way, a boy who had just shot his own dog, until Jess spoke as softly as he could.
“Rick?”
Finally the boy moved. “We had orders. do something very importantOrders.” He resumed looking for the head of the mangled terrier.
Jess was careful not to look at Rick, not to notice whether there were tears freezing on his face. Rick’s movements were steady. All at once Jess remembered why Linda Nellis had dumped him in high school in favor of Buddy Carlin. “I’m sorry, Jess,” she’d said. “You’re just too…I don’t know…wishy-washy for me.”
He searched for the head of the terrier without any real hope that they’d find it.
INTERIM
Newspaper in hand, the deputy knocked on Hugh Martin’s door. The White House Chief of Staff looked up and said, “Yes? Is this urgent, Terry?”
“It’s the Baltimore Sun, Hugh. They got a reporter through the quarantine cordon in Tyler.”
“How the hell did they do that?”
“He sneaked through, sir, from the West Virginia side. You can only cover those mountains so well.” He handed his boss the newspaper and Martin scanned it while Porter gazed out the window at the frozen Rose Garden. The reporter, one Rudy Lundeen, had made the best of his scoop: three separate articles and an editorial.
Martin said sourly, “Where’s Lundeen?”
“Under arrest for federal trespass. Apparently he thought it was worth it.”
“Apparently. So now the world knows that there are still a lot of loose dog packs down there, that FEMA has trucked in enough porta-potties and heaters, and that the CDC still doesn’t have any effective medical protocols. So what?”
Porter didn’t answer. They both knew that the factual reports from inside Tyler weren’t the point. The editorial was.
Martin said, “If we give the order to destroy over a thousand dogs, half of them not even infected, the political fallout is going to be bad.”
“Avian flu has led to millions of chickens being destroyed all around the world.”
“Chickens aren’t dogs. Do you know how Americans feel about their dogs?”
Porter didn’t, actually. He didn’t own a pet, and never
had much liked dogs, who peed and barked and chewed shoes. Terry Porter wore eight-hundred-dollar Italian loafers.
“Americans spend thirty-four billion dollars a year on pets. They sleep with them and travel with them and go to therapists when their dogs die. Hold off on this order, Terry. We’ll just have to ride it out.”
“If even one single infected dog gets out of Tyler—”
“I know. Just hold off a while longer. And tell Scott Lurie to shoot those damn roving packs. He ought to at least be able to do that.”
Porter left. Martin looked at the fresh intelligence report on his desk. Terry didn’t know it yet, but a lot worse things were coming out of Tyler than a single biting dog.
MONDAY
» 39
Allen woke in the hospital very early. His foot was still propped up at the end of his bed, but his mother wasn’t sitting in the chair, crying. Cami had persuaded her that she should go home for the night. Something was still wrong with Allen’s foot and he couldn’t go home yet, but at least he could do stuff this morning without his mother there.
He hoped he could do stuff.
The awful Jason was still asleep. That was good. Lisa was awake, holding her stuffed animal tight, her eyes on the door. She was watching for Cami, Allen knew. Lisa wouldn’t talk much except to say “Poo-poo,” but she liked Cami to read to her, stupid stuff about bunnies or princesses. Yesterday Cami had read to Lisa for hours, when Allen needed her himself. Still, Lisa was just a little kid and she’d seen her mother eaten by their dog so, grudgingly, Allen guessed it was fair that she came first.
Today, however, was his turn with Cami. She would help him with Susie, he knew she would. That’s what she did: she helped people. She told Lisa and Jason that yesterday. Allen’s mom just made people do things they didn’t want to do, and then asked if they’d heard her. That was no help.