“Why does falling in love feel like sleeping with a loaded gun?”
He pulls her closer. “I’d never hurt you, Bird.”
She shakes her head. “It’s the twenty-first century, Coffee. Cupid packs heat.”
* * *
Eventually she picks up her mantle and sword, she hunches her shoulders and ignores her heart and asks him, “So what does it mean?”
“Short or long version?”
“Short.”
“It’s a protein that the v-flu codes for. Part of what makes it so deadly. But that exact stretch of DNA isn’t found on any known flu strains.”
“But that could still mean some Venezuelan scientist developed it, right?”
He stops at that and, inexplicably, kisses her forehead. “It’s not the scientists’ fault, you know. They learn about the world; it takes governments to destroy it.”
“You would say that.”
He sighs. “Get the laptop?”
She pulls it from beneath the bed and watches as Coffee scrolls through his email. The last ten messages are from Aaron.
“What’s Aaron bothering you about?”
He grins. “We’ve been sending each other music. He now likes Caetano Veloso, and I now understand the genius of seventies-era Stevie Wonder.”
“Songs In The Key Of Life?” Bird asks. “I love that album.”
“He said you did.”
“Oh my God, are you getting romance tips from my eleven-year-old cousin?”
“Hey, I know when I’m out of my depth.”
She feels soft and warm and content, which makes it more of a shock when Coffee opens a PDF file sent from a university email address.
Potential Influenza Virus Targets for Artificial Protein DNA Splicing Technology is the less-than-gripping title of the paper written more than a decade ago.
“I appreciate that you have such respect for my intelligence, Coffee, but this is your area of obsession, not mine.”
“The authors,” he says quietly.
The paper has four writers, but only two of them matter: R. Wasson, F. Koramis, G. Bird, C. Bird. The windup and the punch.
“That sequence,” she says, steady as death, “the one on the v-flu. It’s in this paper?”
“With some modifications.”
“What does it do?”
He hesitates. “It’s not entirely clear … things get messy in actual human bodies, and there’s major changes in the genome of the v-flu from anything in this paper. The thing you wrote down, it sounded like the virus mutated after its release, that was what caused all these problems —”
She stops him with a hand. “Just tell me, Coffee.”
“The incubation period,” he says. “It’s unusually long. That’s what this codes for.”
The unusually long incubation period that has allowed what might have otherwise been an unpleasant, localized outbreak to turn into a devastating global pandemic. She presses tight fists against her eyes until the pain distracts her. “Five million,” she says. “You.”
“Whatever your dad did, he’s sorry.”
Because who else could have written down that sequence, the smoking gun that proves the real origins of the “Venezuelan” flu?
“That’s why we got the vaccine so quickly, isn’t it? Even if it mutated, they at least understood where it came from.”
“Your parents probably helped save millions of lives.”
She snorts. “They always acted like they were saving the world. They never said it was from themselves.”
He rubs slow circles on her back. Even now, he doesn’t blame her. It would be easier if he did.
“What are we going to do with this, Bird?”
For a moment she allows herself to imagine it: the scandal of discovering the FBI botched a terrorist sting and released their own deadly bio weapon onto an unsuspecting population. The excoriation of scientists like her father and mother who helped to develop the worst flu outbreak in over a century and covered it up. She would go to the press and tell her story and no one would dare touch her.
But they could touch Coffee.
She swallows it down, that sweet confection, and comforts herself with the reality of his stubble against her forehead. “We use it,” she says, “to get you free.”
* * *
They argue about it for the next day; short, sniping volleys that would make her want to shake him if he didn’t look like he would break apart from the force.
“This is huge news, Bird,” he tries. “The world deserves to know.”
“The world can figure it out later. You deserve to not rot in jail.”
“You forget the problem of me being guilty.”
She stalks to the vending machines and takes her time coming back.
“If you do this, we can be together,” she says.
He hunches forward, pupils dilated with some new drug. “I thought we were together.”
“And when they ship you to Sing Sing?”
“What, you wouldn’t wait for me?”
“My whole life,” she says, and turns away from his smile.
In the afternoon, Bao visits, bringing the bad news she’s come to expect from him. “The prosecutor is contesting the delays. He says we can go forward if Alonso gives video testimony.”
“From his hospital bed!” his mother shouts, saving Bird the trouble.
“I’m fighting it,” Bao says, but they both know that he might not win.
Coffee gets his mother to call Trevor, who stops by an hour later. Bird glares at him, and he smiles back sadly. Trevor and Coffee’s sprawling, gleefully implausible conversation completely excludes Bird, as Coffee intended it to.
“But if the universe was self-aware, there’d be evidence somewhere. You can’t just argue something like that based on probabilities.”
“God, you’re such a chemist. Quantum physics says you’re wrong.”
“Quantum physics says that there’s a nonzero probability your head will turn into a dick, but you don’t see me pulling out a condom, do you?”
There’s a slight pause, during which Bird wonders if she ever heard someone rib Trevor Robinson like that. Should she intervene? But then Trevor actually laughs. “All right,” he says, and puts his gloved hand on Coffee’s shoulder. “I’ll give you that one.”
“Taking pity on the dying friend, is that it? Whatever, I’ll take what I can get.”
Trevor stands. “Get some rest. Don’t die. I’m saving my best arguments for when you get out of here.”
Bird follows Trevor into the hallway. “Thanks.”
“Don’t,” he says, and then stops, as if he’s run out of words. He shakes his head and then hugs her, awkwardly and full of truth. After he leaves she goes to the vending machine and by the time she gets back Coffee has fallen asleep.
Is it okay, Bird thinks as Coffee dozes beside her, to make someone hate you for their own good? The stress of a trial while he’s still in danger from v-flu and pneumonia might kill him. And the trouble, as Coffee said, is that he’s guilty. She’s always understood that the drug laws were the latest incarnation of Jim Crow, a way to target minorities for incarceration (and free labor) without explicitly denying their rights. But the irony is that Bradley boys have been dealing on the side to their classmates for as long as she’s been there, and no one has ever gone down for it before Coffee. And given the pedigrees of the dealers and their clients, she doubts anyone else will.
“I know you know this,” he says, startling her, “but I’m going to say it out loud for your sake.”
“Sleep,” she says automatically. “You’re giving me a migraine.”
“Bird, if I go to them with this, they will never believe you don’t know. All that work we did, everything your mother did for you, that goes away. And your parents might not be very safe either.”
“I don’t want them hurt, but honestly, after what they’ve done, it’s you I’m worried about. They’ll take care of themselves, like alwa
ys.”
“Then what about you? You’ll be watched, recorded, harassed … you might wish you had Roosevelt back by the end of it. I met Donovan too, remember?”
“You’re the only one who could have understood the chemistry,” she says. “You appeal to their paternalism and they’ll believe you. I promise, I’ll keep quiet.”
He brushes his fingers over the pale scar by her hairline, evidence of what happened the last time she became a person of interest. “What if they decide to make sure?”
But even that won’t scare her off. “Then make my safety a condition.”
“What about your happiness?”
“What about yours?”
“Do I look happy to you?”
He doesn’t; he looks exhausted and sick with worry and pain. She is a terrible person for doing this to him, and she would be an even worse person if she didn’t. Is it okay? she asks, and decides.
“I’ll do it for you,” she says. “I’ll go to them myself, and then the fat really will be in the fire.”
“You’re serious.”
“And what kind of danger do you think I’d be in then?”
He’s furious, like he was at the party when she nearly hit him with her shoe. The snap in his eyes shakes her, but she holds her ground. Part of her even enjoys it — the jousting has always been a part of her attraction to him.
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t love you.”
“Why do you think I held out so long?”
“Foda-se,” he says, his voice thin as skim milk. “Get out, Bird. I need some time to myself.”
* * *
The next day, Bao calls before she’s out of the shower. She slips on the tiles and probably voids the warranty of her phone to pick it up with soapy, wet hands. He was fine when she left him last night, but things change.
“I need you to come into the office,” Bao says.
“Is he —”
“The same,” Bao says. “But you need to come here first. Don’t call him or his mother.”
Bird rinses, dresses, looks up Bao’s address on her damp phone, and drives there. She has a hard time finishing her thoughts. Things change.
Citizens for Humane Drug Policy are located on the tenth floor of an older Capitol Hill office building. There’s one other person there besides Bao; they look like they haven’t slept all night. He leads her to his office and shuts the door.
“I check for bugs every week,” he says. “Well, lately, every day.”
“And you’re telling me because …”
“Because we can have an honest conversation. And then you need to forget we ever talked at all.”
Bao leans against the desk, dangerously close to several stacks of books and papers. His tie is draped around his neck, just like a Bradley boy, and she focuses on that, not his red and puffy eyes, not the hard lines etched in the corners of his mouth.
“Alonso has told me everything about your parents and what you overheard during your interrogation by CIA agents.”
The tie is red, just like a Bradley tie, though she’s sure the candy canes would go against dress code.
“Honestly, it makes sense. There have been persistent questions about the vaccine. My partner and I put this together with a few other strange reports that have been circulating — we’re willing to bet that the government has been deploying bio weapons alongside conventional weapons for at least the past year, against traditional drone targets. It explains the terrorist effect — you heard about that? So-called terrorist communities having a strange immunity to the flu? That would make sense if they’d already been infected with the unmutated strain. If the government had deployed it dozens of times, then it also makes sense that they didn’t think there’d be much danger in giving it to their FARC stooges and passing the blame onto Venezuela and even Iran for developing weapons of bioterrorism. That part in your note you didn’t understand, about the used-car salesman?”
Bird forgets herself and meets his eyes. “Yes?”
He hands her a printout of an old article from the New York Times. It details a bizarre story that she vaguely remembers from several years ago — an FBI-thwarted Iranian plot to murder the Saudi Arabian ambassador. The would-be terrorist was an Iranian-American used-car salesman who the FBI had tapped and followed for the entire supposed plot, which involved paying a Mexican drug cartel to make the hit.
“Elements of the government tried to use this to make the case against Iran,” Bao says, “but in the end, it wasn’t very convincing. This guy would never have been a threat without the FBI plant supporting him. And there’s a half dozen other stories like that — FBI thwarts FBI plot. I think what you overheard was someone acknowledging that those sorts of stories aren’t very useful propaganda anymore. Better for the person to actually be caught in the middle of an act, like the underwear bomber.”
“Better for who?” Bird hands back the papers.
“Better for people who want us to take more aggressive action in Venezuela and Iran. Better for war, Bird.”
“And now we have our war. Thanks to my parents.”
He levers himself from the desk and walks over to his window, with a view of the building across the street.
“That mutation … no one could have expected that. I’m betting that it was never supposed to be released in the first place. But even in the worst-case scenario, I think it was like H7N9 bird flu — potentially deadly if you catch it, but it couldn’t spread from human-to-human contact. The chances of this virus mutating to cause a pandemic were minuscule.”
She remembers the argument that Coffee and Trevor had just yesterday, about nonzero probabilities. “There is always a chance. Isn’t that why everyone was worried about H7N9? If you’re right, and they were deploying this Franken-virus with this killer incubation time around the world, then they were loading the gun every time. Maybe the chance was small, but someone always wins the lottery.”
Bao pulls the shades. Bird wraps her arms around her stomach because she knows where this must end and she doesn’t want to get there yet.
“So you were right,” he says softly. “I’m grateful you could convince him. We can use this to make a deal. I’ve been on the phone all night. The conditions are —”
“I never see him again.”
There, out loud. Bao hands her a tissue. “Any further contact between the two of you means the agreement is in breach. They believe you don’t know. But they believe he might tell you.”
“And we’re each other’s hostages. Just like I was supposed to be my parents’ hostage.”
“You were always a more credible witness than Alonso. A US citizen, daughter of two high-ranking scientists in the weapons program, model student … discrediting you was their nightmare. Discrediting Alonso would be easy.”
She isn’t crying, not much, but it’s hard to see. She drags her sleeve across her eyes. “Why didn’t they just kill me, then?”
“Because lucky for you, special service assassination isn’t as easy as it looks in the movies. But … I think there was the possibility with that rogue agent. Roosevelt David. You are both much, much safer with this deal.”
“Never again,” Bird says, just to check. She can’t feel her feet.
“There’s always a chance … quite a few security operatives know the details of this. Sometimes things leak —” He stops abruptly and shakes his head. “No, I won’t lie to you. If you contact him again, he’s in jail or dead. And you’re not very safe either.”
“Okay.”
Bao hands her a manila folder. “You need to sign the papers in here.”
When she’s done, Bird reaches into her bag and pulls out a CD. Aaron’s copy of Songs In The Key Of Life; she figured he wouldn’t mind.
“Give this to him,” she says.
Bao hesitates, and nods. “Did you want to leave any other message? I’m not supposed to do this at all, but I will this one time.”
“Tell him …”
But no. Half of it he
knows already, and it’s too late to say the rest.
* * *
Felice recovers. She moves to a rehab facility in southern Virginia where Charlotte visits a few times, and then stops. The rumors are of paralysis, of cognitive disability, of clinical depression. Bird doesn’t ask.
Bird stays over at Charlotte’s place a lot for the first few months. Her father hugs her every time, embarrassingly grateful that someone is there for his daughter after the initial flood of condolences. They watch BBC dramas and long, complicated animes with magical girls and doomed loves and hungry ghosts. They cook food for soup kitchens and collect clothes for homeless shelters and, occasionally, do their homework. Sometimes Marella tags along, and then, after they stay up all night to watch a Korean drama about a girl who dresses up as a boy to go to an elite school and ends up saving the kingdom, she comes more often. She wonders if it could have always been like this without Felice around, but then winces. Felice took a bullet to save Charlotte’s life; she loved Charlotte, no matter what she thought of Bird. And Charlotte loved her. Bird doesn’t feel obligated to like Felice now that she’s been hurt, but she at least ought to respect the hidden depths no one but Charlotte got to see.
The hot war with Venezuela continues, despite concerned murmurs from coalition countries and stronger rumors that the v-flu couldn’t possibly have been of entirely Venezuelan design. The vaccine halts the explosion of new cases, though the death toll still inexorably rises. People start to talk about other problems: nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, global warming, the stability of global oil production. She reads the national and international news from three papers every day, one of them in Spanish. But Bao’s small hope stays false; no one leaks.
Second semester senior year slides past, her classes not precisely jokes, but nonetheless hard to take seriously. She reapplies to Stanford and Georgetown just to appease her mother, but she has no intention of going to either.
“London, Paris,” she chants with Marella when they talk about the future. She wonders if she could learn French and go to the Sorbonne. That reckless plan she told Coffee’s mother — taking a year off to see the world — looks better with each month of silence. She is almost sure he’s alive, but the doubt tickles her awake in the middle of some nights. She remembers how sick he was, and she’s stared too long at the survival statistics for v-flu with a secondary infection of the lungs. The odds are on his side, but not by much.
Love is the Drug Page 33