Tom stroked my back. He held my head to his chest and patted my hair like I was a little girl. He said nothing.
“Tom, you lied to me again,” I whispered. “You knew how to reach Jack the whole time.”
“No. Well, yes, I had a phone number to reach him, but he didn’t answer for days. I caught him this morning, just as we were getting ready to take off from Salt Lake.”
“And he drove over? What’s that mean, he was six, eight hours away by road?”
Tom squeezed me again. “Don’t do the math, Em. It won’t help you.”
“So where is he now, Tom? Where’s he going? What’s he doing that’s so scary?”
Tom nuzzled his face against the top of my head. “I’ll tell you just as soon as I can. That’s a promise.”
“But what’s all this about his background?” I was fighting back tears now.
“I’m sorry. Forget what I said. It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s a great guy, always remember that. And he’s got two days.”
So there it was. Tom had made a promise, and while he’s a man who knows how to lie, he’s also a man who keeps his commitments. “Okay,” I said. “Two days. But I’m going to hold you to it.”
“Done.”
The rain started half an hour before we went to dinner, and was coming down so hard as we drove that the wipers could not keep the windshield clear. It came down with a passionate vengeance, in drops that seemed the size of dinner plates, splashing on a pavement overwhelmed with runoff, pouring off awnings and palm fronds like cascading fountains. Then, as we approached our destination at the shore, it moderated, quickly tapered off, and then stopped entirely, leaving behind a shameless wetness and the fresh perfumes of lawn, unseen jasmine, and concrete.
Miles Guffey and his wife, Pamela, also had a fancy place, though only half the size of Nancy Wallace’s. Like Nancy’s, it had a screened enclosure—I was beginning to get the idea that biting insects might be a bit of a problem in Florida—but beyond it lay a dock with a big cruising boat instead of a guesthouse. There were boats and yachts all over the place, in fact; they lived on an inlet lined with dripping foliage and stuccoed party homes.
“Welcome, y’all!” Miles called, as Pamela showed us onto the pool deck. “I got the coals going real good, but first we gots to prime the pumps! So whatcha drinkin’?”
“A beer would do nicely,” I replied. “A dark ale. Something I can sort of chew on.”
“Not none of your Coors you cowgirls drink?”
“My tastes have evolved,” I informed him.
“We got. Next?” Guffey pointed at Nancy.
“I hear you mix a noble Salty Dog,” Nancy crooned. “I’d like you to meet my niece, Faye.”
“Nancy, you’re my kind of gal,” Guffey chortled. “Faye, what can I get you?”
Faye patted her belly. “Mineral water for me. So nice of you to have us over, Miles. This is my husband, Tom Latimer.”
Guffey pumped Tom’s hand. “Tom Latimer. The great Tom Latimer. I am truly pleased to meet you. My, my, my. Yes. Well, surely you aren’t holding off on the little lady’s account?”
Tom smiled as a wolf might when it smells prey. “I’m a single-malt man, if you’ve got anything in that category.”
Guffey’s eyes went as wide as his smile, making him look kind of loopy. “Do I? Why, Mr. Latimer, sir, what’ll it be, Talisker, Tamdhu, or some of dis?” He whipped a small, globular bottle out from behind the wet bar that stood by the pool. The label appeared to have been handwritten. “Special stock. They only bottle a couple casks a year.”
Tom smacked his lips. “Cracked ice, and not too much of it, if you please.”
Guffey pulled a drawer out of the bar and fished around in it. When he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he hollered, “Pammy, where’d my ice pick get to?”
“You took it out to the boat, hon.”
Guffey blinked. “Excuse me a mo,” he said, and dashed out to the dock and onto the boat. He was back in a flash with an ice pick big enough to do some real damage. He kicked open the refrigerator below the bar and went at his craft with gusto, lining up glasses and chipping at a block of ice like a mad sculptor. When he was done, and, through some miracle of subtle communication or prescripted agreement, Pamela had taken Faye and Nancy into the house to see some new acquisition in home deécor, and Tom and he and I were settled into wicker chairs with hors d’oeuvres within easy reach, he jumped right into what was on his mind.
“Em here’s got a nice reputation for figgerin’ out geological riddles,” he began. “And you, Tom, are legendary in the trade. So I got me a puzzle for you.”
Tom shot a sideways look at me, then took a miserly sip of his Scotch and watched his host carefully. “Mm?”
I settled in with my beer, hunkering down so the two men would speak freely and I could listen. I thought, What a flatterer this man is. Tom is in fact legendary, but only within the FBI; he’s worked hard to maintain a low profile in the outside world. Now Tom’s going to think I talked him up to Guffey and blew his cover! I said, “Tell Tom about the problem with the reefs, Miles.”
Guffey said, “Yes, well, we got this dust thing. We think dust is carrying pathogens that are killing the coral reefs here in the Caribbean. But we got to prove our theory. Now, our problem is this: In geology, as in any science, the game doesn’t end with your initial observation of a phenomenon; in fact, that’s just where it begins. Say it’s reefs that’s dying, and you don’t know why. So you get an idea about what might be causing your phenomenon. So you start gathering data, try to figger out what makes your phenomenon tick. Your idea begins to grow into a hypothesis. A hypothesis should explain your data, and if you’re a good, law-abiding scientist, you in fact look for alternate explanations. Multiple working hypotheses, we call it. Then you got to test each one of ’em. Identify all your variables and test ’em one at a time, or as best you can. Or test ’em in concert, if that’s what seems appropriate. Or both. You follow me so far?”
“Smooth sailing.”
“Good. I like that. On the basis of whatever testing and data gathering you can perform, you move from a hypothesis to a theory. A theory should explain all the data and be predictive, meaning it should explain all new data you find later. Otherwise, you have to modify or discard your theory. Okay?”
Tom nodded. He had settled back in his chair and looked quite comfortable. His eyes had closed halfway. He was concentrating on what Guffey was saying, one oddly packaged intellectual communing with another.
Guffey continued. “So here’s the deal. We got us a big project. We need all the fresh ideas and smart thinking we can get. Em here tells me she’d like to look at this dust thing like a crime scene. Now, that’s great. So tell me, how’s the way a detective works similar to what I just described, and how’s it different?”
Tom shifted around in his seat. “It’s mostly the same. You start with a phenomenon. Evidence of a crime. Like a corpse or a theft. Extortion. Someone squealing, or making an accusation of something that falls within the purview of your jurisdiction. Then we go through a loop you haven’t yet described, and that’s where you look to make certain you’re not getting snookered by some game your informant or your supposed victim is playing.”
Guffey laughed. “Oh, yeah. We get that in the earth sciences, too. Say the boys and girls upstairs tell me to look at cross-contamination of the aquifers here in Florida, like when the brain trusts that dug the canals to drain the Everglades punched through from one aquifer to the next, mixing good water with bad; well, then first I got to decide whether the crime’s actually happened. What was water quality A and B like before they got started? Did both aquifers really get tapped? Do we really have a corpse, or are the Everglades alive and well?”
“Make me a metaphor that involves your African dust,” Tom said.
“Okay, in the case of my dead corals, I got to make sure first this isn’t something Mother Nature does periodically on her own just to clean
house. And I can’t always prove things like that. So somewhere in there, I consult my guts. I say, in the case of the corals, it happened way too fast, and too many other creatures are obviously in distress, like the Diadema sea urchins. The reefs are dying. So I say, yes, we got a crime here, all right. As in, I think something’s upset the balance, and gone and mucked things up for the corals. And we even have that little jurisdiction thing you mentioned. We’re the USGS, not the CDC; we’re supposed to look at rocks, not disease. But the CDC won’t worry itself about corals, but they might some day get interested in all the asthmatic humans who live hear those reefs. We wind up fighting over something no one else wants to worry about in the first place.”
Tom cleared his throat to indicate that he was listening.
Guffey said, “But then here’s the next bit, and this really crosses lines of jurisdiction: I think there’s a few humans ’at’s gone and gotten personal with what’s riding on the winds.”
Tom tented his fingers. His eyes closed down to dark slits. He purred, “What do you have in mind, Miles?”
“Bioterrorism.”
I almost choked on the cracker I was eating. The first thought that shot through my head was, There goes my Master’s thesis!
The muscles along Tom’s jaws tightened. Dryly, he said, “That would be upsetting.”
Guffey’s eyes flared. “Yes. I see you understand.”
I broke my silence. “What’s your evidence? You got an observer in West Africa who’s seen someone kicking a drum of anthrax into a dust storm? And how’s that going to affect us this many miles downwind? It wouldn’t all get this far, and there’d be dispersion, and …”
Guffey leaned back in his chair and stared up through the overhead screen into the sky, which was full of puffy clouds turning rose-pink with the sunset. Chameleons ran across the screening, hanging upside down by their tiny toes. Guffey’s eyes panned with one of them, an observer doing what he did incessantly, and did best. When he spoke, all trace of humor had left him. “Right. That’s what any intelligent person would ask first. And I got to admit, the idea only tumbled out of my mind as a subparagraph of the working hypotheses, a sort of ‘if-then.’ An abstraction. An intellectual pursuit, just letting the mind follow where it might go. And the first time I waved that flag in front of anyone else, I was trying to get funding from the military. Trying to get someone worked up enough to notice the project.”
He took a swig of his drink and continued. “I like reefs. Been diving all my life. Want to do something for them. But as I got into it with these guys, looking for funding—with the CDC, the Department of Agriculture, the military—I started getting asked to speak at different kinds of conferences, outside my specialty, outside geology even. I began working with the biologists, the medical people, the chemists, the meteorologists. The picture began to change.” He trailed off, continuing to watch the progress of the lizard across the screen. “All this on a shoestring. Couldn’t have done it without the power of the Internet.”
Tom waited. I waited.
“September 11 happened,” Guffey said. “Terrorism on our own turf. Then what came next, remember? Anthrax. The first death was right here in Florida. Then more in New Jersey, and the scare at the Senate Office Building.”
I said, “But that was done through the mail. Those spores were in letters. It’s a lethal bacillus, and it doesn’t take much to cause illness, but it takes more than one spore. You throw it into the wind over North Africa, it’s going to be so diffused by the time it gets here, no one’s going to even notice, let alone get sick.”
Guffey said, “That’s what everyone thinks. But everyone has been wrong more than once in this man’s universe. Hey, all those people went to work in the World Trade Center towers that morning, and I’ll betcha not too many of them thought they’d be lying under tons of rubble by noon.”
I said, “In The Secret Life of Dust, the author quotes scientists as saying that the UV light kills the microbes when they fly up into the air.”
Miles said, “That was the prevailing wisdom, but it wasn’t exactly true. The author of that book had to go to press before we got our early data. We have plenty of germs arriving hale and hearty. I have to suppose that the dust is so thick that whatever’s toward the center of the cloud is sheltered from the UV. But that’s just another scientific wild-assed guess. We get so hung up on guesses that we come to think they’re facts, and they aren’t facts until we put ’em to the test.”
Tom’s face had gone hard with concentration. He said, “But like Em said, show me the evidence that single spores can do what a jet aircraft hitting the Trade Center can do.”
Guffey sat up, frustration making his movements abrupt. “Who says they can’t? Did you know the last person to die of anthrax in that series was a frail old lady in Connecticut? In her nineties. No one could figure that one out. She hadn’t gotten any mail, hadn’t left home in days, but bam, there she was in the morgue with lungs as black and festering as anything you’d see in your worst nightmare. Even I thought: Oh, it’s just a fluke. They missed something in their analysis.
“Well, then I got an e-mail from a feller in England who’s a meteorologist. Like I say, I been traveling in some different circles, and I’ve become part of a grass-roots network of people ’at’s interested in all this medical stuff. So this guy says he analyzed the winds and air conditions recorded for metropolitan New York the evening when that old lady’s exposure would have occurred. What did he find? Moist, cold air flowing straight from the postal building where the letters were handled right over toward the town in Connecticut where this old lady lived. The air would have stayed low to the ground, and there was almost no turbulence. No diffusion. That lady was old and frail, her immune system pretty well shot. Maybe she went out to call the cat, took a deep breath of the night air so she could holler, ‘Here puss-puss.’ You tell me how she got that dose. Thing is, in her case it didn’t take much.
“But here’s the thing: The point of bioterrorism is not to kill everyone. All you got to do to be effective is make enough people sick that the nation’s resources get sucked up into nursing a bunch of invalids. And we are a graying society. We got all these boomers and their elderly mothers living in tight clusters we call cities. Hell, down here in Florida we got all your snowbirds. Medical wizardry has kept them alive long past their three score and ten, and if they don’t get their meds, they’d drop like flies. We’re a hothouse society, used to our little supports. Imagine what a disease like anthrax could do if you moved beyond a half teaspoon in a letter to a whole drum of it dumped purposefully into the wind.”
“We have vaccines,” said Tom. “And antibiotics.”
Guffey laughed humorlessly. “Tests show the vaccines don’t do the whole job.” As Tom’s eyebrows shot up in alarm, Guffey pressed onward. “A combination of vaccination and antibiotics worked the best in clinical trials. Hell, we don’t even know for sure what those tests mean, because we ran them on monkeys! Do you know any human that would have volunteered for that? Nobody in their right mind would even think of it. Not even prisoners. We’re talking about a lethal disease, not the common cold. Even with both vaccination and drugs, you have to start administering the drugs within twenty-four hours of exposure, and the first symptoms take at least forty-eight to emerge, and even then, it comes on like a case of the flu, and no one even goes to the doctor until they’re five inches from gone.
“What’s more, these bugs used by terrorists have teeth as long as your arm. Hell, that’s no normal anthrax floating out of those envelopes. Our own smart guys worked hard to make them as potent as possible, and as you no doubt know, our strains are the source of most of the terrorist supplies in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s boys bought their starter supply from the American Type Culture Collection, a private germ bank in Maryland.”
Tom was starting to squirm in his seat. He’d long since forgotten his Scotch. “All right,” he said. “You’ve got my attention. But take a n
umber on the big list of things to worry about. English Muslims wearing explosive tennis shoes climbing on airliners. Suitcase-sized A-bombs. Pregnant women wearing plastique. The list is endless. We simply have too many things to fear these days.”
I said, “And if you really want to make people sick, rent a crop duster and buzz Miami.”
Guffey took a gulp of his drink. “Sure enough, Emily. Go to the head of the class.”
Tom set down his drink. “Then you’re not talking about Africa.”
Guffey said, “Oh, hell no. I’m talking much closer to home. All’s anyone’s got to do to nail us and hide it under the cover of nature is this: wait for a nice dust storm to work its way across the ocean, then run a drone trawler past us just outside the international limit with a nice smudging device running. Our own military researchers developed the technique. A small canister of the stuff would be enough to kill every man, woman, and child in this state several times over. Hell, the Russians made whole tank cars of that bacillus that are unaccounted for. Where’d it all go? You tell me, Tom. You tell me.”
Tom sat up straight and leaned toward Guffey. “But you’re not really talking about Russian anthrax left over from the Cold War. You’re talking about new germs being cultured right now.”
Guffey stared off toward the sunset. The golden orb had disappeared below the horizon, and great billowy clouds had darkened to a moldering gray. “You are correct. Now we’re getting back to our missing microbiologist.”
– 11 –
Lucy fumbled with the buttons on the front of her best beseen-in-public dress, wishing that, when the publicist had called and asked her to sub for a colleague, who had developed laryngitis, at this evening’s public appearance she had had the intelligence to say no. She would have been within her rights to do so, citing an interest in staying free of germ exposure before a flight. But as usual, she had said yes, unwilling to risk anyone thinking she was not tough enough to do whatever needed to be done. Deep inside the closely kept privacy of her mind, Lucy grumbled, Can’t the PR department do its job without making me trot in front of the public? As her fear and frustration mounted, she thought, Damn NASA for using its astronaut corps like freaks in a sideshow!
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