Mind Virus

by Charles Kowalski

  She turned to look out over the piazza, which was rapidly filling to capacity as the crowd poured out of the basilica and the European Center for Disease Control scrambled to set up decontamination booths. Fox heard a scream from below as the first person saw her. The voice was soon joined by hundreds of others.

  Fox tried one last gambit. “The fall might not kill you, you realize.”

  She paused on the ledge.

  “If you survive, how many bones do you think you’ll break?” Fox went on. “How many vital organs do you think you’ll puncture? How long will you spend in the hospital before they roll you into court in a wheelchair? Which would you rather? Turn yourself in while you can still walk, or be peeled off the pavement and then arrested?”

  As she stood hesitantly on the granite baluster, another security agent came running with the key. He hurriedly unlocked the gate, letting his colleagues and Fox through.

  That was all the woman appeared to need to steel her resolve. She flung her arms wide, and cried at the top of her voice across the piazza:

  “GOD IS NOT GREAT!”

  And she began to pitch forward.

  The guards caught her from behind and pulled her back down onto the terrazza. As they led her away, Fox glimpsed her face in the glow of the floodlights. The expression he saw there was not fear, nor anger, nor stoic resignation, none of the emotions he would expect to see in a newly apprehended suspect. It looked like nothing so much as disappointment.

  ...

  The Piazza di San Pietro had been transformed. The field investigation team from the European Center for Disease Control had set up row upon row of white tents, illuminated by floodlights, where all the worshippers from the Mass had to be sprayed with decon solution and have nasal swabs taken to test them for exposure.

  Adler had pulled all the strings he could to allow his team to be among the first in line, and to be released to continue their investigation when their test results came back negative. Officers of the Gendarme Corps now led Fox to the Palazzo del Tribunale, the Vatican police headquarters and courthouse, a coffee-colored building nestled into the meticulously manicured gardens of the Vatican interior. He had sometimes wondered what happened to criminals caught in the Vatican—whether perhaps there might be a dungeon or two left over from the Inquisition that could still be called into service when needed—but he soon learned that the country’s correctional facilities consisted entirely of three small “safe rooms,” which rarely saw any use other than to hold petty thieves and pickpockets until they could be turned over to the Italian police.

  The woman they had caught on the rooftop sat in a wooden chair across the table from him, her eyes downcast. An icon of Michael the Archangel, patron saint of law enforcement, hung high on the cream-colored wall of the interview room as though supervising the proceedings. The police had Michael, soldiers could choose between St. George and St. Martin of Tours, and the falsely accused could turn to St. Raymond Nonnatus. What about interrogators? Did they not rate a patron saint?

  He looked at the copy of her passport that the Gendarme Corps had provided. “Mairead O’Mullany, from Tramore, County Waterford,” he read. “Shall I call you Peg?”

  She kept her gaze on the table.

  “I see,” Fox said. “Like the others, you’ve been trained not to talk. So, if you’re not going to say anything about yourself, I guess I’ll have to. You’re a graduate student at Oxford. It was there that you joined OAF, and met Chris, who recruited you along with TJ, Shira, Aidan, and Ahmad. Have I left anyone out? Oh, yes, of course, Kenneth Oldman.”

  She kept her silence.

  “So, now that we have some time,” he said, “maybe you can answer my earlier question. What did these people do to you to make you hate them so much?”

  She finally broke her silence. “How familiar are you with the Magdalene Laundries?”

  Fox grimaced. “I’ve read about them. Not a particularly bright chapter in the history of the Church in Ireland.” These laundries-cum-asylums had originally been conceived as reformatories for prostitutes, but eventually expanded their definition of “fallen women” to include unwed mothers, rape victims, and teenage girls whose families judged them too strong-willed or simply too pretty.

  “Imagine, if you will, a laundry from the days of the Industrial Revolution. Now imagine a women’s prison. Now imagine a convent. Now combine the worst parts of all three, and you’ll have some idea of what I went through.”

  “My God, Peg.”

  “If this God of yours really exists, and if he’s the one responsible for it all, then I’ll thank you not to mention his name. ’Twas his supposed servants, in the name of saving my ‘soul,’ who made me scrub the blood out of hospital sheets, for hours upon hours every day, six days a week, until my hands were cracked and bleeding and my legs could barely support me. ’Twas they who stripped me stark naked so all the other inmates could laugh at how fat I was. Prison would have been a pleasant change. At least prisoners know exactly how long they have before they can be free. As it turned out, I only ended up staying there for two years before that evil place finally closed. But every day of those two years, I was sure that I was going to grow old there, die there, and be buried there in an unmarked grave. And do you know why I was sent there?”

  “Why?”

  “Because, when I was twelve years old, I told my parents that my priest had indecently assaulted me. Instead of calling the police, they called the bishop. The result of that conversation, for me, was the laundry in Waterford. As for the priest, he’s probably preaching his Easter Eve sermon as we speak.” She leaned forward and recited, in a voice brimming with bitter irony: “Thus saith the Lord: ‘Let whoever boasts boast about this: that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight.’”

  “Oh, Peg. All I can say is if I had gone through such a thing myself, I would probably jump at the chance to take revenge on the Catholic Church, too. And you certainly chose a clever way to go about it. Just out of curiosity, how did you get into the cupola when it was closed for the Vigil?”

  “They didn’t close it until the afternoon. It was still open in the morning. One equipment locker, one tiny padlock, one lockpick, and one guard in the box who never looked up from La Stampa. That was all I needed. I guess no one bothered to check whether the number of visitors going up equaled the number going down.” She shrugged. “Italians.”

  Fox had been up in the cupola once before, and recalled how the security check consisted only of a token metal detector. Even if Vatican security could have been warned to expect her, it would take a very astute guard to look at her passport and make the leap from “Mairead” to “Margaret” to “Peg.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Fox said. “My colleague is in the other room right now, talking to Shira. Whichever one gives us the more useful information, we treat as a valued asset to the investigation. The other gets left to fend for herself. Now, it’s fair to tell you that in this game, Shira has quite a head start on you. She told us about your group, and offered to identify you. You can’t really blame her, she has a very strong incentive. Going to prison in Italy might not be much fun for you, but compared to what you’ve already gone through in Waterford, you might actually find it quite mild. Going to prison in Israel would be a great deal worse for her. So, if you want to catch up with her, you’re going to need to start talking fast. Now, about our friend Chris.”

  She looked down.

  Clearly, the Prisoner’s Dilemma was the wrong approach to run on her. By setting up a competition, had Fox made her decide that Shira was already so far ahead of her that there was no point in trying to catch up? Or was she more afraid of Chris than she was of the CIA?

  “If you answer our questions, we can guarantee your safety,” he said.

  To see her look of shock at his suggestion, anyone would have thought he had just propositioned her. “Shira turned on him to save her own wretched skin. That’s o
n her account. I never will.”

  So the Antichrist had his anti-Simon Peter. Fox recalled the look he had seen on Peg’s face on the balustrade, sending a clear message that if she had to sacrifice her life, she would be not only willing but overjoyed to be chosen for the honor. He only knew of two forces in the world that could inspire such devotion, and in spite of everything they said in the Army, patriotism was not one of them. One was faith, and the other was love. And it looked as though Peg had, as Jorge Luis Borges would say, created a new religion with a fallible—in her case extremely fallible—god.

  “I see,” Fox said. “You were his…special favorite?”

  She looked down and blushed, but somehow managed to beam with pride at the same time.

  If Chris was capable of inspiring such devotion in her, she would be able to hold out even longer than TJ. But if she could be convinced that her love had been betrayed, Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like…

  “All your life,” Fox said, “the men who were supposed to protect you betrayed you instead—the priest first, and then your father. At Waterford, you were told that you were a miserable sinner, worthless, unlovable, so many times a day that at some level, you couldn’t help wondering whether it might be true. And then, for the first time, a man came into your life whom you felt you could trust. Someone who made you feel that you really were worth something, after all.”

  As he spoke, her head nodded very slightly, almost involuntarily, as though it were being pushed from behind by an unseen hand.

  “But there was a darker side to him, too, wasn’t there? He knew how to make you feel special…but he also had his subtle ways of making you think that everything the nuns said about you might be right. He made you feel that you were the only one for him…and also that he was the only one for you. That if you were to lose him, no one else would ever love you. Is that more or less how it was?”

  The invisible hand pushed her head more strongly.

  “I suppose you must be curious about how I knew?”

  “Well, then?”

  “The thing is…ah, but maybe I’m not the best person to tell you this.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear it from me?”

  “Tell me!”

  “Very well.”

  He picked up the metaphorical dice, blew on them, and rolled them.

  “What would you say if I told you I heard the same story from Shira?”

  Her eyes widened and locked onto his. “I’d say surely it’s lying you are.”

  Surely it was, as far as he knew. But if it were true, it would have fit perfectly into the profile that was emerging for Chris.

  “I wish I were, Peg. But the truth is, we deal with people like him all the time. I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but he’s probably done the same thing to dozens of other women. When you’re with him, you feel like you’re the most important person in the world to him. But in fact, love is not something he’s capable of. He’s a hunter, he does this for sport. He knows where to find his prey, and he knows all the right lures to tempt them out of their hiding places. But if you let your guard down around him, then you end up as meat on his plate and a head on his wall.”

  She shook her head vehemently, as though trying to dislodge his words from her ears before they had the chance to penetrate her eardrums and work their way into her brain. “No. I’m not having that.”

  “Did he ever tell you his full name? His real name?”

  “Of course.”

  “Which name was it that he gave you?”

  She looked down, lips locked.

  “He never told you, then,” Fox said. “At least not the truth.”

  “He did.”

  “Then what was the name he gave you? Chris w…”

  He had started to ask, “Chris what?” but as soon as his lips were in position to form the “w,” a look of shock crossed Peg’s face. She controlled it instantly, but it had been unmistakable.

  “So,” Fox said. “It was the same name that Shira gave us, then.”

  “What was it?” The question came out in a thin, faint voice, like that of a patient asking, “How long do I have?”

  “Let’s say it together. Three, two, one…”

  Fox called on his theatrical training and spoke in synchronicity with her. The sound came out of his mouth barely a moment after hers: “Warndale.”

  Fox scribbled on the page in his notebook. Chris Warndale. Finally, he had a full name at the top of the wire diagram. But there were still some unanswered questions, mainly the role of Rashid Renclaw in the network.

  Chris Warndale. Rashid Renclaw.

  Like a flock of birds startled from their perches, the letters flew from the page, swooped and dived in circles, and then came back to rest. Fox could barely suppress the urge to leap from his seat and rush into the hall, waving his notebook and shouting “Eureka!” Instead, he looked back at Peg with the aplomb of a master gambler about to lay down the trump card.

  “Peg, I’d like to show you something. We have a source who admitted to selling a sample of the Zagorsk virus to someone named Rashid Renclaw.” He showed her the page. “Rashid Renclaw. Chris Warndale. Try counting the letters, and you’ll see that they’re the same in both names.”

  She stared, clearly seeing the letters rearrange themselves in the same way that he had, despite willing them with all her heart to stay still.

  “Now, look at this.” He wrote a third name, and showed her. “They’re aliases. Both of them are anagrams of Charles Darwin. I’m sorry, Peg, but this name is no more real than anything else he gave you.”

  Fox watched as a five-act play of emotions began to unfold on her face. He had seen the same pattern in other subjects about to break, a pattern strikingly similar to what psychologists called the five stages of grief. Denial, then anger, then depression. Fine, let her take them out of sequence if she likes, he thought, just as long as we get to acceptance in the end. Or bargaining, that will serve the purpose just as well.

  She lay her head on the table and sobbed. He placed a packet of pocket tissues within her reach, and let her cry it out. When she raised her eyes again, they were a dangerous red.

  “He has a house in some fancy part of London.”

  “Do you know where?”

  She shook her head. “We all rode blindfolded.”

  “So I heard. But I’m guessing that perhaps you saw a bit more of the house than the others did?”

  She grimaced at the memory that had suddenly become painful. “To get from the garage to the main house, I had to go outside for a while. But I still had my blindfold on.”

  “What kind of surface you were walking on? Do you remember how it felt?”

  “Grass at first, then flagstones.”

  “What kind of sounds did you hear?”

  “Birds, mainly. The odd car now and then, at a bit of a distance. ’Twas a quiet neighborhood.”

  “And once you were inside the house?”

  “Enormous it was, to be sure. I remember that my steps echoed. I went up three flights of stairs before I finally got to…” she blushed again, “the room where I could take my blindfold off. Sure and it was a gorgeous house. Expensive furniture, chandeliers, decorations all around the walls and ceilings…very Victorian. Ah, yes, and one more thing. I had to duck. Just before going up the stairs, I had to pass through a door that was a bit shorter than I was.”

  Fox drew a rough sketch of the house from her description. “Does this look right?”

  “Something like that.”

  He turned to a fresh page. “What can you tell me about Aidan?”

  “From Belfast, he was. When he was a boy, his parents sent him to boarding school in England. ’Twas while he was there that he got word that his parents had been killed.”

  Fox grimaced. “What happened?”

  “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, nothing more. They got caught in th
e crossfire between Catholics and Protestants.”

  “You mean, between Unionists and Loyalists?”

  “Whatever.”

  “What was he studying at Oxford?”

  “He was reading biology and music.”

  “Music?”

  She nodded. “He’d a fine voice on him, to be sure. He was working on some original compositions, like the Big Band Big Bang and the Evolutorio. He always liked to say, ‘Why should the infected get all the good music?’”

  Between Shira and Aidan, Fox’s faith in music as a force for global peace was slipping fast.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “We parted ways in London. I caught the Eurostar, and he went underground.”

  “Did he give you any clues about where he was going?”

  “No, of course he didn’t tell me where he was bound for. But there was one thing he did say. ’Twas rather odd, to be sure. He said, ‘And so the fool gets his revenge at last.’”

  Fox copied down the words. “Is that a quote?” He wondered whether it could be from Shakespeare. It fit the meter of Shakespearean blank verse, but Fox had no recollection of reading it in any play. A fool, and revenge? King Lear, or perhapsTwelfth Night?

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, sure.”

  “Thank you, Peg. You’ve just helped us save hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

  “Yes. When you catch Chris, could you give him a message from me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell him I’ve changed my mind. I hope there really is a God…and a Hell for him to go to.”

  ...

  Possibly out of patriotic sentiment, Adler had booked them into the Hotel Columbus, at the corner of the Via della Conciliazione and—in a twist of the knife—the Via dei Cavalleri del Santo Sepolcro, the Street of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. Fox climbed up and down numerous staircases, and wandered through labyrinthine halls furnished with desks that could have come from a monastery scriptorium, before he found their room.

  “How did it go?” asked a haggard Adler.

  Fox briefed him. “Any word on whether any contamination escaped?”