The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  I sighed, expecting another debriefing. “Who’s that?”

  “Her name is Mariana Fernanda de Andrade,” Melody said. “She was until recently, a member of Dragões da Independência, the Presidential Guard Battalion, assigned to protect the vice president. We caught her planting a bomb in the Palácio’s parking garage, in the spot reserved for the presidential vehicle.”

  “Is she—”

  “Infected? Yes. I insisted on a full battery of imaging tests at the local hospital. A doctor there confirmed the presence of a fungal infection with deep incursion into brain tissue.”

  “And you want me to talk to her? I’m no interrogator.”

  “Believe me, the professionals have had their chance at her. I want to know what you see.”

  I rubbed at my eyes. So far, working for the NSA seemed to involve a great deal of operating on insufficient sleep. “I’ll do it,” I said.

  The prison stood on the other side of the city, a twenty-minute drive. It was old, like the neighborhood around it, and made of concrete and steel. The guards wore riot gear and combat boots and carried shotguns and automatic weapons. Two guards brought Mariana de Andrade out with manacles chained to her hands and feet and sat her roughly in the chair across the table from me. They stood behind her, their faces as grim as their black clothing, and their shotguns held diagonally across their chests. She stared at the floor instead of at me, but her expression was belligerent.

  “Are they treating you well?” I asked.

  She held up the thick chains and spoke English with a heavy accent. “Would you be treat well, you have these?”

  I switched to Portuguese. “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I have no authority here. I just want to understand why a career soldier on protective detail for the acting president suddenly decides to betray her country.”

  She made eye contact for the first time and responded in Portuguese. “Is that what you think? That I betrayed my country?”

  “What would you call it? You swore to protect the president, and you just tried to kill him.”

  “Vice president Gonzaga gave up his right to the presidency the moment he called for you.”

  “For me?”

  She made an all-encompassing motion, to the extent her chains permitted. “All of you. Gringos. Imperialists. You have three-quarters of the world in your pocket, but it’s not enough. You want to control Brazil, too.”

  I watched her face, looking for anything unusual, any distinction between the real Mariana de Andrade and the influence of the fungus. “So, you think it’s appropriate to murder a leader who makes a decision you disagree with?” I asked. “I’m surprised you lasted in the service this long.”

  “Not just any decision. This decision.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s our country. Not yours. When he gave it away, he lost his right to govern it.”

  “Did anyone suggest to you that you should do this? Were you in any way prompted by César Nazif or his provisional government?”

  “We’re all connected,” she said. The Portuguese word she used was ligados.

  “Who are? You and Nazif?”

  “Everyone who wants to protect this land and its resources is connected.”

  “So you were under orders? Compelled in some way?”

  “You intentionally twist my meaning.” Her eyes, which had drifted away to stare at the floor, found my face again. “It was necessary. It was right. It was the only thing I could do.”

  I decided to try a different approach. “Do you know you have a fungal organism growing in your brain?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “A what?”

  “A fungal organism. You picked up a lung infection, which would have given you a bad cough for a while, maybe even put you in the hospital. Do you remember that?”

  “I was in the hospital three or four weeks ago. I was coughing up blood.”

  “The organism that caused that infection is still in your body. It’s been growing up into your brain.”

  She shrugged. “I know. The doctor recommended a sugar-rich diet to help it grow.”

  I gaped at her. “A doctor told you it was a good thing to have a fungus living in your brain?”

  “Of course. He said his had been growing for weeks, and that he’d found that a diet high in carbohydrates and sugars helped increase its health and size.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew my brother welcomed the idea of a fungal parasite, but he was a mycologist. He was weird. “Didn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, it’s not exactly a common thing.”

  She smiled. “More common than you think.”

  A Marine helicopter passed nearby, rattling windows with its chop. “Who is your doctor?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the noise.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, standing. “There are too many of us for you to stop.”

  One of the black-clad soldiers behind her said, “The prisoner will sit down.” I realized the helicopter wasn’t passing by. The sound of its rotors was louder and directly overhead, as if it were landing on the roof.

  The soldier took a step toward her, his hand on his weapon. “Sit down. Right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

  The second soldier raised his shotgun without warning and shot the first soldier point blank in the back of the head. The noise was deafening in the small, concrete room. The man’s face and neck exploded, showering the far wall with blood. I stumbled backward, falling onto the floor against the wall, adrenaline flooding my system. Mariana seemed completely unsurprised. She didn’t even turn around to see what had happened.

  I heard nothing but a high buzzing sound and the pounding of my own blood in my ears. In slow-motion, like we were underwater, I watched the soldier turn his shotgun toward me.

  “Stay where you are,” his lips said, though I couldn’t hear the sound. I didn’t move while he unlocked her chains and the two walked out of the interview room, or for long minutes after. By the time my hearing returned, the room was quiet but for the faraway sound of shouting prisoners and the beat of a helicopter’s rotors receding into the distance.

  CHAPTER 19

  Melody was furious. She showed it with a kind of quiet energy that did nothing to mask the inferno behind her eyes, a furnace I expected to explode on the first person not in her inner circle who did something she thought was stupid. She had been a kind of queen of intelligence, bullying the bureaucracy into effectiveness and solving the unsolvable. Now, her agency was utterly failing to anticipate the enemy, and none of the tactics she relied on were working.

  “We need to test everybody,” she said. “All the agents, all the soldiers, the general staff, everybody. We need to know they’re on our side.”

  Melody and Shaunessy and I were crammed into the closet-sized room they’d allocated her for an office. “Is that practical?” I asked.

  “Not if we have to do PET scans or MRIs. We need a blood test, preferably one that doesn’t take a week of analysis in a lab to reach a conclusion. That’s your task for tomorrow. Check with the Brazilian docs who examined Ms. Andrade and see what they can tell you. Then find the Army docs and tell them we’ve got a potential epidemic on our hands. You said your brother has cultures of this thing?”

  I yawned. I couldn’t help it. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the last time I’d slept had been in the back seat of a taxi. “He does, in his lab at UMD. I’m not sure if he’ll be willing to give them up, though.”

  “He’ll have to. This is an infectious disease issue, so we need to get USAMRIID involved, and the FBI as well. This is a threat we can’t ignore.”

  “Does Deputy Director Clarke know?” Shaunessy asked. “And General Cardiff?” Cardiff was the commander of the US forces in Brazil.

  “They know,” Melody said, “but they don’t really believe me. The evidence is pretty thin, and it’s not something they’ve been trained to expect. If people were dying, and I said ‘pandemic,�
� they’d have docs in HAZMAT suits swarming the place like flies. But people betraying their country because of an infection? It doesn’t compute. They don’t have a category to put it in.”

  One thing they had in Brazil was good coffee. I refilled my disposable cup from the pot Melody kept going day and night.

  “What was she like when you talked to her?” Melody asked, meaning Mariana de Andrade. “Could you tell? Did she seem drugged, or high, or like anything was wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “She didn’t, and it was pretty creepy. She seemed perfectly lucid and rational. On the other hand, she considered it perfectly normal to have a fungal parasite sending tendrils through her brain, to the extent that she seemed surprised I would question it.”

  “She knew?”

  “Yeah. And get this—she said her doctor was infected, too. That he was giving her tips for how to help it grow.”

  “We need to find that doctor. Shaunessy, contact the local police tomorrow. They should know how to pull her medical records.”

  “My brother didn’t mind the idea of a fungal parasite either, but I didn’t think it was weird coming from him. I mean, it was weird, but fungi is his thing. It’s like a herpetologist kissing snakes. It wasn’t out of character. From Andrade, though . . .”

  “To be fair, we don’t know what her character was to begin with,” Melody said. “But I agree. Weird.”

  “I’ll call home first thing in the morning,” I said. “If Paul won’t give up his cultures, maybe my dad will allow a blood sample to be sent to USAMRIID.”

  “I know a guy there,” Melody said. “You get your father to give his consent, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  I followed Shaunessy to the hotel where they were housing American staff, and the cheerful desk clerk informed me that all the rooms were full. “Come on,” Shaunessy said. “My room has a pull-out couch. Not much more than a foam cushion, from what I can tell, but it’ll be better than nothing.”

  I felt awkward. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll call another hotel. There’s got to be some place that—”

  “There won’t be. They’ll be booked for miles around, and by the time you find a place, it’ll be morning. Come on. I promise I won’t take advantage of you.”

  I smiled. “Well. In that case.”

  By the time we reached the elevator, my yawns were coming so fast I could hardly close my mouth. I walked into her room, lay down on the couch without pulling out the bed, and shut my eyes.

  After what seemed like only moments, the gray light of morning filtered through the curtain, and the phone was ringing with a jarring tone loud enough to split rock. Shaunessy answered it. She made a few one-syllable replies, then set the phone in its cradle.

  “We’re at war,” she said.

  We made it back to the Palácio do Anhangabaú in time for the general staff’s daily briefing, which was held in one of the largest rooms and packed with people, both American and Brazilian. An Air Force colonel stood at the front, illustrating his summary with a series of pictures taken from satellite and drone imagery. I recognized the format as the same one used by the intelligence agencies to produce the president’s daily briefing. It was the end of the analysis chain, a carefully selected meal of easily digested tidbits linked to maps and statistics.

  I also knew how biased it could be.

  “Ligados forces initiated hostilities twenty miles west of São Luis at 0300,” the colonel said. “The attack was a coordinated land and air assault including a combination of Brazilian and Venezuelan forces. US casualties were light, and the attacking forces were almost completely neutralized. Our fighters followed retreating air units back to Val de Cans airfield in Belém. At 0450, B-52s from the 11th Bomb Squadron commenced a retaliatory strike. Bomb assessment confirms complete neutralization of Val de Cans as a future staging area for air assault.”

  Melody watched the briefing with heavy lids and unfocused eyes. She wore the same clothes as the day before, and I wondered if she had slept at all. The colonel switched to a summary of drone coverage of the Amazon states, noting that the vast area and thick ground cover made thorough enemy identification problematic.

  “He means we have no idea what we’re up against,” Melody said. She didn’t really lower her voice, so half the room heard her.

  The colonel wrapped up his briefing with a series of “happy snaps,” imagery selected more for its wow factor than its intelligence value. We saw an F-22 ripping past the explosion of an enemy aircraft it had just destroyed, the ravaged remains of a Val de Cans airstrip, a ragged line of enemy troops running into the trees away from an unbroken US emplacement.

  “Stop!” Melody stood, her eyes suddenly sharp. “Whose are those?” She indicated the bottom right corner of the most recent image, where I could just make out two blurry aircraft.

  The colonel’s smile was patronizing. “Commercial craft, ma’am. Single-pilot turboprops, from the look of them, maybe agricultural planes. Non-military.”

  “And what possible reason would a pair of crop dusters have to be flying through a war zone in the middle of a dogfight?”

  “I assume they just found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Melody rolled her eyes and turned on her heel, not waiting to hear General Cardiff’s closing remarks. Shaunessy and I traded glances and then jumped up to follow her.

  “What’s up with the crop dusters?” I said when we caught up with her.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  I considered. “They’re requisitioning civilian planes for military purposes?”

  She stopped and faced me so suddenly I almost collided with her.

  “What do crop dusters do?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again, feeling foolish. “You think they’re using them to spread fungal spores,” Shaunessy said. “They’re trying to infect more people.”

  “I think,” Melody said, biting off each word, “that this whole suicidal attack might have been engineered for the sole purpose of getting those crop dusters close to our troops.”

  The radar data confirmed Melody’s suspicions. It was obvious, once you were looking for it. Ten crop dusters in total, flying in pairs from different angles, their approach timed to coincide with attacks by military aircraft. They stayed low and never approached directly, but their course always brought them upwind of the US base of operations or São Luis. In the darkness, the clouds of particles they released wouldn’t have been visible.

  “I’m talking about biological warfare,” Melody said. She stood in General Cardiff’s office, which she had entered without knocking, completely ignoring the fact that he was in conference with his top commanders. She had thrown the data on the desk in front of him and insisted that he treat every soldier in São Luis as a potential hostile until they could be tested.

  The general was lean and tough-looking at sixty years old. His hair was still dark, with only a touch of gray at the temples, and the deep lines of his face cut sharply, giving him an intense, hardened look. I doubted he could have slept much either, but he seemed energetic and ready to take on the world. “We have a process for this, Ms. Muniz. I have a Theater Army Medical Laboratory on site staffed with doctors trained to recognize biological agents in the field. There has been a significant sickness rate, I’ll admit, and they’re testing regularly. But the chief doc out there tells me he’s not seeing any of the warning signs. Just a bad respiratory infection making the rounds, not uncommon with troops on a different continent.”

  “This is something different,” Melody said. “Mr. Johns here has seen it at work.” I was already nervous, standing behind her surrounded by the top brass. Now I wanted to sink into the floor. It was a theory, one that seemed to fit the facts, but hardly backed up with any significant scientific research. If they challenged me on it, I had nothing to back Melody’s claims but my uneasiness with my brother and father, and a lot of unconfirmed pattern matching. “It’s not designed to kill,”
Melody continued, when I didn’t speak up. “At least not many. It’s more subtle than that. It’s going to affect their minds, erode their patriotism, influence their choices. It’s like Ms. Andrade. Until they’re tested, you can’t trust them.”

  “Andrade was a traitor, pure and simple,” the general said. “I don’t need any viral voodoo to explain that one. And what do you expect me to do? Give brain scans to three thousand servicemen? We don’t have the equipment, and we don’t have the time. If you want me to take this more seriously, you’ll need to provide more concrete intelligence than the appearance of a few turboprops on the outskirts of an air battle. I’m not discounting what you’re saying, but it’s not enough.”

  “At least let me speak with the ranking corps officer,” Melody said.

  “Be my guest. You’re welcome to convince him with whatever data you have available. In the meantime”—and here an ironic note slipped into his voice—“may I have your permission to continue meeting with my senior staff?”

  Melody didn’t even blush. “Of course, General,” she said.

  As they shut the door behind us, I heard Cardiff say, “So that’s why they call her the Major.” His senior officers laughed.

  If Melody heard them, she gave no sign.

  Melody delegated to me the task of contacting Captain Suharto, the ranking medical corps officer at São Luis. I called him and explained my suspicions over the phone as convincingly as I could. He was polite, but unimpressed. He asked what medical background I had, what laboratory tests had been performed, what field studies with substantial statistical findings. The longer I talked to him, the more I started to doubt my own theory.

  “General Cardiff said you’ve seen a lot of respiratory illness,” I said. “Has that been fungal in nature?”

  “I expect so, but it’s mostly a presumptive diagnosis,” Suharto said. “Fungal etiology is hard to prove and generally unnecessary to treat in less serious cases. But as you probably know, fungal infections are endemic in this region. The rainforest, the humidity, combined with a large pool of previously unexposed subjects, and a high incidence of minor infection is inevitable.”