The Pinocchio Syndrome

by David Zeman

  The boy’s eyes were beginning to glaze over. Rafe aimed a powerful kick at his undefended temple. Dick was kneeling to undo the boy’s fly.

  Then something happened.

  Dick’s hands froze in midair. His face, contorted in a grimace of hate, suddenly went blank. Off balance, he teetered and fell to the ground, his arms and legs rigid.

  “Dick? Are you all right?”

  Rafe and Donny paused to look at him. Rafe, assuming the black boy had injured Dick in some way, aimed a hard punch and hit his unprotected stomach. The boy screamed.

  Donny bent to look at Dick. “Fucker passed out on us.”

  Rafe pushed Donny aside to get a better look at Dick, whose eyes were wide open. They were not the glazed eyes of a drunken man.

  “Bullshit,” Rafe said. “No way. He’s not passed out.”

  The two men stood swaying over their friend, swearing inconsequentially as they wondered what had happened. They did not notice the black boy as he crept away into the thick brush.

  “You don’t think . . .” Rafe was scratching his head.

  “Come on, don’t bullshit me.”

  “You know . . . that thing . . . that sickness.”

  Donny looked closely at Dick’s eyes. “Jesus.”

  “Let’s get him to a hospital.”

  Rafe had jumped back in alarm. He seemed afraid of the inert body of his friend. He shook his hands as though to rid them of a contagion. “Fuck that. Let’s get out of here. We’ll call an ambulance.”

  They hopped into the truck, suddenly sober. Rafe gunned the engine. Spinning the wheels on the gravel, he got the truck onto the road and hit sixty within a few seconds.

  The roar of the engine subsided. The only sound was the wind in the weeds. The black boy was nowhere to be seen. The motionless white man lay on the shoulder, where a passing farmer would notice him before dawn.

  Rafe would fall into drunken sleep before dawn. When he failed to awaken by mid-afternoon, his brother would become alarmed and call 911.

  By then Donny would already be in the hospital, a victim of the mystery disease like his two friends.

  11

  —————

  Washington

  November 25

  KAREN EMBRY was waiting for a news conference to be given by the director of the CIA.

  The director was a political appointee who had played a crucial fund-raising role in the president’s narrow election victory. His background was in business and advertising. He had not expected to end up on the hot seat in his new job, though he was aware of the embarrassments suffered by the intelligence community over the past decade.

  But theCrescent Queen explosion changed all that. The public held the CIA responsible for not anticipating the terrorist threat and taking steps to prevent attacks. The agency’s fecklessness was one of the key issues cited by those who wanted a new administration in Washington.

  So the director was on the defensive today as usual.

  Karen had arrived at CIA headquarters a half hour early, and she studied her notes as other journalists set up video cameras and joked with each other. She had dressed carefully for the news conference. She knew the director liked women. She wore a fitted blazer with a short skirt. Her legs were her best feature, along with her eyes, and she knew how to show them off.

  The director began the news conference with some routine details about the population of terrorists in European jails. His voice was hard to hear, and his syntax was slightly garbled as usual. Evasiveness had become part of his persona, like the character in Proust who became deaf when unwelcome things were being said to him.

  He droned on as long as he dared and finally threw the session open to questions. Karen was the first reporter to raise her hand.

  “As you know, sir,” she began, “the intelligence community has not gotten to the bottom of theCrescent Queen disaster.”

  This question was not a surprise. But it was a sore point with the director.

  “All I can tell you about that,” he replied carefully, “is that we’re investigating. We will bring those responsible for the attack to justice.”

  “All the major known terrorist organizations have denied involvement in the attack,” Karen said. “Isn’t that true, sir?”

  “Yes, but we suspect their denials are in bad faith,” the director replied.

  “The intelligence services haven’t been able to prove that any terrorist group had either nuclear weapons or the missiles to deliver them, isn’t that true?” Karen asked.

  “That’s true.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that someone else was behind the attack?”

  The director raised an eyebrow.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “If we suppose for the sake of argument that none of the known terrorist groups was behind the incident,” Karen said, “wouldn’t it be possible that someone else built and delivered the bomb, knowing that the existing terrorist groups would fall under suspicion?”

  The director did not know how to answer.

  “We have no evidence that such a scenario is the correct one,” he said.

  “But if it were,” she pursued, “how would you proceed?”

  The director was thrown. His professional role was to sift through data and find the most clear and obvious answer. He had no time for unlikely hypotheses, and didn’t really know how to deal with them.

  “All I can tell you is that we’re investigating all possibilities,” he said. “The very fact that an outlaw organization possessed the technology to use a nuclear weapon”—he pronounced the wordnucular —“against innocent civilians is a monstrous thing, a totally unacceptable thing. I guarantee you we will find out the truth behind theCrescent Queen disaster, and those responsible will be punished to the full extent of the law.”

  Karen waited while he answered a softball question from another reporter. Then she raised her hand again.

  “The wire services are reporting an outbreak of illness in southern Tennessee that has features in common with last week’s outbreak in Iowa,” she said. “You’re familiar with that, sir?”

  “Yes, I am.” The director had been informed as a matter of routine about the outbreaks in Iowa and Tennessee but had not given the matter much thought, since it was outside his field of expertise.

  “Do you consider the outbreaks to be a public health concern?” Karen asked.

  “Certainly. The public health people are looking into it.”

  “But not a terrorism concern.”

  “We have no reason to suspect that.”

  Karen pushed an errant lock of her dark hair away from her eyes.

  “Let me ask you hypothetically, Mr. Director—suppose that terrorists possessed a chemical or biological weapon capable of affecting large groups of people in a short period of time. Do you think the radical terrorist organizations would shrink from using such a weapon on a mass scale?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure,” the director replied. “But I would not like to find out. I want to be sure that none of the terrorist groups ever develops that capability.”

  “Do the outbreaks in Iowa and Tennessee put thoughts like this into your head?”

  The director thought for a moment.

  “They would if the disease we found there could be linked to any known toxin or pathogen.”

  “And it has not?”

  “No, it has not.”

  “Are you saying, sir, that it is the same disease in both locations?”

  “No, I’m not,” the director replied with some irritation. “I’m only relating what I’ve been told by the public health authorities.”

  “You’re saying that neither disease presents symptoms associated with known pathogens or toxins?”

  “To my knowledge, neither. That’s correct.”

  “What if a toxin or pathogenas yet unknown to the authorities had in fact been used?”

  The director shrugged this off. “You’re talking
about a hypothesis for which we have no evidence. It’s hard for me to comment about such things.”

  He made a point of calling on other reporters for the next several minutes. Karen let him get away with it, for she was confident he would look at her sooner or later. He had noticed her beauty.

  When his eyes darted to her she pounced. “You’re aware, Mr. Director, that Vice President Everhardt’s illness is baffling the physicians at Walter Reed,” she said. “Are you concerned that a man so important is ill, and nobody knows why?”

  The director was taken off guard.

  “I don’t know that to be true,” he said. “The doctors are evaluating the vice president’s condition and giving him the best possible treatment. I don’t know that they are ‘baffled,’ as you put it.”

  “But no one at Walter Reed or in the White House has been willing to comment on the situation,” Karen said. “Don’t you think the public has a right to know what the vice president is suffering from?”

  The director frowned. “I’m not really the person for you to be asking about that,” he said. “I’m not a physician, and I’m not close to the situation. I’d suggest you speak to the doctors.”

  “They’re not talking.”

  The director was ruffled by Karen’s questions. It had been a long time since he had been grilled this way by a reporter. Her questions were maddening because he didn’t have good answers to any of them.

  “Sources have told me,” she pursued, “that the vice president’s illness has features in common with the outbreaks in Iowa and Tennessee. Is there any truth to that?”

  “None at all, to my knowledge,” the director replied. “Miss Embry, at the risk of offending you, I think we should stick to the topic at hand.”

  “The topic, as I understand it, is terrorism,” Karen countered. “It seems clear that terrorism and public health are two issues that can’t be separated easily.”

  “Nor can they be connected easily,” the director said. “Not without hard evidence.”

  He did not call on Karen again. The news conference petered out amid questions about the ongoing Chechen uprising in Russia and the India–Pakistan conflict.

  As the reporters were packing up their equipment the director’s press secretary appeared at Karen’s side. A tall, handsome man who looked strikingly like a male model, he had kept a low profile during the news conference.

  “I’m Mitch Fallon,” he said, extending a hand. “Why haven’t we met before?”

  “I moved here from Boston last spring,” Karen said. “I’m doing a series of articles on politics and public health issues.”

  “Well, it’s good to have you here,” he smiled. “However, I must say you seem to have a slight tendency toward the hypothetical.”

  She smiled. “Back in the eighties, who could have guessed that the money being used to support the Contras in Nicaragua was coming from Ronald Reagan through the Ayatollah Khomeini? Sometimes the wildest hypothesis is less strange than the truth.”

  “I have to agree with you there.”

  He studied the young reporter. Her look of permanent skepticism seemed superimposed over a face that, at rest, would have communicated something quite different. Something soft and even girlish that she had long since renounced.

  “Do you have any evidence for your theories about theCrescent Queen ?” he asked. “I mean, about terrorists having the capacity to make and deliver nuclear weapons.”

  There it was again—nucular. Karen had to suppress a smile. Was Fallon mispronouncing the word out of loyalty to his boss? There was no way to know.

  “No.” She shook her head. “It’s just a possibility I’ve been wondering about. I thought it was strange that all the known terrorist organizations denied being involved. Something about that had a ring of truth. They’re ruthless people. They don’t care about public opinion. They wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.”

  “What about the illness in Iowa, and the Tennessee problem?” he asked. “What got you interested?”

  “I try to keep tabs on the news from the various public health organizations,” she said. “I just thought the stories sounded strange. I’ve done articles on the major viruses, HIV and Ebola and Marburg and so on. I flew out to Iowa a couple of days ago, by the way.”

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “A little, here and there.”

  He was looking at her with apparent admiration for her beauty, though she sensed a harder scrutiny behind it.

  “What evidence do you have that such a thing might be intentional?” he asked.

  “None,” she said, not taking her eyes off him.

  “What makes you think the connection is even possible?” he asked.

  “It seems to me that it’s just a matter of time,” she said. “If you look at the terrorist activity over the last couple of decades—Lockerbie, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center, and of course theCrescent Queen —it’s obvious that the terrorists have been coming into possession of better and better technology. They’re not the old-fashioned bomb-in-the-suitcase types. They’re twentieth-century men, like everybody else. And with countries like Iraq and Libya stockpiling chemical and biological weapons, it seems to me almost inevitable that sooner or later we’re going to see a terrorist attack employing such weapons.”

  “A scary thought,” he said.

  “But not unrealistic,” she replied. “The terrorists don’t care much about human life. They do what they think they have to do to achieve their ends. As I say, some things are only a matter of time.”

  “But you don’t have any evidence that the time is now,” he probed.

  “No.” She shook her head.

  There was a pause. Fallon nodded to a female reporter who was hurrying past with a cameraman in tow. Something about the nod seemed a bit too familiar for a high-level official’s press secretary. Karen suspected Fallon was a ladies’ man. She filed away her intuition for future reference.

  “Well,” he said. “Nice talking to you.”

  “If it was possible to make a person sick for political purposes,” she said, “Vice President Everhardt would probably be a good choice, given the current circumstances. Don’t you think so?”

  Fallon smiled. “You certainly do have a tendency toward the hypothetical,” he observed.

  “Think about it a moment,” she went on, undaunted. “Everhardt was the ideal running mate for the president five years ago. He was chosen over a lot of other possible candidates, and the process of selection took a long time. Now, just like that, he’s out of the picture.”

  “That’s true.”

  “The administration has been struggling in the polls, with all these calls for the president to resign,” Karen said. “Now, with Everhardt removed, the pressure will probably increase. The administration looks weaker than ever.”

  Fallon nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Suppose for the sake of argument that Everhardt was eliminated intentionally,” Karen suggested.

  “That’s a heck of a supposition,” Fallon observed.

  “Far-fetched or not,” the reporter said, “suppose it was true. Unlikely things happen in the world, don’t they? Think of the Kennedy assassination. Nobody saw it coming. And the ripple effect was enormous. The whole course of our history . . .”

  As a CIA man Fallon bristled at the mention of the Kennedy assassination.

  “I’m afraid I’m out of time, Miss Embry. I wish you good luck with your theories.”

  “Call me Karen.” She held out a hand. Mitch Fallon was a person she had to be nice to.

  “Karen, then. Call me Mitch. Keep in touch. Nice to meet you.”

  “Same here,” she smiled. “I’ll be around.”

  He watched her walk away from him. She moved with firm strides, her body lithe and athletic.The young female animal at the peak of her powers andher attractiveness, he thought. If she was this intense on the job, what must she be like between the sheets?

  He stopped in at the d
irector’s office on his way back to his own office.

  “Did you talk to her?” the director asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What does she have?”

  “Nothing, except an overactive imagination. As far as I can see.”

  “Keep your eye on her.”

  “I will, sir.”

  The director turned his back.

  Karen arrived home an hour after the news conference. Before turning on the computer to write down her notes, she rewound the tape on her office VCR and checked the last hour of news. An item immediately caught her eye.

  “Health authorities in Australia are concerned about a tiny Aborigine village deep in the outback where a strange and crippling illness has broken out. Over a hundred villagers are unable to speak or move. Others, according to doctors on the scene, have died of the disease, which was apparently not reported at first because of the remoteness of the village.”

  A video image of one of the victims was displayed behind the commentator. It was a close-up, surprisingly eloquent, of an Aborigine girl, perhaps seventeen years old, whose eyes looked unseeing into the camera. The eyes were macabre. They looked hypnotized from within.

  Karen dropped her notes and looked long and hard at the TV screen.

  She had seen that look before. On the face of a six-year-old child in Iowa.

  12

  —————

  THE GIRL is bound to an apparatus which resembles a couch or examining table, tilted sharply toward the floor. Her skin glows against the black leatherette, the more so because of the light shining down from above. Her eyes are open, but she seems to sleep like the princess in the fairy tale. Her hair is blond. It is in disarray and hangs over her left cheek, obscuring much of her face.

  Her hands are bound by rings fixed under the seat. Her legs are not bound, but because of the shape of the apparatus she assumes the crouch as a natural position. Her knees are bent, the thighs approximately vertical, the calves angled toward the floor. It is just possible for the eye to see that her toenails are painted, though the color does not come through from this vantage point.

  Her left breast is clearly visible, pushed against the leatherette. The outline of her ribs is seen under the skin of her side. Her arms are long and slender.