The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  He winced.

  But not as much as she would have liked.

  “At least look at the data Wey Chen sent me,” he said, retrieving a plain brown envelope from his case and pressing it into her hands.

  It felt thick, containing a few dozen papers at least, and aroused her curiosity. Nevertheless, she threw it back at him. “Shove it, Ryder.”

  The envelope fell between them on the ground.

  He cocked his head. “Just look at it, Anna. As I said, maybe it’s genuine.”

  “Are you deaf, Terry? Read my lips while I say this again. I don’t trust you. Never will. Face it!”

  He stooped down, picked up the envelope, and handed it back to her, an aw-shucks-you-got-me smile parting his mouth.

  “Unbelievable!” she said, stepping closer. Her fury toward his daring to play her so cynically nearly sent her up on her toes again, but where that stance might intimidate lesser mortals, the thought of once more pulling it against him suddenly gave her pause. Shoulders thrown back and snowy cleavage jutting out as she glared into his eyes, she might as well parody a maidenhead on the prow of an oncoming ship. “Leave me alone,” she said instead, not wanting to appear comical, and simply looked up at him with her coldest, icy stare.

  This time the son of a bitch didn’t flinch at all, just stared back at her with flashing baby-blues that ought to have been declared a licensed weapon.

  “I’m not trying to play you, Anna,” he said, refusing to budge, which left his lips an inch from hers.

  For an instant she thought he would kiss her. Outrageous! she screamed to herself, too shocked to recoil. At least that’s how she explained the few seconds of hesitation it took her to duck out of his reach.

  Turning heel, she once more walked away from him, her graceful stride kicking sand up behind her the way a cat would cover a mess on the beach.

  When Anna reached the sliding glass doors to her lanai and looked back, he had already gone. But propped up on a small tuft of grass, the envelope lay where he’d been standing, like bait.

  * * * *

  That night she dreamed of making love with him again.

  Of his urgency.

  Of her hunger after having been celibate for so long.

  She felt the jungle heat of Gabon, their skin coated in sweat until their bodies seemed to flow against one another, his flesh gliding back and forth over her breasts, thighs and hips as slippery and smooth as the hard thrust of him deep inside her.

  She emerged from her sleep flushed with desire and filled with the sweet happiness of that night, only to feel it all drain away, leaving her alone in the dark, riddled with memories as vivid as when they were a day old.

  She’d gone into the area at the general’s request and Terry’s coaxing nearly two years ago, April 2000, twelve months after the latest outbreak of Ebola had killed seventy-five percent of its victims. The source, a chimpanzee found dead in the forest, had been butchered by locals, transported, and prepared for consumption. Officially, Anna acted as a WHO representative doing a follow-up tour through the many isolated villages to verify if all proper precautions regarding food and water supplies were now in force. Unofficially she was to check out rumors that a group of rogue Russian scientists, posing as aid workers, were running trials to weaponize Ebola. Terry would be her contact in the town of Makokou, about a hundred kilometers from the western border of the Congo. “We say goodbye to porcelain toilets and hot showers, the pillars of civilization,” he’d teased.

  They’d worked together before on other assignments, and she knew he liked her. Seeing him every few days for the better part of a month in the relative isolation of West Africa, his interest became ever more obvious. As their conversations over drinks and meals extended well beyond microbiology to literature, music, and art, she welcomed that interest. One evening he simply reached across the table and stroked her hand. “We both want to Anna,” he said. The tips of his fingers electrified her palms.

  That had led to the night she’d recalled in her dream.

  Afterward, forays into the jungle had seemed little more than boringly routine interruptions of her hours with him. There’d been no traces of Russian aid workers, counterfeit or bona fide. Nor did she find any public health violations that might trigger a recurrence of the Ebola outbreak. And whether traveling by jeep or on foot through well-worn paths, she was always accompanied by her guide and a hired security man. Life felt safe, love was working its magic, and she let her guard down.

  One afternoon, everything changed.

  Anna and her two hired men, returning on foot from an inspection of a neighboring settlement called Mayibout 11, had met a group of hunters on the trail, not an unusual occurrence. But these inhabitants reported that they’d come across white men who were capturing chimpanzees, then spraying them with mists in a tent, claiming to be disinfecting them to prevent a recurrence of what happened last year.

  That’s a lie, Anna had thought. No such protocol to stop Ebola exists.

  As was usual for that time of year, sunny breaks had been interspersed with violent thunderstorms, and columns of black clouds were already massing above the hills where the white men had been spotted. Nevertheless, Anna insisted on checking the report out.

  No, I don’t want to remember, she thought, throwing off the bed covers and standing in the open doorway of the lanai. Seeing Kyra sleeping peacefully in a futon of cushions and blankets they’d arranged together comforted her. After a few lungfuls of cool night air, she tiptoed into the kitchen, threw cold water on her face, and drank a glass of milk. The clock said 2:30 A.M. Big day tomorrow, she reminded herself, and began to run over the next talk she had to give, not because she didn’t have it down pat--English, Russian, forward, backwards, she knew it cold--but it helped her to suppress thoughts of Terry Ryder. Repeating it paragraph by paragraph, like counting sheep, she crawled back into bed, determined to get an undisturbed rest.

  Her mind had other ideas.

  The dream picked up where unwanted memories had left off, then leapt ahead in time, and the afternoon light quickly became choked with plumes of black fog and pelting rain. Another leap brought her into night, and the tent loomed before her, its shrouds luminous in the darkness. She didn’t want to go closer, but a hand at her back kept shoving her toward it. The thunder and din of rain couldn’t hide the hideous shrieks coming from inside. She cringed from the sounds, but more hands grabbed her, propelling her forward. “No!” she cried, struggling to dig her heels into the greasy mud as she was manhandled toward the front flaps. They hung listless under the downpour, but rippled when brushed by the frantic movement within, and the screams behind them grew wilder. The creatures could sense her fear, and it fed their own. “No! Please!” She tried to shrink back from the ruckus, but a final, savage push sent her stumbling through the thick folds of canvas into total darkness. She tripped, pitching to the ground on hands and knees.

  First she heard the clink of chains as the animals scurried around her, exhaling hot breath against her face.

  It stank of sour vomit mingled with the stench of rotten meat.

  As they grew bolder she felt the brush of their furry arms. Then came the hiss of nozzles, and a clammy vapor covered her, coating her lips with droplets that seeped inside her mouth, filling it with a bitter taste--

  She woke screaming, back in the soft, early dawn of Hawaii, the air noisy with bird song. Instead of the cloying heat from equatorial West Africa, she felt the cooling caress of the trade winds on her skin.

  She got up again, made herself a cup of coffee this time, and went outside to sit on the still deserted beach.

  Terry had come to her rescue twenty-four hours after her capture. The armed Russians were arrested.

  Neither she nor the two men who had been hired to protect her contracted Ebola.

  But at the time she hadn’t known that that would be the outcome, and the possibility of never seeing Kyra again frightened her more than death itself.

 
; She’d had reason to worry. The liquid they’d sprayed her with turned out to be gastric juices from an Ebola-infected primate that the Russians had captured in the wild. The chimpanzees in the tent had also been infected, from exposure to the spray days earlier.

  Terry had insisted that he inject her and the two guides with ten cc’s of blood from a survivor of the previous outbreak, the local doctor.

  Maybe that’s what had saved their lives. Or maybe their own immunological defenses did the work. Passive immunization against Ebola has never been proven in controlled studies. Luckily such a small amount of untyped and unmatched blood didn’t cause a transfusion reaction. And on a continent with the highest incidence of AIDS in the world, it was doubly lucky that the local doctor who’d donated the sample was HIV negative.

  She took a sip of her coffee and stared out over a Pacific Ocean that lived up to its name this morning, lolling with gentle swells against a molten sun.

  The general’s and Terry’s betrayal had only become clear weeks later.

  She’d initially been suspicious about how readily the Russians had pulled their guns after she walked into the clearing where they were carrying out their wacko experiment. And how summarily they dismissed her story of working for the WHO.

  It had been as if they not only expected her, but knew of her covert reasons for being there. But she couldn’t pin those suspicions on anything solid.

  Then one Sunday morning, weeks later in New York, she’d read in the Times that the Department of Defense had finally flushed out a former soviet mole who’d continued his clandestine work after the end of the cold war. He’d spent the last decade stealing long-range missile technology, but instead of passing it on to his former political masters, sold it to a network of arms dealers in Russia. They in turn, she read, marketed whatever they got their hands on to any militia warlord or terrorist with a visa card they could find, including a then little known figure named Osama bin Laden.

  DOD superiors had caught this mole in a sting operation, having provided the man with classified information and placing him under surveillance to see if he acted on it.

  Terry had returned from Gabon a few nights later.

  By then she’d encased her hurt in steel. When he showed up at her front entrance, all smiles and carrying flowers, she threw the newspaper article at him. “Tell me, Terry,” she said, “when you were fucking me for real, had you and the general already fucked me over? Blown my cover to your suspected spy in Washington? Let him in on what I was really doing in Gabon, expecting he’d pass on the news to warn those creeps who nearly killed me?”

  He’d stood motionless in the doorway, his mouth open.

  She’d still clung to a flicker of trust that this man couldn’t have been capable of such treachery, that he would respond with genuine bewilderment, having no idea what she was talking about. Instead, he continued to stand absolutely still, the way a body initially reacts when it’s struck by a bullet. His radiant expression slid off his face like a rock slide, carrying her fool’s wish with it. He knew exactly what she meant.

  As he’d struggled to find words, she slowly closed the door on him and snapped the lock. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, when he called, she hung up; if he wrote, she returned his letters unopened; and each time he e-mailed her, she deleted his messages unread.

  But even now, sitting on a beach in paradise nearly two years after the finality of that day, a pressure deep within her chest tightened its hold, and a bruise she thought had withered into scar tissue began to ache.

  ...2009...

  Chapter 9

  Thursday, January 22, 2009, 2:31 P.M. EST

  Tenth Floor, Park Medical Building, Fifth Avenue near 69th Street, Manhattan

  The door to Yuri’s inner office flew open and smashed against the wall, sending a picture of Bogie--the one of him dressed in a white evening jacket and wearing a black bow tie as he squinted through the smoke of his cigarette--crashing to the floor.

  “FBI!” said a little man wearing a tan overcoat as he leveled the muzzle of a PPK Walther at Yuri’s head.

  He recognized the make because most of the policemen he’d had to bribe in Hong Kong over the years had acquired them from their former colonial masters.

  The woman lying on the examining table with her feet in stirrups told the gunman to fuck off, and pulled the paper gown down between her legs.

  “Yes, fuck off,” Yuri repeated. “This is a doctor’s office, and I’m with a patient!” Armed with nothing but a vaginal specula, he held the clear plastic instrument like a pistol and faced off with the intruder. Out in the corridor he saw four more diminutive men in similar tan-colored outfits.

  Cashmere, he thought.

  Over the top of their heads, he spotted his latest Velma, her youthful complexion bone-white as she gestured frantically at him on the heels of the invading force. Only then did Yuri click to the fact that all these so-called FBI agents were Asian. “Velma! Call the real police.”

  For his trouble he got the muzzle of the gun thrust under his mandible so hard that it bulged into the floor of his mouth. “Let’s not have a blood bath, Doctor,” his captor told him, grabbing him by the collar and speaking through clenched teeth.

  Still holding the specula, Yuri let himself be marched out through his waiting room. A half dozen of his patients gawked slack-jawed as he passed.

  “Everyone relax,” ordered one of the other cashmere clad men. He flipped open a wallet and held it up to show what looked like a picture ID, FBI inscribed in large white letters on a blue background. “You won’t be seeing the good doctor today. He has an emergency.”

  Yet another of the intruders walked over to where Velma had started to dial 911 and grabbed the receiver from her hand. “No calls,” he said with a smile, roughly shoving her into a chair.

  She started to get up, only to be pushed back down again. “Dr. Yuri, what’s happen--”

  “Do exactly as they say,” he told her, having grasped who they probably were and what they might be capable of if pushed.

  The remaining two stood watching a TV that Yuri had had installed in his waiting room for the entertainment of his patients. As usual it was tuned to CNN, his regular clients being news junkies who, like all good Russians, lived in constant expectation of bad news. Today’s dose of disaster was all about the catastrophic wreck of the USS Reagan.

  “Rumors continue to swirl that the tragedy resulted from some kind of a bioterror attack on the doomed carrier . . .”

  Yuri was yanked out the door before he could hear any more.

  “FBI,” his captors said to an old woman waiting for the elevator, once more flashing their identity cards. They commandeered the next car down.

  On the ground floor foyer there were more startled looks as they frog-marched him toward the front door, still waving their IDs and yelling, “FBI!”

  Cold air swept over Yuri as they pushed him outside and into the worst snowstorm New York had seen in years. Flakes the size of popcorn streaked through the chalky winter light, melting against his face with an icy burn. Everything around him--the passersby, the pavement, the cars, the barren trees in the park across Fifth Avenue, even the noise--was muffled in thick layers of white.

  They no sooner got to the curb than a white stretch limo--the choice of color seemed redundant given the weather--glided to a stop in front of them. Its black-tinted windows made it impossible to see inside. Definitely not FBI issue. More like he was being abducted by some rock star.

  “Help!” he screamed. “Kidnappers--”

  A hand grabbed his neck from behind, forcing him to bend over, and, as the rear door swung open, propelled him headfirst into the spacious passenger compartment. He landed face down on a thick blue carpet.

  Someone kneeled on his back, the door slammed shut, and the car roared away, fishtailing on the slippery pavement.

  He tried to look up.

  The person sitting on him grabbed a fistful of his hair and forced
his face into the plush floor.

  Yuri’s immediate concern became the ability to breathe.

  The pressure on his hair increased. Whoever was on top of him had grabbed a second fistful, pressing his nose and mouth into the carpet all the harder.

  He struggled to draw in air, got none, and began to panic. The bastard intended to smother him.

  He started to buck.

  Someone else sat on his legs.

  His hunger for air rocketed.

  A rushing sound echoed in his ears.

  His lips and nostrils flattened into the fibers until he thought his skull would crack against the steel beneath. A salty, warm fluid flowed over his tongue. He couldn’t see anything but the shoes of his killer and an expanse of blue strands that appeared thick as ropes. Then a darkness crept over him, as if he were inside a black sack and someone was pulling the top closed with a drawstring. He tried to scream, but it came out a whimper.

  Horns blared outside the car, followed by a loud crash.

  In an instant the pressure on his head, back, and legs released.

  He gulped down air, his vision clearing with each inhalation.

  The doors of the car were wrenched open.

  “FBI!” someone said.

  Not this again, Yuri thought, and looked up.

  Tall men in black winter coats surrounded the car, guns drawn. Yuri couldn’t recognize their make, but the open end of the muzzles looked bigger than anything he’d seen on the belt of a regular New York cop. Three of them reached in and manhandled the Asians out of the car.

  “Diplomatic immunity!” the men in tan cashmere were now shouting as they allowed themselves to be yanked into a line, their hands up, but their pupils huge with fury.

  “You too, Dr. Raskin,” one of the new arrivals said to Yuri, grabbing him by the collar and jerking him up off the floor. He wasn’t any more gentle than the Asians had been. This wasn’t exactly a friendly rescuer, Yuri thought.

  He looked around, and saw that a pair of black limousines had crashed into the white one. Its driver remained motionless behind an inflated air bag. Nobody seemed too interested in checking him.