Code Orange

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Dr. Larkin went back into his office. Olivia and Derek went out the front door. They stood on the granite steps staring at a sky that also looked granite.

  “I can't believe that man seriously thought you and I would sit in a classroom at a time like this,” said Olivia.

  “Let's go over to Mitty's apartment,” said Derek. “See what his parents know.”

  “You think they'll talk to us?” she said doubtfully.

  “Mitty's best friend and his girlfriend? Of course they'll talk to us. They must be scared to death, hanging over their phone, trying to call Mitty on his cell, praying he'll call them, reading his biology paper and that horrible letter over and over.”

  “I don't think Mr. and Mrs. Blake even know I exist.”

  “Probably not,” agreed Derek. “If I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't talk it over with my mom and dad. But they know now, because they must have talked to these guys.”

  It was only a dozen short blocks to Mitty's, making the subway more trouble than it was worth. Olivia was usually a big window shopper and loved looking in every window, from the locksmith with his four-foot-wide shop to the shoe store she couldn't afford, from the boutiques that specialized in brimless caps or glitzy evening bags to the bakery windows, where she took one look and had to have that pastry or collapse. Now she couldn't see through her tears. “Let's not take Columbus Avenue,” she said to Derek. “Let's walk along the river.”

  “He's not in the river, Olivia. If the NYPD or the FBI thought Mitty drowned himself, they'd be out there.”

  But they turned west anyway. East-west blocks werelong, and today they seemed even longer. At the sight of the Hudson, Olivia burst into tears. “Why didn't Mitty trust me? Why didn't he share any of this with me?”

  “He didn't trust me either and I'm not crying,” said Derek. “Cut it out with the emotion. We have to think what to do next.” Derek would stack his brains against anybody's, and Olivia's brains were way better than his. The two of them could get ahead of any old FBI in a New York minute.

  “If Mitty could communicate with us, he would,” said Olivia. “His silence is a bad sign.”

  Derek wasn't convinced that Mitty wanted to do any communicating. If Mitty had gone underground, he could only pull it off by not communicating. The problem with vanishing in New York was, where did you find the privacy? And the money to pay for it? Transportation was a problem. Sure, there were a million trains and buses. But to where? And what then? “Stop trying to see a body in the Hudson, Olivia. We need to figure out where Mitty would hide out.”

  “You think that's what happened?”

  “I would hide out. It would be more fun that way. Well, fun if you don't get smallpox. Mitty gets smallpox and I guess he's pretty much permanently out of fun.”

  Olivia sat down on a bench. There were dozens of them facing the Hudson, lined up against gnarled cherry trees. In spring, summer and fall, Riverside Park was a joy. In February, it had nothing going for it. Derek sat down next to her.

  “I'm not going to school tomorrow either,” Olivia told him.“I don't want anybody questioning me. I don't want to risk sobbing with anybody but you. I don't want to dosomething stupid like take a quiz. I just want to sit on this bench.”

  “And freeze to death and think about Mitty?”

  “No, we'll think of something to do. We'll accomplish something.” Olivia took out her cell phone and called the school.

  “Olivia?” said Dr. Larkin excitedly, as if he had known all along that she would tell him everything.

  “Derek and I will not be in class for the remainder of the week.”

  “Olivia! I don't know what's going on, but you leave whatever it is to the FBI. You two get back here right now or I will telephone your parents.”

  “And tell them what,” asked Olivia, “since we are not permitted to discuss any aspect of this? Derek and I will not fall behind in class. Kindly give us excused absences for the rest of today, and for Thursday and Friday.”

  How surprising, thought Derek, that Mitty had been drawn to this girl. Mitty was relaxed and good-humored, slow to worry and quick to have a good time. Olivia was not relaxed, not particularly good-humored, and had a rare definition of a good time: scholarship.

  Olivia hung up. “It was fun to give Dr. Larkin orders. But basically I'm scared, Derek. The men in the office and Dr. Graham—they didn't seem scared. How come they weren't scared?”

  “I think they're just good actors. But maybe they know more than they said. Or they're too excited to be scared. I was excited following anthrax history. You were excited following typhoid. But this is the real thing. Maybe it's so exciting to be in the midst of bioterrorism that theydon't have time to be scared. Now. You're right. We have to think of something to do.”'

  “I can't think of anything except to walk up and down every street of the five boroughs looking for a thread from Mitty's sweater,” said Olivia glumly.

  “I bet it's only four boroughs,” said Derek. “Manhattan's pretty high rent for taking prisoners. They'd want some isolated warehouse in some wreck of a slum where Mitty could scream all he wants and nobody would hear.”

  They gazed at the water. No bodies. Nobody looking for bodies either.

  Derek couldn't stand it. He hauled Olivia on to Seventy-second Street, where they left the park, passed Eleanor Roosevelt's statue and headed to Mitty's.

  “It just seems strange,” said Olivia,“for those guys to tell us everything and risk having us let out the news. Smallpox news.”

  It's all about risk, thought Derek. You're always guessing. A little knowledge here, a speck of information there. You do the best you can with what you have.

  And what does Mitty have right now?

  Anything?

  Mrs. Blake was barely holding together. She struggled to have a normal conversation with these friends of her missing son. “I wish I'd known Mitty was dating such a lovely girl,” she said, trying to smile.

  “It's a stretch to say we're dating,” Olivia said honestly. “I was pushing for it. But Mitty's mind was elsewhere.”

  Mrs. Blake started weeping, which, from the look of her face, she'd been doing a lot of. “His mind was on deathand disease. I had no idea Mitty was keeping secrets from me.”

  Derek was pretty sure every sixteen-year-old boy in the world kept secrets from his mother. But for Mitty's sake, he was nicer than he would have been to his own mother. “Not secrets, Mrs. Blake, just stuff he hadn't worked through yet. The whole letter is somebody still thinking it through.”

  He saw that she did not agree, that she had found the letter pretty coherent. She looked away from Derek and into the eyes of this girl her son liked. “Do you think Mitty killed himself?”

  “No,” said Olivia calmly.

  Derek gave Olivia points. He told Mrs. Blake about Mitty's teen suicide essay.

  Mr. Blake was just standing there. Derek didn't want to look at Mitty's father. He was afraid that while Mitty's mother was still hoping, Mitty's father had assumed the worst.

  Mrs. Blake pressed her hands over her mouth and then took them away, and words she did not want to speak flew out of her mouth. “What do you think of the FBI's theory, about, you know, some sort of people taking Mitty?” She was dancing around the word terrorists. “What if he's out there somewhere, the prisoner of somebody planning to harvest smallpox virus from his body?”

  “Harvest?”repeated Derek.

  “That's the word the CDC used. As if it's a crop. As if Mitty is a field. And when he breaks out in pustules—”

  Derek changed the subject. “Did you guys know about these scabs?” he asked Mr. Blake.

  “No. They searched his room, but although Mitty hadfour old books listed in his bibliography, there are only three under his bed. No envelope. His backpack is gone, though. Maybe he has that book and the scabs with him.”

  “Can we look around?” asked Derek.

  “Sure, but the FBI was thorough.” Mr. Blake led them into Mitty's
bedroom.

  Olivia stood in the door of Mitty's room, appalled. She didn't even want to go in. People lived like this? People she liked lived like this?

  “What exactly happened? You called the NYPD and then they called the FBI and the CDC?” asked Derek.

  “As far as we can tell, Mitty's e-mails were forwarded to the FBI and to the CDC. Both of them were closing in on his location at the same time we were calling the police. The CDC got here in the middle of the night, hoping to find the scabs. The FBI dusted for fingerprints, as if Mitty could have been snatched from here.”

  Derek doubted that. What with doormen and desk staff, it would be hard for strangers to get into the building unnoticed, and if they did slip in, and knew the right apartment, and got up to the eighth floor, and Mitty let them in, and they overpowered him—how did they get him back down in a small elevator used by twenty-six floors' worth of residents without somebody noticing an unconscious or fighting teenage boy?

  They went back to the splendid living room, with its fine paintings and large furniture. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked down on a school playground and the thin, sad boughs of small trees in winter. Behind these were apartment buildings, narrow and tall like a child's drawing of a cityscape.

  Olivia said,“Does Mitty's sister know?”

  “We called Emily at college,” said Mrs. Blake. “Her plane is due in another hour. We can't leave the phone in case Mitty calls. My brother is picking her up.”

  If Mitty called, he could use their cell numbers; they didn't have to stay in the same room with their regular line. But maybe if the Blakes weren't safely inside this apartment, their fear would spin out of control. And there was a lot to be scared about. Because kidnappers would want Mitty dead in the end, Derek thought, since he could identify them. So even if Mitty hadn't already died of smallpox, or drowning, or anything else, he was still going to be dead.

  Mitty's father must have arrived at this conclusion before Derek and was keeping silent because he knew there was no good ending.

  Mrs. Blake and Olivia were filled with hope and the conviction that all would be well.

  There's no way, thought Derek.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Aaintly, through the hole where the TV cable had been strung, Mitty heard a radio. He chinned himself on a black iron pipe to listen. The dial was tuned to 1010 WINS.

  The camp bed was not sturdy enough or high enough for Mitty to stand on, and there was no handy stool to drag over, so when the ads came on, he let go of the pipe and rested and when the news came on, he chinned up again. Eventually, he had heard traffic, weather, sports and headlines.

  Twenty-four hours since anybody had heard from him and yet Mitty Blake was not a headline.

  How could that be? His mother went ballistic when he missed one hour of school. She was not going to take anovernight disappearance lightly. By now, she would have phoned everybody she'd ever met and his sister, Emily, would be on her way home from college. Mrs. Blake would want not just the NYPD on this, but also the FBI, the CIA and Superman.

  In ordinary circumstances, the police would probably refuse to get involved. Sixteen-year-olds run away and do stupid things, and there you have it. But by now, somebody somewhere ought to be looking for Mitty

  But no one was.

  Mitty felt his way around in the dark, touching every wall, jumping up to touch every support beam, sliding his fingers down electrical wires and plumbing connections, running his hands along the bottoms of rafters. Mainly he got splinters. Finally, he located a nail so lightly tapped into the wood that he was able to pull it out with his fingers. It was not much of a nail, long and thin, barely strong enough to hang a calendar on.

  My weapon, thought Mitty.

  Then he taught himself to find the lightbulb from anywhere in the cellar by counting off paces.

  At some point they stopped listening to the radio upstairs. Bad enough he was down here in the dark with a nail instead of a chain saw. Now he'd lost his only friend, the constant cheery repetition of the same old news. If he lived through this, he was definitely planning to patronize all the WINS advertisers, the only people right now who cared about him and wanted him alive.

  Right over his head a cell phone rang. Its programmed ring was “Here Comes the Bride.” Mitty had already assumed these guys weren't American. Like when those planes crashed into the World Trade Towers, every pilotthe TV stations called for opinions said, “No American pilot would do that.” Now he knew his kidnappers couldn't be American. Only a total alien wouldn't recognize that melody. Any American would change it.

  Maybe the call was from the person in charge, who had to be working on the next stage of the plan; Mitty didn't see how they could manage their operation out of this cellar.

  He had just decided to go sit on the top step and try to hear the phone conversation through the door when it opened.

  Fourteen steps above Mitty stood a man in a red ski mask, jeans and a plaid wool shirt. Behind him, Mitty could see kitchen cabinets. There was not time for Mitty to take the stairs in a single bound and stick his foot in the door to keep it from locking. The guy tossed a McDonald's bag at Mitty, stepped back and slammed the door.

  The cellar was dark again, but Mitty was a total fast-food fan. He could figure it out by feel and smell: two burgers, large fries, a chocolate shake and an apple pie. It was like Thanksgiving. Mitty chowed down. When he finished, he was still hungry, so he licked the paper for leftover salt and grease. Then he folded the bag neatly and set it on the end of his camp bed, saving the napkin and the empty flattened fry and pie boxes. His tool collection. He was afraid he'd lose the nail if he set it down, so he didn't add that to the pile but slid it carefully into his jeans pocket.

  The food took care of the pain in his gut. Now all he had was the hole in his cheek and the throbbing in his skull.

  And fear. He had lots of that.

  Mitty knew now that he'd spent his life paddling in a clear pond, happy and dumb as a duck. Now suddenly the water was deep and murky; slime had him by the ankles.

  For the first time in his life, music was a barrier to thought. He put away the iPod.

  How miraculous that nobody in America had the slightest idea what smallpox was like. Not one of the 290 million. But smallpox was exactly what his sources said: the number-one biological warfare agent.

  The stumbling block in bioterrorism is that some scientist in some laboratory has to sneak the disease out. Who would risk his own life, his family's lives, his colleagues'—in fact, the lives of everyone in his whole country? Even if that scientist hated America with all his heart and mind and soul, that hate would be the opposite of some love, wouldn't it? Love for his country or people or religion. And he would not risk his own life, would he? And so bioterrorism would always be a threat, but it never would be acted upon.

  Until he, Mitty Blake, allowed terrorists to skip a step. He personally was providing the virus—and in a central location too. The only risk was to Americans, and that was the point of terrorism: putting Americans at risk.

  Mitty had never gone out of his way to gather—or to exhibit—intelligence.

  It was time.

  He was past the stage where he could gather information. All his intelligence had to be guesses. But maybe all intelligence was guesses.

  How were they planning to use Mitty? Did they hope to create an aerosol and release that somewhere in thecity? It seemed pretty high-tech for guys keeping a prisoner in a cellar with a rusty toilet. The only real option for these guys was to use Mitty as the infection agent, just as Derek had described.

  But even in New York, two gowned, masked and gloved guys pushing a coughing, moaning carcass in a wheelchair through, say, Penn Station, were bound to attract attention. And even if the regular passengers averted their eyes, the major train stations were crawling with security. These two guys would have to dress normally and just face the fact that they were going to get smallpox too. But no matter what clothes they put on, they w
eren't normal. People who plotted to commit mass murder were not normal.

  So, properly dressed, would they duct-tape Mitty into a wheelchair and start pushing? They'd want Mitty to breathe and cough, but they wouldn't want him strong enough to yell, because it would really screw up the plan if the human bomb started shouting,“Call 911!”

  They probably had about a ten-minute window where this would work, and then Mitty, flat out with agony and black blisters, would be screaming his head off with pain, and the authorities would come running.

  Well, that was what happened when you committed your terrorism on the spur of the moment. You had glitches.

  After all this thinking, Mitty arrived at exactly two conclusions:

  1. The guys upstairs were not normal.

  2. He was in big trouble.

  Of course, they could be softhearted kidnappers. He wouldn't get a rash, he wouldn't get sick, they wouldn'thave their virus and a week from now, they'd say, “Too bad,” and slip quietly away, leaving the door unlocked so Mitty could head on home.

  They had another glitch, although they didn't know about it: the hole in the floor where he'd yanked down the cable cord. One book had had a gruesome story about some poor woman in a British lab. Smallpox research was taking place on a different floor from hers. A window cracked for fresh air carried the virus outdoors; the breeze lifted it around the side of the building and up through her open window and into her room. She died.

  These two men had darted out of the cellar like squirrels from a dog rather than let Mitty touch them again. If they had been vaccinated against smallpox, wouldn't they have stayed to beat him up a little more? So they had no protection except their layers of paper. Plus, if his guesses about the rustling sounds were right, they stripped off their paper covers once they got upstairs.

  Should've done your research, Mitty said silently to his captors. My virus is wafting into your lungs right now.

  Hours later, Mitty pulled the lightbulb chain. After so much time in the dark, twenty-five watts felt like the sun in July. Mitty did a quick skin examination and then eased up the stairs with his nail.