The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  I immediately dialed Eddy back, but the line was busy. He must have picked up the phone to call Tina. I left a voicemail for him, scrambling to find the number for the phone I was calling from. I waited fifteen long minutes and tried calling again. This time the line wasn’t busy, but no one answered. I wondered if he was already on his way to FedEx.

  I went back to my desk and booted up my computer. While I waited for it to finish, I checked my cell phone and saw I had a message from Eddy. He’d tried calling the number back, but it rang into some other office. I tried calling him again from the phone in my cubicle, but he didn’t answer.

  I opened up email and tried to work, but it just wasn’t going to happen. There wasn’t a single thing that looked remotely important enough to even read, let alone think about and respond to, so I shut everything down again. I’d ended up with a whole day I couldn’t bill a minute for, but that was the least of my problems. I packed up my computer and headed out the door to the hotel. Michael’s cube was empty when I passed it. It was just as well. I wasn’t ready to have any kind of a conversation with him until I talked more to Eddy.

  CHAPTER

  26

  WHEN I GOT TO MY HOTEL ROOM, I CALLED EDDY and told him to call me as soon as he got in. And then I waited less than patiently for the phone to ring. I got online to see if he was on gtalk, but he wasn’t. So I went to the concierge’s lounge and got a glass of wine and some veggies and dip. There was no flashing light on my phone when I got back to my room. I drank the wine and looked at the veggies. I had no appetite. I turned on the TV and tried to find something familiar, so I wouldn’t have to concentrate. I caught the last of Jeopardy and then found a station hosting a Friends marathon. It was a double win: familiar and mindless. I turned the sound down on the TV and surfed the Internet.

  Around eight, I went back to the lounge, got a refill of wine, and returned to my room. Still no flashing light. I called home and the answering machine picked up again. This wasn’t like him to leave in the evening, so the only logical conclusion I could come up with was that I should be worried. Given how my morning started, I decided I should be really worried.

  I finally turned off my computer and the TV. I crawled into bed to try to sleep, but my nerves continued to jangle, so I lay with my eyes shut, my mind wide awake.

  Finally, at about eleven fifteen my time—twelve fifteen in Colorado—the phone rang.

  “Eddy?” I said before he could say hello. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He sounded tired. “But Tina’s not.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t get to her in time.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “As soon as we got off the phone this afternoon, I called to her office. The receptionist was really vague but said Tina wasn’t in the office. So I called her at home, thinking maybe she was off today. There was no answer there, and I just got the answering machine at Pete’s body shop. So I called back to Tina’s office and said I was a close friend of Tina’s. I had a family emergency and needed to reach her. The receptionist wouldn’t tell me anything except that she didn’t expect Tina in for the rest of the week. So that’s when I took off to try to track them down. It just didn’t sound right.”

  “So what happened to her?” Wild possibilities tumbled through my head. At least Eddy was okay.

  “I’m getting there. I drove over to Pete’s shop because I thought they’d be more likely to tell me something. I caught Freddy, that ponytailed guy. He said Pete was at the police station because the Feds had come in and arrested Tina.”

  “Arrested her?” Oh my God. “For what? For what she did to me?”

  “They’ve got a list of things, apparently, and yeah, that’s one of them, although Pete says they don’t have any names, just accusations. But the whole list they’re charging her with is all homeland security violations.”

  “So they’ll be felonies.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “You found Pete, then?”

  “I did, finally. He was at the downtown police station, trying to track down what had happened to Tina. No one would tell him. They just kept giving him a runaround. At first they denied she was there or had even been brought in, but then he got some clerk to admit that there were all kinds of Feds taking over some of the interrogation rooms.”

  “Did Pete get a good attorney?”

  “He found one, but it’s too early to tell if he’s good. They finally gave him a list of the charges, but he wasn’t able to even talk to Tina yet.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “They’d already taken her some place else.”

  “You mean like Florence?” The federal penitentiary, the one where the first person died of smallpox while being held without bond waiting for trial—it meant the rules had changed.

  “They won’t say.”

  “But they can’t just whisk her away. They have to give her access to her attorney, don’t they?”

  Eddy sighed. “Apparently not under the Homeland Security Act. If they say she’s a threat to national security, all legal protection disappears.”

  “Eddy—”

  “I know.”

  Neither of us talked for a minute, too overwhelmed with possibilities.

  “Pete must be beyond crazy.”

  “He is.”

  I started crying softly. I didn’t want Eddy to hear me. The day had started all about me, and now something even worse had happened.

  “I’m going to write up some stuff for the website. I’ll post as much detail as I can and then try to summarize the rest.”

  “Don’t. Please.”

  “Maggie, I don’t have a choice.”

  “No. Look at what could happen to you. You have to stay under the radar.” He could hear my tears, I’m sure.

  “That’s exactly why I have to do it. As long as people stay under the radar, this can continue to grow.”

  I could barely breathe through my tears, but I managed to whisper. “I love you, Eddio.”

  “You, too, Mz M. More than you’ll ever know.”

  I hung up the phone before it registered that we hadn’t talked about my missing health card or how I would ever get home again. The small things.

  I lay back in bed, expecting to never sleep again. But I’d been in an adrenaline-fueled free-fall since six that morning; exhaustion finally won. I slept like a drugged woman until the alarm buzzed me awake at six thirty.

  CHAPTER

  27

  DON’T ASK ME WHY I EVEN WENT INTO WORK ON TUESDAY. It’s not like I could put three interesting words together or that I would even have a job by the end of the week. I went in, I guess, because I was like a terminally ill patient straightening out my life details in anticipation of my impending death. In fact, that was closer to the truth than I cared to admit. My life as I knew it was over.

  As I was logging on, Michael stopped by my cubicle.

  “You okay?”

  “No,” I said. “Not remotely.” I didn’t dare even try to say more because that would only guarantee I’d start crying instead.

  “What’s going on?”

  I shook my head. It was too complicated to explain.

  “You want to go to lunch today?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  He smiled. “Thai okay? I’m always up for Thai.”

  I at least had the presence of mind to write out Eddy’s website on a sticky note for Michael. I knew there’d be something about yesterday there already. It was his style. “Memorize it and then shred it.” I smiled grimly.

  Michael laughed.

  “I’m not kidding, Michael.”

  I spent the rest of the morning cobbling together a PowerPoint presentation for Michael to present to the project executive steering committee and ghostwriting an email for the CEO to thank the Baja Breeze team for the long hours they were investing to make this a successful project. It was all I could do not to embed an eye-rolling icon in t
he email signature. Regardless, as I reviewed the email, I realized I was teetering ever closer to the chicken shit side of the equation.

  During a late-morning conference call with the Zaan training consultant and the Baja Breeze training staff and their manager who was working from home because the traffic report was bad—I swear that’s what she told me—I brought up Eddy’s site. I only needed to half-listen on the call or, more accurately, I could have skipped the call altogether, but that would have required someone such as the traffic-phobic training manager to summarize the call in an email and give me a few simple details to put in future communications about upcoming Zaan training.

  Eddy hadn’t shown up on gtalk yet, and by looking at the site it was easy to tell why. He’d pulled an all-nighter, no doubt a victim of his own adrenaline free-fall. Next to the now-permanent box that listed things people had been detained or arrested for, the home page held two unattributed “news briefs.” The knowing eye—mine—could easily see that the news stories didn’t come from any official source but were created by Eddy. He and I had had lots of discussions about whether this was ethical. I came down on the side that said a spade should announce itself a spade. Let people make up their own minds whether the substance and the source had credibility. He always argued that he only played the game that everyone, especially the government, played in releasing propaganda under the guise of news. Let the buyer beware.

  Tina’s story was first and then mine, as it should have been. I had been terrified, yes, but mostly I faced inconvenience. God only knew what Tina faced. In spite of my phone calls to Eddy, he also had a lot more details about Tina since he spent half the night with Pete trying to track down where she was. Both news blurbs linked to more detailed accounts, although mine was sketchy and avoided giving my name or even telling whether in fact I still had my vaccination. Basically, it informed the reader of the Gestapo tactics, confirmed airport security checked the vaccination against the health card, and warned about the threat of a felony if the health card didn’t match the vaccination.

  The ensuing information about Tina included the list of charges against her. Under the Homeland Security Act, Eddy noted, every item on the list was a felony. My stomach softly flipped over and over as I read them:

  Aiding and abetting terrorist activity

  Deliberately contributing to spreading the smallpox virus

  Destroying government property

  Illegally withholding information

  Falsifying information

  Contributing to the criminal behavior in others

  Performing subversive activities

  Organizing a terrorist cell (Eddy clarified this bullet: under Homeland Security, any group of two or more who discussed subversive activities could be convicted of this.)

  How could Tina defend herself against those kinds of charges? Especially if the government could deny her access to legal council.

  “You got that, Maggie?” Geanna, the Zaan training consultant, asked.

  “I think I got most of it.” Not true at all. There wasn’t a single thing I could repeat from the call except that the traffic report looked bad. I’d be backpedaling with Geanna to cover my butt on this one. Or maybe I just wouldn’t do it since I’d be gone soon. It was the most comforting thought I’d had in thirty-six hours.

  We ended the call, but I couldn’t tear myself away from Eddy’s work. I wished he would get on gtalk so I could find out if he knew anything more. I tried calling home, but the answering machine picked up. He might have had the ringer turned down to sleep, or maybe he was in the shower. Or maybe he was out on his white horse riding the streets of Colorado Springs, poking around in ways that could only take him bad places. I hoped it wasn’t the last. Mixed metaphor or not, there wasn’t a white horse rider alive who knew how to stay under the radar.

  CHAPTER

  28

  “DID YOU HAVE A CHANCE TO LOOK AT THE SITE?” I asked Michael as soon as we were out of earshot of the smokers who congregated outside the Baja Breeze building. We walked briskly in the direction of the restaurant. Everything Zaan consultants did, we did briskly.

  He nodded. Unfortunately, he had the same sick look on his face that I know I had.

  “And?”

  He shook his head. “It’s all so unbelievable.”

  “All is a pretty broad word.”

  “All. Every bit of it.” He ended with a hedge. “If it’s true, that is.”

  “It’s true.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “The RFID stuff, the charade the government is running, the Homeland Security stuff.”

  “Did you read the two news briefs on the first page?”

  “Yeah. I skimmed them.”

  “That second one? The one about the woman nearly getting arrested at the airport? That was me.”

  Abruptly, he stopped walking and stared at me. “I should have guessed.” He sighed and started walking again. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Here’s another one for you. Eddy avoided pointing out that the doctor, the one in the first news brief, was the one who removed my vaccination capsule.”

  “Are the two connected? Do you think you were detained because they knew about her?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think they detected that I didn’t have the vaccination anymore.”

  “But now they’ll connect the dots. You’ll be tainted, too.”

  “If she gives them my name.”

  “Will she?”

  Selfishly, I’d thought about this possibility at least ten or fifteen times every minute since my alarm had sounded. “How can she not? If they’d carted me down to the federal penitentiary and did God knows what to me, would I have been able to maintain my integrity and not implicate her?”

  “You didn’t though.”

  “Michael, I was held at the airport for an hour. If that little TSA Nazi had been only a little better skilled, who knows what I would have told him to get out of there.”

  “You’re selling yourself short.”

  “I wish.” I knew I wasn’t, though. “I think I’m just human, which is why they can get away with this crime in the first place.”

  We reached the Tiger Lily and found a table in long-legged Kai’s station. Michael wouldn’t even need actual food to be happy with lunch.

  “How are you going to get home this weekend?” he asked as soon as we were seated.

  I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. Any more, and I’d get teary eyed.

  “Are you going to get re-vaccinated?”

  “Are you kidding? That’s the last thing I’ll do. Have you gotten vaccinated?”

  He shook his head. “I’m passing on this one. And after looking at Eddy’s site, I know I made the right choice.”

  Kai arrived at that moment to confirm my curry choice for the day. She flirted with Michael and somewhere in there confirmed that he wanted his usual.

  “Your usual? How often do you eat here?” I asked when Kai left.

  Michael blushed. “Maybe once or twice a week.” His eyes darted to the left. “Sometimes three times.”

  Thai food three times a week seemed a little much even for a man in love. Unless you were Thai, of course.

  “But you still haven’t asked her out.”

  “I will some day.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I was glad to be distracted from my own problems for two minutes.

  “What if she says no?” He sounded genuinely worried.

  “What’s the worst that could happen? You’d have to start eating more pizza.” We passed two pizzerias to get to the Tiger Lily. “Or you might actually have to eat in the Baja Breeze cafeteria.”

  Kai set down our drinks and our lunches, mine a spicy yellow curry and Michael’s a delicately scented basil chicken. The place hadn’t filled up yet, and she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to move on. “So what’s the go-live date du jour?”

  Right. Once or twice a week.

  M
ichael smiled shyly at her. “They’re still saying March first, come hell or high water.”

  Kai rolled her eyes.

  “Unless, of course, someone gets a hangnail,” he added.

  Kai laughed. “I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  “Well, a good close Thai restaurant seems to be helping him a lot.” I smiled at her and winked at Michael.

  Michael giggled softly and turned red.

  Kai patted Michael’s hand and laughed. “And I’m doing whatever I can to help.”

  “Are you?” I asked her.

  “Anything for my best tipper.” She smiled broadly.

  “Are you doing anything on Saturday night?”

  Michael’s eyes widened, and he looked like he wanted to just slide under the table.

  Kai looked a little taken aback. “Uh. No. Do you need someone to build code or something?” She said it like she actually could but truly regretted making the offer.

  I waved my hand. “No, nothing like that. Michael’s not doing anything on Saturday night either. But he’d love to go dancing. I’ll bet you’re a great dancer, Kai.”

  Her eyes brightened and she threw her head to the side and laughed. Her perfectly straight jet-black hair swung easily with the move. “I’d love to go dancing. It’s so nice of you to ask.” She winked at me. “What time are you going to pick me up?”

  The exchange had clearly rattled Michael. He looked at his watch as if that would tell him the time for Saturday night.

  “I think eight,” I said. “What do you think, Michael?”

  Kai wagged her finger. “Let’s make it seven. I’ll cook you dinner before we go dancing.” She smiled at him. “I know what you like.”

  Poor Michael just shook his head. He needed all the coaching he could get.

  I said, “Michael, now it’s your turn to say, ‘Okay. See you at seven.’”

  “Okay. Okay. Seven.”

  Kai laughed and scooted off to take the orders for another table.

  “How do you know that I don’t already have plans for Saturday?” he whispered across the table.

  I rolled my eyes. “Right. And if you did, what would it have to be that you wouldn’t cancel to go out with Kai?” I spooned some curry over my rice. “Maybe if your sister were getting married you’d cancel.” It was his family joke. He had an exotically beautiful sister in her mid-thirties; his mother had been lighting candles for her for fifteen years to no avail.