The Virus

by Janelle Diller

“Well, for starters, we need to get in touch with Eddy.”

  I jerked back. “You’re not with Baja Breeze?”

  He looked puzzled.

  Yeah, right. What kind of an idiot would assume that?

  “Who are you? How did you get to my cubicle without being escorted by a Baja Breeze employee?”

  He smiled a genuine Tom Hanks smile. I wanted to shoot him for looking so harmless. “I’m with the DHS, CDC Division, the Center for Disease Control.” He pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. Before he could shut it, I grabbed it and studied it. It looked as genuine as anything, but how could I tell? I’d never seen a real CDC badge before.

  The DHS stumped me for a moment before I realized it stood for Department of Homeland Security.

  “Why do you need Eddy?” My stomach tightened. I should have never let myself zone out on commas on a day like today.

  “We need to get in touch with him.”

  My brain fog cleared ever so slightly. “Then why are you here in California? Eddy is in Colorado.”

  “Is he?” He gave me his Tom Hanks smile again. I would never be able to watch another one of his movies. He leaned across the table and folded his hands. He looked kindly, even gentle. “He seems to have disappeared.”

  “He’s in Colorado. He and I had an instant message conversation this morning. I’m sure you know that.” I smiled, but I’m sure it looked like I was chewing glass.

  “No. I didn’t know that.”

  How much did I tip my hand? I said nothing.

  “Maggie, you can make this easy or you can make this hard.”

  “Really?” I put my hands under the table and squeezed them between my legs. It was the only way to keep them from shaking. “Is that some kind of a threat?”

  He shook his head. “It’s no threat. I don’t know where you get the idea that we’re the bad guy.”

  “Maybe from the radio frequency identification tags you’re passing off as vaccines? Maybe from—” I stopped myself before I could mention the deaths of the developers. I couldn’t believe I’d come so close to that stupid move.

  Mario sighed. “I don’t know where your friend Dr. Bastante came up with that. But you and I know it’s ludicrous.” He laughed lightly. “The government has its hands plenty full just trying to stop this epidemic. Why would it want to track people on top of everything else?”

  His voice was dangerously soothing. For a flash of a second, I wanted to believe him, or maybe I was afraid he was right and this whole thing had been some kind of horrible nightmare that Eddy and his paranoia had accidentally created. I didn’t trust my voice or what would come out of my mouth, so I only said, “I don’t believe you.” My heart pounded. I hated that it sounded like a child’s response.

  “Why not?”

  The question was a trap for someone or something. If I said I’d seen the RFID that Tina had showed me, it would be material evidence against her. I tried to remember what Eddy had on his website. Was she already compromised? I didn’t think so. He would never have done something to put her at risk.

  Did I dare point out my own nightmare Monday morning as I went through security? I opted for safe even though he surely had to know. “There’s too much evidence out there already.”

  “And most of it’s on Eddy’s site, which is why we need to talk to him.”

  “Like you’re talking to Tina?”

  His eyes narrowed slightly, but the smile stayed.

  “Where is Tina? What have you done with her?”

  He ignored my question. “Maggie, we’re worried that because of Eddy’s website, a lot of people are not going to get their vaccination and will be dangerously exposed. Or worse,” he nodded slightly at me, “they’ll get it removed and have just enough exposure to smallpox from the vaccine that they’ll actually end up getting sick from the vaccine and won’t have the immunity to stop it.”

  He knew, of course. How could he not? I couldn’t stop the red flush from rising on my neck and face.

  “We’ve had at least a dozen of those cases.” He paused and then casually added, “The incubation period is seven to seventeen days. You should know something in the next week or two.”

  I had a single moment of clarity, probably the only one in the entire conversation. “Really? Give me the names of the victims. I’d like to talk to them about the circumstances.”

  “Ah, the little come-on. If we don’t give you names, the people don’t exist.” He shook his head. The smile never left his face. “Maggie, you understand confidentiality issues. You know we can’t do that.”

  “You can give them my name and phone number, then. They can certainly call me.”

  He paused and chewed his lip slightly. “I’d like to do that. I really would, but none of them have survived the disease.” He folded his arms and leaned on the table.

  I thought about the developer Sanjeev wrote about. Had he died?

  Mario Seneca seemed to study the table’s wood grain a moment, then looked me in the eye. “It’s a horrific death. You know that, don’t you? You should see the last anguished days of these people. Their bodies are totally covered in pustules, even their throats and eyes. They’re silenced and blinded. Then the blisters rip away from the underlying skin. It’s extraordinarily painful. Extraordinarily. But they stay alert to the end.” He dropped his voice, but his eyes stayed steady on mine. “It’s not something you ever want to go through or see someone you love go through.”

  “Surely, that’s a threat?” I could no longer stop shaking. How could he not hear my heart pounding?

  “I guess you could call it that.” He took a business card out of his pocket and placed it in front of me. “Have Eddy call me. Today. We’ll make sure neither of you get sick.”

  And then he left.

  I stared at the business card, nearly touching it and then not. Finally, I went to the restroom and got a couple of wet and dry paper towels. I scooped the business card into the trashcan and wiped down the table where it had been. It was probably a stupid reaction, but I couldn’t help myself.

  Fear is a funny thing. It has a taste, a rhythm, as it pulses through your body, its powerful current distorting time and truth. I’d seen with my own eyes the cut-open vaccination capsule with its spidery copper antenna. I’d been stopped at airport security because I no longer had my vaccination—something they could only know if the capsule contained an RFID. And now I had Sanjeev’s handwritten note in my pocket.

  Yet fear had a voice, too. It whispered that those bits of information meant nothing. Smallpox produced a hideous death. How could we know for sure there weren’t honest-to-God victims out there? How could we know there wasn’t an epidemic raging through the country that the government was frantically trying to stop?

  What if we were wrong?

  CHAPTER

  37

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, MY DAY WAS PRETTY WELL SHOT. I couldn’t think, couldn’t write, couldn’t even face a comma.

  I returned to my desk, determined to close down my computer and leave. I’d go back to the hotel, but there would be no graphic news clips to stare at, no frantic reports of the day’s events to hear over and over. Whatever was happening moved like a cloud settling slowly down until it became a fog, obscuring reality and stifling reason.

  Leaving early wasn’t a solution, and I knew it. I still wouldn’t know where Eddy was. I still wouldn’t know how I would get home. I still would carry Mario Seneca’s not-so-subtle threat on my shoulder as it whispered the future in my ear.

  My brain and part of my heart had shut down, though, so I disconnected from the Internet and closed my open files and programs. When I closed down Outlook, an odd message popped up: “There are still e-mail messages in your Outbox. Do you want to exit anyway? Exiting in 15 seconds.”

  I watched the seconds count down to eight before the message registered in my fried brain, which was thinking more about smallpox symptoms than one more computer message, however unusual. I clicked on “No.” T
hen I closed down Outlook again to see if the message had said what I thought it said.

  It did. I clicked on “No” again.

  There could be only one explanation: Mr. Seneca from the CDC apparently had an associate who had a task, one a bit more devious. Evidently, our federal friends didn’t want to depend on mere threats to reel Eddy in.

  I fumbled around, looking for the Outbox in the program. I always opened Outlook and worked offline because I used its calendar and task functions. I never used it for email, though, since we were mandated to use the Zaan email system, so I didn’t know the Outlook email function very well. Finally I found the Outbox. There was a single message showing. From me to Eddy. Of course. Who else would it be from and to? The subject line said, “Emergency!! Call me on my cell ASAP!!!

  I opened the message to see what I’d been frantically trying to reach Eddy about.

  Eddy,

  Your sister and her family have been in a horrible accident. Josh was killed and Karen’s in a coma and may be brain dead. Both kids are in critical condition. We have to make some tough decisions. CALL ME!!!

  I mentally kicked myself. How stupid could I be to ignore Eddy’s number one rule? I left my computer running with my email open and nearly paid a price. Fortunately, Mr. Seneca’s cohort must have been email-illiterate to think I’d have an empty Outlook inbox. He also must not have checked to make sure the message had been sent. At least that’s what it looked like. I double-checked my Zaan email Sent and Trash folders to make sure he hadn’t sent a similar message from there. Nothing showed up.

  I suppose he could have been clever enough to send a message in both systems, delete the message from my Zaan Sent and Trash email folders, but I didn’t see the point in alerting me with the unsent Outlook message. This didn’t seem to have the same value as leaving my health card for Eddy.

  After slowly examining the possibilities from twenty different angles, I decided the email sender was simply incompetent.

  Finally. A point for the good guys. That would make the score about one to ninety-nine. Or maybe two to ninety-nine: they didn’t have Eddy.

  I did one final check, searching for all activity for the day and then sorting the list by type. Just because my intruder was an email incompetent didn’t mean he wasn’t a whiz at installing new spyware software.

  Sure enough, Mr. Seneca’s buddy had left—in Eddy’s vernacular—a chestnut. I found a Spectorsoft.exe file, an executable that looked vaguely familiar and had arrived on my computer at 1:28, a point in time that my friend from the DHS was turning me inside out. I gently drummed my fingers on the keyboard, trying to decide what to do next. I resisted the temptation to log back on to the network and do an Ixquick search for more information, which would confirm that I should extract this leech before it could wrap its bloodsucking tentacles around every particle of information I had. They’d turned even my machine against me since every email, every gtalk, every keystroke could now be captured whenever I was online. I held on to a fragile thread of privacy only if I worked offline. Forever.

  I don’t know when the knot in my stomach had begun to grow, maybe with the announcement of the first reported smallpox case. Now that knot surged to all my extremities, weighing my body down as surely as if lead flowed in my veins. I couldn’t take it any more. I missed Eddy. I needed him. We were so tangled together that I didn’t know where my thoughts started and his stopped. And now, if the Feds got to him first—I couldn’t think about it. I wouldn’t think about it.

  It was all I could think about.

  I closed out the search window and finished shutting down the computer. On the drive back to the hotel I anxiously studied the corner the Feds had trapped me—us—in. I could pack my bags and leave California that night. My job could only last another week or two at the most anyway. What difference would it make if I just walked off the project with no more than an email apology to Michael.

  But where would I go?

  Maybe Eddy was holing up in Pete’s basement only a few miles from our house, but I didn’t think so since he surely would have tried to contact me one way or another. Which left me with zero ideas. We had no favorite mountain hideout. Our closest relatives were a thousand miles in the opposite direction. Even old college friends weren’t on the path between Colorado and California, and I couldn’t imagine him heading any other direction.

  It made no sense to stay. It made no sense to leave.

  Here’s an irony that nearly sent me into the back end of a Hummer when I thought of it: we should have paid more attention to all those Homeland Security alerts that recommended making plans for where to meet up with your family again in the event of a terrorist attack. But then, we’d never even bought duct tape.

  I could wait for Eddy to contact me, but what if the Feds got to him first?

  I nearly rear-ended the Hummer again.

  Around dinnertime, I reluctantly roused out of my depressed stupor. I had few options, but if I didn’t choose one, I’d have even fewer. Whatever I did on my own computer was a poison of sorts, but somehow I needed to get in touch with Eddy.

  In all my years of travel, I’d never used a business center in a hotel, but it seemed like the logical place to start. Even if they had the same spyware software, I didn’t think they could track it to one Maggie Rider. Or this Maggie Rider, which was all that mattered at the end of the day.

  The place was empty, no doubt because the few business travelers who actually used hotel business centers had finally gone home, and the weekend crowd would only use it if there were a death in the family. I logged onto a computer and then stared at the screen, not sure how to become invisible. I mentally juggled whether to email Eddy directly or go through his website. And then I juggled some more since I was pretty sure Mr. Seneca’s cohort could track all my email regardless of whether it originated on my computer or my inbox.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  I looked up at the business center receptionist, who was all of seventeen. He might not have even been mature enough to shave yet. At least his voice had changed. I must have given him a stupid look.

  “I mean you’ve been sitting there for a long time and haven’t done anything. Can I help you with something?”

  I shook my head. “I’m just really tired. Sorry.”

  “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

  I nodded and smiled. When he left, I opened up Internet Explorer and typed in Eddy’s website URL. The familiar graphics popped up, and I rapidly clicked through the links to see if he’d been on the site since Wednesday morning. A single entry had been added as of this afternoon, something I’d totally missed because I hadn’t turned on the TV or radio. Eddy had posted a press release from the White House noting that as of February first, all people entering the US from any port—by air, rail, land, or sea—would need proof of a vaccination. It didn’t matter if it was a Mexican trucker entering the US for two hours to deliver a load of fruit, a carload of Canadians coming across the border to shop for the day, or the Pope himself. Every single person of any nationality had to be vaccinated to set foot on American soil.

  No doubt someone somewhere was happy that the illegal immigration problem would be solved once and for all.

  It was a bittersweet moment since it confirmed Eddy was still somewhere. Sadly, the noose tightened a tiny bit more for every other person on the planet.

  I couldn’t dare send an email directly to Eddy, so I clicked on “Contact Us,” but I immediately closed the email form that popped up. I couldn’t send something from maggie.rider@Zaan.com. Too many eyes spied in too many unknown places.

  I opened up Gmail and created a new identity, then returned to Eddy’s site and clicked on “Contact Us.” An email message popped up, and I typed in my information:

  To: smallpoxscare@webmaster.com

  From: MZM@gmail.com

  Subject: EddytheWebMan

  Message:

  Thanks for gtalking on Thursday mor
ning. I have a chestnut to tell you about.

  xoxo, Mz M.

  I thought about the xoxo a minute and then deleted it. It would be highly unlikely that someone emailing him would seal it with kisses and hugs. I changed the Mz M to MZM, too. He’d recognize it.

  I sent it with a prayer, hoping I hadn’t inadvertently used a word that would get snagged by the Homeland Security filters for a closer inspection. Even if Eddy were sleeping, he had to spot the signature on the email. Paranoid that he was, he’d catch both my clues—that someone had been on his computer and that one or both of us was being tracked. Lighter, I headed back to my room to order room service and catch CNN for the first time that week. Surely there’d be explosive responses from all the countries insulted by this new restriction. At the very least, wouldn’t the Queen of England be offended?

  Maybe someone forgot to tell the Queen, as well as the rest of the world. There was barely a news buzz on CNN or Fox, which meant that if it even made the network evening news, at most it would have gotten thirty seconds, and that would have been buried well into the half hour. Finally, around nine, CNN had a couple of senators, one Republican and one Democrat, debating the new requirements. They could have both been press secretaries for the president for all the heat they generated. I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t any outrage. None. Instead they pattered on about the worry of all the potential terrorists flowing across the borders. At one point, the moderator asked about whether non-US citizens would see the information requirements as being invasive.

  One of them, I couldn’t remember which one since they sounded like blood brothers, actually appeared startled. He looked at the other senator as though no one had raised privacy as an issue with this topic. “Maybe my esteemed colleague has another perspective, but I would think all those folks would be glad to have the opportunity to get vaccinated. After all, this virus doesn’t recognize borders.”

  His esteemed colleague nodded in agreement. “I know there’s been some fuss about people having to give their social security numbers up one more time, but frankly, I don’t get it. Why would people care about that when we’re fighting a gruesome epidemic here?”