The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  “I couldn’t agree more,” the first senator said. “I mean, if my wife ended up with smallpox just because she didn’t like the idea of giving her social security number to the government,” he paused and then, almost as a punch line, added, “again.” Everyone chuckled. “And then she put our family and everyone she came into contact with at risk, well, what kind of selfish behavior is that?”

  The other senator shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “You know, Tim,” he said to the moderator, “if you’d told people fifty years ago that they’d be putting up with the traffic we have today or twenty years ago you’d told people they’d be glued to their cell phones and computers they would have revolted. They would have refused the benefits of easy transportation and instant communication because they couldn’t imagine what they’d be gaining for what—at the time—they thought they’d be losing. Give people a few years and they’ll look back on this moment and roll their eyes. They’ll be glad to give up an insignificant amount of information for the enormous good they’ll be gaining.”

  “So what will people be gaining, Senator Epson?” the moderator obligingly asked.

  Senator Epson smiled. “Well, for starters—and this is by far the most important thing—they’ll be gaining peace of mind because they won’t have to worry about this horrific epidemic.”

  Horrific epidemic. That made three times in three days. Someone had passed out a script.

  “Second, we’re using the data we’re collecting to give us the ability to track terrorists who attempt to come into the country. As a side benefit, we’ll also be able to identify illegal aliens and those who overstay their visas. Tim, I believe most Americans would agree that’s easily worth giving up a little personal information for.”

  The other senator nodded his best senatorial nod. “Ten years ago, if people had realized there’d be a surveillance camera in every 7-Eleven or street corner, what would they have thought? But if you walk the streets of central London for a day, you’ll be photographed literally thousands of times. But do people stop going to London? Absolutely not. It’s busier than it ever was. And the payoff? The worst crime you have to worry about in London is getting your pockets picked. People seem to understand the value of giving up a little information for a lot of safety.”

  I turned the sound down and watched the talking heads. They looked serious and sincere with their starched white shirts and crisply knotted ties. They knitted their eyebrows and nodded solemnly. It didn’t matter what they were saying. No one in America was listening anyway. They were all watching some finale to a Survivor show, eyes glued to the TV, arms extended and sleeves rolled up while the government pricked and prodded and stripped them of the last iota of privacy they had.

  My fingers itched to get on a keyboard and check my new Gmail account, but the business center would never be open at this hour and I didn’t dare log in on my own computer. I’d have to wait. I fell into a restless sleep and dreamed of Londoners goose-stepping after pickpockets.

  What had we become?

  CHAPTER

  38

  SOMEWHERE IN OUR WEDDING VOWS EDDY AND I HAD PROMISED to love, cherish, and savor lazy Saturday mornings of champagne and Belgian waffles. We had a few of those where we barely made it to the first matinee because we’d slept so late. Within months of getting married, though, we grew up and discovered that Saturday was the day to get things done.

  Welcome to adulthood.

  It was also the day to spend together. Even counting the years I’d worked for Zaan, I hadn’t missed a Saturday at home unless I was on an overseas project. This was an absolute first, to be stuck in a hotel in Burlingame, California. No champagne. No waffles. No Eddy. Just all the worry I could carry.

  I woke at six and tried to go back to sleep. The business center wouldn’t be open for hours. I had nothing to do but check my new Gmail account. Even then, I wasn’t sure I’d have anything to do. I lay in bed trying to figure out what to do with these two days I didn’t want. I had too much time on my hands to think—to think about Eddy, developers who died, and corporations that compromised their country for a buck. And about vaccinations gone awry. How empty was Mario Seneca’s threat? Seven to seventeen days after exposure. Ten days to go before I would know for sure.

  I shoved the covers off and got out of bed, as if movement could knock the anxiety away. I refused to let myself be consumed with fear since that would sap the energy I needed to figure out how to get out of this whole mess. Which, I’m sure, was exactly what Mario Seneca wanted: no extra brain cells for me.

  I showered and dressed and continued to try to shake off my fears, which were now deliriously happy at the chance to eat away my stomach lining. Finally, at seven thirty, I headed downstairs to the business center, only to discover that without business travelers on a Saturday, the hotel had no reason to open its business center before noon.

  Maybe I was crying. I certainly felt like it even though my cheeks were dry. Tony, my friendly night manager, noticed anyway even though he was across the room.

  “Something I can help you with Mrs. Rider?”

  “Tony.” I sighed and tried not to sound emotional. You’d think with all the practice I’d had, I’d be pretty good at it, but I wasn’t. Grief is grief. “I was hoping to get into the business center. I’m, uh, having trouble with my computer and I have to get on email.” I’m a lousy liar, so I surprised even myself.

  “I can let you in.” He disappeared out a door behind the reception counter and reappeared on the lobby side. “I wouldn’t ordinarily do this, but you’re such a good customer, I know I can trust you in there. Don’t worry about logging the time. It’ll be on us this time.”

  “Thank you. I really appreciate your bending the rules.” And if I’d known, I would have been downstairs at 6:05.

  “Don’t mention it.” He unlocked the door and flicked the lights on. “Hey, did you have a good anniversary?”

  “Anniversary?” My anniversary was on the other side of the year.

  “On Thursday? When your husband surprised you and showed up here?”

  “Huh?” The words were all in English, but in the order he delivered them, none of them made sense. Eddy? Thursday? Here?

  Tony missed my confusion. “Yeah, he was all excited about surprising you. He said he drove in from Colorado.”

  I shook my head. Could Eddy have arrived and I missed the signal to contact him? My heart beat faster. “My husband showed up on Thursday?”

  Tony flushed and stuttered a little. “Yeah, I’m sure it was Thursday. Dark curly hair, nice looking. A little stocky.”

  A little stocky? “Looks a little like Tom Hanks?”

  “That’s him.” Tony laughed awkwardly, glad I guess because he thought he would still have a job after this conversation.

  I tried to control my breathing. “That’s not my husband.” I fumbled around for my wallet and pulled out the only picture I had of Eddy, a cheery post-hiking shot that blazed with color.

  Tony flushed and he jingled his keys. He shook his head. “Not the guy.”

  “So let me get this straight.” I tried to keep my voice even. “You gave someone a key to my room because he said he was my husband?”

  “He showed me his driver’s license.” Tony looked every bit as miserable as I felt. “It never occurred to me that it wasn’t real.” His eyes widened. “Why would someone go to all that trouble?”

  I brushed off the question. Thursday night I’d sat waiting for hours for Sanjeev to show. Had my man Mario waited for me in my room? Had he just spent the time searching it? What did he expect to find?

  “So he still has my key?”

  Tony nodded weakly. “Who was it? Why would someone pretend to be your husband?”

  I still didn’t answer his question. “Then I need to move to a different room.” I looked at him. “Now.” My heart sank since it would delay checking my Gmail account for another few minutes.

  He nodded.

  He put
me in the honeymoon suite, which was pointless. I packed up my things, checking for anything that looked different or disturbed. But everything seemed to be where I’d left it.

  Mr. Seneca seemed to have a purpose-filled life, though. Maybe he hadn’t been trying to find something. Maybe he’d left something. A bug, a video camera. What were the possibilities?

  I pulled the door shut behind me and immediately felt lighter. Whatever Mr. Seneca left in my room, the folks at Homeland Security would be playing big brother to someone else.

  CHAPTER

  39

  TONY LET ME BACK INTO THE BUSINESS CENTER, and I started my day over.

  When my MZM Gmail started to load, I had to swivel my chair around and study a rack of tourist brochures. Thirty seconds can be a lifetime.

  It did me no good. MZM@gmail.com was empty. Nothing. No Eddy message, not even a pornographic come-on or an enticement to lower interest rates. It was oddly reassuring that Gmail hadn’t sold my email address in the fifteen hours the account had been open.

  That left me with Jola Pavelkavich, my one friend who lived on the dark side as a Zaan software developer. Three years earlier, we’d discovered each other serendipitously on a Boston/San Francisco flight when I booted up my computer and the Zaan wallpaper appeared. The six hours made us, if not fast friends, at least commiserating co-workers. When I had the rare reason to visit Zaan headquarters, we always met for lunch.

  It was time to cash in my single remaining chit. And Jola Pavelkavich was, at the very least, an easy internet search.

  Within fifteen minutes I was in my car, started plugging in the address into the Hertz Neverlost navigation system. As I waited for the GPS to load street names, I jolted awake and shut the car off again. What was Neverlost if it wasn’t the ultimate tracking device? I wiped my palms on my pants and tried to stop shaking. I’d nearly left a Hertz breadcrumb trail to Jola’s. Then a worse thought hit: I’d driven this same car to Sanjeev’s house on Wednesday, Neverlost directions and all.

  Oh Lord. What had I done?

  I was too shaky to drive, too shaky even to trust my legs for a head-clearing walk. I was in way over my head. I sat, catatonic with indecision. Hours, or maybe only minutes, later, a tapping at my window startled me. Tony watched me from the other side of the glass.

  “You okay, Mrs. Rider?”

  I nodded, then shook my head, turned on the car, and rolled down the window. “I need to go into the city, but I don’t want to drive.” I handed the paper with Jola’s address to him. “How much would a cab cost?”

  He studied it a moment. “Do you know what the major cross streets are?”

  I scratched my head, trying to retrieve the general vicinity. “Maybe Lombard and Grant?”

  “You could probably do that for forty or fifty dollars. But it’d be a lot cheaper to take BART into the city and then grab a cab. It’s probably faster, too, even on a Saturday.” He chewed on his lip a second or two. “Look, I’m on my way home. Why don’t I just give you a lift to the nearest BART station?"

  Jola lived in a slim lavender house on a sloped street filled with other shoulder-to-shoulder painted houses. Only in San Francisco could a lavender house look understated. Pink January flowers filled window boxes and a porch pot. I rang the bell and crossed my fingers that she had no weekend life.

  “Maggie?” She wore a thick terry robe that covered all but her bare ankles and feet. I’d gotten her out of bed.

  “Jola.”

  “What ... what are you doing here?” Her almond Slavic eyes widened. Her short bleached white hair spiked without a pattern. Together, they gave her a triangle face.

  “I’m so sorry to surprise you like this. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  Jola shook her head and smiled graciously. She opened the door wider, inviting me in.

  “I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday like this, but I’m hoping you can help me.”

  “What’s going on?” She still had that giveaway Polish lilt in her speech.

  “It’s complicated, and you’re the only person I could think of who might know what to do.”

  I’d thought her to be spare and lean in all that she did. Her tiny house confirmed it. The living room and kitchen combined into a long open space and looked like it had been lifted straight from an Ikea store. She put on hot water for tea and found some dark, grain-laden bread, butter, and raspberry jam. Then she sat at the simple maple table with me. It wasn’t till then that I noticed she didn’t just have a morning tired look; she’d been crying.

  “I think I’ve come at a bad time, Jola. I should have called. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, really.” She propped her elbow on the table and rubbed her neck “We’ve just had a bad run of things at work. A good friend of mine died Thursday.” She patted her pocket but burst into tears before she could find a tissue. “This smallpox thing is terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Your friend died of smallpox?” The words tumbled out in an anxious rush, but Jola didn’t seem to notice through her tears. I’d come hoping for a contact, someone who could direct me to the right software development group at Zaan. Instead, I’d hit the jackpot.

  She held up three fingers. “It’s the third developer to die at Zaan in the last month. We all feel ... what’s the word? Ginced?” All her words were softer somehow, remnants of a childhood filled with few vowels and an abundance of S’s, Z’s, and C’s.

  “Jinxed?” For the first time in a week, I felt the opposite.

  She nodded. “Jinxed. That’s the word everyone keeps using.”

  The teakettle shrilled and she got up to get some mugs and tea bags. The tears didn’t stop during all the tea fixing, so we sat quietly, each with our own thoughts until Jola reached a tearless interlude.

  “There were less than a hundred in our development group. What are the odds?”

  “So you knew all three of them well?”

  Her eyes shifted away from me and she started rubbing her forehead, but it didn’t do any good. The tears spilled over anyway. “Daniel better than the others. He was the one who died from smallpox. We started at Zaan within a week of each other and survived six massive layoffs over the years. You know how it is. All that trouble, it bonds you.” She tried to laugh but it caught in her throat and came out as a sob.

  “Jola—” I reached across the table and squeezed her forearm. “I’m so sorry—” There was nothing I could say to fill the void, yet it was all I could do not to sprint through all I wanted to say. I counted to ten in my head. “It must be very painful for you.”

  She nodded. “He was kind, the kindest man you’d ever want to meet.”

  “And now you must be worried that you’ve been exposed.”

  She shook her head. “That’s probably the only good thing. He’d taken a sudden leave of absence to take care of his mother back in Russia who’d had a stroke. The next thing we heard was that he was in an isolation unit at UCSF Medical Center, and that he was dying from smallpox.” The words produced more fumbling for a tissue.

  “So he died in San Francisco and not Russia?”

  “I know. We thought that was odd, too.”

  “Did they have any idea how he was exposed? Have others around him gotten smallpox, too?”

  She shook her head again. “In Development, we’re all past the incubation period. Just to be safe, though, the CDC came in and vaccinated everyone who wasn’t already vaccinated.”

  Why wasn’t I surprised?

  “Jola.” I hesitated. This seemed like such a lousy time to talk about anything but losing her friend. “Jola, the other two that died? One died in a traffic accident, and one from a heart attack. Is that right?”

  She paused and tilted her head slightly. For the moment, her eyes didn’t brim with tears. “You heard about them, then?”

  “Thirdhand. I don’t even know their names. All I know is that those two and your friend Daniel had one thing in common.” I paused, waited and watched. “Do you know w
hat that is?”

  Jola nodded her head ever so slightly, and even though it was just the two of us in her house, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “The CDC project. There’s a rumor floating through the group that their deaths are connected to that.”

  “What do you think?”

  The tears had pretty much stopped, and now another emotion crept over her face. I knew what it was because I’d seen it in my own mirror a hundred times in the last few weeks.

  “But why? Why would they end up dead because of that project?”

  “What were they doing there? Do you know?” I asked her, even though I already knew.

  “It wasn’t that complicated. They were building some one-off software to enter data and run reports. They were building some interfaces, too, between Zaan and some other systems. This one started with our core human resources application and then they customized it to pieces. I picked up that the report running had to be pretty sophisticated and very powerful since it needed to do more than report. It needed to be able to also flag items in real time.”

  “Did any of them ever talk about the project with the rest of you?”

  She blew her nose and shook her head. “The company more or less sequestered them in their own space. Lots of the rest of us helped with some of the routine stuff, but we didn’t have regular meetings like we often do when we’re building new software.”

  “Is that common?”

  “Every project is different.” She shrugged her shoulders. “We didn’t think about it at the time.”

  “Are there any rumors at work about how the software is tied into this massive smallpox vaccination campaign?”

  Jola didn’t respond right away. Instead, she lightly drummed her fingers against the raspberry jam jar. Her eyes shifted down, then up, down again and up. Finally, she nodded. “There’re rumors that the vaccination isn’t a vaccination at all. It’s a tracking device. A people-tracking device.”