The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  The bubble burst. It wasn’t a “what if” we wanted to hear.

  “Unless—” Kai began tentatively. “Unless you can find your husband.” She looked at me. “And he can post something to his website to warn people. To tell them what is going on. We take advantage of the chaos before the government can reorganize enough.”

  It was just too neat and tidy.

  Stepan shrugged a shoulder. “Perhaps. But first we have to get the health cards.”

  Michael nodded, “And then we have to find ten people willing to use them.”

  Well, maybe it wasn’t as neat and tidy as we’d like.

  CHAPTER

  46

  IT’S NOT A GOOD THING TO SUSPECT THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN HELP YOU. It makes for odd conversations and too many stolen glances. Even worse, it’s miserable to be forced to trust nearly total strangers. Here I was, though, trusting Phil Generett, a man I’d met at midnight in a hotel far from home, who offered the silver bullet.

  Stepan left Kai’s around midnight. Michael, Kai, and I revived ourselves with a fresh pot of coffee and examined the possible angles that Phil Generett represented. If either Michael or Kai was the one setting Eddy and me up, they didn’t betray themselves with unexpected questions or over-the-top pressure for me to produce Eddy. Kai couldn’t quite believe that he and I hadn’t had contact, but the heart of the disbelief was the scariness of bearing the unknown for so long, not that I wasn’t trying hard enough to find him.

  I didn’t even hint at my meeting with Eddy. It was the one card I had to hold close.

  Kai offered to carry the note to Starbucks to contact Phil. In it, we had very clear instructions about where to go and what to do. If he didn’t show up, that told me something, but not much. If he agreed to follow the directions, it still didn’t tell me much. The guillotine blade might be waiting for a better moment to drop.

  The rendezvous plan was inspired. Of course, the inspiration might have been Kai’s since this would be a perfect time to capture two birds with one net if they wanted to find Phil Generett anywhere close to as much as they wanted to find Eddy.

  A Green Extreme convention had descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center over the weekend. Day passes were cheap, and Kai knew the place well since she worked part-time for a caterer that often won convention contracts. Inside the convention center, a dozen kiosks sold the ubiquitous green shirts and caps that were synonymous with the giant tech company that sponsored the event. I slipped on a long-sleeved green T-shirt and pulled my ponytail through the gap in the green baseball cap.

  Invigorated by my new invisibility, I took up watch. Kai had told me to hang out at the west end of the balcony of Moscone South. It would give me the clearest view of the escalator and Phil Generett if he showed. While the balcony view was easily the best position, I decided not to be so easy in case Kai had told someone else where I’d be standing. Instead, I found a corner just inside the main entrance where I could stay tucked away. I could see the escalator fairly well, and the bank of main doors really well. Frankly, my problem wasn’t going to be that I couldn’t see the escalator well enough. Rather, I didn’t trust my ability to recognize even Mario Seneca in a crowd like this, let alone a new surveillance team. Even worse, the first and last time I’d met Phil, I’d been tired, distressed, and buzzed from vodka. I wasn’t even sure if I’d recognize him again.

  I studied the rivers of people and made an insightful note to myself: geeky wasn’t as geeky as it used to be—or maybe I’d been surrounded by pocket-protector types for so long at Zaan that my yardstick had shrunk a couple of inches. I tried to look for patterns, to see if the same people meandered or, like me, stayed in an unobtrusive corner. No one stuck out. But the only thing that told me was that no one stuck out. Maybe I hadn’t been followed. Maybe no one would follow Phil Generett. Maybe we’d be nabbed fifteen seconds after the two of us connected.

  About nine forty-five, a full half hour before my note said to meet, my eye caught a lanky, balding man coming out of the exhibition hall. He looked like my man Phil. It was the height, the fine thin nose, the cleft in his chin. His eyes darted around the room. Even when he strolled over to a literature kiosk and picked up a brochure, his eyes weren’t on the paper in his hand. They were everywhere else. It was Phil.

  It wasn’t our meeting point, but maybe it was better.

  Casually, I made my way across the room, wishing I had eyes like a fly. I noticed he didn’t have anything with him that could look like a ream of documentation. I tried not to worry, but lacked imagination. I picked up the same brochure he had, a glossy Fujitsu marketing piece.

  “Think Fujitsu can pick up a larger share of the laptop market?” I asked him.

  The green shirt and cap had done their trick. Only two feet away, he saw me as me for the first time. A tiny smile appeared.

  “It’s getting harder and harder to crack Apple’s momentum.” The brochure shook slightly in his hands and his forehead glistened, even though it was cool in the convention center.

  I waited.

  “Have you seen their display?” He tilted his head toward the exhibition hall.

  “I hear the Sony booth is better.” In the end, I still wanted to control where we met.

  “Yeah? I’ll check it out in a few minutes.”

  I smiled and put the brochure back in the rack and headed into the maze of the exhibition hall. I glanced back and saw him continue to peruse the kiosk although his eyes still weren’t on the brochures. He could have been looking for his backups. He could have been watching to see if he’d been followed. I wouldn’t know for the next few minutes.

  According to the map, the Sony exhibition was to the far right, Fujitsu to the left. I went left, nonchalantly checking out the various displays and scanning the crowd for a familiar face that followed my erratic path. I picked up a black canvas bag and some pens from the Oracle booth. It used to be that exhibitors at these places couldn’t throw goodies at you fast enough as you walked past. Now you were lucky to get a free keychain. I’d remember Oracle’s generosity next time I wanted to update my business applications. I took what I could and signed up for some drawings. My luck, this would be the one time my card would get drawn out of the hat, but some untraceable woman named Jane Dille would win the free tablet.

  I gave myself twenty minutes to make my way over to the Sony booth, which had a comfortable collection of techies milling around the innovative display. Phil Generett, his head a half head higher than anyone else’s, stood in front of a sleek, flat screen monitor that seemed unattached to anything by even the thinnest wire.

  He glanced at me, then angled off toward one of the elaborate hors d'oeuvre buffets. As I passed the booth, I realized why: a bank of nine monitors reflected every corner of the display. Even though the video probably wasn’t fed beyond the Sony booth, there wasn’t any reason to be captured on camera if we could help it. I studied the booth on the opposite side of the aisle as I walked past and slipped in line behind Phil for a plate of shrimp and tiny crab cakes.

  “Where’s Eddy?” he asked softly. He rattled some coins in his pants pocket and lightly tapped his foot. He still didn’t have anything that looked like documentation. He carried no bag.

  My own anxiety ratcheted up. “I don’t know.” It was the truth. We didn’t want to know where the other person stayed, only how to get in touch.

  His eyes darted. I did not like this.

  “That was the plan. I gave you a sample so you could see what I had. I trusted you. You’ve got to trust me.”

  I shook my head. “Not going to happen. It’s way too risky for him.” And this was way, way too risky for me. My own eyes darted.

  He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “This is my only chance. The funeral is in process right now.” His voice caught and it took him a full minute before he could talk again. If this frazzled man in front of me was acting, it was the finest live performance I’d ever seen. “The funeral is happening r
ight now,” he repeated. “They know I’m not there, so they’ll flip into panic mode. I don’t have time for another meeting—I have to leave the country.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t give it to me.” I really didn’t. Eddy and I had that same skin in the business. “What do you think I’m going to do with it? Destroy it? Turn you in?”

  The line inched forward. He looked ready to bolt.

  “No, no. It’s just that—” He paused.

  Nervous as I already was, he was making me more nervous. If he could have just stood calmly in line, no one would have noticed us. But all his fidgeting made him a magnet.

  “Look,” I said carefully. “We—Eddy and I want to get the truth out as much as you. If you have documentation to back up what you gave me, we’ve got the smoking gun.”

  He laughed tensely. “Lady, if you think that’s a smoking gun, wait’ll you see the rest of it.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “It’ll bring this government down. Not just knock them out of office, it’ll put them in prison.”

  “You have proof this was all deliberate?”

  “I do.” He glanced all around us. “So what do you think they’ll do to try to stop it from happening?”

  “What wouldn’t they do?”

  He cocked his finger and thumb into a gun and poked my arm. “Exactly.”

  “So will you trust me enough to give me the documentation?”

  He took one final visual sweep of the chaotic hall and, I swear, whispered, “You already have it,” before he slipped out of the line and disappeared into a swarm of passersby.

  This hadn’t gone at all like it was supposed to. The only thing worse that could have happened would have been for Mario Seneca to materialize and slap handcuffs on me.

  How could I already have the documentation?

  I ducked into the ladies’ restroom and dropped my Oracle bag into the trash. The ratio of men to women at a techie convention is about the same as at a professional football game, so of the ten stalls, nine were vacant. I stepped into the first stall and halfway through relieving myself, I had an epiphany, which isn’t the typical moment I usually have them. Two minutes later, I retrieved the Oracle bag out of the trash and dumped the contents on the faux marble counter. Pens, business cards, and key chains scattered out. In addition, one USB flash drive, smaller than a thin disposable cigarette lighter, tumbled out of the bag.

  At least it looked like a flash drive. It could just as easily have been a homing device. I understood the government had a knack for that sort of thing.

  CHAPTER

  47

  I STARED AT IT. If it had been radioactive, I couldn’t have been more miserable.

  Of all the possible setups, this was the most elegant. Phil Generett, a total stranger forty-eight hours earlier, had tracked me down and handed me the silver bullet. How could I refuse it, even though the entire history of humanity is of greed—for money, power, lust, or control—triumphing common sense. My brain told me to dump it in the trashcan. My heart said take the risk.

  So I compromised.

  The W Hotel, a too-cool sister hotel to the Sheraton, was only a block from the convention center. Since the Sheraton and the W are both part of the Starwood hotel chain, my frequent stay status gave me an edge in asking favors, even if I didn’t have a room there at the moment. I didn’t feel the least bit embarrassed about asking for an envelope, flashing my Starwood Preferred Guest card, and asking if I could leave something in the hotel safe.

  I’d entered on Mission Street, detoured to the third floor where I deposited the green shirt and hat in a housekeeping cart, and left by 3rd Street.

  For the first time in days, I didn’t worry about being followed. If the flash drive was a tracking device, I now had a head start. I caught a cab to Chinatown, where even on a damp Monday morning in January tourists roamed the streets. From there, I took a streetcar down to the Embarcadero and found the Blue Bottle Coffee Shop. Eddy already sat at a back corner table.

  He kissed me lightly on the cheek and held my hand under the table.

  “Did he meet you?”

  “He did.”

  “And?”

  “He only wanted to give it to you, but I must have convinced him. When he left, he dropped a flash drive in my bag.”

  Eddy’s eyes widened slightly. “No hard copies?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you have it with you?”

  I shook my head again and told him about the W hotel safe. “I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t some kind of a tracking device.”

  “Good thinking.”

  I could feel his foot tapping next to mine.

  “Or it could have a virus,” he said a minute later.

  I thought of our own virus plan. “Maybe even something time-release, so whoever downloads information from your website gets the virus.”

  “Or it could track cookies—who visits the website.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Eddy sipped his coffee. Two elderly window shoppers stood three feet away from us on the other side of the glass and pointed to the flaky almond croissant on my plate. I glanced at Eddy and then around the room for a back door. The women moved on. I realized I hadn’t been breathing. Nothing would ever seem benign to me again.

  “The first thing we do is find out if it’s a tracking device,” he said.

  “How do we do that?”

  “Buy a cheap laptop and test it. If it works, we download everything to the laptop and leave the flash drive. If it doesn’t work, we drop it in someone else’s bag and run like the wind.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “And then?”

  “Then,” he paused and thought for a minute. “Then we buy a high-speed printer and scanner. We print off the information and re-scan it back into my laptop. No virus can go from soft copy to hard copy.”

  “What if it’s a thousand pages?”

  “Then it’ll take us all night. I’m ready to pull an all-nighter, aren’t you?” He winked at me.

  I squeezed his hand.

  “How did the meeting go with that programmer? The Russian. Did the instructions make sense to him?”

  “Stepan? He was very confident that he could hack his way into the system based on the information from Anna.”

  “I’d say that’s terrific, except that I hear a ‘but’ coming.”

  “You do. Here’s the deal. He says that Daniel left a back door into the software not just so he could go back in, but so he could go back in to plant a virus.”

  “That’s perfect—”

  “The idea, yes. The reality, no. He says to make it work, he needs ten health cards and the matching vaccination capsules. He’ll program them to plant the virus in the DHS system so that twenty-four hours after they’re scanned in, all the numbers in the database will default to the terminal number for each entry.”

  “So all the health cards ending in zero become all zeros in the database?”

  “Exactly. And all cards ending in one become all ones and so on.”

  “So you end up with only ten numbers in the database for the entire population?”

  I nodded.

  Eddy laughed out loud. “I love it.” He was quiet for a minute and I could almost hear his brain buzzing. “But what about the vaccination capsules? Couldn’t they just rescan the vaccination capsules and reissue the cards?”

  “Probably. Unless we time it with the release of Phil Generett’s information and people are so outraged that they refuse.”

  He nodded slowly and smiled. “It’s so simple it’s beautiful.”

  “The pessimist says this? Don’t confuse me,” I said. “Again, the idea is simple, but how do we get the health cards and the vaccination capsules?”

  Eddy chewed on his lower lip.

  “And how do we know for sure that Phil Generett’s information is true, that it’s not a setup? And, for that matter, where do we come up with those ten people willing to risk going through security with a false
health card that will plant the virus?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that we don’t have a choice.”

  Eddy and I power-shopped in one of the shoebox-size electronics stores near Pier 39. We could just as easily have been in Hong Kong since, except for us, everyone on both sides of the counter was Asian. Within twenty minutes Eddy had picked out a cheap, fast Toshiba and a backup hard drive.

  “So who are you betting on?”

  To anyone else, it was a non sequitur. I knew, though, the question was about who might be setting us up.

  I shook my head. “I still don’t know.”

  “I’m betting on Phil Generett.”

  “He’s the most logical—unless you’ve seen him in person. He’s crazy with grief.”

  “Like Pete.”

  My feet were killing me. “No doubt.”

  “Well then, what about Michael or his Thai friend?”

  I shook my head. “I kept looking for signs, but again, they’d have to be amazing actors to pull it off. Kai, maybe, since I’ve never met her before this project, but Michael? Not a chance.”

  Eddy handed the clerk a wad of cash.

  “Besides,” I continued when we were outside. “I started that project before this whole smallpox thing began.”

  “True.”

  “You didn’t put your website together until I’d been at Baja Breeze at least six months.”

  “They could have bribed her or threatened her to be part of the set up.”

  I nodded and thought about it for a minute. “Anything is possible. But I don’t think that’s one of the things.”

  We were back in the coffee shop and Eddy was working his magic on the computer, loading the software and setting preferences. I knew what was coming, and it made me nervous.

  “Maybe Stepan? Is he the plant?”

  “He could be. He’s arrogant. He’s been through tough times. You never know what a person will do for money. He talks, though, like he’s doing this for the sheer challenge of it.”