The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  Anna and I hugged each other, but not for the reasons the TSA agent thought. Arm in arm, we left the security area. I glanced back to see Eddy put his shoes back on. A TSA agent stood next to him. I could hardly watch. We’d made it this far. What were the odds all ten of us would make it?

  Anna squeezed my arm. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved me.”

  I shook my head. If the TSA agent suspected her, they certainly wouldn’t have let her go just because an old college friend spotted her.

  “It was nothing,” I whispered. “They were going to let you go anyway.”

  I looped my arm through Anna’s and we strolled off toward the restroom. My last glance back at the security area told me the one thing I didn’t want to know: Eddy now sat in the extra security booth.

  It was my turn to throw up in the restroom, which at the moment, was packed. Anna stood in line in front of me. We whispered to each other as we patiently waited.

  “What was the holdup?”

  “I got pulled over for a random search. Then they say my vaccination isn’t in the right place. I say to them, ‘What difference, this vaccination place? I have it. Why do you stop me because it’s not in the right place?’” She shook her head. “I think to myself. My Daniel make this all possible. To track all these people. Is not good.”

  “But he also made it possible to stop it. And we just did.”

  I hoped.

  “Yes. This part is good.” She didn’t sound convinced. Maybe she needed this for her grieving process.

  Her turn came to take a stall. I took the next one, but all I did was lean my head against the inside of the door. I didn’t know what they were doing with Eddy.

  The toilet flushed behind me. I hated automation.

  Anna waited for me while I washed my hands, and we walked back towards security. Two agents were escorting an irate Sanjeev out of the area. What did he not understand about keeping his head down?

  Unfortunately, Eddy still sat in security. He was leaned over, his forearms resting on his knees—his basketball bench stance. He caught my eye and gave a half smile.

  If only he’d had an ounce more of charm.

  “You can go,” I said to Anna. The longer we waited on this side of security, the more we stayed at risk.

  She shook her head. “I am with you until is over.” She’d looped her arm through mine again. I felt Russian.

  A second TSA agent joined the first one. Eddy looked relaxed. He stood up and talked some more. It was a good move because sitting people who talk to standing people are at a psychological disadvantage. He motioned with his hands and shrugged his shoulders.

  I really needed a chair. My knees wouldn’t survive this.

  Finally, the TSA agent stepped back and waved Eddy out of the security booth. Anna and I strolled towards baggage claim where the others had gathered next to a carousel with a fresh load of circling luggage. We hadn’t planned to rendezvous, but after the intensity of the last two hours, I don’t think any of us could just walk away. We’d been changed forever. Hopefully, we’d changed things forever.

  A hand touched my arm. This time it was Eddy.

  I turned and hugged him and tried not to cry.

  “We’re safe.”

  “Thank God we made it.”

  “I love you.”

  “What happened?”

  “Later. Not here.”

  We shook hands and hugged all around, promising to keep in touch. And then we left so we could disappear for the next twenty-four hours.

  Eddy and I grabbed a cab to take us to the bus station. The adventure never ended with this guy.

  CHAPTER

  53

  THE BUS STATION SEEMED DOWNRIGHT PRIMITIVE BY COMPARISON. We paid cash for our tickets and then stood in line with an exceptionally motley group, not for security, but to get a seat. The bus company took “first come, first served” as a Biblical commandment. Ten minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave, they opened a door to the outside. We patiently filed out to the platform and climbed up the bus steps to find our seats.

  “They thought I resembled a terrorist named Eddy Rider,” he whispered as we pulled out of the station.

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “I kept saying they had my fingerprints and my DNA. I could look like Hitler, but it would only take a minute to prove I wasn’t.”

  “I can’t believe you were so bold.”

  “It wasn’t that. I just know that no matter what the technology is, as long as people are making the decisions, it’ll never be foolproof.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  I fell asleep in Eddy’s arms before we crossed the Oakland Bridge and didn’t wake up again until we’d passed into Nevada. We got off the bus in Reno and found a cheap motel with a high-speed Internet. Eddy worked feverishly to finish getting the documents ready to load on the website. I rounded up some deli sandwiches and a six-pack and then spent the rest of the night trying not to say over and over, “I can’t believe we did it. I can’t believe we’re okay.”

  At least not out loud.

  We both watched the clock. At twelve o’clock midnight, the moment the server backed up the data, we toasted each other with the last of the beers. I fell asleep again around one, waking only briefly when Eddy crawled in bed around four. At nine, the alarm blared. A trumpet sounding would have been more appropriate. If the virus had done what Stepan said it would, it should have just released into the system.

  We sat up in bed and Eddy hit the power button on the TV remote control. He flipped through the channels until he found CNN.

  We waited.

  Bland news blips scrolled across the bottom. There’d been a small earthquake in Turkey, a car bomb in some unpronounceable place in Iraq, and a nasty snowstorm developing over the Great Lakes region.

  The longer we waited the more I worried something had gone wrong. Maybe it was the ultimate scam and the instructions didn’t release a virus after all. Or maybe Sanjeev convinced someone that Maggie Rider, of all people, figured out how to destroy the system, and they figured out that they shouldn’t back up the data.

  “Just wait. These things take time,” Eddy said, completing our transformation of me becoming the pessimist in the family and him the optimist.

  I took a shower and got ready for the day. Eddy followed and then once again we were in front of the TV.

  Finally, close to noon, the first headline scrolled across the bottom of the screen. It was a simple message: “Long delays occurring at all major airports due to a computer problem. TSA expects to resolve by 3:00 Pacific Standard Time.”

  “Sorry, friends. It ain’t likely to get fixed in three hours,” Eddy said to the TV. He turned on his computer, connected to the Internet, and began uploading the new pages with Phil Generett’s information to smallpoxscare.com.

  I stayed glued to the TV. The news ticker tape gradually swelled in urgency: the computer glitch appeared to be a virus, impacting the entire Homeland Security database. The DHS suspected a terrorist attack on the database. The White House reacted and raised the terrorist threat level to red, the highest level possible.

  By four o’clock it was the only news story CNN or FOX talked about.

  We ordered pizza, which seemed innocuous enough except that as Eddy was paying the delivery guy, CNN chose to report breaking news in the next level of the crisis. They flashed pictures of Eddy Rider and his lovely wife Maggie as the terrorists who had temporarily brought down the database.

  The pizza guy’s eyes flicked from the TV to me to the TV to Eddy back to the TV again and then back to Eddy.

  My stomach flopped over. Eddy handed the pizza guy another hundred-dollar tip and smiled.

  The pizza guy paused. His bulk blocked the door and his eyes shifted around the room one more time. Eddy’s computer purred in the background.

  I was a second away from throwing myself at the pizza guy’s chest so Eddy could at least have a thirty-second escape lead. To where, I did
n’t have time to think about.

  But the man in the door just shrugged his shoulders. “That’s really something, huh? How just those two people could bring down Big Brother all by themselves.” He handed back all of Eddy’s money, including the tip. “This one’s on me.”

  Eddy’s hand shook slightly as he took the money back. “You know what they’ll do if they think we’re eating pizza in a cheap motel in Reno,” he said.

  The pizza guy gave a tiny salute. “My lips are sealed, no matter what size the reward is.”

  It turned out to be ten million dollars, for each of us. It might as well have been a billion dollars. There was no knock on the door.

  All evening we watched the talking heads debate what had happened, how, and why.

  Eddy snorted at that. “Why? Why would someone want to take down a national database that contains the DNA and fingerprints of every person on US soil? If that’s the best question the media could ask, it’s no wonder they couldn’t put this story together before it was spoon-fed to them.”

  The White House held a press conference late evening to shriek about how this attack against the freedom of the American people on US soil by terrorists was unparalleled. Even the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon paled in comparison. The president echoed those famous words of another day: “We will hunt you down and we will kill you.”

  But the words already had a tinny sound since Eddy’s website information had started seeping into the news reports as well.

  The president might as well have been repeating the famous line from the Wizard of Oz: “Don’t look behind the curtain. There is not a man behind the curtain.”

  Already the next morning, plastic card shredding machines started appearing on street corners across the country, placed there by private citizens whose hearts beat like our own.

  Epilogue

  I’d never dreamed of going to Honduras, but when a person needs to disappear, it’s hard to find a sweeter place. Eleven bus rides and a ferry later, Eddy and I landed on one of the English-speaking Bay Islands just off the mainland coast, a tranquil spot surrounded by the most undiscovered coral reefs for a thousand miles. The guidebook described the place as the Caribbean in the fifties.

  We found a comfortable little house perched on stilts right on the water. I hung out for hours on our dock that jutted out over the water and watched the daily rhythm of the sea life that circled through our piece of the bay: angelfish, barracudas, tiny squid, and a small school of silky manta rays that always flew through at dusk.

  The island had electricity from 6:00 a.m. till midnight every day, except on the days it didn’t, and running water the hours they had electricity. There was a simple mechanical reason for this that I never learned. The supply boat regularly chugged into the bay and stocked the two tiny grocery stores with anything you could want from the mainland, except—for some unknown reason—butter. The boat also brought Eddy slightly stale copies of The New York Times, which cycled through a dozen hands—sans all the articles Eddy ripped out of them—before they ended up in the trash.

  Some day we’d return to the US. Or maybe we wouldn’t. It depended on whether the new administration could prove itself trustworthy and whether the country had the guts to make the prison sentences stick for the old administration. I was a little nervous that all those guys who had formerly run around the White House might end up on our little Honduran Island.

  If they did, we didn’t recognize each other.

  WHERE THEY ENDED UP

  Keri, the useless Baja Breeze project lead: Without Michael at Baja Breeze, Keri was totally exposed—well, at least figuratively. The CEO zipped his pants and fired her for incompetence. She filed a sexual harassment lawsuit but lost, probably because she wore a see-through blouse on the third day of the trial. Currently, she’s bartending at a sleazy place on El Camino. Surprisingly, she’s been a faithful pen pal to Mario Seneca and promises to wait forever until he’s up for parole in 2025.

  Sanjeev Srivastava: He moved his family back to Bangalore but kept his job at Zaan and probably his same salary. It took him over a year, but he eventually emailed Michael and apologized for not having more courage. Better late than never.

  Lisa, Phil Generett’s niece: She went back to her Starbucks, having only taken off the morning. No one ever realized she’d played such an important part in saving the country.

  Stepan the Dishwasher: Brilliant though he was, he was more brilliant if someone gave him the hacking instructions to follow. Still, he leveraged his part in the drama into a mega salary with a startup antivirus company.

  Phil Generett: Even for the major media, it didn’t take much sleuthing to figure out he was the source of the information on Eddy’s website. He testified at various trials and eventually published a book about his experiences, which did almost as well as Eddy’s book. Both books stayed on the The New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Most people treated him as the hero he was, although—as in any event of this sort—there were those who claimed he was the one who had betrayed the country with his revelations. Go figure.

  Jola Pavelkavich: She worked for Zaan for a few more months, but finally quit in disgust when they asked her to work on another Homeland Security project, one that would require no cards but would scan and capture irises. She returned to Poland and started up a small company that built anti-spy gizmos. Although she was three decades too late for when Poland needed the technology the most, she made a bucket of money selling to Americans and Western Europeans.

  Anna Denisov: Her Russian restaurant in Palo Alto continued to win awards and hold a devoted following, but her heart just wasn’t in it anymore. Eventually, she sold out and built a small distillery that made boutique vodkas.

  Michael and Kai: Michael cashed in his huge portfolio of Zaan stock and turned in his resignation to Zaan the same day as the database failure. Michael and Kai got married and moved to Southern Louisiana, where they opened a fabulous Thai restaurant in New Orleans. They occasionally visit us in Honduras, where they too hang out on the dock and watch the manta rays.

  Tina Bastante: The DHS released Tina twenty-four hours after the database crash, as she’d become the ultimate lightening rod. Although they’d exposed her to smallpox, she was still well within the incubation period. The Center for Disease Control provided a true smallpox vaccine, complete with needle pinpricks. Not even a single pustule emerged. If it had only been so easy to undo the other scars the government had inflicted. She eventually returned to El Salvador, where she continued to practice medicine.

  Pete Kawalski: He carried his guilt in betraying his friends forever even though Eddy reminded him repeatedly that we would have never gotten the health cards and vaccination capsules if it hadn’t been for him. Pete’s therapist assured him that losing Tina was a crazy-maker, but he wouldn’t stop blaming himself. As penance, he took care of selling our possessions and selling our house in Colorado. He followed Tina to El Salvador, where they endured in spite of some rocky times. Sometimes love does conquer all.

  The mole at DHS who fed Eddy his best stuff: We never figured out who it was. We’re hoping he’s still there, patiently waiting to discreetly expose the next Orwellian government plan.

  The Reno pizza guy: We don’t know. He kept his mouth shut. What a guy.

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  With nearly everything in life, we gain something and we lose something, even though it may be difficult to see in the moment. What would be the benefits of an RFID implant in every citizen? What would be the losses?

  What role does humor play in the story?

  What is the effect of the author's use of first person narrative? Does it make the story more or less immediate or credible?

  How do you define civil disobedience?

  Have you ever committed an act of civil disobedience? What did you do? Why did you do it? If you haven’t, what would be the impetus for committing an act of civil disobedience? What would you be willing to do
?

  What would society be like if no one ever committed an act of civil disobedience?

  If the government required everyone to get an RFID implant, what would you do? Why? What would you choose for your children?

  In Chapter 28, Maggie reminds the project lead, Michael de Leon, of the old cliché of the frog that boils alive because it doesn’t know when to leap out of the water that’s getting hotter and hotter. Given that all the technology in the book currently exists, think about where our society is today on a scale of one to ten. One represents room temperature water, in other words, total freedom without government control. Ten is boiling water, in other words, total control by the government. What number are we today as a society? Why do you believe this?

  In Chapter 40, Anna compares the definition of freedom that the Soviets had until communism fell and the American definition of freedom—corporate versus individual. What do we gain with our view of individual freedom? What do we lose? What would you give up to have more corporate freedom? What would you give up to have more individual freedom?

  The story makes numerous references to breadcrumb trails. What are the breadcrumb trails you leave every day if someone wanted to find you?

  The story references back doors at various points, both literal and metaphorical. What are your back doors in case you’d ever need one?

  Over the course of the story, Maggie gives up her computer because of the tracking software, her clothes because of the possibility of RFIDs, and finally cuts her hair—part of her identity—so as not to be spotted. Ultimately, she leaves her home, community, and country, maybe forever. What would you give up if you had to?