"I'm not sure of the 'where' yet," he said. "But I'll get on it this afternoon. If ShadowStrike had any idea who you are, they might come after you. I do need to go out of town for three days, and it won't be the last time."
He shifted nervously in his seat, avoiding Shahzad's eyes. Hodji had gone away several times, and Shahzad got separation anxiety each time.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"Can't say."
Shahzad took off in Punjabi, which is his tendency when he gets upset. I only understood the words "Cancún" and "Mexico" and sensed his total frustration that Hodji was probably going to help look for Omar. And despite that we had fed him the intelligence about where Omar was, he would not confirm his plans.
"Stop picking," Hodji interrupted, knocking one of Shahzad's hands away from his cheek. Hamdani likes to pick his scabs when he's thinking. "And stop focusing on what you don't get instead of what you do. I've got a meeting with the squad in New York today. I've got a great plan of protection in mind, just in case those idiots eventually try to do more harm to my two most trusted, uh, v-spies-oops-I-mean-friends. That is, if your senses of humor are still working."
My sense of humor only malfunctioned for about half of each day. Hamdani never had any, so the remark was directed at me.
"I'm not sure USIC will go for it. But I would like to propose faking your deaths. If you had new identities, I could go back to work and quit worrying about you all the time. So. How would you feel about, uh, dying in some staged accident? Becoming two other guys?"
Hamdani watched patiently for more information, as if this were a perfectly normal conversation.
I finally decided, well, screw him if he can't see the humor. "Do we get to be carried out of here in body bags? You won't let anyone accidentally embalm us, right?"
Hodji said, "We would drive you to the morgue, get death certificates, the whole schmear. We can even drug you with chloroform—maybe. We've done worse in Intelligence to set a realistic stage. We can have a 'funeral.' Of course, we'll tell your uncle Ahmer in Pakistan, Shahzad, and have him come back for a 'funeral' so it would look good in the newspaper. I trust him with my life."
"Will USIC go for this?" Hamdani made a face like Hodji had warts on his cheeks.
Hodji shrugged uneasily, repeating his doubts. "The Witness Protection Program doesn't do minors without parents. You're setting yet another precedent. And wherever it is, it would have to be somewhere you can stay out of sight for weeks—months, if necessary. Our country is in a state of national panic right now over acts of terror. Considering the two of you look like a radioactive rain shower dropped on you, you'll have the media chasing you five minutes after you're seen in public. It would have to be someplace where you can heal in private. A farm or something. Maybe in Kansas or Oklahoma, say. I'll check our contacts—if USIC agrees to this. Tyler, we would have to tell your mother in jail that you actually died. That's ... horrendous, as far as I'm concerned. USIC might say the same."
"I'm only a minor for another eight months. If I were eighteen, would it be so iffy?" I asked.
"Intelligence has been known to lie about causes of death for the sake of national security, even to family members," he said. "But yes, it's iffy. A minor is a minor, whether he's got eight months to go or ten years to go. God forbid the truth should come out—"
"She's earned it," I said, though I felt the bottom fall out of me. Turning in my own mother for spying for the North Koreans made me feel like a hero when I was looking at Shahzad and Hodji but like fungus-infested roadkill in the middle of every night. "She stole my high school years from me. She was so embarrassing, I couldn't even make friends," I went on, mostly for my own sanity. No one could understand the feeling. I could have lived with having a hooker for a mother. Walk a mile in my shoes, I had told my shrink at Beth Israel.
I wandered away from them, up to my bedroom. Ever since eighth grade, when I found out about my mom, it was the only room in the house that felt like I belonged in it. I'm a pretty ridiculous information head—I like keeping information just because. In ninth grade I was on lithium for obsessive-compulsive disorder after my mom got a load of all my CDs and how obsessed I'd gotten over cataloging and cleaning them. She forced me to the doctor's office, but it's hard to trust a woman who is a big fat liar. I went off the medication after a month or so. I enjoy collecting facts about people and still can't see the big deal in that part of it.
I had five shelves of CDs, the length of the room, probably containing every online People magazine article ever printed, every NatGeo, Yahoo!, and MSNBC article on every person ever featured, and that's for starters. I have a corkboard that runs the length of the wall, and almost every centimeter is covered with people news I've read. Mostly right now, it's covered with pictures of Cora Holman.
I use two bedroom doors turned up on their sides as desktops, and they meet in the corner. On them I have four towers, four flat-screens, four printers capable of varying tricks, and six extra hard drives, also full of information. I'm also a cord-cover freak. In all of that hardware, you would be hard-pressed to find a loose cord.
My bed was in the middle of all this ... unmade today. So it looks to me like some rabid goose flew in here and took a dump right in the middle of the room. That's what has bugged me worse than anything about being sick. When your inability to clean gets to be a problem, you know that terrorists have managed to climb very far up your ass.
Hodji and Shahzad had followed me up. I hadn't let too many people in here over the years, because the complex nature of Being Tyler was too weird on most people's eyeballs.
"The first time I was in this room, back in March, I thought all these CDs were music," Hodji said, and I detected a note of concern. Only about forty of them were music. "Did they get you back on lithium?"
That's the obsessive-compulsive-disorder drug. The doctors nixed it because I'm taking so much other shit right now to reduce the f/x of ulceroglandular tularemia. Decision: They would fix my head after fixing my body.
I was pretty proud of myself for standing in the middle of my room and not cussing out the bed for being unmade. I felt something more powerful than my compulsiveness, despite that my compulsiveness went over the top lately.
I didn't answer. At least not directly. "Got a great idea. You want Shahzad and me to 'die' and have nobody question it? Let's burn down the house."
I glanced at the two of them, their jaws floating and their eyes scanning this info tank of CDs, which could have served the New York Public Library extremely well. I guess the two of them knew me well enough not to focus on the loss to mankind. Considering my compulsions, this was major ground breaking.
"...dangerous..." Hodji was remarking. "...don't want to take out the whole neighborhood ... kerosene fire would burn fast and dramatically but not hotly ... not as dangerous." Blah blah.
I was looking at my CDs, reading the side jackets. I had science dudes, then history dudes, then criminal dudes, then detective dudes, then various writer and novelist dudes whom I'd never had time to read, then philosophers and musicians and movie stars.
"Do you know where all your mom's money is?" Hodji was asking. "It would probably be a good idea to get it all out of the house sometime soon, no matter what we do about your—"
Hamdani and I are surviving here on cash payments that my mom had hidden all over the damn place. If you deposit money you earned as a spy, it could send the IRS into epileptic seizures. I knew most of the hiding places by v-spying on her. Over a hundred thousand in cash and precious metals—gold, silver, and platinum coins—were buried behind the fireplace, behind the stove, under the floorboards where Shahzad now slept, yadda yadda.
"Why?" I turned, ignoring his slight flinch, which could still happen if either Shahzad or I turned our faces to him without warning and his thoughts had been on something else. "I don't want it."
I gazed at my CDs again. I think at last count it was eleven hundred and eight.
"So, pick
a night when there's no wind," I told him. "But make it a second-story fire. Shahzad and I can hole up on the first floor to get taken out on stretchers, right? I really want to do the body-bag part. That sounds like a rip."
They said nothing about my bad pun, and I attacked the damn bed to make it before the sight of it gave me a hole in my head.
EIGHT
SCOTT EBERMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
9:30 A.M.
HIS BEDROOM
RAIN'S PREDICTION that I would get the Throat from Hell was dead on. I glanced at my watch. 9:31. I'd slept the clock around, but I shut my eyes again, trying to enjoy the fact that for the first time in two months, I had slept on a mattress that wasn't wrapped in a rubber sheet.
I opened my eyes minutes later as I suddenly smelled Cora. One side effect of our antiretroviral meds is an overly keen sense of smell. It could be annoying, as not all smells are good. Cora has a distinctive smell, some combination of talcum powder and carnations, and it was wafting in from the corridor. She was standing out there, god knows why, but she'd done that at St. Ann's sometimes—just stood outside the door until I smelled her and told her to come in.
If any of a hundred girls smelled that way, I'd have admitted it could drive me nuts. But Cora's got that virginal, never-been-kissed, honor-student way about her, and even I have a conscience. I'd been with my share of girls, but any innocence they'd had was either gone long before they got to me, or they seriously wanted it gone. You don't cuss in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother, and you don't smell Cora Holman and think bad thoughts. Especially if you're a germ fest and it would be pointless anyway.
I didn't want to force my throat into speaking. I finally picked up a paperback on vitamins for AIDS patients I'd been planning to read last night before crashing, and I threw it at the door. Her face appeared a moment later, wide-eyed and blushing.
Rain and Owen and I just barged in on each other with a knock. Sometimes Cora's shyness was adorable; other times it was annoying. We didn't always have the energy to lead her around by the nose. I gestured her in.
"Can I get you anything?" she asked.
I fumbled for a slushy our new live-in nurse, Marg, had left for me an hour ago, but by now it was warm and watery, and the orange juice burned on the way down.
"Do you want a refill?" she asked quickly. "Regular water?"
I shook my head, thinking my eyeballs would blow out. I patted the bed, not exactly wanting company, but Cora was more like the family pet than a person, insofar as she wasn't as noisy. She handed me the TV remote and sat at the edge of the bed where it had lain. The Montel Williams Show was on the muted screen, somehow making me think of idle time I didn't want. I looked at Cora instead.
She was a little like one of the portrait people who had stared from the walls of the stairwell when I stumbled up here last night. A woman in eighteenth-century garb now stared at me from a portrait between the two windows. Cora wasn't dressed like her, but she wasn't dressed like us either. Our hospital rooms at St. Ann's had been littered with jeans, cutoffs, gym trunks, sweatpants. I think Cora owned one pair of jeans. Right now, she was wearing black shorts, a black top that matched, and a really thin gold chain around her neck with a locket that I knew contained a picture of her grandmother. Her hair, the same color as a Hershey bar, was pulled tight in some knotty thing at the back of her neck, like she took all the time in the world to fix herself up. Well, she had the time. We each had our little coping mechanisms. Hers was being impeccable.
I pointed to her and held up four fingers.
"Yes, four-star. I went out for about twenty minutes and looked all around this property. There's a pond, there." She pointed out the south window. I could only see treetops and a blue sky. "The old outbuildings are, well, starting to fall down, because they haven't been restored and are a hundred and fifty years old at least. Great Bay is on the eastern side, but you can't see the barrier islands right now. Too misty. When you're up to it, you have to let me show you about."
She sounded casual, but hope rang through it. I let a fact seep back in that both strengthened and alarmed me: Cora got flustered when I was symptomatic. It made me want to get up, though I'd have to face my boredom once I did.
"I took some pictures," she continued. "And Mrs. Starn showed me a darkroom down in the basement. It's the old-fashioned kind, the kind I suppose Aleese used to develop her war photos. I learned how to develop film the old-fashioned way at school, and I'm going to develop these. Mrs. Starn said the photo historian will bring me some chemicals this morning."
She must have gotten up at seven to accomplish all this. I felt outdone and tried to sit up. She was suddenly on her knees beside me, helping me wedge the pillows around. I forced myself to speak and ignore the razorblades.
"Be careful of those chemicals."
"I will. I have gloves."
"Wear a mask."
"Oh."
"Ask Marg for one." I grimaced without meaning to.
"I'll go find her..." She backed away on her knees and stood guiltily, like she had caused my pain.
I made some annoyed, choppy motion with my hand that was meant as some version of "Relax, will you?" But she took it wrong.
"...and I'll bring you a new slushy!" And she bolted out the door again.
I threw back the blanket and sat on the side of the bed. I could have stayed in bed all day and nursed my sore throat, but I wouldn't be the worse for having gotten up. Our immune systems actually still worked. But it was like a car running on three pistons. This symptom would go away in a couple of days like it had the last few times—whether I stayed horizontal or faced my life.
NINE
SHAHZAD HAMDANI
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
10:15 A.M.
Upstairs
I APPROACH THE BATHROOM and turn on the light switch, only to find Tyler sitting on the toilet seat with his mouth open and his eyes staring at me. Except only the whites of his eyes show. With his skin condition it appears most horrific, and I am not amused by his grin when he hears me gasp.
"Did I blink when you turned on the light?" he asks. "It's important that you don't blink, or it will ruin everything. I am so stoked to play dead."
"You do not blink," I tell him.
"You gotta winkie-tink?" He stands. He has not been using the toilet—just sitting in the dark, awaiting my arrival so as to alarm me.
"Where you have been?" I ask. "You get quiet after Hodji leaves."
"I cleaned the toilet and shower. Now I'm practicing being dead."
I roll my eyes, not at all sure that Hodji should have told Tyler of this plan yet, despite that it involves us so personally. I have had years of experience with American Intelligence, and I do not think USIC will go for it. It is too radical, reflecting Hodji's fear for our security. He is "too emotionally involved," and as their policies do not acknowledge help from minors, there can be no help for minors, USIC will say. If an anonymous source turns out to be a minor, that is not their problem.
And besides, I have more pressing news to report. "I just found Omar online again today. He was at an Internet café in Tijuana. He either has a plane ... or a patch on his computer."
"Tijuana? That's a border town. Oh shit. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"That he is in Mexico because he is planning to cross over?" I spell it out. "I thought of it first thing last night, but I had also hoped perhaps he was looking for a country in which to practice a new designer germ without attracting attention to himself."
"He could have done that in Ethiopia," Tyler points out. "Or the Sudan, or fucking Greenland..."
I finish and turn to wash my hands, shaking my head at the challenges. "I don't believe USIC has agents in Tijuana. Their base south of the border is Mexico City, and I would imagine that having received that e-mail from us, they sent whomever they had there to look for him in Cancún. Perhaps he is not even in Tijuana but drawing off its server. Perhaps he is in Europe.
The agents will be angry if I sent them to Cancún for nothing."
"The agents don't know you sent that tip," Tyler says and starts to pee. He can't withhold a hooting laugh. Obviously, they did know. They just have to pretend they don't know for the sake of their policies. Regardless of a source's age, they are not going to send a script like our gift of last night into the shredder and pretend they didn't receive it.
"Relax. You're not responsible for how they interpret the info that you so graciously send." Tyler continues. "Who was Omar talking to, and what did he say?"
"He was talking to VaporStrike," I say, which will be news to him. This is the first resurrection of VaporStrike online since he and Omar escaped Trinity Falls together.
I think Tyler will be very impressed by this, but he doesn't stop to think of it, in light of his other question: "Did they discuss their new germ that can turn a corpse into a skeleton in four hours or less?"
"Indirectly. He said, 'Fire will fall upon Colony Two.'"
I hear Tyler stop peeing, midstream. My troubles with ShadowStrike and the Trinity Falls water poisoning started with online chatter I captured in November of last year. It was this: "Waters will run red in Colony One."
Tyler mutters curses and follows with what I believe will be the next Question of Our Lives. "Where in hell is Colony Two?"
It seemed that the place was already known by both men, and they did not name it outright. But, anyway, Tyler would not assume the answers would be so easy. The question is rhetorical.
He flushes and then begins his washing ritual, which is quite involved, using very hot water and his own prescription soap bar each time, with suds rising to his elbows. It is disturbing to watch the scalding water run over his pustules, and I turn and face out into the hallway.
He finally brushes past me, and I know he is rushing to my terminal to see this chatter. He cannot understand it, as I have not yet translated it. I sit, saying, "They were having an argument. About the location of Colony Two. Omar does not like it."