He holds a third disk out to me, but Miss Susan intercepts it, and I watch it disappear into her jacket pocket with awe. Ping will have done huge, huge favors for American intelligence if the programs will work as he says.
I see the agents trying not to respond with too much shock, but I am shocked as he repeats a line I am quite familiar with. Apparently, it is not as original as I thought: "In the land of computers, men are the children and children are the men."
I feel the agents' anxiety. Tyler's manners are horrendous. And yet, I would not have had the nerve to introduce myself to Catalyst and present a false program concept to his face. I am a good TNT but an inexperienced mole. I wonder how good I would be with this maniac Tyler Ping for the other half of my brain.
"Maybe we could try them and make for certain they work," I tell the agent.
"They work." Tyler folds his arms across his chest. "But suit yourself."
The agent still watches him, very uncomfortably. "Why are you giving us these things? Are you expecting to be paid?"
"Any offer less than three million would be an insult, so maybe it's like I keep saying—maybe I'm just an asshole."
The agent tries to smile but looks befuddled. "How do we know, if you're willing to give them one thing and us a better thing, that you haven't actually given them a better better thing?"
Tyler smiles. "Well, I guess you don't, do you? You want to take a risk? You want to take a risk to find out who Omar is and what other tricks he's developing, before a lot of Americans turn into something resembling a smallpox victim with a short-term memory of zero?" Tyler turns to me. "Did you see that chatter last night about new vinegars? That ought to get some anus muscles working."
He is vulgar and very much of a "loose cannon," to use one of Hodji's terms.
"I guess we all know where Colony One is, don't we?" He continues to shock me.
I do not know that yet—thanks to this new job. The agent acts as if he does know the location of Colony One, which galls me.
"Did you hack into the CDC?" He points a finger at Tyler. "Because that's a very serious federal offense."
"I don't think so. I don't remember. You'll have to ask my attorney. What the CDC doesn't know, that guy Catalyst is probably willing to discuss with his friends. Oh, and he said he would take me to a party with him sometime soon and introduce me to—"
Miss Susan puts her hands in the middle of the table and beats on it once or twice to silence him. "Mr. Ping. We are grateful for anything citizens bring in here, but there is a hell of a big difference between stumbling on information while you're minding your own business, and making our business your business. Your safety comes first. Okay? So, what kind of a deal can we cut so that we don't have teenagers chasing guys like Catalyst around town and trying to sell them software and video games, for god's sake?"
"He took the software, didn't he? The guy loves me. I can make anyone love me—for a few days. Can we just say that for reasons I cannot state, I owe you? Why don't you just take these programs here, and let me help Hamdani out sometimes? Bet I could be a really, really big help."
"I'm afraid that's impossible," Miss Susan says. "Mr. Hamdani wasn't forthright about his age. We're letting him go."
I suppose Tyler Ping does not see my world falling apart in my eyes, because he only cackles more and says, "You guys found out about that, too? Took you long enough. I'll be eighteen in ten months. I'll be as old as some of those guys being trained to toss grenades in Afghanistan. If they're old enough to toss grenades, I'm old enough to ... what's the term? V-spy?"
He pulls his driver's license out of his wallet, but she does not drop her eyes to look at it. "Mr. Ping, to provide an intelligence service for the Coalition, you have to be efficient in every possible way, because trust is such a key factor. I don't think anyone in USIC could work, even sporadically, with your personality."
She hasn't said it spitefully, but the honest words cut into him. Despite his continued smile I can see the sadness smoke through and completely overtake the harshness in his eyes.
He stands up. "Keep those disks. They're user-friendly. Maybe you'll discover some things by the time Catalyst's buddies come up with, uh, green vinegar, or black - and - orange -polka-dot vinegar ... in Colony Five."
My neck snaps at his harsh words, which Miss Susan ignores entirely.
"It's not in my job description to stop you from befriending maniacs, Mr. Ping. Just leave me a phone number, okay? When we find your body hacked into five pieces outside the Midtown Tunnel, whom do we call to collect you from the morgue?"
I'd have been more worried they would find him toxic and dead from a chemical agent. Tyler pulls on his jacket, blinking into the tabletop, and for the first time, he looks very serious. All he mumbles is "Let me think about that"
And he turns and walks out. I turn my stunned eyes from him to Miss Susan as she reaches and pulls the first disk out of my hand.
"Miss Susan." I stand quickly. "I have been helping my father v-spy since I was ten. I don't think age is a critical factor. You need me!"
"Yes, we do," she says, pulling on her jacket and studying her cell phone messages. "But there is no way in hell we'll keep on a minor. If something happened to you, every mother in America would want to lynch us. We'd be 'irresponsible lunatics' on every news channel in the world. And look at the way this played out. We work with one kid, and within twenty-four hours it's a horrendous mess of big mouths and immature people with dangerous information. It'll never happen again. Tell me, why'd you do it? Come over here and lie? You seemed to be doing great where you were."
Don't I know this? My first thought is to protect Roger and Hodji. "Having been an FBI subcontractor and not an agent, my father was not entitled to death or medical benefits. I have very bad asthma and need American medicine, which is expensive."
She looks up from her phone, and perhaps I can sense a mother's heart in her softer tone. "Well. You're here. If you give your aunt custody of you, you'll get American medicine from her insurance at work. You just can't be a v-spy over here. Go to school. Get educated until you're an adult"
She probably means this without insult, but it rings of Uncle Ahmer's "Act like an adult!"
"I don't think it is right for you to explain to me how I am and how I am not," I blurt. "You know nothing about me."
But it is in vain, I see, by her unmoved eyes. Americans are very organized. They are moved by policy and forfeit common sense. They would rather be huge and organized than humble and correct, and they are so self-righteous about this tradition that they feel no guilt over their losses.
"Do you want a ride home?" she asks in a sweet voice that I find condescending.
"I do not. And you treat your children like sacred cows"
"We just want them to live to be very old cows," she says, but I am finished listening to her many quick answers, and I leave through the door in which we came, heading into an afternoon fog.
THIRTY-FIVE
CORA HOLMAN
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
2:00 P.M.
AS SOON AS I could see clearly, I knew that I had not died, and this place was not heaven. There were many tubes and wires pressing on my face and chest, and the constant beeps made my ears want to shut down. I sensed that time had lapsed since I spoke to my father on the phone, and somehow, I had gotten into this other room with all these machines.
A man stood beside the bed looking down at me. He had a kind smile. He was patting my head and talking to me in one of the languages that my mother used to babble in. But it sounded pretty and poetic. Jeremy?
Our eyes locked, and he stopped speaking suddenly and looked stunned. This time, he spoke in English.
"You see? I woke you up. When people hear the golden poetry of the Orient, it can rouse them from death. That's how pretty it is."
My dad? The questions poured forth, but I couldn't utter them. A tube felt like a snake in my throat. I had only a second to decide that I was breathing
through it, but that I was also breathing on my own somehow. It slowed when I stopped breathing.
My throat was sore. My hand jerked awkwardly, then flopped onto my chest. A series of tubes pulled and wouldn't let me bring it to my throat, so I pointed one finger shakily.
"You're thirsty, aren't you?" he said.
He brought a bottle of water out of his jacket pocket and put it to his own lips and took several swallows. "You won't be thirsty for long."
I shut my eyes just to rest my eyelids, thinking he would get the nurse and bring her in here. I couldn't understand the meaning of all these tubes, but I sensed I didn't need them. I needed a drink worse.
But when I looked again, he was only licking water off his lips and watching me. "You're very beautiful," he said. "In my country, you would be considered a prize. A porcelain prize."
I would have liked anything kind my father had said, I supposed. But I couldn't remember how to smile.
"I'm glad you have awakened. I have a lot I want to say to you. Unfortunately, I don't have much time. And besides, I personally do not feel it is appropriate for men to talk to women. But I will tell you a couple of lovely things. First, I am sent by Omar. You don't know him, but he knows you well. He made you ill. And now, you are about to be sacrificed. Are you afraid of dying? I hope not."
The syringe he brought out of his pocket sent out a flash of alarm. I wanted to ask, "Daddy, what are you doing?" But I was too limp to even thrash my foot.
"I wish this were a fast death," he muttered, reaching over me, behind me it seemed, but I was too dizzy to tell. "I would like to stay and watch you leave us. But my associates, they won't have it. They want you to die melodramatically. They are right, of course. It will leave a better message for those who foster you and your kind."
The kind came out in a hateful whisper, and I felt the tubes in my arm giving way, but I couldn't tell if it was a pinch or a jab or just a movement ... it didn't matter. My heart banging was sending me dizzily back into dreamland.
But loud noises came close—an argument.
"You said it was her dad! You didn't tell me you've never seen the guy before—"
I didn't recognize the voice, but I did recognize Scott Eberman, who flew under some tall man's arm. I thought he had jumped on my chest. My brain screeched as tubes went flying through the air, from my arms, my neck, my abdomen. He yanked the long snake out of my throat and a stream of something acidy followed into my nostrils and out. I choked endlessly but could hardly hear myself because of Scott hollering.
"What the hell did you just give her, you freak!"
A blond man slammed the other man into the wall. I would swear he had a gun to the man's head. This was not my father, the impression was strong. My head fell on Scott Eberman's shoulder, but he gripped my chin in his hand, staring insanely.
"Cora! Did he inject you with something?"
All I could do with my throat was gasp for air. Scott yelled down at the ground. "...empty ... syringe is empty!"
He fainted. He slid off my bed onto the floor, and I only remember going back to sleep in some nurse's chest.
THIRTY-SIX
SHAHZAD HAMDANI
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
2:00 P.M.
I EXIT THE police building, and the weather has turned foggy. Tyler Ping is not ten feet from me when I realize he has emerged from between two parked trucks.
"Congratulations on getting fired"
"I have nothing to say to you." I try to keep my dignity since all else is gone.
But he walks along beside me. "Yeah, I guess I'd be pissed, too. But now maybe you can really get something done. Right?"
"I go home to Pakistan, that is what I do," I mutter, more to the fog than to Tyler. "I go back to my land of the free. My land do not stop me from my life."
A flash of Uncle's face shoots through my mind, and I realize how angry he will be. He will now not get his forty-thousand-dollar "cost-of-intelligence" fee for my services. Perhaps he will be so angry, he will not take me back.
"Aw, fuck 'em all." Ping makes a grin about his dirty word, which I have heard more often in a day of school than in all my years of exposure to English-speaking foreigners at home. For all the study of poetry that is forced upon them, American students seem not very poetic.
"If you want to work for free, you don't have to go all the way to Pakistan to do that. We can fuck up Catalyst's life right from here. They're not tailing us," he says, looking over his shoulder for the second time. "I don't think they will, given that their Colony One problems are starting to hit the fan"
With that mysterious statement in the air, I cannot help but keep walking with him. I am a hopeless addict for intelligence.
"What do you know about Colony One?" I ask.
"Okay. There's a town in New Jersey—maybe three-plus hours from here—where two women recently died of brain aneurysms within twenty-four hours of each other. One got a huge write-up in the obituaries. Her name is Eberman. The other, I can't remember. I found the obits in their online newspaper. After that, around nine o'clock this morning, I found out that one of their kids was admitted to the local hospital Friday for observation of strange flu symptoms or something"
He glances over his shoulder again almost reflexively before going on. "It's a little town called Trinity Falls. What a mess that's gonna be."
"You are sure this is Colony One?" I ask. "You have confirmation from a reliable source? Did you hack into the CDC?"
"Let's say I can't remember." He giggles as evasively as he had in the police station. "But there's a handful of other people in Trinity Falls who have the same symptoms as the dead women. They're mostly relatives, mostly young, like, our age. They're in and out of a hospital near there. The town is lousy with USIC agents, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone but USIC, and probably the CDC." Tyler nods in satisfaction. "Trinity Falls, New Jersey, just a hundred-mile trek down the Garden State Parkway after the Lincoln Tunnel. It's not a big city. But a big city would probably be outside terrorist capabilities, and it's within three hours of New York, within driving distance of Catalyst and friends. It makes perfect sense"
"Who else was admitted to the hospital? Somebody else now, too?" I ask, his "in and out of a hospital" comment still echoing in the air.
"If you can believe this—are you sitting down?"
Obviously, I am not. I wait for him to stop cuckooing with his strained laughter. "One other hospitalized person is the daughter of the new USIC supervisor in South Jersey."
I stop dead, staring. He continues laughing.
"The South Jersey USIC supervisor lives in Trinity Falls. Both deceased victims live on his street. Do you still think Colony One is somewhere else on the globe?"
I walk along, trying not to burn too thoroughly over certain issues, like Tyler knowing more things than I do. Also, I don't like that Hodji and Roger are avoiding me to "appear respectful to my new squad," as Hodji had confirmed in the plane would be their stance. I cannot be the one to deliver the news that Colony One is in America, and Home Base is New York, just like my instincts had said. I have suspected that perhaps Roger believed more of what I said than he was letting on. He would have said he was trying to protect me, but I am owed some congratulations, at least. Instead, I am fired.
"How did you find this out?" I persist. "I must know."
"Various hacking adventures. But I've got something even better than that. Do you know how to hack into a phone conversation?" he asks.
I figure it is probably as easy as hacking online, but confess, "I've never done that."
His laugh turns full of disgust. "You'll fit right in here in America, dude. Everybody's a goddamn specialist. I hacked into a phone line today that could turn out to be a really special phone line."
Uh-oh. "A USIC agent?" I guess.
He laughs more. "I would definitely do jail time for that, and I might end up doing it for this. Yesterday, I made myself a deal that I could find your friend Omar. Well ... I go
t a cell phone number and a bunch of phone chatter with a guy named Omar Hokiem. The last four digits of the phone number are 0-3-2-4."
It takes me moments to believe him, because he is laughing so hysterically at what face I must be making. I am all of awed, disbelieving, and horrified.
"Why you not tell of this to USIC? They would value this more than your programs."
"When was I supposed to tell them? Before or after they told me to go fuck myself? I want to get this guy on the line so you can hear him."
This is big trouble if I am caught. But how can I resist?
He says, "I didn't tell them because, for one, I've got my little streaks of pride. I gave them programs that I'm sure will work. I don't want to give them tapes of Omar McFoogle-Dee-Doo talking about the weather in Ireland in Gaelic. I can hear him talking, but he's talking in some other language. Before I decide anything, I want to make sure I've got the right guy."
I finally break out of my freeze, tugging him along with me by the elbow, despite that we are going to his house and not mine, and I don't know the direction. I only perceive that he is right, and USIC is not tailing us yet, and I am not surprised. They have major challenges and think they have time to catch up with us later.
"I can only get live conversation," he warns me. "God forbid if he's taking a long nap..."
As I am not going to work tonight, I do not perceive this as a problem.
THIRTY-SEVEN
TYLER PING
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2002
2:20 P.M.
HAMDANI AMUSED ME at my house. I tried to bust on him while we were waiting for Omar to make a call, but there were two problems. First, the guy did not understand sarcasm.
When we first got into my room: "Hamdani, you gonna fire up that extra terminal or stand there all day with your dick in your hand?"