Streams of Babel (36 page)

A man turns the corner way down the corridor, and two well-known eyes lock with mine, coming closer and closer. They are blue as the sky.

"Kid, my god. What are you doing here?"

If I hadn't so much to think about, I would have guessed USIC would be everywhere in this hospital. Agents often have to make their office wherever their travels take them.

When I don't answer, Roger mutters, "Welcome to Colony One."

I am thinking he will apologize for doubting my instincts about Colony One being in America. But he changes the subject instead of offering due praise.

"Hodji will be here any minute. He left me a message late last night, said he was coming at noon. He's actually late..."

"You have spoken to him?" I ask.

He pulls his cell out of his pocket and shrugs in frustration. "No cell phones allowed in a hospital. Not even by USIC. CDC got here at five yesterday, and I haven't left since. I'm only returning my 9-1-1s."

He means that other agents would put "9-1-1" into his phone pager after their own numbers, and it means that they
need a callback immediately. For a moment I am deflated that Hodji did not consider my termination a 9-1-1. Then, I realize something intriguing:
Roger does not know I am fired.
I do not imagine that this could be a vast wealth of information for me. I just know instinctively to be still.

"I'm leaving messages all over the place. I need some face-to-faces. I need Michael down here. I told him so explicitly ... I don't get why he would send you."

I try not to look stunned by his inference. "I only do what I am told..."

He seems pleased. For a moment. Then he shakes his head. "You're a rookie. What the hell is going on up there?"

"I wanted to come," I say, which is truthful. "I have chased the men who torture these people for many months now. It is only natural that I want to see them."

He speaks in Punjabi, which makes me long for home. "I could have gotten you a chance to meet these kids once we got out from under."

"What if they die?" I ask from my heart. "Then I will never meet them."

He digs his fingers into the back of my neck. He doesn't deny it. "I'll introduce you. Just promise me you won't get emotional," he warns. "Especially not in front of the boy."

I grow stiff with pride at the suggestion and wonder why he mentions the boy and not the girl. Aren't girls usually the emotional ones? The nurse brings him the same hospital outfit as I have, and after putting it on, he moves me over to the door. He is so very tall that he speaks over the heads of the two huge figures standing there.

"Guys. Can I introduce you to someone?"

The two big boys part, and I see the two figures in the beds. Roger tells them I am a friend from Pakistan who has come to America, and that I had helped them with a few things.

"This is Owen and Rain," he says to me.

The girl makes me stare. She has very long yellow hair, which I have only seen in Pakistan a few times. There are probably a number of such yellow-haired people in Karachi, but they don't make it to my village. She has a bandage over one ear. I wonder what element of Omar's Red Vinegar has left her thus bandaged and looking so tired.

The boy's eyes are half dead, as if all hope has left him. He is as large as his friends who took up the whole doorway—maybe larger, though he looks pale and weak. He forms a nod, but it is as if he can do no more.

A man has been sitting in a chair inside the room. He has on the same surgical outfit as mine, but his eyes, while blue like Roger's, have the intensity of Hodji's. He stares at me and extends his hand.

"I'm Alan Steckerman. Rain's dad. You're..."

I tell him "Shahzad," and I shake his hand. I keep my eyes to the floor, thinking this name will mean nothing to him. I know
his
name, surely. When USIC tested the water towers back in January, Steckerman was the main speaker at the news conference. This girl is his
daughter.
Tyler had spoken this news accurately. I wonder if the terrorists have targeted his neighborhood because of him. I imagine he wonders the same thing. But my name seems to have distracted him momentarily.

"You're Shahzad," he repeats. "
The
Shahzad?"

His voice is soft, as if he doesn't wish to bother his daughter and her roommate with this information. But he looks keenly at Roger.

Roger says nothing, which means
yes.
Mr. Steckerman squeezes my hand very tight, which screams a hundred thank-yous. I find this quite honorable given his current circumstances. And I have shaken the hand of a very important American through our sets of gloves, and now Roger squeezes my neck through his gloves. Something about this feels "not quite here."

The girl has her father's intense gaze, and I perceive she listens for things she should not hear. She absorbs the whispers and speaks soft English.

"Wait a minute. Are you that kid Scott was telling me about? He said there was an article in
Newsweek
about the Kid ... and that Roger knew him."

Roger must have thought that I would never meet these people. He must have been under enough stress not to be able to "think five steps ahead," like he always preached about himself. The girl seems hypnotized by me, and a little smile forms on her lips.

"I'm bad," she mutters. "I never paid enough attention to the computer geeks in school. I mean, the computer whizzes. Come here."

She holds her hand out to me. Feeling shy, I still would like to touch the warmth of life on her fingers through the gloves and think that maybe something I have done has helped her. I am a Pakistani, but in this doorway, I
feel
American, because the presence of its victims, healers, protectors, encouragers is so very strong.

"He's not allowed in," Roger reminds her, and she drops her hand and rolls her eyes.

"This place is getting on my nerves. There's no better way to get well than to be able to touch your friends."

Her father's intense gaze implies an understanding of both the medical needs and her need. He takes me into the room by the arm, and over to the bed. The girl beckons me closer, despite that Roger follows me and doesn't let go.

I don't know what to say as the girl takes my gloved hand in hers. Her squeezing very tightly makes me squeeze back. Her fear shoots up my arm, but also her hope, which comes from I don't know where. Except that I perceive in her beautiful little town, with so many hopeful presences surrounding, that hope is part of life.

Roger mutters in my ear from behind in Punjabi, "She doesn't know exactly what you do for us, but I think she gets it. I want you to do something very important right now. I want you to deny that you are the Kid."

His words hurt my heart. Roger thinks I am still hired. I think it will hurt very much to deny who I am, but in reality I am no longer the Kid, not after yesterday.

"I am not that person of whom you speak," I say. "But I wish you well. I hope you ... make better soon"

She lets go of my hand in disappointment. "Oh. Well, it was nice meeting you. Thanks for stopping by."

Roger takes me up an elevator, mumbling in tired, nonsensical English that it is fine for me to see the other boy, because he will surely not recognize me or ask me any questions. In fact, in the ICU he leaves me alone with this patient who goes by the name Scott, while he talks to another agent who is reading the newspaper just inside the double doors.

This boy is under a dozen tubes and wires. He looks a little like the boy downstairs, but he is not quite so big. He is more lean and slightly older, with golden hair instead of yellow. I cannot think of what ICU stands for, and Roger has not told me, but it is very serious, obviously.

I take this Scott's hand. He does not move, and though Scott's eyes are sometimes half opened, Roger has mentioned not to mind this. He said the boy has an aneurysm on his brain and one on his heart, also. His coma is caused by a drug that slows his heart enough to prevent the heart aneurysm from bursting. He can either be alert and quickly dead, or comatose until they can figure out what to do with him.

"I don't know how the doctors can help," I explain to him in Punjabi, "because I am not a medical person. I am a v-spy now and forever. I promise, with Allah as my merciful friend, that I will find those bad people for you. My father would want me to."

I could say much more, but Roger is suddenly beside me. It renders me unable to think, except to understand that I am in quite a predicament here. I make a decision. I will deceive him, but it is more than to get information. I will lie to get away from yesterday. I so long to be my old self—to be useful and productive and a part of important issues, to help this boy, his brother, and the girl with the yellow hair and lively eyes.

"You know what? Skip the fourth patient," he says in Punjabi. "Despite that she's under sedation, you might scare her out of her wits. You heard that some ShadowStrike whore got in here yesterday, right?"

"Yes. He tried to attack the girl." I realize he thinks my squad told me, and my giving a detail back will reinforce this. I decide to play into the conversation as if yesterday never happened. It makes me breathe more easily to pretend as much.

"He tried to inject her with something deadly. CDC still doesn't know what it was, though they're working on it. Scott Eberman and I stopped him."

"I suppose they are not dying fast enough to please Omar," I say.

Roger nods. "Fortunately, the guy injected it into her IV bag and not directly into her bloodstream. They're growing overly confident. Omar took a great risk. This time, he lost."

He nodded at the bed. "The overexertion almost blew Scott Eberman's heart wide open, and it may yet. Anyway, we got one of their goons. We're still trying to make him, but his IDs are all false. He can rot in the can until we figure that out"

I find my voice, but can only say, "Congratulations"

"And the same to you. Not that we have time to discuss it. Maybe Michael's not being so stupid after all. Most of what I had to tell him concerned you. This doesn't end with the arrests, you know. We need evidence that will stand up legally. We don't have enough yet. We need chatter—we need them confessing to each other what they've done. That would be great."

"Any specifics?" I ask.

"Anything with new names, first of all. We got a couple because they posted a website. Did you see it?"

"No," I confess with irritation. I could have been the one to find it, were my hands not tied. "I had to settle for discovering what the 'Q' in 'Mother Q' means"

"I saw that. Good find, Kid. Actually, the CDC has suspected it was a Q fever mutation for several days now."

I am surprised but do not ask the source of this. Roger often gave me many intelligence details in Pakistan, but only surrounding those issues that he perceived I needed to chase chatter.

"We need more background confirming which guys actually poisoned the water. Maybe they're bragging between each other on how they only infected one small part of the water supply that runs into five streets. We found the device they used. It was hooked up to the sewer line in front of the house belonging to the first dead woman. A confession that links specific people to it would be a profound
bingo.
"

I nod. "And what about their predictions on how the virus will act?"

"That's not a main priority right now. The CDC predicts that the worst is over as far as very sick people turning up. ShadowStrike made a major error. They weren't considering America's bottled-water fetish, especially among the more affluent folk. Most of the people on those streets haven't drunk from a tap in years. Six people on that street have turned up 'suspicious' and were tested, but the CDC is calling them 'acute,' and telling them they have the flu for now. It acts like a flu, and it will go away with antibiotics if it hasn't reached a certain toxicity level. We're trying not to start a panic, which means holding off telling anyone anything until we have more answers."

"I have read all the panic protocols," I say.

"These four kids are being called 'chronic.' Very high toxicity levels. We haven't seen any more like that."

"Perhaps you would like for me to try to locate the other terror scientists? Perhaps, if they developed the germ, they would have developed an antitoxin in case they should infect themselves."

Roger nods. "Keep trying. Omar and VaporStrike are the only big guns we've identified so far from ShadowStrike. Omar probably was involved in designing the germ. VaporStrike, while not a scientist, is a higher-up, and possibly a trained assassin. PiousKnight and Catalyst are just puppet men. We think that they and four others worked in a discount shoe store in a nearby town for a few months as a front. Look for anything containing 'store' or 'shoe store' or 'shoes.' It appears that in the middle of the night of December 28, they drilled the water main that serves five streets—including Steckerman's. It's pretty obvious that they mapped out their plan to include his household. They buried a container filled with a concentration of the hot agent and a transline connecting to the water main. It was set to release the stuff over a period of four months. It was an experiment. If they'd had a couple of dozen deaths, they planned to repeat it other places. Now they know Americans generally don't drink much tap water—at least not enough to make it worth their while. They target the very successful—the stockbrokers, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors—but they'll go back to the drawing board."

"I will do my best," I say, though my conscience is seeping through. But now, I have to ignore its pangs. Roger would die if he knew I was terminated and he had spoken so liberally.

He goes on. "Well, they're getting a bit boastful lately, Michael says, though I haven't seen their brags firsthand. If they start bragging—admitting their actions and applauding one another—we can use that as a confession"

I nod, thinking of Tyler's captured phone chatter, Omar admitting to telling a whole roomful of students what he did. Roger will see that soon enough.

"Should Red Vinegar still be a priority in my search engines? The chatter of yesterday alluded to them maybe moving onto newer—"