Streams of Babel (6 page)

"You do whatever you feel is best, but um ... don't panic. It's got to be a coincidence."

By "coincidence" he was talking about Aleese Holman bleeding out through the facial orifices, versus my mom's bloody nose. He could be right, I knew. I surely hadn't freaked to see a DOA with the same flulike symptoms as my mom. But when
my mom's nose started to bleed like my DOA's? I gave the squad a Priority One call. I still wasn't ready to relax and admit I had panicked.

I looked down at my watch and saw it was quarter to midnight. The obvious question finally rapped me on the head. "Alan, what are you doing here at this hour?"

"Besides yawning?" He strolled along beside me toward the break room. "USIC's got me doing all sorts of stuff that the FBI never did. I have to clock in forty hours of forensics and human anatomy before September. If a terrorist threat actually came to pass, USIC might have to work closely with physicians and pathologists, or so its policy manual reads. So, Johnny Gallagher has been ... very patronizing, poor guy."

Johnny Gallagher was Saint Ann's head coroner. We moved into the empty break room and collapsed into a couple of chairs.

Alan yawned again and rolled his stiff neck around. "Gotta do something with my nights, being that there aren't any Cinderellas breaking my door down."

Mr. Steckerman's wife had been killed in a six-car pileup outside the Shore Mall when Rain was only three. The man had been up to his gizzard in sexy, flirting divorcées since I could remember—though he rarely took anyone out. I kept watching him because, in spite of his shrug- it-off tone, I sensed some tension. Being that my mother's presence here was taking my brain apart, it took me a minute to draw up obvious question number two.

"So, what the hell is Johnny Gallagher doing here at midnight? Couldn't this wait until tomorrow? It's not like he's got the mayor on his slab."

He shrugged. "He had to scrub to a Level Three, being that she was a needle user. Maybe he doesn't like to waste so much time during the day."

I almost missed the way his eyes dropped from mine when he spoke. They didn't dart like most liars' would have.

"That was pretty good, Alan. Nice try."

"What?"

"Come on. Did USIC call Johnny in to work on that corpse?"

"
Mm...,
" he moaned, like a guy finding himself in check in a game of chess. "Your powers of observation have amazed me since you were about six."

I watched as he put his feet up on the seat, and I said, "If there's anyone you guys should trust, it ought to be those of us who pick up the sick and the dead. What's going on?"

"Probably nothing. I called Washington tonight to tell them I was putting this autopsy on my tab, under my training budget. They called back half an hour later and said to send any samples to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta."

He shrugged again, and this time I sensed more sincerity, though the news disturbed me. The CDC is where all the paramedics' memos came from on emerging infectious diseases. And Mr. Steckerman had his own mountain on symptoms of bioterror. Welcome to the year 2002. The dust of the Trade Center falling couldn't reach into South Jersey, but the world seemed more panicky now. My supervisor, Phil, was always shaking his head at our memos and saying, "Strange times, strange times." The emerging infectious disease awareness had actually struck the summer before 9/11, but it was after 9/11 that we noticed our mail slots at work filled beyond what we
were able to read on the job. Add terror intrigue to science, and you've got Mount Memo.

"Probably the CDC discovered extra space in its Strange Sinus Phenomena refrigerator, blathered that to the bosses, and we're just being good, contributing Americans. That's the assumption I'm working with at any rate. Even if Johnny Gallagher jumps when I mention the CDC. Generally, these things turn out to be nothing, Scott.
No-thing.
"

Even if it was
no-thing,
my head went a little nuts. I envisioned Washington telling him some terror cell was trying to blampf us with the Ebola virus. Ebola kills with 90-some percent accuracy, and its deaths come equipped with bloody noses. Rumors flew that some sicko terror nations had gotten their hands on a few Ebola samples and had tried injecting it into soda cans as part of their fun-and-games curriculum.

I would have laughed outright at my own imagination, but one's version of reality shifts a little when one's own mother lies down the hall—with a strange flu and accompanying nosebleed.

I leaned forward in my chair as my mind for detail suddenly fired off a useful yet slightly nauseating image. "Alan, I'm sure you're sick of hearing the words 'water tower' after what you went through in January. However. You know that puddle in front of the Holman house has been there for weeks. I wasn't thinking of it too much tonight, except that it forced us to park the ambulance in the middle of the street. But if we're going to sit here and talk about USIC intrigue ... I'm thinking of it, okay?" I laughed uncomfortably. "I don't know how water towers work and all, but ... it's just funny, that puddle. It hasn't rained in over a month, and there's no sewer in the middle of that block to back up, so..."

"So you're imagining some ... what? Some poison in the water so strong that it could eat through a pipe? Leak into the street?" He laughed, too. "Think of it. If a germ was that strong, we'd all be dead."

"Well, don't snicker at me for trying too hard."

"Actually, I'm laughing at myself! When we were doing the testing, I asked Leo Stetson over in the Utilities Department about that puddle one day. He and I were driving to my house. It looks funny—like it doesn't have a source. Stetson assured me that puddles in streets have nothing to do with the water towers in question. There's just a leak in the vein somewhere near Shore Road, though he did say if it were in front of the Blumberg or the Endicott estates, it would be fixed by now. That part is a shame. We gotta make sure to look after that little Holman girl."

Right now, I'm looking out for my mom,
I reflected, though I said, "Yeah."

"They're a good bunch, down at the CDC." Alan shifted around, his face growing serious. "They ran all sorts of tests for the water; the whole thing amazed me. There are tests to tell them if the water is suspicious—even if they can't name the substance making it suspicious. Trinity's towers came up pristine; same with all the townships I supervise. It was an expensive exercise, but the CDC and Washington are sparing no expenses this year. I think that's why they agree to pay for random autopsies here and there."

I still hoped if anything bizarre showed up in an autopsy, it might be found in USIC's pile of memos—certainly not in mine. My memo mound from the CDC on emerging infectious disease symptoms was growing, despite my attempts to keep up
with it all: West Nile virus, E. coli, mutations of the common cold, hoof-and-mouth, blah blah. For whatever reason, Saint Ann's had decided that paramedics need to know this stuff, too, so I wished I had a computer chip for a memory.

"No matter what, I'd rather have my job than yours," I muttered. I remembered after the media discovered the water-tower check, he said on television that they'd tested all water supplies because of some "chatter" they'd captured online.

"One thing I would hate about your job is having to acknowledge a threat as real that was found in a chat room. A
chat room.
It just sounds like smoke and mirrors. Like you're chasing Captain Hook, ya know?"

He nodded. "I was always a phone guy, a face-to-face guy. Maybe it's my age..."

"It's not your age," I assured him. "My buddies e-mail me something, and if I have something to say back? I pick up the phone. I'm pretty good at picking up on people's thoughts. But it's from watching faces and motions and expressions, and from hearing the clicks in people's voices ... you know. It's the only way to do things."

"For
us,
maybe. I'll tell you something interesting. It's not exactly a secret—it was vaguely referred to in a January issue of
Newsweek.
"

I don't have time to read
Newsweek.
"Go for it"

"The reason we tested all those water towers was that a Pakistani informant had captured a lot of related chatter over a few weeks' time. This Pakistani informant, he's sixteen years old."

That was younger than Owen. "You gotta be kidding."

"No. Supposedly he's an ace hacker, and he writes programs that help the intelligence community find spies online. USIC
just calls him the Kid. Of course, that age thing may be an idle rumor. I don't ask any more questions than I feel I have to. But I've seen copies of the chatter he captured, along with the notes of his interpretations."

"Really? Does he sound sixteen?"

Alan laughed. "He's not saying 'kewl!' and 'f-this' before all the chatter he sends us. He sounds ... invisible. Truthfully, I only remember the chatter."

"What'd it say?"

He sighed like he was exhaling the many hours of nights not slept. "'
Waters will run red in Colony One ... Waters will run red three hours from Home Base in December ... They will drink in December and die like mangy dogs in April
.' Isn't that sweet?"

"What's 'Home Base'?"

"The agents were thinking Home Base was the headquarters of some terror cell. They were checking water supplies in Yemen, Jordan, Ethiopia ... But the kid thought Home Base was New York, for reasons I wasn't privy to. So along with all other supervisors within three hours of New York, I decided to test the water."

"You mean to tell me ... our government spent all that money testing water, based on the theories of a sixteen-year-old?"

Alan shrugged, looking weary again. "Sixteen or fifty-two. It's simpler than it sounds. You get a dozen scripts of chatter like that, and you have two choices: You either investigate or you ignore them."

"Well ... he was wrong," I said, feeling somehow victorious. The idea of a kid younger than Owen steering some sort of rudder on American intelligence—that oiled my puke factor.
My brother couldn't even remember to keep his feet off the coffee table.

"In the case of the Internet, we're grateful for what we can get, Scott. It's a vast, dark galaxy of hiding places. But we got a double whammy on that water supply threat, because anytime someone mentions waterborne agents of bioterror, it's a punch in the gut. You know..."

Yeah, I did know, but I let him say it anyway. Our towers had come up clean, so it was merely interesting.

"A potential water attack is different from a mustard gas attack or a subway bombing—where knowledge of the crime and the display of symptoms are simultaneous. In the case of waterborne agents, people don't drop like flies. The three germ agents we studied during my training took weeks, even months, to build up in the human body before people became symptomatic. Therefore, with water threats, intelligence has to jump on things like chatter, which, in and of itself, feels like smoke and mirrors. But we can't afford to wait around for symptoms, or for the crime scene to be compromised many times over. There are just a thousand and one problems with water threats."

There's nothing much to say to that glurt of tasty news. I shuddered. He took the reassuring high road.

"There's nothing ... nothing to hook up the Holman woman with anything I'm aware of," he said. "But you tell me what you would do if you walked into a DOA that was the slightest bit suspicious—and your desk was covered with the types of memos that are covering mine."

"I'd dot all my
i
's, sure. So, what was Johnny Gallagher saying about the corpse?"

"Not a lot. I watched him start the autopsy from the observation deck so I wouldn't have to superscrub. All looked fine to him from the neck down. She didn't even have the enlarged heart of a morphine addict, considering the number of collapsed veins. All her organs looked healthy. He said she probably built up an amazing immune system, waltzing through every disease in Asia and Africa while working as a photographer."

"That's where she was a photographer? Asia and Africa?"

"So the rumor goes."

"Shooting pictures of
what?
" Growing restless, I got to my feet and pulled him by the arm. "I'd like to take a quick peek at the corpse, listen to Johnny ramble for a couple of minutes. Maybe by that time Dr. Godfrey will be finished with his late-night shit-shower-shave routine and I'll find him with Mom"

Alan walked along beside me down the corridor to the basement elevator, telling me his lump of Holman gossip, being that he had known the grandmother, Natalie Holman. "Aleese was freelance. I heard she worked on a newspaper in Beirut for a while. But I think most of her freelance jobs were for charities. Feed the Children, Peace Corps, stuff like that."

"You're kidding."

"Nope."

I scratched my head, remembering that sweet little Holman babe hiding her face when I had mentioned a morphine addict's tendencies toward violence. "
You have no idea,
" she had said. "How the hell does a photographer for Feed the Children end up addicted to morphine and beating up on her kid?"

He pushed the elevator button. "I remember Aleese Holman from when she was in high school. She was always ... a little different. You know how some parents run around saying
their kids are too smart, and that's why they don't do well in school?"

"You mean, ye ol' they're-just-bored routine?"

"Yeah. Natalie Holman was the song leader of that tune. Not that the kid ever did anything horrendous. She got arrested a couple of times, but it wasn't for drugs or boozing. It was for..." He chuckled as the elevator door opened and we stepped in. "I had just gotten on the FBI down here when she and a couple of kids from the student newspaper broke into the, um, Not-So-Humane Society and let all the dogs loose from the death row pen."

I snickered. The girl sounded like a cop's nightmare, but a part of me wanted to say,
Nice going.

"Another time, she got arrested for lying across the doorway to that old abortion clinic on New York Avenue in Atlantic City. When the cops showed up, all the protesters moved amicably to the curb—except for her. In either case, most picketers would have been happy to carry a sign around on the front sidewalk. She was, um..."