The Messenger (35 page)

But at the edge of Calista she runs over a brown dog, and when she gets to Pratt she’s still screaming.

U
pon arrival in Kansas City Sam Watterman had been locked down in a specially quarantined FBI “hotel”—for his own protection. Since then, nothing.

Chamai has vanished. Grimaldi, on whom he now realizes he has developed a sort of senior crush, is all the way across town doing something more important.

He calls Alice at the hospital but there is no answer.

He sits in his room, stares at the furniture. There is no one to talk to. Barrigar and all his homies are still back there in chicken land.

His driver knocks at the door. A plastic bag with new clothes—a blue FBI jumpsuit and stiff black cap in a plastic bag. They’re supposed to be downtown in ten.

They drive through a tawny city of endless horizons and sparkling skyscrapers. He tries another call to Atlanta and gets Irene. He can tell from her voice how much she has been dreading his call.
“I’m so sorry for you, Dr. Watterman,”
is how she begins the conversation.

“How is she doing?” Somehow he is able to manufacture his I-am-in-control voice once again.

“She’s slipping away, she’s slipping away on us. I’m so sorry—”
and here he can hear Irene starting to cry, a snort, and then a little murmur.

“Ahh …” For a long moment they both stay there, breathing on the line. “Is she in any … pain, do you think?” he asks gently.

“No … no, she’s just … starting to breathe irregularly and, you know … her heart is wanting to shut down. She’ll be resting soon, Doctor.”

There is a constriction in his throat, his breathing stops. He swallows.

“I’m so sorry; she is such a beautiful woman,”
Irene says, careful not to use the past tense.

“Can you ask Nakamura for morphine? If she is in pain or discomfort, well then …” He says everything he needs to without actually saying it. Let her rest, he is thinking. Just let the poor girl rest.

“Oh, yes. I asked and he said he would check on her at lunch and decide, and go over it with you.”

“So …” Remembering to calculate the time zones, he checks his wristwatch, only to discover it has been taken off him at some point in the process. Probably for his own protection. He cranes over the seat and peers at the clock on the dashboard of the FBI Humvee. “I’ll phone later, okay?”

“Yes, sir. Of course. I’ll be right here with her. I won’t leave her, not for a second. Do you want to say something to her? I can hold the phone up …”

For a moment there is silence. Then Irene’s voice, a little distant.
“There you go …”

“Hi … Maggie,” he says. “Hi, hon …” It feels incredibly awkward. He imagines Irene at the bedside holding the cell phone up to Maggie’s ear. He can hear her ragged breathing. For a long moment he falls silent. “I love you,” he says because it’s all there is, finally. There are no real words that matter anymore.

The raid on the house where Vermiglio is hiding is nothing like on television.

Nor is it a car chase. Indeed there is no panic at all. Just cops
being cops, driving easy and fast, big V8 horsepower whisking him down broad thoroughfares, the streets cleared by the flashers and an occasional screech from the siren of the car that takes him into Brush Creek.

Sam rides in the backseat alone, dressed in a biohazard suit, already sweaty, the hood pulled back. What he can hear from the radio is only cryptic phrases; numbers, abbreviations. At first he finds the constant chatter to be an intrusion, then he ceases to listen.

Out the window of the squad car: dogs on chains barking, a cat streaking out of the way, policemen going house to house evacuating everyone, old people looking out their windows, a man with a hose trying to keep his garden alive, another sanding the fender of a car beneath a portable white plastic tent. One by one their day is being ruined. Mothers hurrying away with children in their arms. Nobody wants the bug. Still, one angry old man yells at the cops from his back steps that no matter what happens he’ll never leave.

The car slows, accelerates, then slows again as they pass through a series of checkpoints. The Kansas City PD and local FBI have blocked off a six-block perimeter around the Vermiglio house. Ahead are ambulances. Everybody in masks. Then a brand-new orange truck and a cluster of people wearing biohazard suits with self-contained air. The house looks like it has already been through a siege. Plywood tacked up over one of the front windows. A mismatched front door painted lime green.

It’s early. It’s quiet. Inside they won’t know what’s coming.

Black-clad emergency-response cops whisk him behind the ring of trucks to meet senior FBI negotiator Kandyce Schumacher. She’s in her fifties and relentlessly cheerful. Sam almost expects her to hand him a tray of cookies. She’s seen it all, she says with a smile, and has no plans to treat the Vermiglio suspect any differently. It’s showtime, she says, and they walk toward the driveway of the house.

“This is Ms. Morton, she’s going to help us,” Schumacher tells him, turning toward a large woman dressed in a pink pantsuit and sturdy industrial shoes. Sam starts to put out his hand, but he is
wearing biohazard gloves, so the two of them only nod at each other.

“Can I speak to them?” Morton asks, plainly upset.

“The people in the house? Yes, ma’am, we want you to help us speak with them; we want you to come with us and help keep things as calm as possible.”

“I certainly will—there’s a baby in there.
Paulina?
” she suddenly shouts, and steps forward, toward the driveway. Schumacher reaches out to restrain her, but Sam stops her. It doesn’t matter. Everybody in that house has been exposed. Another five minutes isn’t going to change things.

“Paulina?” the woman shouts again. From inside there are noises. Someone standing behind a door. Ms. Morton climbs the front stairs laboriously. “Everybody just chill out!” she says to the lime-green door, frowning as she takes in the patched-over windows.

Sam and Schumacher wait at the bottom of the steps. Through the hazmat suit he can barely hear the conversation that is going on at the front door. After a time, Morton turns back to them, motions, and he and Schumacher go up the steps. A young woman holding a baby backs away and erupts in terrified tears when she sees them in their orange suits. The baby wails and she retreats into the bedroom. In the gloom of the hallway, Sam can see the girl—the blonde, the one from Detroit—her face pale and stricken. A young man, black, barefoot, skin slashed with tattoos, comes out of the bedroom, holding his hands high where they can be seen.

“Please … we don’t want to go back …” the girl says through her tears.

He calls Nakamura at noon to authorize the morphine. Since its use is risky, the doctor is careful to explain to Sam all the dangers. The man has a rich baritone voice, like a preacher or a psychiatrist. It’s more what he doesn’t say than the actual words he uses. Everything between the lines. It is a kind of dance, almost formal. They are both
educated men, professionals. Realists. Both of them know what increasing Maggie’s dose will mean. When Sam gives the necessary permission, he adds his thanks.

So …

Sitting there on the stainless steel back bumper of one of the hazmat trucks, staring at the pavement, lost in memories of his forty-year marriage to the beautiful girl he knew as Margaret Leah Klausner—his Maggie.

It was a good marriage. Often very good. Exquisite. Wonderful times. Laughs, epic fights. She was smart, incisive. Sassy. They were a pair of survivors through all kinds of shit, tragedy, sadness, sickness. Amy had died before them, and they had somehow—he would never have believed it at the time—but somehow they’d got through it. Hideous, crushing, terrible grief. But even with all the reversals, the setbacks and defeats, honestly, hadn’t their lives been good? They had been blessed in so many ways.

His day-old FBI cop shoes are planted upon the worn pavement of Fifty-second Street. Asphalt and gravel. Cracks and patches. Oil stains and ellipses of chewing gum. Tiny rocks polished smooth by the tires of automobiles. What had lived there in those rocks? Tiny fossils. His poor girl. She is gone by now, he thinks, watching the rising sun slice shafts through the trees.

Gone.

“Dr. Watterman, the IC asked if you’d interpret some issues for the pool?”

He looks up at the boy. A soldier or a cop—it’s increasingly hard to tell—barely in his twenties. Moving easy in his Kevlar and Gore-Tex, ready to give his life for … his IC.

“Sure.” Replace grief with work, Sam tells himself. It’s what he’s always done. It’s how he’s stayed alive. He’s always been a stoic.

While the Brush Creek suspects are being quarantined and interrogated, he is prepped for an interview with the local news. The FBI needs a face on the ground in Kansas City who knows what they are talking about, and he’s it. A camera crew is standing by, and as he waits another two arrive. In minutes there are five cameras, and a
couple of radio reporters pointing microphones at him. The cameras are amazingly small, not like the heavy, spine-bending minicams of his youth. Delicate-looking carbon-fiber tripods are spread out on the pavement; microphones are aligned. They are setting a fill light. He stands in the driveway. Surely by now, he thinks.

Someone gently conceals a speaker in his ear. A young woman comes by and combs his ratty hair, another puts powder on his stubbly cheeks. He stands in front of the now-quarantined house on Fifty-second Street. It could be anywhere in America. It could be next door. Someone’s voice comes through his earpiece.

“Hello? Hello, Dr. Watterman?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“Brilliant. Connie is going to ask you some questions. Just look directly at the cameras and try to keep your answers short. Just wait for Connie, Doctor.…”
The feed changes and he can hear “Connie,” wherever she is, getting ready to start her questions.

Daria is stunned, and then begins to tremble. This must be what Saleem Khan meant when he said the virus was on steroids. This is what he meant when he said she should be proud. The enormity of it.
Oh …

This was the supreme achievement of God’s scientists. A terror disease for which there was no cure. None of the shots that Monica gave them would be doing any good.… 
Oh … oh …

Sobbing, shaking, she forgets to drive and the car coasts to a stop on the dusty shoulder. She had no idea, she wants to scream … But it’s no good. There is no excuse. Nothing she can do. Her tears come, and then stop, and finally it does not take long for her to realize that she should not have been surprised. Even after all she has lived through, she has still been innocent of the horrors men can do.

They will tear her apart when they capture her. Her name and face are everywhere. Brutus would kill her in a heartbeat, for what she’s done to Nadja and Paulina and Daniel. She has condemned them all to death.

She will go … into the mountains. Hide. Suicide herself like the boy from Nigeria. Burn herself. It’s what she deserves, after all.

The gun is there on the seat.