The Starving Years (31 page)

“If you don’t speak English,” one of the clerks said loudly, “you’re going to have to wait for the translator. Trans-la-tor!”

He was a white guy, older, with a thick build and a flush of spider veins around his nose. A Chinese couple who were on the verge of having a meltdown pleaded with him in whichever dialect they spoke, and the clerk’s color began to rise. “Just our luck we’ll end up with that guy,” Randy said in Tim’s ear. “When he’s good and pissed-off, and he’s decided he’d just as soon tell us to go fuck ourselves.”

Tim said, “He wouldn’t do that,” just as the clerk stood up, fuming, got in the Chinese man’s face and pointed aggressively to another line, hollering, “Get in that line or I will have you removed!”

The person waiting in front of them was called by a normal, rational-looking clerk. “Yep,” Randy said. “We’re gonna get Mr. Happy.” He showed Tim his watch. “Can you tell this is pretty much new? It’s worth two hundred, easy. I can slip it to him—”

“Are you delusional?” Tim said. “You can’t bribe a corrections officer with a watch.”

“Probably not. It’s got a ding in it now. If you twits hadn’t made me give up my hundred dollar bill….”

The Chinese couple shuffled over to the translator line, the woman weeping, the man barely holding it in, and the red-faced clerk looked up and drew breath to call Tim and Randy to come forward. Tim turned to the guy behind him, a stoic man with a mustache, and said, “You can go first. We’re not ready.”

The stoic man shrugged and went ahead.

“Good thinking, Bones. Now, if we could make it so we get that lady at the end, I think she’d….”

“Call me that one more time, and—” Before Tim could think of a suitable threat, he noticed something going on by a cluster of desks in a workstation island, just beyond the naugahyde ropes that corralled him in the three-hour line.

A pair of flustered, middle-aged women in frumpy sweaters were hovering around an outdated computer. They appeared to be trying to fix something—not very successfully. Tim heard the words “Internet is supposed to be up again,” rise above the general din.

“Next!”

“Perfect,” Randy said. “We got ’er. Come on.”

“You go ahead. I’ll catch up with you.”
 

“Wait a sec, where do you think you’re going?”

Tim barely heard Randy—he was too riveted by the computer. He stepped over the rope and approached the women. One had the leathery look of a lifelong smoker. She was probably in the midst of a monumental nicotine fit. The other one had her unnaturally red hair sculpted into stiff curls with enough hairspray to leave its own hole in the ozone.

“Hello. I’m Tim. I might be able to help you with that—I’m in I.T.”

The women both looked at him blankly.

“A computer guy.”

The smoker seemed leery, but the hairspray woman heaved a huge sigh of relief. “I can’t get online. They told me it was back up, I need to get on, but this stupid thing won’t…I keep getting this message about port something-or-other. What the hell is that?”

 
The router it was connected to had reset itself. Elaborate fix? Heck, no. She just needed to reboot. “That’s pretty serious,” Tim said.
 

Online. He spotted a USB headset attached to the phone system, then slipped his hand into his pocket and felt the smooth edge of a business card. He could get online…which meant he could call Nelson’s phone. He did his best to sound pessimistic, though it was quite a stretch, with the surge of hope bubbling up in his chest. “You’ll need to re-set all your ports.”

“How do I…?”

“I’ll show you. First, go around to the back.” The hairspray woman obediently rounded the computer. The leathery woman followed, scowling at the cables.

Tim glanced over at Randy. He spotted him through a gap in the milling crowd of distraught people, leaning on the clerk’s desk, talking to her, trying to look smooth. Maybe he thought he did. “Bobby Oliver. Or Robert, try Robert. O-L-I….” He couldn’t see that half his face was green with bruising, after all.

Tim rebooted the old computer, then looked in back for something harmless for the women to play with. The printer had its own network cable. Perfect. “Okay…now the timing’s going to be critical. I need you to unplug that cable when I say.”

The women both nodded, as if it would take two of them to do it. Hooray for government workers.

“Password?” Tim said. The hairspray woman pointed to a robust, randomly-generated password…written down on a Post-it stuck to her monitor. Nice. He plugged in the headset, located the driver, and pulled up a browser. The smoker was looking at him oddly—maybe she wondered why “resetting the ports” required a headset. Time to distract her before she took that suspicion any further. “Okay, are you ready with that cable? Three, two, one, go.”

He pulled up a VOIP phone service and set up a quick account, typing so quickly he could hardly feel the keys under his fingers. “Okay, now plug it back in when I say. And be careful. You had a little lag…but I think we can go on to step two.”

Both of the women were staring hard at the printer cable when Tim pulled out Nelson’s business card and keyed in his cell phone number.

“Ready?” he asked them. “Okay…wait a minute.”

Someone picked up, and then, cautiously said, “Hello?” Nelson. Awake. Thank God.

“It’s Tim.”

“Tim?” Nelson sounded delighted. “Where the hell are ya and how’d you get through? Caller I.D. says Hairspray Cigarette.”

Tim pretended to adjust the headset so his hand shielded his mouth from view, and he spoke very low, directly into the mic. “I need Bobby’s name. His full name.”

“Why?”

“Please.”

“Pham Duc Bao.”

“Spelled how?”

Nelson spelled it, then said, “Tim, you’re freaking me out. What happened?”

“Hold on.” Tim turned toward the women behind the computer and blurted out, “Okay, now!”

The redhead pulled the cable, flustered.

“No, no, no,” Tim said in his most douchebaggy I.T.- guy voice. “That won’t work at all. Plug it back in.”

“You didn’t give her any warning,” the smoker said, eager to vent her nicotine-deprived frustration on somebody. She began to round the computer.

Tim mumbled, “I’m sorry,” into the headset, closed the connection, and pulled up a DOS window to cover the browser before she could see it. “Now look what happened.”

“You broke it!” The smoker backed off, eyes wide with horror at the sight of the plain black window with its blinking control prompt. “Holy crap, you don’t know what you’re doing. This wasn’t my idea—I didn’t say you could touch it. I didn’t have anything to do with this.” Her mouth worked helplessly. “I’m going on break.” She pushed her way into the crowd and disappeared.

“Can you fix it?” The hairspray woman had tears wobbling on her lower eyelids, ready to spill.

Tim had never wanted to be one of those tech guys who made people cry. Even pretending to be one made him feel soiled. “We’ll try again.”

She gave him a quavery smile.

“Just unplug it one more time,” he said more kindly as he erased the browser history and cleared the cookies. “Okay. Plug it back in now. There you go. Perfect. You’re online.”

Once Tim dodged the woman’s profuse and tearful thank-yous, he stepped back over the naugahyde rope to go help Randy figure out what had happened to Nelson’s son.

***

The desk sergeant at Midtown North was a no-nonsense African American man who was squinting like he hadn’t slept in a couple of days. He handed Javier his belt, his shoe laces, his eye patch, and his keys. He paused with Javier’s prepaid Visa in his hand as if he might just throw the card in the trash for all the extra red tape they’d needed to go through on Javier’s behalf—but he did decide to give it back, if grudgingly. When he handed it over, he said evenly, “Now get the fuck out of here.”

Once the police station was online again, they’d matched Javier’s fingerprints and determined he was not Timoteo Foster a lot more quickly than he had anticipated. Who would have known they would cross-reference the database of the International Federation of Journalists…though given the fact that the Voice of Reason was a blogger, he supposed it actually was a logical place for them to start.

Once he was free of the police station, he headed uptown on foot and stopped off at the building where he rented a closet-sized room with a shared bath. If his real identity was now linked to the Voice of Reason, he might as well gather his credentials in case he needed them. More importantly, he could wash the stink of the past few days from his body, and the adhesive residue of the disposable patch from the orbit of his eye socket. He ducked his head beneath the shower, and felt the spray prickle against his scalp. He wanted to luxuriate in the sensation, but of course, there was no time. He’d given himself a strict 15-minute limit in which to stop at his room and get himself together on his way back to the DLR Construction site.
 

The adhesive was more stubborn than Javier had anticipated, and he’d left several eyelashes and part of his eyebrow on the back of the patch, too. Not that it mattered. He’d had strong, handsome eyebrows once, but the brow above his ruined eye had been fragmented into three distinct parts. A private surgeon in Costa Rica had mentioned that a surgical scar revision and a hair transplant would repair much of the damage, possibly to the point where it would be hardly noticeable, for a mere fifty thousand
colones
—twenty or thirty thousand American dollars.

What a joke.

Javier was perched on the foot of his twin bed in his briefs, damp from the shower as he worked the last of the gummy adhesive from the patches of his eyebrow, when his cell phone rang.

His head jerked up. The phone?

He grabbed it from his nightstand and glanced at the screen—his battery was nearly dead and he didn’t recognize the number. But the first call to come through since the job interview? Of course he took it. Also, it was a New York number, not Costa Rican…in which case, he would have been tempted to let it go to voice mail.

“Yes?” he said cautiously.

“Javier? Is that you?”

“Who is this?”

“Marianne said you got arrested.” Ah, Nelson Oliver. “What happened, are you okay?”
 

Javier remembered scrawling his phone number on the traitor’s arm with detachment, as if it had happened in another life. This was what happened when you trusted people. Maybe he should have let it go to voice mail after all. “I’m fine,” Javier said coldly. “Are you still at the site?”

“Yeah, but….” There were muffled noises, and Marianne’s voice encouraging Nelson to not worry about it right now. More shuffling, and then, “Javier, just level with me. What’s going on with Bobby?”

Despite the anger, the humiliation of the betrayal, Javier felt a pang of sympathy over the desperation he heard in Nelson’s voice. It was with no pleasure at all that he said, “There was a gas explosion at your building.”

Nelson held the phone away from his face and said, “How could you not tell me this?”

Marianne was sobbing. “How could I say it? What could we do about it?”

“Where’s Randy?” Nelson asked her. “Where’s Tim?”

“They’re trying to help your family. We would have only slowed them down.”

Javier’s phone beeped. Not much longer on the battery.

“Listen to me,” he barked into the receiver. Both Nelson and Marianne went quiet. “There’s an illness spreading. A hunger, a terrible hunger.” Like Marianne, he decided to spare Nelson the detail he could do nothing about—the rumor that the children were eating each other…and the possibility that if his son had survived the gas explosion, he would have been quarantined with a bunch of other children. “Is it the Canaan?”

Nelson’s voice was quiet. Worn-out. Exhausted. “Yeah.” He sighed. “The simplest way I can put it…it’s basically…drugged. Not just Canaan, either. I think they had other distribution channels, too—Park Avenue, for sure.”

“You know specifically how they managed this.”

“Totally. And if it blew up in their faces, I can’t say I’m surpr—”

“Can you prove it?”

“Prove…how, in a lab? Yeah, if you can pull a lab out of your butt.”

“Can you explain it convincingly, in technical terms—without dumbing it down?” Javier’s phone beeped again. “Not right this second. But could you?”

“Well, yeah—”

Javier glanced at his press pass, and the spark of a plan flared into being. “Can you walk ten blocks? Can Marianne?”

While Nelson conferred with Marianne, Javier’s phone beeped again. The part of him that had been burned one time too many questioned whether it was actually wise to expose himself further to someone with no sense of loyalty…but time was running out, and in a last-ditch effort to salvage the rapidly deteriorating situation, Javier said, “Come to this address….”

Chapter 29

Tim had thought they were on the lowest level of The Tombs, but he’d been wrong. Two more flights of stairs later, they found themselves at a barred metal door where a stout woman with a permanent frown looked like she was just waiting for an excuse to turn away someone who’d come this far. Tim and Randy both stood straighter and did their best to look trustworthy and earnest as she scanned their paperwork. “You’re picking up Pham Duc Bao?” She said the non-English name with a surprising lack of hesitancy.

“Yes, ma’am,” Tim said, projecting as much humility and respect with those two words as he could muster—though the emotions he was attempting to convey were probably lost amid the sound of wailing coming from the hallway beyond the bars.

“Boy or girl?”

“A boy. He’s twelve years old, just under five feet tall—”

“End of the hall, turn right, give your forms to the guard.” She pressed a button and the door gave a startlingly loud electronic buzz as it opened just long enough to admit them, then shut behind them with a clang that made the hair on the back of Tim’s neck stand on end.

An eerie sound filled the guard station, growing louder as they approached the hallway—dozens upon dozens of tiny voices echoing through a metal and concrete warren that couldn’t seem to absorb them, as if it had been built for larger voices, adult voices, and these thin, piercing sounds built and multiplied on each other in a macabre feedback loop. And while the sounds were bad, the smells were ten times worse. Feces, mainly. But underneath that, urine and sweat, and the stink of way too many unwashed bodies crammed far too close together.