Code Orange

  He had the vague thought that if he had been in charge, he would have sent an ambulance to pick up the millennium's first smallpox victim. In fact, he'd have sent a doctor who'd been vaccinated and didn't have to hold her scarf over her mouth.

  There was something wrong with this picture, but Mitty didn't spend a lot of time on it. He just walked right up to the car and—

  They hit me! he thought, lying on his back in the cellar. They hit me in the head! I, Mitty Blake, got mugged.

  He was offended to have been mugged but happy to have a good reason for a bad headache. A nonsmallpox reason.

  Unless this was the smallpox headache he'd read about, the vicious throb no medication could soothe.

  Guess she wasn't with the CDC, he thought. Too bad. I have some symptoms I'd like explained.

  It was easy to come up with comforting possibilities. His stomach hurt because he was hungry. His head hurt because he had a concussion. He was shivering because he was cold. His back ached because the thing he was lying on sagged so badly.

  Mitty threw up.

  It was sudden and unexpected. Because he was on his back, he began to choke on his own vomit. He tried to turn sideways, but the straps of duct tape over his chest prevented it.

  Nearly all smallpox victims experienced nausea.

  The wave of vomiting stopped. The churning in his stomach continued. He spit, trying to get rid of the taste. The stink of his own vomit was making him gag again.

  Every ghastly symptom loomed vivid in his mind, but especially the pox themselves, their pain, itching, pus and stench.

  What had it been like to live when smallpox was rampant? When every time you turned around, somebody you knew had the pox? What had it been like to glance at your kid or your parents and see pox bursting out on their beloved bodies? Back then, you must have lived with fear the way Mitty lived with traffic.

  Up above him, Mitty heard an eerie slithering sound, as if viruses, huge and crispy, were coming alive, and then came a series of taps and thuds. Not heating pipes. More like—mugs of coffee clunked down on a counter?

  He vomited again. This time he lacked the energy to wrench his face around. He couldn't get the vomit out of his mouth and he had to breathe. He would breathe it in.

  He heard scraping then; voices; feet hitting the floor. There was a snick of metal—a handle turning. Then pounding on stairs and light in his eyes.

  People loomed over him. They were covered in pale blue garments that rustled. Their hands were gloved and their faces masked. Really masked—not just little white cups over the mouth. Over the eyeholes were goggles.

  Because I'm infectious, thought Mitty.

  Somebody's gloved hand sliced through the duct tape with a sharp knife. Other hands swung Mitty's feet around and lifted him to a sitting position. He was whacked on the back until he coughed. Something cool and plastic was pressed against his cheek and a sticklike thing was inserted in his mouth.

  Mitty sucked on the straw. The cold water took away the worst of the taste. He felt as if he could never swallow enough water to take away his terrible thirst.

  The hands holding him were large and very strong, definitely male, and slimy, as if attached to a reptile.

  Mitty's head fell to his chest, a position that relieved his headache a little. He closed his eyes for a while. When he opened them again, he found himself sitting six inches off the floor on a camp cot, the cheap aluminum kind that folds up and gets tossed into the car trunk or the attic.

  His jailers straightened up. When the throbbing in his temples was under control, Mitty looked up at them.

  The masks were not hospital issue. They were knitted ski masks.

  The slimy feeling had been from disposable gloves. The men were now holding their gloved hands in the air. They high-fived each other and laughed deep, satisfied chuckles.

  These people were happy that Mitty was sick.

  Tentatively he brought his own hands into his lap. He couldn't see well. What had seemed like blinding light was in fact dim. He squinted to be sure there were no blisters on the backs or the palms of his hands. But it was still too early for blisters. First came the little freckles, the macules.

  They hauled him to his feet and walked him across the cellar.

  Standing cleared Mitty's head, and the cement floor chilled the bottoms of his feet, which also helped. He was glad he'd worn socks today. Or yesterday. Or whenever this had happened. And maybe because he was vertical, not slumped on sagging vinyl, his backache disappeared.

  In front of him, barely visible because of the shadows he and the two men cast, was a sort of wooden stage or ledge with an old-fashioned washtub and a faucet. One of the men turned on the faucet for Mitty. The splash of water was beautiful, but Mitty had spotted an ancient rusty toilet. It was not exactly in a closet but sort of behind a board. It looked connected to plumbing, so he used it. They watched.

  Mitty stumbled back to the washtub, put his face under the faucet, gasped at how cold the water was and sluiced the vomit off his face and neck. The icy water diminished his headache.

  The men were whispering, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. Either they weren't speaking English or his brain wasn't functioning.

  So … if these guys aren't the CDC, he thought … and if I'm not a patient but a prisoner … and if they're wearing ski masks … and celebrating because their prisoner has smallpox …

  An ancient cake of soap, withered and split, lay in a little hollow on the rim of the washtub. Mitty picked the soap up, thinking that since his shirt was soaked with vomit, he'd peel it off and wash it under this faucet, and then he thought, I'm in a basement with bioterrorists and I'm doing laundry?

  He whipped around, throwing soap and water into their faces. He had the one-step-up advantage of the little stage, and he used it. He jumped one guy with his entire weight and knocked him down, kicked the other guy between the legs, and just as the first one got to his feet, socked him in the face. Their grunts of pain were satisfying. But they recovered immediately, encasing him in arms so strong, Mitty figured these men had been in prison for years, spending every waking minute lifting weights.

  They actually tossed him through the air into the remains of workshop shelving. A sharp edge caught his face and ripped open his cheek. He hit the floor, cracking his kneecap, and lost a second staggering to his feet. Then he was up and after them to fight on, but they were leaving. Not just leaving: they were tearing up the cellar stairs.

  They reached the top before Mitty could get to the bottom, and then they slammed the door on him. He took the stairs two at a time, hoping to grab the knob before they could lock it. But the door had locked automatically the moment they shut it. They hadn't needed to find a key or even flip a dead bolt.

  Mitty tried to turn the knob about a hundred times before he accepted that this wasn't going to accomplish anything. He felt along the edges of the doorframe. There weren't hinges on his side, so he couldn't dismantle it, and since the door was metal, he wasn't putting a fist through it anytime soon. There was a keyhole, but Mitty had a real shortage of keys. Through the door he heard that slithering rustle. Then footsteps. Then nothing.

  They didn't even talk about it! thought Mitty. They didn't swear or kick the door or anything.

  The rustling could be from that blue paper clothing, which must be disposable protective gowns of some kind.

  Mitty put his hand up to his cheek. The wound was, in fact, the kind Mr. Lynch said gave you lockjaw. Mitty figured he had more to worry about than needing a tetanus booster.

  He sat down on the top step and leaned against the door, hoping to hear something through the crack.

  The light was a single bulb in a single socket screwed to a wooden rafter. It had a short metal pull chain. The bulb was probably about twenty-five watts. Why would anybody even manufacture a twenty-five-watt bulb? It didn't actually light the cellar. It just made the shadows less thick.

  Mitty peeled duct tape off his watch.
It was now 10 a.m. on Wednesday, February 11. He would have been in the park with Olivia around 4 p.m. the day before. His parents must be crazy with worry. Mitty was a little worried himself. Eighteen hours, even for a sleep lover like Mitty was a bunch of time to be out cold.

  The stairs were open wooden treads, never painted, and the cement floor was cracked and stained. Cement had been roughly troweled onto the walls, which were covered with active spiderwebs. The old gas furnace was close to the far wall, with the stairs coming down the middle of the one-room cellar and the washtub ledge at the other end. There were black pipes, copper pipes, wiring, the water heater, the electrical panel, a few vertical two-by-fours that had once held shelves. No window, not even the little eyebrow kind sunk in a pit below the pavement. No bulkhead door.

  Mitty had been stored in an empty room with no window, no exit, no phone, no food, no weapon, no tool.

  He eased himself down the stairs and circled the furnace. Then he walked back and forth, staring up between every set of rafters. There was nothing to use as a weapon. No hammer had been carelessly left hanging by its claws from a nail. There were no shelves to rip off and have himself a nice splintery sword.

  One end of the cellar had been remodeled, and something had been cemented over. The walls and floor here were filthy. Mitty dragged his hand through the filth and rubbed it between his fingers. Black dust. Long ago, had this place been heated by coal, and had a coal chute? He didn't have a pickaxe, so he couldn't smash the layer of cement and crawl out the old chute.

  He recognized with satisfaction the fat black cable of television. He hung on the wire until it snapped, and then he hauled it in.

  Nobody yelled when they lost their show. Nobody came storming down the stairs.

  Mitty spooled the cord into a neat circle. He found a nice dark place to hang it, and it looked good there; he could tie people up with that. Assuming they came downstairs one at a time and lay still.

  I could break a pipe, he thought. Use that for a weapon.

  Copper broke easily.

  Mitty started swinging like an ape from the copper pipe nearest him. Nothing happened right away, but it would work eventually.

  The lightbulb went out.

  It was not the flickering finish of a burning-out bulb. Somebody had flipped a switch, presumably upstairs. He considered pulling the little chain to see if he could control the light from down here but decided to stay in the dark. They surely were watching him, though he hadn't figured out how. The ceiling was open—rafters pierced by electric wires and the pipes for heat and waste and water—so there was a lot of stuff hanging around and threaded through beams. There could be some high-tech minicam, and he supposed they might even be able to see him in the dark. But they couldn't see him everywhere, from every angle.

  He would think about that later. Right now, he needed to sort out this situation.

  There had to be at least three people: the woman, whoever had slugged him and the driver. The last two could be the guys keeping him prisoner, but he couldn't be sure.

  So they had read one of his e-mails. It could have been forwarded once or dozens of times. Maybe he'd been online with them. Once they'd analyzed straph.edu and found St. Raphael's home page, they'd have faculty names, office phone numbers and, of course, the school's street address.

  That woman could easily have pretended to be a parent. She could have coaxed the admissions office to let her browse through a yearbook until she figured out who mblak was. A person willing to kidnap off the streets of the Upper West Side would not be shy about lying to staff or doing anything else it took. Then they could just park, he supposed, and watch kids pour out the front doors when school ended.

  But how did they know it was urgent to get Mitty right away? How could they figure out that Mitty was on the brink of smallpox and there was no time to lose?

  From me, he thought. I said in my messages that I just found the scabs. I even told the scab collector what day I found them.

  Derek had said that terrorists would be online all the time, trolling for information, scouting out possibilities. They would have their computers set up so that a key word—say, smallpox—would trigger their attention.

  You're right, Derek, thought Mitty. It is all out there. I was too birdbrained to add two and two and get four. I'm not even as smart as a bird. Birds can migrate. I can't get out of a cellar.

  So once these guys knew the scabs were in New York, they had, say, twenty-four hours to plan. They could already have been in town, since New York is the target for terrorists. Okay: their plan. First, find a place to keep a hostage. Except I bet I'm not a hostage. A hostage is a person you plan to give back.

  Then what?

  Nobody, not even the most eager terrorist, could be ready for an event like this. Nobody would have a facility prepared, doctors on call, laboratory experts, airborne-disease experts, creepy people willing to get infected so they could infect others. They'd just have do the best they could in the short time they had. Finding Mitty having a nonentity in brown flag him down—that had been their best.

  But this cellar … It was hard to tell if this was their best, because Mitty didn't know the plan.

  It was small, the furnace was old and the water heater was not going to supply more than one shower at a time. Presumably there was an equally small building above him. Probably not much of a building either, because everything down here was old and dated and wouldn't meet code. The outer boroughs of New York had tons of small houses—row houses, two-families, that kind of thing—some nice, some slums. But whether Mitty was still in New York or whether he had been moved across state lines—who knew?

  In the dark, he felt his way to the stage and the washtub with its faucet, peeled his shirt off, rinsed out the shirt and put his face under the faucet. With the pathetic little bar of soap he scrubbed out the wound. It hurt.

  He went back to the furnace without difficulty, because of the blue glow, and hung his shirt to dry on a pipe.

  I don't feel as sick anymore, he thought. I hurt in some places, but I don't feel like I'm going to throw up. What does that mean? Can a person throw up from fear? Would that person be me? Or did they give me a drug and my stomach was getting rid of it? Was my headache bad enough to make me throw up, like a migraine? What are the symptoms of concussion, anyway?

  He knew what he was doing. He was still trying to pretend it wasn't smallpox.

  Wednesday was a long day, but Mitty had had practice at long days: he attended school.

  He had hundreds of songs on his iPod; might as well play them. Mitty sang along and then, to get some exercise, danced as well.

  He listened to Clutch and the Darkness, to Def Leppard and Aerosmith and Widespread Panic.

  He heard nothing upstairs.

  Maybe these guys had regular jobs and were out selling lottery tickets in some dingy little corner store—or, for all Mitty knew, stocks and bonds on Wall Street.

  He wondered if they'd give him food.

  Why bother? Mitty was a well-fed guy. He could go twenty-four, forty-eight, sixty-four hours without food, and as for water, he had a tap.

  He considered his options. Once he broke off a pipe, next time these guys came down, he'd wallop them in the head and …

  Mitty ceased to breathe. His eyes dried up, frozen like the pointer on a crashed screen.

  These guys are doing what I need them to do: keeping me away from innocent people. Keeping people safe. My people.

  I can't even let anybody rescue me.

  I have to stay here.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Derek, you think Mitty is missing because somebody took him?” Olivia whispered. “Kidnapped him? Because they want his virus?”

  Derek loved how she asked him instead of the FBI or the CDC. He nodded.

  “Then he didn't kill himself,” she said, sagging with relief.“He's safe!”

  “He's kidnapped,” Derek corrected her. “Which is not very safe.”

  “But i
t's alive,” said Olivia.

  “We're going to ask you not to discuss this with anyone,” said Finelli. “Not your parents. Not your teachers. Not your friends. Not a single classmate. It won't be easy. We'll have to think up excuses for this time we've spent.”

  “Does Dr. Larkin know?” asked Derek. “Does Mr. Lynch?”

  “They do not. We will instruct Dr. Larkin not to ask you anything. Now, promise you're going to keep this situation secret. The most important thing is not to throw New York City into a panic. We cannot use the word smallpox.”

  “The most important thing to me,” said Olivia, “is finding Mitty.”

  “We'll find him.”

  Derek wasn't so sure. He wasn't all that impressed by the FBI's track record. What had it taken—ten or fifteen years to locate the Unabomber? And even then it wasn't the FBI who'd found him—the guy's brother had figured it out. And nobody had solved the anthrax mailing.

  “To explain this meeting,” Finelli suggested, “tell your friends that there was some initial confusion about Mitty's whereabouts, and Dr. Larkin thought you might have information, but in fact Mitty's parents took him out of school early for vacation.”

  This was almost reasonable, because winter vacation was only two weeks off. St. Ray parents had little use for school calendars and pretty much took trips when they felt like it.

  Olivia and Derek were dismissed. They left the headmaster's office and walked through the tangle of secretaries' desks and out into the main hall, where they ground to a halt like stalled cars. They had so many more questions, so much talking to do.

  Dr. Larkin rushed out to them. “Now go straight back to class,” he said briskly.

  “Of course,” said Olivia.

  “I'll meet with you later,” said Dr. Larkin.

  “Absolutely,” said Derek.