Fire Will Fall

  Scott came to life, and I had to admire him for handling this so well. He used to get angry all the time. Now he couldn't afford to. He had an aneurysm in his head that could blow under too much stress.

  He simply said, "Rain. Stop calling names. Stop torturing my brother. I can get you a shrink tomorrow if you want to talk about this, but the fact is ... nobody in this car wants to talk about it. If you can't button it up, go sit in the front."

  He laid his head back, letting out a long breath of pent-up energy. He obviously had something on his mind, and this was all a big distraction.

  My brother can be intense. Even his jokes have a kind of backhanded feel to them. But any subject change had to be a good one. "What's up, bro?"

  FOUR

  SCOTT EBERMAN

  FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002

  7:22 P.M.

  ROUTE 9

  "I NEED ... A JOB," I said.

  Rain picked up her yearbook and stared at a page. Her friends had gotten everyone in the class of around six hundred kids to sign it, and the rule was, "You can't put 'get well soon.' You have to be original." Every page was literally covered with pen scrawl.

  "You mean ... a paycheck?" she asked impatiently, obviously still steaming. "You don't need money, not until you get better."

  I ignored the limitations of her vision. "How can I talk your dad into letting me work for USIC? Whatever it is they're doing, I bet it's not all that hard. Making phone calls ... checking up on leads about where those guys are hiding..."

  She let the book drop down and stared at me, torn between her natural sympathy and her desire to get even for my pushing the pause button on her sore subject of we-may-never-have-sex, ever. Her tone wasn't spiteful. "In all the years my dad was in the FBI, I never, ever heard him spill one work-related secret. How likely do you think it is that he's going to spill USIC secrets about terrorists to you?"

  That was putting it bluntly. "Thanks for your help and support."

  Score: Even. She broke into a smile. "Meagan Monahan wrote, 'Thanks for always being the designated driver. When you come back, the whole hockey team is taking you out and being your designated driver!' Dang. Why did I waste all of high school being the designated driver?"

  "Must be nice to have nothing to think about except high school." I shouldn't have said it, but blurting had replaced yelling in my life by necessity.

  I was reminded of one strange miracle: Having already had one aneurysm removed from my heart while another lived on in my head, I had fewer of our weird headaches than the other three. I believe the reason is that I'd found ways to be a fighter. I was proactive in the medication we were being given, and even did online research on drug cocktails that might better restore us to our former selves. But I had gone about as far as I could with all of that. A cocktail was being designed, but wouldn't be ready until September—or that was the first promised date from any of the research teams.

  I shut my eyes and lay my head back. I had not been in a limo before, ever. My girlfriend of the hour around my senior prom, Sandy Copeland, was the daughter of the fire chief. The two of us and Ronnie Dobbins and his date thought it would be a riot to go on the back of the fire truck. We were not the most elegant folks to arrive, but we'd been the loudest. So, the limo was cool. Under the circumstances. But while I tried to pretend we were rich, I'm not a great pretender.

  The car turned, finally. I lowered the window a couple of inches, just to smell the reality. Branches swished against the car, flinging raindrops onto my face. My god, this is out in the sticks, my head echoed, and with each passing minute I felt a little more sorry for Rain. I had been out here once recently with Mr. Steckerman on a four-star day, but the drive itself was now gone from me. Meds.

  Finally, the road opened up very wide, and beyond it was a pile of black boxes that reached up to the treetops, with little orange dots in the windows suggesting candles, though this was modern times and you had to infer they were the plug-in types of candles. It looked like a small city of candlelit windows in some sort of castle. It was to be home for god knows how long. Or how short.

  FIVE

  TYLER PING

  FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002

  10:01 P.M.

  LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

  I LAY ON MY BED looking for the hundredth time at the cover of People magazine, the one from March featuring the four Trinity Falls victims. I imagine a lot of other kids stare at this picture, too. The reason? You look at them and think, "Could they really have this illness?"

  You read this gag-inspiring list of autoimmune symptoms they live with, and you have to flip back to the cover again—and back and forth from the pictures to the writing. Their hair is so shiny. Their skin isn't dinged up. They don't naturally have a drop of ugly in them. But the universe has been known to play cruel jokes on people like that, and they stand as evidence.

  There does appear to be something kind of wrong—but it's hard to pinpoint. You have to look closely. They're kind of pale and have what looks like a slight bruising at the corners of their mouths and around their eyes. You'd almost think it was shadows. Then, there's some sort of translucent or fluorescent factor to their skin that you can't help staring at. It's not gross. If you're a sci-fi head, you'd say they look a little radioactive. If you're a goth, you might say they look like pretty vampires. It almost looks like a strength instead of a weakness, but that's only if you're using imagination.

  Reality is that they live like early AIDS patients who haven't hit the throes of it yet, only no magazine has had the audacity to make a comparison between their Q3 and the AIDS virus. Their drug protocol is very similar, and yet it's politically correct to hope that the Trinity Four, as they're called, will be cured relatively quickly. Q3 is a cruel virus, allowing them to feel normal on lots of days. But as soon as they get their hopes up that they're improving, they get flu symptoms and slamming headaches. I've got the inside scoop on them. For a number of reasons, the Trinity Four is personal to me.

  I laid the magazine down on my chest, feeling sleep coming on. I was almost asleep, because I'm pretty regulated. I lie down at 10:00 and almost never see my digital clock hit 10:05. Tonight, I heard Shahzad Hamdani's keypad clattering from across the hall in my mom's old room. Hamdani is not regulated at all—up, down, up, down, all night, since there hasn't been a need for a schedule. In Pakistan, you're allowed to quit school after eighth grade, so Hamdani hasn't seen the inside of the Halls of Knowledge in three years, except for his first day of school in America, when he met me. Our hacking escapades got us in trouble immediately, and hence it was also his last day. He says that even in Karachi he did his best hacking and v-spying between two in the morning and sunrise. He generally knows to be quiet between 10:00 and 10:05, but once I'm out, I'm not an evil prick about his noise.

  "Hel-lo?" I hollered across the hall to him. "My five minutes, please? Do I ask for a lot in this thing we call our life?"

  "Yerklun un stivach," he mumbled, or some such thing, which could mean anything from "one more minute" to "bite me" in one of the twenty or so languages he can converse in, not including dialects. It's a gift. He jokes that he was born crying in three languages.

  I fought my compulsive desire to blast him, stuffed the magazine under my pillow where it belonged, and headed across the hall. The clincher wasn't what he was saying but the fact that he wasn't speaking English. Hamdani only forgets what language he's in when he's totally absorbed.

  He was now staring into the glow of his screen, his light off. His profile glowed blue, and his fist was pushed up against his mouth as he thought. His hand flopped down on the mouse, and he drummed his fingers on top.

  I reached for the switch and turned on the overhead, which only caused him to flinch and lean closer to the screen. "Yerklun un stivach..."

  "English, dude. You're in America."

  "Sorry. I am wondering if I should send to USIC this dead-dog article."

  "I thought our interest was dead people." I scanned the wall in front
of him, where my mother used to have a mirror. It's just a bare wall now, except that Hamdani has taped up hard copies of eight or nine recent news stories from MSNBC, most of them only a few paragraphs long. "Six Die as Mystery Illness Grips Cruise Line." "Food Poisoning Suspected in 11 Deaths at Mardi Gras." "Dengue Fever Claims 9 in Nepal Hotel District." "Mystery Disease in Tripura Claims 14 on British Military Base."

  He finds the stories buried in worldwide news about dirty politicians, crimes, forest fires ... He hard copies any that might be the work of a terror cell looking to kill fifty or so people without attracting attention to itself. He then sends them to Hodji Montu, a USIC agent we're tight with.

  I studied the picture of the skeleton in the middle of a dusty road. "What's so great about a dog corpse?"

  He reads Spanish easily and pointed to a line of text under the picture. "Outskirts of Mexico City. Several locals are hysterical. They say the dog fell down in the road sick, and several hours later, this is what it looked like."

  He enlarged the picture two hundred percent, and even in black-and-white I could see the bones lay in some sort of gloppy mound with a few hairs sticking out.

  "Um... ew?" I plopped down beside him on my mom's bed—now his bed—yawning. "You know that's bullshit. Bodies don't deteriorate that fast. Aren't Mexican locals given to smoking homegrown marijuana?"

  "They say it is the fourth such incident in as many days. They contacted a photographer from a Mexico City newspaper, who came for this one and photographed the deterioration." He spun up a PDF page that had been off the screen and pointed to a similar picture, only in this one you could still see it had been a dog. Had a tail, had some hair, but some internal organs were already showing.

  "This was shot at hour two." He pointed.

  Fat chance I would escape my usual nightmares tonight. The recurring one was my favorite: My mom reaches out to me through prison bars, crying, " Tyler, you rat, how could you?"

  "Why can't you find your weird stories at ten in the morning? How did you even capture this swill?"

  "I surfed," he said. Duh.

  I said that the Trinity Four are personal to me. The first reason is that as self-proclaimed v-spies, Hamdani and I look for members of ShadowStrike online. We follow them into chat rooms and try to script their chatter, and we give it to USIC. But they're not easy to find, and in the five weeks we've lived and worked here together, our search engines have coughed up nada. After ShadowStrike members were arrested in March for the Trinity Falls water poisoning, it seems that all chatter from extremists anywhere on the planet suddenly stifled itself. You'd think ShadowStrike was defunct, if you were an impatient type. But we know more operatives are out there, including two dangerous officers—one a scientist and the other a trained assassin—who escaped Trinity Falls by the hairs on their asses. OmarLoggi and VaporStrike were two log-ins we hunted constantly.

  Our favorite game in the world is trying to find them online. But in the barren wasteland of online intelligence lately, Hamdani succumbs to surfing the news. ShadowStrike specializes in designer germs, hence Hamdani's charming collection of suspected Weapons of Mass Destruction on the wall.

  "Don't be a smart-ass," I begged him. "It's late. How in the hell did you bump into dead dogs in your search for potential terror attacks?"

  He slumped back in the chair, watching the edge of the keypad, blinking. It's the first clue I had that "I surfed" might have been a stalling tactic and not smart-assery.

  His gaze turned to me with those big Pakistani browns, and he said, "I decided I would surf for the germ 'tularemia.'"

  Ah. This is really personal. My eyes flew to the photo of the bones and glob pile, then looked down at my hand on the back of his chair. I knew how many scabbies were on that one hand, because I'd counted them a dozen times. Thirty-nine: four between my fingers, one under my pinkie fingernail, eleven on my fingers, thirteen on the back of my hand, and ten on my palm. The rest of our bodies were decorated, too. We have a little more in common with the Trinity Four than that we'd love to see the same guys caught. We had been struck, too, in a different way, though they have no idea.

  "Obviously, this would be a far more stringent mutation of tularemia than what you and I were attacked with," he said.

  "They're sure it's tularemia?"

  "So they say."

  "Who's they?" I wished I'd paid attention in Spanish class so I could read it myself.

  He rolled the mouse around again until the other picture came clear. "In Mexico, they still get away with 'authorities say' over something like this. They are not panic stricken about emerging infectious diseases and terrorists like the Americans."

  I wondered if "authorities' would be the Mexican government or American Intelligence.

  "Maybe USIC already knows about the dead dog," I said. "But send it to Hodji anyway. Tularemia. That's gotta be ShadowStrike."

  In the past two weeks, I could actually forget that Hamdani and I are infected with a strain of tularemia. The first day we were released from Beth Israel Hospital, I took down all the mirrors in the house or covered them with a towel. I am so used to looking at Shahzad's face that I forget to notice the hundred dots covering it, and I can't see my own face. We look more like chickenpox victims than tularemics, because we were struck with a waterborne mutation of the original that's about twelve times as potent in what it does to skin tissue. But our hundreds of bumpy dots haven't itched or burned in about ten days. They're just crusty. We have to sit on a pillow and toss around a lot while sleeping, but you can actually fail to remember for minutes at a time.

  He printed out the first page but hesitated after opening an e-mail to Hodji Montu. Hodji rarely responds to anything we send to him with more than a grunt or rolled eyes on his daily visits to check in on us and make sure we're behaving. He's the closest thing we've got to a father figure between the two of us. We're not supposed to be v-spying. We're underage. And we're supposed to be recovering from our brush with death.

  "Authorities found tularemia in tissue cells, according to this," Hamdani said. "But it is another mutation, apparently far stronger than what Catalyst had when he scratched us in the face."

  "USIC has grown men who sit around all day and surf for people and animals turning up dead," I reminded him. "I'm sure they know about it."

  "So, then, let us give them something they don't know..." he mused, and I took it more as a prayer to his Allah than a comment to me. He surfed again, this time for "dead dogs," "Mexico," and "April 2002."

  I met Hamdani on a Thursday in early March when he showed up as a new student in my school, which he was supposed to start attending like a regular student. He'd just arrived from Pakistan. I've been an expert hacker for going on three years, and I can detect my own likeness with just a few lines of idle chitchat. That night, I captured his screen at this Internet café where USIC had set him up as a v-spy, scripting the chatter of a ShadowStrike guy seated twenty terminals away. I figured out what he was up to in a minute and a half. The next day I invited myself to the party by giving USIC track 'n' translate programs (TNTs) that they couldn't refuse. Hamdani and I captured phone and Internet chatter like crazy from my house on Friday, and I got some idea that it would be an adrenaline rush to see the terrorists we'd been scripting.

  We went to a ShadowStrike recruitment party near Trinity Falls Saturday and pretended to be recruits. But we were acting too nervous and got skunked out by the leaders. Fortunately, Hodji had followed us and had the place raided—hence a lot of arrests were made. Catalyst was one of two recruiters there, though he never even got handcuffed. He took six USIC bullets in the head but managed to scratch us first.

  The Trinity Four, as we call Rain, Scott, Owen, and Cora, know of Hamdani only as the Kid. That's his USIC nickname, which was alluded to in a Newsweek article in January. Hodji has been down to see them at St. Ann's. He gives us updates on them, and once or twice he has told them stories about serving as a bodyguard to the Kid in Pakistan while the Kid sc
ripted chatter of dangerous extremists who were seated three terminals away in his uncle's Internet café.

  The Trinity Four think he's now working from Nigeria or something. They have no idea I even exist.

  Hodji would joke to us, "You'd think I was telling them about Peter Pan." He said it took their minds off their symptoms, hearing about a guy their age who could script chatter with the best of v-spies. They were told that the Kid had worked on Trinity Falls, but not that he and his new best friend took a hit while acting stupid down there.

  Hamdani and I are USIC's biggest kept secret at the moment. We can't step outside. If one person saw us, they would think they had hallucinated. If two people saw us, it would create a national panic within about nine hours. Welcome to 2002.

  "So, what's your take?" I asked. "You think ShadowStrike is in Mexico, injecting dogs with a newer mutation of tularemia to see what happens to them?"

  We scanned his Google returns. "Nothing in the news, but..." He clicked on the International Organization for Animal Rights news page, where "Tulum Couple Charged with Killing Stray Dogs" was the headline. Not exactly something you'd come up with while surfing for strains of known WMDs. Whatever we find is usually by thin threads.

  "Look at this." He breathed in awe. It was in English. I dove in.

  "'A Tulum couple was arrested yesterday after neighboring farmers discovered a shed filled with animal remains. A scorching odor had plagued the area for days, according to local police, who questioned Alvarez and Maria Vincente, suspecting the source was on their farm. Though the couple denied any knowledge of the odor, police discovered the corpses in a grain silo.