“Not anymore,” the man said, which didn’t come as much of a surprise.
“I think Ms. Sanderson can go now,” said a woman who hadn’t spoken before. Tessa had pegged her for government counsel the second she laid eyes on her. “She should perhaps have an escort off incident headquarters.”
“Jess Langstrom is out there, in case we need him,” someone else said. “He can take her home.”
“Yes,” Tessa agreed sarcastically, “that would look good to the media. Show of solidarity.”
There was a certain freedom of speech in no longer working for the government.
Jess was indeed waiting outside, looking impatient and weary and disturbed all at once, an interesting look to pull off. He said, “Tessa?”
“No charges, but they want me out of here. How’s Billy?”
“Fine. I called the hospital. Victor Balonov didn’t hit anything important.”
“No wonder the Soviet Union fell,” she said, and felt slightly warmed by Jess’s reluctant laugh. “I guess you better follow orders and take me home. God, look at this spectacle here.”
“Just what I thought. But at least the scientists are doing useful work.” As he told her what Joe Latkin and Deborah Preston had said about the virus, Tessa got a sick feeling in her stomach.
“How are they choosing the dogs to kill for brain tissue?”
“I don’t know. Please don’t tell me you’re among the more lunatic animal-rights activists.”
“No. Just a dog owner,” she said, and noted that he frowned. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Minette. But anyway, now the powers-that-be have ended my deputyship.”
“Sort of figured they would. Can’t have you shooting any more exemplary Maryland citizens.”
She laughed, although it didn’t really make her feel any better. It was never easy to kill a man, not even when you’d had no choice. Tessa knew she was not unduly sensitive. But she also knew that Victor Balonov’s dead face would turn up in her dreams for months. That was the price you paid.
They rode in silence through the streets, empty except for official vehicles. It looked as if every cop in the entire state had converged on Tyler. If they were all picking up dogs, there couldn’t be any left. Her stomach tightened as they pulled into her driveway.
But Minette was still there, barking joyously as Tessa opened the door, seven pounds of thrilled ecstasy. Tessa picked her up with one hand and turned her to study the little poodle’s eyes. “None of that milky film you said the researchers found in infected dogs.”
“I still have to take her in, Tessa.”
“I know you do.” She hated the pleading note in her voice. “But can you somehow tag her to not be…so they choose some other dog for… shit!”
“I can try,” he said, so gently that she was moved. He looked exhausted. They were both exhausted. She said, “When did you eat last? Breakfast? If I heat up something in the microwave, will you eat?”
He hesitated, then smiled. “Sure. If it’s quick.”
“I don’t cook anything not quick.” Salah, strangely enough for an Arab male, had loved cooking. He’d prepared most of the meals they didn’t eat in restaurants. His paella had been incredible. Salah…
Jess said, “Where’s the bathroom?”
She told him, transferred two single-serving pizzas from the freezer to the microwave, and checked her Caller I.D. Five calls, all from Ellen, who was probably worried out of her mind. Tessa would call her sister right after dinner. But first she darted into the other bathroom, the one adjoining her bedroom.
Sitting on the toilet, and prompted by the memory of Salah, she suddenly recalled the printed email she’d shoved into her jeans pocket early this morning. She pulled it out and looked at it. Too bad she couldn’t read Arabic. Although she’d picked up a few spoken phrases, the foreign alphabet had always defeated her. All these squiggles looked so much alike—
Too much alike.
For the first time, Tessa paid really close attention to the paper in her hand. It wasn’t, as she’d assumed, a string of varied Arabic characters. It was one set of characters, maybe one word, repeated over and over:
» 26
Jess didn’t like to feed pets without their owners’ permission, but Minette looked up at him from pleading black eyes, sitting on her little haunches in that dog stance that meant I’m being so obedient, aren’t you going to reward me?
“Not without Tessa’s say-so,” he told the toy poodle. She wagged her tiny docked tail with the fervor of a tent-revival evangelist seeking souls. Five minutes later no pizza remained. Minette had not taken her gaze off him for an instant and Tessa had not returned. Whatever domestic crisis was going on with her sister and the sister’s husband was apparently lengthy. Jess was glad he no longer had in-laws.
Liar.
Another five minutes. This was getting ridiculous. Tessa’s brotherin-law might not know that she’d been involved in a shooting today, but wasn’t the guy sensitive enough to realize that Tessa, stuck smack in the middle of quarantined Tyler, might have a few things on her mind besides other people’s domestic issues? Some people were just oblivious.
Tessa’s pizza was cold. Jess picked off a corner, fed it to Minette, and wandered into the living room. A wilderness of unpacked boxes, except for a small table under a window. On the table sat a statue of some sort, a many-armed god or goddess. It seemed an odd thing for an ex-FBI agent to have. He picked it up for a closer examination. Heavy, finely detailed, brass or copper or—
His truck was gone from the driveway.
“Son of a bitch!” He tore through the front hall to the closed bedroom door, didn’t bother knocking. The bedroom was empty, but the window wasn’t locked. Jess flung it open and saw her boot prints in the soft mud of the flower bed.
He went back to the kitchen and hit Caller I.D. harder than necessary, pulling up her call record. The most recent entry said JOHN MADDOX, followed by a Washington number. This told him nothing.
He had to report the theft of the truck before she got out of Tyler. But to whom? His list of critical-incident command numbers was in the truck. Hot with fury and embarrassment, he called Don DiBella’s cell on his own. The sheriff answered, sounding weary. “Jess? What is it? Can it wait?”
“Afraid not,” Jess said. Christ, this was going to sound stupid! And Jess had always ragged on Billy for hapless behavior… “I have a problem here, Don. That ex-FBI agent, Tessa Sanderson, just stole my truck. I think she might try to get out of Tyler with the FEMA passes. I showed them to her.”
Silence. Jess closed his eyes, hating every second of this. Then DiBella said, “Stole your truck? Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. But somebody should alert the checkpoints, I guess.”
“You wanted to deputize her!”
“I know. The…aw, shit.”
“Shit? What shit? What’s happening now, Jess?”
“I think the FBI is here.” He gazed out at the two long black cars pulling up before Tessa’s bare winter lawn. “Just notify FEMA, okay?”
He clicked off. Minette, hearing someone coming to the house, raced ecstatically to the front door.
It occurred to Jess, the way that black humor sometimes did at totally inappropriate moments, that he could hold off the FBI by telling them that Minette was infected. That it would be really funny if a seven-pound toy poodle could take them all down and, a canine angel of mercy, somehow set Jess Langstrom free.
“Tell us again,” said the big, good-looking man who seemed to be in charge. Maddox. “Once more, just to be sure we have all the details, Mr. Langstrom. Start with Tessa Sanderson’s first appearance at critical-incident headquarters. What was the first thing you heard her say?”
So he went through it all again, his anger banked by now, his humiliation dulled by the simple sheer repetition of his own gullibility. She’d played him for a fool. He saw that Maddox thought so, too, but that Maddox was making allowance for Jess as a n
on-Bureau civilian. And something else: Jess had the impression that Maddox knew Tessa already, and very well. Was it remotely possible that this was her husband? Agents, he’d heard, sometimes married each other. Maddox wore a wedding ring, but didn’t seem to live in Tyler. Estranged husband? Ex-boss? Had he forced Tessa out of the FBI?
They sat in the living room on chairs hastily denuded of boxes, Maddox in a wing chair and Jess on the sofa while another, totally silent, agent sat beside him. As he talked, Jess kept his eyes fixed on the brass statue of the many-armed god. He’d just reached the part of his sorry-ass story where Tessa shot Victor Balonov, when another agent came in from the kitchen. “Sir, we have the warrant. ‘All relevant or possibly relevant articles, information, or materials.’”
“Then start on the computer, Lee. Evan, Molly, you start in the bedroom.”
Jess talked on, hearing boxes being ripped open beyond the wall, drawers opened, furniture moved. Almost immediately a printer hummed in the kitchen and Agent Lee (first name? last name?) came in with a sheet of paper. “Original of the email we were copied on, sir. English. I’ll do a complete checking.”
English. Something jogged in Jess’s brain. “Wait… There is something I just remembered.”
Maddox turned to Jess.
“Something Tessa asked me. I didn’t think anything of it, but you said to remember everything—” He stopped. Was this going to get Tessa into more trouble?
“Go on,” Maddox said, patient and intent and predatory.
Tessa hadn’t hesitated to get Jess in trouble, now, had she? And anyway, this was—could be—a matter of national security. Oh, God—for the first time he actually believed that. This could be a matter of national security.
Maddox said, “What did Tessa ask you, Mr. Langstrom?”
“She asked me if I could read Arabic.”
» 27
Tessa made random conversation with the driver of the KESSEL SHORT-TERM MOVING truck until she spotted what she wanted. She knew the small city of Frederick, not well but enough, from driving up to visit Ellen. "Could you drop me in that mall, please?"
“Sure, honey. Pleasure to have you aboard, like the airlines say.” He laughed, the deep chuckle of a happy, dim, easily pleased man. Tessa envied him. She hopped out of the truck and waved.
On a Saturday night, the small strip mall was mostly closed. But cars clustered at one end, under a multiplex sign listing ten different movies. Beside this were a pizza place, a Starbucks, and a video arcade. Teenagers hung around outside, smoking. Tessa pulled up the hood of Jess’s jacket and went into the arcade. At the inevitable change machine she got forty dollars’ worth of quarters. Then she ducked into the Starbucks, which heavily advertised wireless Internet for its patrons. She ordered a latte and turned on Salah’s laptop.
Solomon said, “A living dog is better than a dead lion.” But I prefer 2 Kings 8:13.
No new email to her account from
[email protected]. The address, Google informed her, was a mixmaster remailer, which meant the email could have come from anybody, anywhere in the world. Mixmaster remailers couldn’t be traced without subpoenaing the remailer records, and many of those places didn’t keep records. Many were located in foreign countries.
2 Kings 8:13 read: “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?”
Tessa scowled at the laptop. Dogs as servants, doing “great things”—she was dealing with a religious lunatic. Or with someone pretending to be a religious lunatic, which could be far worse.
If she had received only the second email, she would have assumed it had come from someone capitalizing on the Tyler plague in order to harass her. As an agent, she had worked on a number of task forces that had thwarted or put away a number of home-grown crazies bent on domestic terrorism. They were certainly out there; Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh had a lot of company. And it was not unheard of for freed convicts, or their unjailed friends or relatives, to mount a vendetta against the FBI agents who’d investigated their cases.
But the first email, the one in her jeans pocket, the one repeating over and over again—dkd78 had sent that one to Salah three months ago. The email might merely have been a repetitious insult; “dog” was a common epithet throughout the Middle East. But it could be more. It could suggest he or she knew that the canine plague was coming.
Tessa would have to tell Maddox about this. Maddox had the second email but not the first. And Tessa would tell him—but not just yet. If Maddox knew that Salah had received a December email saying “dog” in Arabic, it would only serve to deepen Bureau suspicions that he had somehow been involved in the “attack.”
Back at the arcade, covered by the jangling noise of machines and kids, Tessa found the public phone. Nobody paid her the slightest attention. She got the operator, requested international directory assistance for London, and prepared to feed quarters into the pay phone.
"Ahlan? Ahlan?” The guttural voice sounded alarmed, as well he might. It was one in the morning in London.
“Ruzbihan al-Ashan, please. This is Tessa Mahjoub, the wife of Salah Mahjoub.”
Silence. Then, “I am Ruzbihan. We have sent email, yes?”
“Yes, and I’m sorry to call you so late,” Tessa said, speaking slowly and carefully, praying that Ruzbihan’s English was good enough for this conversation. “It is an emergency.”
“Emergency?” Bewilderment, wariness. “It is Salah’s family? Aisha?”
So Ruzbihan knew Salah’s sister. Of course he did. They had all grown up together, in that Tunisian childhood she could not even imagine.
“Aisha and Fatima are well. I’m calling to ask about an email I received and one Salah received. They—”
“You call me now to ask after some email? Now?”
“Please, Ruzbihan, it’s very important. I think I am in danger from an email in Arabic. It was sent to Salah on December 17 and said only one word: the Arabic for dog. Over and over. Do—”
“You think I have sent this email to Salah?”
“No. But I’m hoping you can identify the email address for me. The person sent me a second email with threats in it. Threats of danger.” Had news of the dog plague reached London? Of course it had; anything on CNN was known to the world. “The address is ‘
[email protected].’”
“I do not know this address. What says this email?”
Tessa squeezed her eyes closed. All at once she was dizzy—when had she last eaten? She fought off the vertigo and recited as accurately as she could remember.
“The email said, ‘Salah is dead, which is unfortunate, but I will work with just you instead, Tessa. He owes me this. He wanted it for me. Did you study your Bible? Solomon said that a living dog is better than a dead lion. But I prefer 2Kings 8:13.’ That’s a Bible verse about using dogs as servants to—Ruzbihan, are you there?”
Silence, and then over the new buzzing on the line, his voice again, loud and sharp in Arabic. She recognized the curse. It was one Salah had used only in extreme situations, and had looked shame-faced afterward.
“Ruzbihan?”
“The Christian Bible,” he said, his accent abruptly thicker, so that Tessa had to strain to catch the words. “The email, it comes then from that one.”
“Which one? Who?”
“Our classmate. Richard Ebenfield. He has converted Salah at the Sorbonne, that one, from Islam to Christianity. He is very crazy.”
“Crazy? How? Is he by any chance a microbiologist?”
“What?”
“A…a scientist. Who works with diseases, maybe.”
Ruzbihan made a rude sound. “He was not. He was nothing. He did not go to the classes, did not sit the examinations, did not finish his studies. Tessa—you are FBI?”
“No. I quit. Left. This danger is personal.”
“Go back to your FBI. Tell them all this. Also, Tessa—”
“Yes?”
“Do not say my name to your FBI, please. I have talked with you because you were Salah’s wife. But
do not say my name to your FBI, or to the London authorities. Do you understand this?”
And Tessa did. Ethnic paranoia cut both ways. “Yes,” she said.
“You promise me this?”
“I promise. One more question, please, Ruzbihan. Do you know where Ebenfield is now?”
“I have not seen Richard since Mogumbutuno a few years ago. I do not want to see him. Good-bye, Tessa. Please do not call again.”
“But you—”
“Good-bye.” The phone clicked.
Perhaps his paranoia was justified. On the other hand, perhaps she had not shown enough paranoia. Richard Ebenfield, crazy American who had not finished his studies at the Sorbonne, could probably not have gotten Tessa’s and Salah’s name into the intel chatter in the Mideast. Ruzbihan, a well-connected Arab whom Tessa had never met, might have been able to do so. Ruzbihan’s family dealt internationally in copper. They had influence and connections. Was everything Ruzbihan had just told her a lie?
Or was she the paranoid?
She fished out the rest of her quarters and called Switzerland.
No answer at Aisha’s apartment in Geneva. Aisha was with a medical team at the World Health Organization; she could have been sent anywhere in the world. And it was 2:00 A.M. in Geneva. Tessa was not going to get any more information there tonight.
She went back to Starbucks, set up the laptop again, and searched the web for “Richard Ebenfield.” Nothing. No address, no search-engine hits, no Web presence at all. Electronically, Ebenfield didn’t exist, at least not under that name.
The cell phone in her purse rang. Damn—she had forgotten to turn it off! That meant that Maddox could find out exactly where she was. She pulled out the phone; it displayed her own number. The damage was already done, so she answered.
“Tessa? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Trying to find information, John. And I have some for you. That email may have come from one Richard Ebenfield, an American who was Salah’s roommate at the Sorbonne, and whom Salah hadn’t seen since. Ebenfield may be a religious nut of some variety, and I have it on good authority that he may be crazed. Check him out.”