Code Orange (18 page)

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.

“D
erek, 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 it'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.

Dr. Larkin went back into his office. Olivia and Derek went out the front door. They stood on the granite steps staring at a sky that also looked granite.

“I can't believe that man seriously thought you and I would sit in a classroom at a time like this,” said Olivia.

“Let's go over to Mitty's apartment,” said Derek. “See what his parents know.”

“You think they'll talk to us?” she said doubtfully.

“Mitty's best friend and his girlfriend? Of course they'll talk to us. They must be scared to death, hanging over their phone, trying to call Mitty on his cell, praying he'll call them, reading his biology paper and that horrible letter over and over.”

“I don't think Mr. and Mrs. Blake even know I exist.”

“Probably not,” agreed Derek. “If I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't talk it over with my mom and dad. But they know now, because they must have talked to these guys.”

It was only a dozen short blocks to Mitty's, making the subway more trouble than it was worth. Olivia was usually a big window shopper and loved looking in every window, from the locksmith with his four-foot-wide shop to the shoe store she couldn't afford, from the boutiques that specialized in brimless caps or glitzy evening bags to the bakery windows, where she took one look and had to have that pastry or collapse. Now she couldn't see through her tears. “Let's not take Columbus Avenue,” she said to Derek. “Let's walk along the river.”

“He's not in the river, Olivia. If the NYPD or the FBI thought Mitty drowned himself, they'd be out there.”

But they turned west anyway. East-west blocks were
long, and today they seemed even longer. At the sight of the Hudson, Olivia burst into tears. “Why didn't Mitty trust me? Why didn't he share any of this with me?”

“He didn't trust me either and I'm not crying,” said Derek. “Cut it out with the emotion. We have to think what to do next.” Derek would stack his brains against anybody's, and Olivia's brains were way better than his. The two of them could get ahead of any old FBI in a New York minute.

“If Mitty could communicate with us, he would,” said Olivia. “His silence is a bad sign.”

Derek wasn't convinced that Mitty
wanted
to do any communicating. If Mitty had gone underground, he could only pull it off by not communicating. The problem with vanishing in New York was, where did you find the privacy? And the money to pay for it? Transportation was a problem. Sure, there were a million trains and buses. But to where? And what then? “Stop trying to see a body in the Hudson, Olivia. We need to figure out where Mitty would hide out.”

“You think that's what happened?”

“I would hide out. It would be more fun that way. Well, fun if you don't get smallpox. Mitty gets smallpox and I guess he's pretty much permanently out of fun.”

Olivia sat down on a bench. There were dozens of them facing the Hudson, lined up against gnarled cherry trees. In spring, summer and fall, Riverside Park was a joy. In February, it had nothing going for it. Derek sat down next to her.

“I'm not going to school tomorrow either,” Olivia told him.“I don't want anybody questioning me. I don't want to risk sobbing with anybody but you. I don't want to do
something stupid like take a quiz. I just want to sit on this bench.”

“And freeze to death and think about Mitty?”

“No, we'll think of something to do. We'll accomplish something.” Olivia took out her cell phone and called the school.

“Olivia?” said Dr. Larkin excitedly, as if he had known all along that she would tell him everything.

“Derek and I will not be in class for the remainder of the week.”

“Olivia! I don't know what's going on, but you leave whatever it is to the FBI. You two get back here right now or I will telephone your parents.”

“And tell them what,” asked Olivia, “since we are not permitted to discuss any aspect of this? Derek and I will not fall behind in class. Kindly give us excused absences for the rest of today, and for Thursday and Friday.”

How surprising, thought Derek, that Mitty had been drawn to this girl. Mitty was relaxed and good-humored, slow to worry and quick to have a good time. Olivia was not relaxed, not particularly good-humored, and had a rare definition of a good time: scholarship.

Olivia hung up. “It was fun to give Dr. Larkin orders. But basically I'm scared, Derek. The men in the office and Dr. Graham—they didn't seem scared. How come they weren't scared?”

“I think they're just good actors. But maybe they know more than they said. Or they're too excited to be scared. I was excited following anthrax history. You were excited following typhoid. But this is the real thing. Maybe it's so exciting to be in the midst of bioterrorism that they
don't have time to be scared. Now. You're right. We have to think of something to
do
.”'

“I can't think of anything except to walk up and down every street of the five boroughs looking for a thread from Mitty's sweater,” said Olivia glumly.

“I bet it's only four boroughs,” said Derek. “Manhattan's pretty high rent for taking prisoners. They'd want some isolated warehouse in some wreck of a slum where Mitty could scream all he wants and nobody would hear.”

They gazed at the water. No bodies. Nobody looking for bodies either.

Derek couldn't stand it. He hauled Olivia on to Seventy-second Street, where they left the park, passed Eleanor Roosevelt's statue and headed to Mitty's.

“It just seems strange,” said Olivia,“for those guys to tell us everything and risk having us let out the news. Smallpox news.”

It's all about risk, thought Derek. You're always guessing. A little knowledge here, a speck of information there. You do the best you can with what you have.

And what does Mitty have right now?

Anything?