Invasive (6 page)

“But the United States never ratified that,” Ez says.

Hannah answers this one: “And yet, a lot of American companies want to do business overseas. Which means they have to be on the books.”

“And in the database,” Hollis says.

Ez asks, “You can get me access?”

“Already did. Check your e-mail, Ms. Choi.”

“I think you mean
Doctor
Choi,” Ez says, giving Hannah a wink before wheeling around to open her e-mail.

“Apologies, Dr. Choi, for any injury I have caused.”

“Relax,
Agent
Copper. I'm just fucking with you. Oh. Here's the e-mail.” She gives a double thumbs-up. “If there's something to find in here, then I will jolly well fucking find it.”

H
annah's hands are slick with blood.

Wind whips the meadow grass around her feet. The knife in her right hand—a folding gut-hook knife, a Schrade—is greasy with red.

A body lies before her. Human feet—one dirty brown shoe knocked off, a corpse-black toe poking through a hole in the fraying sock beneath. But she spies white fur, too. White fur spattered with red.

The air is thick with the smell of animal waste. The sound of a fly wing hums near her ear.

Dad stands nearby, the breeze lifting his wisps of white hair like the seeds blowing off a dying dandelion. He's got a rifle in his hand. A .30-30 lever-action. Held across his chest, across his heart, like a gate closing a road. “What did you do?” he hisses.

She gasps as hands shake her awake. It takes her a second to get her bearings—the grass is gone, no carcass at her feet. Instead the light is garish, bright: the harsh fluorescence of the university lab. A face roving into view: Ez. She wears a look of concern.

“You okay?” she asks.

Hannah tries to answer, but her words are sticky, tacky, incomplete. She swallows and gets some saliva to her tongue and tries again: “Fine.”

“You passed out hard.”

“Sorry.”

“You still sleep with your eyes open sometimes, I see.”

She blinks. It's like blinking past sand. Hannah pats her pocket,
but she didn't bring her wetting eye drops with her. She should have, given how dry the air is here. “Sorry. It's not often, just . . . sometimes.”

“I found something.”

Hannah stands. “Show me.”

On the screen is a database. It's clumsily designed: utilitarian and ugly. Ez says, “The key is, like we said, those marker genes. They're unique.”

“A signature.”

“A fucking
signature
. Nobody else uses these markers except—”

She hits a key.

Nothing happens.

Ez mutters something under her breath. “I swear, if this thing crashes on me again . . . It's amazing how the scientific community somehow maintains such outmoded, antediluvian technology to keep themselves afloat—oh!”

The database pulls up one entry: Arca Labs.

“Arca?” Hannah asks. “Is that—”

“One of Einar Geirsson's many boo-jillion-dollar companies? It is.”

Hannah remembers. “The mosquitoes. That was them.”

“
Aedes aegypti
.”

“Same gene markers?”

“The very same.”

“Shit.”

E
inar Geirsson—a billionaire contemporary of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs (maybe even
Iron Man
's Tony Stark)—has houses all around the world, but his chief residence is in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai. Arca, one of his many companies, sits on a private island—the Kolohe Atoll—west of Kauai, a couple of hundred miles past Niihau.

Hannah can't just drive over and knock on his door.

Days pass. Ez continues studying the ants. Hollis works to open lines of communication with Einar and Arca. Hannah, for her part, feels adrift. She spends her nights reading about Einar Geirsson and his companies. She also spends time reading about ants, an unpleasant subject that leads to uncomfortable dreams. Hard not to wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling of them all over her, skittering over every inch of her skin.

She tells Hollis she should go home. But Hollis says she should stay there. In case Ez has anything. And a flight to Hawaii from Arizona would be easy.

Does she even
want
to go home? She's been avoiding it for so long . . .

Hannah spends her mornings hiking Sabino Canyon—she tries to outrace the heat, though she never does. The third morning, she's running the overlook above Sabino Creek. Down below, the cottonwoods are at the start of their bloom: clusters of fat red flowers dangling down, waggling in the breeze like chastising fingers.
Tsk, tsk, tsk.

And then, down there in the creek, walking around: a whitetail
deer. A doe with her belly hanging low. Hannah stops. Watches for a while as the deer stoops and drinks, tail flicking. A few flies buzzing around her hind end. Ripples radiating out from around her legs.

Hannah's right arm tightens a little. Her trigger finger twitches.

An absurd muscle memory—even back then, even when she was a child, she wouldn't have shot a pregnant doe. Her mother would have stripped her hide for that. But still, seeing an animal like this, it's like the ghost of a memory rises up and she hears her mother's voice:
Deer that size would fill the freezer for winter.

Suddenly, a buzzing at her hip followed by a quick chirping ring. Her phone. Hannah's surprised she gets a signal out here, but she grabs it and answers it and by the time she looks back up the doe is bolting—two splashes and an arcing jump before the deer ducks down through the underbrush and is gone.

It's Copper. “They're stonewalling. Asking for a warrant. Their representative—some cocky prick someone-or-other named Espinosa—says they're a private corporation, they've done nothing wrong, and until there's a formal connection . . .” He sighs.

Above Hannah's head, a pair of vultures orbit each other as if bound by a single axis. “I feel like I'm in a holding pattern.”

“Because you are in a holding pattern. We all are.”

“Maybe you want to send someone else to deal with this.”

“So far, we're not sending anybody.” A pause, like he's considering his next words. “Hannah, I understand you had plans to go home, but this kind of thing? It's why I need you. It's why we pay you. Unless you want us to pay somebody else.”

She knows the Bureau has other people like her on its payroll. Futurists aren't common, but they aren't rare anymore, either. The FBI also has a stable of hackers, philosophers, authors, other professional miscreants, and future-facing weirdos. If they can't get her, her stock sinks. If she bails on this, she bails on future consults.

“It's fine. I'm in.” Her own words sound stiff and angry because, she realizes, she feels stiff and angry. It's not Copper's fault. He
needs what he needs. She is a tool and he needs her to do a job, end of story. She decides to switch tacks. “You find anything else about the body? You didn't just call me to deliver this non-update, right?”

“Oh, there's more. First up: We found something in the lake. A container.”

“What kind of container?”

“We don't know, exactly. It's not typical for anything. It's a lab container used for shipping. Picked it up on the lake floor not far from the dock. Weighted down with rocks.”

“Send me a photo. You get an identity on the body?”

“No. We still don't have a national database of dental records or DNA, and with no idea of who he was in the first place, we don't have anywhere to start. We're having someone work on a potential facial reconstruction. The nose is a problem, since it was mostly gone, but the reconstruction'll give us
something
to feed to the recognition software.”

“Fingerprints?”

“I might remind you he seems to be missing those, since an unholy colony of demon ants nibbled them off.”

“You might still be able to find them. Ez found bite-and-stinger marks on a few individual swatches of skin. Go through the skin samples. One by one. See if you can rescue a fingerprint.”

“That's grisly. I like it. I'll get the lab geeks on the job.”

A rustle down below. Hannah leans over the short stone wall framing this part of the overlook. A rangy coyote slips out of the brush, loping along. It looks up and sees her. It watches her watching it. A moment of recognition between them, then the coyote moves on.

“What else did you find?”

“Found more boot prints leading down to the lake. The print is one size down from the victim's Lowas. The gait is off-kilter, too. Sometimes it leans in on the outside of the foot. Sometimes has a tilt inward.”

“Huh. Okay.”
Same boot, but not on the victim's feet?
It's an answer that only conjures more questions. “Something in the gait, then. Ill-fitting shoes. Or a physical disability, maybe.”

“We'll keep on it. Just wanted you to have the update. Feels like not much, but we're getting closer. And we'll get you closer, too. Arca will open up to us somehow. Even if we have to pick up a battering ram to make them do it.”

But she doesn't want a battering ram. She wants a scalpel. “I'll talk to you later, Agent Copper. I'll call you if I think of anything. And send me a photo of that container!” She hangs up her phone, waits for the e-mail from Copper, but her signal isn't robust enough to download any image. Above her head, the vultures are gone. A plane draws contrails across the sky like a pair of chalk lines.

Back at the hotel she pulls up the e-mail. Sees not one photo of the container but several. Some of the photos are washed out, but they serve her purposes: The container is a metal box. Lined with rubber and what looks like Styrofoam. Inside the container are chambers separated out by plastic dividers. Hexagonal. Like honeycombs for bees, if the bees were the size of a rat.

That night, she does dinner with Ez at a nearby taco joint, and she shows the entomologist the photos. “Looks like a cryo container,” Ez says. “We use them sometimes.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Ours aren't exactly like that—the honeycomb design is different. Ours are cylindrical. This is custom, maybe. But the overall idea is the same. They probably had smaller containers inside those chambers. Around the cylinders you pack in liquid nitrogen. The dry vapor keeps everything chill; then when you open it—boom, thaw. And the buggies warm up.”

“Like they're hibernating?”

“Almost. More like suspended animation. Easy enough with ants
or other buglets. Bigger animals are still a challenge, though I'm pretty sure someone figured out how to cryo-freeze a pig and revive it.” She looks down at her taco and raises a curious eyebrow. “Now I want a pork taco. You into
al pastor
?”

Hannah's heading back to the hotel—walking, because the evening is cooling down and night is bleeding into the sky and the happy (if idiotic) voices of students from the university carry—when her phone rings.

She answers it. “Hi, Mom.”

“You haven't called.”

“I know. I'm sorry. It's this case.”

“This case. That speaking engagement. An appointment. A conference. We've stopped expecting that you'll make any time for us. For your father.”

“Hey, can I talk to him?”

A hesitation. “He's resting.”

“Is he?” That would be strange. He usually stays up watching all the late-night shows. “Is it the medication? Oh, right, it can't be.” A sudden knife-stick of guilt in her gut. That was a petty barb and she knows it.

“He's not doing well enough for a call,” Mom says. Her words are rushed. Hannah knows she's lying.

“I'll try tomorrow,” Hannah says.

“If you have time, dear.”

Hannah sits back in her hotel room, chewing a fingernail and stewing. She bites the nail down to the quick and tastes blood. The panic hits her like a wave she wasn't facing:
Antibiotics are becoming useless. Superbugs are rampant. Even a small infection can end your life. You're bleeding and it could become infected and just because you had to chew your stupid fingernail you could lose the finger or maybe the hand or maybe your life and then—and then!—what happens to
the world when antibiotics fail us all? Everything from heart operations to getting a tattoo will go from being rote explorations of the human body to perilous trips like the first pioneers crossing the badlands . . . Once antibiotics go, everything goes. Maybe that won't be the first domino to fall. Maybe it'll be the one where we lose all the honeybees, or maybe it'll be when we lose all the ice caps, or, or, or—

She's sweating even in the conditioned air of her hotel room. Her chest tightens. Her arms feel loose, rubbery. Her eyes are watering. Her jaw is so tight she could crush a Brazil nut between her back teeth.
I'm having a heart attack.

No. She's having a panic attack.

She lies back. Tries to breathe. In through her nose, out through her mouth. Her fingernails are digging into her palms and it takes truly heroic effort to relax her hands enough that her fingers straighten. She repeats her mantra in her head:

The future is a door.

The future is a door.

The future is a door.

She pictures the door: A black rectangle at the end of a white hallway. A silver doorknob. Bright light shining in around the edges.

The door is unknowable. It is perfect in its uncertainty. It isn't an answer. It remains a question. The world's destiny is not set. Her life is not ending.

The future is a door.

Hannah looks up. Night has settled over Tucson.

She clears her mind and looks out her window for a while. In another hotel room, a woman unpacks a suitcase with meticulous attention. Lifting up shirts and skirts and dresses, placing them on hangers, picking off bits of lint with pinching fingers. It's calming to watch someone else go about her life. Focusing so much on little things.

The suitcase looks fancy. Not black like other suitcases, but patterned. Probably monogrammed. Maybe even custom-made—

Something nibbles at the back of her mind like a dog biting at an itch.

Custom suitcase. Container.
Ez said the container was like the ones they use, but not the ones they use. She said it could be custom.

She texts Ez:

           
Hannah:
You said the container could be custom?

           
Ez:
weirdest way to ask for a booty call ever, H

           
Hannah:
Do you think Arca has proprietary cases?

           
Ez:
would make sense yah

           
Hannah:
How do I get Einar Geirsson's email address?

           
Ez:
hes my boyfriend so hold on let me just grab it from my contacts list

           
Ez:
[email protected]

           
Hannah:
Ha ha.

           
Ez:
i met him on tinder LOL #blessed