Invasive Species (26 page)

THE FOUR OF
them sat in a corner booth in a chocolate restaurant down below Union Square. Until Mary Finneran had said that Kait wanted to eat at one, Trey hadn't even known that such a thing existed.

To him, a restaurant that came equipped with bubbling vats of chocolate near the entrance, napkins made to look like milk, dark, and white chocolate, and a menu offering little but chocolate foods seemed like a sign of a civilization about to crumble. Then again, a lot of things did.

The four of them: him, Sheila, Mary, and Kait. Uncharacteristically, it was Sheila who was doing most of the talking. Sheila and Mary. Trey guessed that Mary did her part to keep any conversation going, but it was strange to see Sheila so relaxed and animated.

Or maybe “relaxed” was the wrong term. “Comfortable” would be more accurate. In between sips from a nonalcoholic chocolate martini, she was describing everything she and Trey had been doing these past days. Every once in a while she'd ask Trey for a detail, or for backup on some assertion she was making, but mostly he was extraneous to the conversation.

This was fine with him. He was all talked out. If he never had to utter a word again, it would still be too soon.

For two weeks, he and Sheila had done what they could to bring reality—or at least a touch of it—to the media coverage of Anthony Harrison's blockbuster speech. They'd called the networks, CNN, MSNBC, public radio, positioning themselves as experts, offering to describe the process, the risks, the way those risks could be minimized.

When you could safely remove an implanted larva, and when you couldn't.

At first they'd been a hot item, in demand, but soon attention had begun to drain away. Trey wasn't surprised. Absent some new infusion of energy, some new headline, no story captured the public's attention for long. Not an epidemic, a tsunami, a terrorist attack. Nothing. Not these days.

When reports of new attacks fell off, then stopped almost entirely, he had known their time was up.

They were sitting in the chocolate restaurant waiting for a science reporter from the
New York Times
. Trey hadn't put it into words, but he had the sense that this interview would be the last big one, a postmortem for all of their efforts.

He missed Jack. But Jack was gone, in some secret research lab in Florida. Since the government had spirited him away, they'd heard from him just once, a voice-mail message saying he was fine and working hard.

“Not that it's gonna make the slightest bit of difference,” he'd added.

*   *   *

WAITING, TREY DRANK
his coffee—at his insistence chocolate- free—and watched Kait, who was sitting opposite him by the window, taking sips from a cup of hot chocolate filled with melting marshmallows (and served in a marshmallow-shaped white mug) and working on a chocolate pizza. She was a neat eater, cutting the gooey brown crust into bite-size chunks before transporting them, one by one, via fork to her mouth.

“When I was your age,” Trey said, “I would have been wearing that thing by now.”

Kait's eyes flickered to his face for an instant. “Grandma told me to keep it off my blouse,” she said. Her quiet voice matched her solemn, oval face, dark eyes, and fair skin. Her blouse was white and dotted with little yellow, blue, and red flowers.

Mary, in the midst of her own conversation, heard and said, “You're darn tootin' I did. That shirt is new, and I'm not made of money.”

She turned back to Sheila. Trey and Kait looked at each other, and Trey said, “Grandmas are always listening, aren't they?”

“They sure are,” Kait said.

Her gaze strayed over his shoulder. He turned to look and saw that there was a TV perched above the restaurant's counter. It was tuned to ESPN, which was showing highlights from a soccer game. A player in a white uniform scored a goal with his head.

“I play soccer on my school team,” Kait said. “My new school. In Charleston.”

Trey nodded. “What position?”

“Striker,” she said. Then, hesitating, she added, “I score a lot of goals.”

“That was my position, too,” Trey told her.

Kait's brow knit. “Really? But—” She closed her mouth again.

Trey thought he knew what she'd been about to say. “You're surprised that I played soccer, because most people my age didn't.”

Kait nodded. “That's what my da told me.”

“Your da was right. Most kids in the United States didn't. Not back then. But I didn't spend all my time in the U.S. when I was a kid.”

She thought about that. “Where, then?”

“Brazil,” Trey said. “Kenya. England. Other places, too. My dad was a doctor, and we traveled a lot. But the places all had one thing in common.”

“Football.”

Trey smiled. “Yes, their football. Soccer. I knew when I was, like, six, that if I was going to fit in, I had to play.”

“Me, too,” Kait said. “Now.”

Her eyes growing distant.

“Is it helping?” he asked. “Soccer?”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes. I think so. But—”

Again the words cut off. Trey said, “But what?”

She compressed her lips, her gaze reaching his eyes, then quickly away. “It's just,” she said, “you know? The other girls? They're like, you know, all really . . . blond.”

Trey smiled. “Well, you can't blame them for
that
. Some people are just unlucky.”

She stared at him for a moment, then actually laughed. Beside her, Mary looked startled.

“Being different is only a problem,” Trey said to Kait, “if you
want
to be just like everyone else. And who wants that?”

He saw her working it through. After a while she gave a considered nod. “I never did . . . before,” she said.

“Then why start now?” He pointed at himself. “Look at me—I'm doing fine, and I'm not like
anybody
else.”

“You can say that again,” said Sheila, who'd apparently also been listening.

*   *   *

THE
TIMES
REPORTER
was named Becca Shaw.

Seeing her curly blond hair, Trey glanced at Kait. She gave him a wide-eyed look, and when he raised a finger to his lips, she let loose with a small, stifled giggle.

Becca Shaw was smart, serious, interested. Pulling a chair up to the head of their booth, she withdrew a tiny digital recorder and a well-used notebook from her black shoulder bag and began to ask pointed, relevant questions. She worked through the history of Trey's discovery, touched on Sheila's tragedy without crossing any lines, made sure she got every detail right about the thieves' life cycle.

She also took advantage of the Finnerans' presence to ask about their own encounter with the wasps. Answering, both Mary and Kait were clear-eyed and coherent. Trey wondered if he'd have been capable of as much, if he'd been in their shoes.

“I just wish I hadn't agreed to sit there on TV during Harrison's speech,” Mary said, repeating something she'd said to Sheila. “This isn't about politics. It's a health issue.”

Becca Shaw opened her mouth to say something, then closed it and, frowning, shook her head.

It's both,
Trey knew she'd almost said.

It's always both
.

*   *   *

“LOOK,” KAIT SAID.
“On the TV. It's Mr. Axelson.”

“Oh, joy,” Mary said.

Trey and Sheila turned to look at the television above the counter. Someone had switched from ESPN to CNN, and on the screen the familiar figure stood in some scrubby field behind a cluster of microphones and a scroll that read, “Breaking News: Statement from the Harrison Campaign.”

Becca Shaw was already standing beside the counter, asking a waiter to turn the sound up. He was working the remote as the rest of them joined her.

It was a press conference, and Axelson was listening to a question when the sound came up.

“Look at his face,” Mary said.

Kait tilted her head. “He's . . . happy.”

It was true. At first glance, Axelson's expression seemed to convey nothing more than his usual interest and intelligence as he listened. But if you looked beneath, you could see more. If you knew what to look for—his posture, something gleaming in his eyes, the way his hands grasped the edge of his lectern—you saw a kind of fierce joy.

“He looks like he's afraid he'll fly right up in the air if he lets go,” Mary said.

“Shhh.” Becca Shaw was leaning forward, as still as a dog pointing toward the hunter's prey.

On the screen, Axelson nodded. “Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. President Chapman and his administration have known for weeks—months, maybe—that these creatures pose a deadly threat, but have gone to great lengths,
criminal
lengths, to hide their knowledge.”

“Do you have proof?” someone called out.

“Yes, we have proof,” Axelson said, pausing between each word and enunciating very precisely. “Incontrovertible proof of a cover-up.”

Even through the screen, it was impossible to miss the excitement that rippled through the crowd of reporters at the press conference. Voices shouted out. Axelson let them go on for a few seconds before raising his hands.

“Sorry,” he said. “I can't explain yet.”

Beside Trey, Becca Shaw was holding her breath.

More shouting voices, angrier now. The communications director was unfazed. “In the Harrison campaign, we believe in doing what's right for America, not just what's right for us,” he said. “Or the press.”

“As opposed to the Chapman campaign,” Mary said in a low voice.

“At this moment,” Axelson continued, “our campaign manager, Ron Stanhouse, and other members of our team are meeting with their opposite numbers at the White House. Until we learn the results of this meeting, we consider it unwise—unpatriotic, even—to detail what we've learned in the past days.”

He leaned forward, the camera coming in close to his face. “But let this be understood,” he said. “I am here today to tell you that the president's reckless actions have led to American deaths. Instead of protecting us—his sworn duty—he has put us, as a nation and a people, in harm's way.”

Axelson stared into the camera. “Let it be understood, President Chapman,” he said. “Anthony Harrison will keep America safe. And you will be held accountable.”

With that, he turned and walked steadily away from the microphones.

When the scene returned to the studio, one of the anchors said, “The White House has just released a statement.” She gave the camera a strange look, a kind of half smile. “The statement says, in full, ‘The White House will have no statement at this time.'”

“Uh-oh,” Becca Shaw said, her voice little louder than a breath. Reaching into her bag, she pulled out her smartphone and glanced at the screen. By the time she lifted her gaze, she was already far away.

“Thanks for all your help,” she said. “You'll hear from us with any follow-ups, and we'll let you know when the story will run.” Her eyes flicked up to the screen. “I'm guessing sooner rather than later.”

Then she was gone, out the door, moving fast.

Mary and Kait headed back to their booth. Sheila, though, was still looking up at the television. The guy behind the counter had switched back to ESPN. A golf ball, shining white against deep green grass, rolled toward a hole. It teetered and then fell in. A golfer pointed his club at the sky.

“‘The president's reckless actions have led to American deaths,'” Sheila said, then turned her eyes toward Trey. “What on earth do they know now,” she said, “that they didn't before?”

Trey didn't answer. Somewhere deep in his brain, in his gut, in the tips of his nerve endings, something was shifting. Rousing. Coming closer to consciousness than it ever had before.

Flooding him with . . . anger? Fear?

No.

Anticipation.

“I'M SORRY,” SAID
the gatekeeper at Rockefeller University's security desk, “but Dr. Shapiro is on leave.”

The man didn't
sound
sorry. Trey was silent for a moment. Then he said, “When is she expected back?”

A trace of impatience in the return look. “Dr. Shapiro's leave is indefinite.”

“Do you know where she's gone?”

The gatekeeper's mouth tightened. His body language caught the attention of a guard standing near the front door, who fixed his gaze on Trey.

“Never mind,” Trey said. He began to turn away, then stopped. “How about Elena Stavros? Is she gone, too?”

“Do you have an appointment?”

Trey shook his head. “Just tell her Trey Gilliard is here to see her.”

With a frown, the gatekeeper punched a few numbers into the phone. After a moment, a squawk came across the line.

“Security,” he said in a precise tone. “There's a man named Trey Gilliard here to see you, but he's not in the system.”

The squawk got louder, so that Trey could make out the words. “Gilliard? Arrest him at once!”

The gatekeeper said, “What?”

“No, no. Send him up.”

A loud crunching sound as the phone clattered into its cradle.

The gatekeeper looked at Trey, then bent to print out his security pass. He muttered something with his head down.

Trey thought it was “I hate this goddamn job.”

*   *   *

TREY AND ELENA
Stavros had first met on the Rio Roosevelt, the River of Doubt, in Brazil nearly ten years earlier. He'd been doing his usual thing: walking into the wilderness, then emerging weeks later twenty pounds lighter, engraved with dirt, festooned with bug bites, and brimming with an encyclopedic knowledge of the area's fauna.

Meanwhile, she'd been heading downriver, the microbiologist on an interdisciplinary team studying a new form of leishmaniasis. They'd met, taken measure of each other, and grabbed the chance to share a tent for the nights before their paths diverged.

You took your opportunities where you found them, and you didn't waste time with preliminaries.

In the year that followed, they'd spent two weekends together—one in Bangkok, one in Rio. Both had been memorable, filled with laughter and cigarette smoke (hers) and various other kinds of pleasure and release. Neither Trey nor Elena had asked for or expected anything more.

And then, one day, Stavros had stepped off the carousel. The grapevine said that she'd gotten married. True or not, Trey hadn't seen her again, though he'd heard she'd taken what was basically a desk job here at Rock U. The wheel had spun them to different places.

This, too, was how it worked, most of the time.

*   *   *

WHEN HE WALKED
into her office, she was standing behind her desk. She looked him over, the same frank assessment she'd given him a decade earlier.

He did likewise. She was almost as he remembered: short, a little stocky, with olive skin and dark eyebrows and all that irrepressible black hair. And eyes that had the amazing ability to actually sparkle. She was the only person Trey had ever met whose eyes did that, and they were doing it now.

It was she who broke the silence, as usual. “Bastard,” she said. “You've stayed thin while I've gotten fat.”

Her voice exactly the same: deep, a little scratchy from years of cigarettes and retsina. And talk.

Before he could reply, she came around the desk and across the room and hugged him. That was familiar, too, her soft, compact body belying her arms' stranglehold.

Then she pulled away from him and looked up into his face. Up close, he could see that the years had added some lines around her mouth and across her forehead. The hair might now be getting some help staying black. On the other hand, she didn't smell like cigarette smoke anymore.

“You look great to me,” Trey said, and he wasn't lying.

“For an old married lady,” he added.

He'd noticed the photo on her desk, an eight-by-ten showing Elena with a tall, dark-haired man and two young girls.

“Can you imagine?” she said. “Boring old homebody me, making cheese sandwiches for school lunch every morning.”

Trey smiled. He'd seen this so often. The population of itinerant scientists, doctors, and field researchers was always being thinned by those who tired of the constant motion, who sought a more settled life.

Or who thought they did. Plenty then discovered that they couldn't tolerate the lack of stimulation, new sounds and smells, changing colors of light. Who missed the geography of unfamiliar bodies, another kind of terra incognita, as well.

Trey wondered whether Elena ever yearned for her old life.

She went back to her desk and sat down. “You came to see Clare,” she said. “To talk about all this foolishness.”

Trey sat down in a chair opposite her. “Foolishness?”

“This . . . hoopla.” She glanced down at her desk, and Trey knew that she was searching for a cigarette. With a grimace, she raised her eyes to his. “Making it into a political football. Making it about who wins an election.”

Trey said, “Because the thing itself, the thieves, that's not foolishness. Regardless of the hoopla, it's real.”

She stared at him. He recognized the expression. It meant: Do you remember who you're talking to here?

“Real?” she said. “Christ, Trey, it's more than real. It's the end of everything.”

*   *   *

TREY SAID, “WELL . . .”

Elena sat up straight in her chair. “Oh, come on. You know more about these beasts than anyone. Don't you see it?”

She ticked the evidence off on her fingers. “A new threat we don't understand. A clever, resourceful enemy. An attack we have no comprehensive defense against—and no time to develop one.”

She shook her head. “That empty suit Harrison is right. It's an invasion, a war. What he doesn't understand is that we've already lost.”

The same words Trey's brother had used.

“Come on,” Elena said. “I've seen you on TV. You've been out front on this. You've seen what those creatures are capable of. You know I'm right.”

It was true, he thought. He had
known, almost from the start, but hadn't allowed himself to face it. Too busy taking one step at a time, just as he'd always done, and not looking at the whole picture.

“Look,” Elena went on, impatient as always with a slow pupil. “Let me give you a hypothetical.”

Her words awakening a powerful memory in him. Elena had always said, “Let me give you a hypothetical.”

Sometimes her hypotheticals were devastatingly true. Other times they were ridiculous. But they always got her point across.

“Listen,” she was saying now. “Hurricane Sandy.”

Trey said, “What about it? I wasn't here.”

“But you remember what it did.”

Trey said, “Sure. It knocked out power to millions of people, overloaded satellite circuits, flooded the subways, destroyed entire towns. Hundreds of people died.”

Elena nodded.

“That's not quite the end of the world.”

She drew in a breath through her nose. “Trey,” she said. “All that destruction was caused by a single Category Two hurricane. Now tell me—”

The hypothetical.

“Tell me what would happen to the region if there'd been another hurricane a week later, only this one a Category Five, and another one the next week, and one the week after that? And what if, at the same time, a storm of the same size hit Florida and one hit California, followed by another, and another. And not just in the United States . . . Europe. Japan. China.
Everywhere
, one blow after another, for weeks. What would happen?”

Trey said, “That couldn't—”

“Imagine,”
Elena said.

Trey took a long time before answering. In the silence, he heard—felt, really—an electric hum, a vibration through his bones. It was Rockefeller University's power supply, the whale song of hundreds of powerful computers and the rest of the hungry machinery the university's brilliant scientists needed to do their work.

Trey wondered if the university had generators to provide emergency power in case of a blackout. Most likely. But how long would the fuel for these emergency generators last?

And how brilliant would Rock U's scientists be without their machines?

“It would take months—years—to get back to where we'd been,” he said.

She made a dismissive gesture with her hands. “And if those months, years, were characterized by repeated hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis? Destroying crops, making huge areas uninhabitable, tearing apart our power grid?”

Trey was quiet.

“The five-hundred-year drought,” she said.

This was also Elena. Announce what she was talking about, and leave it to you to catch up.

“I have a friend who's a paleobotanist,” she said. “He was studying ancient pollens
in Nevada—remnants found along old trade routes—and he uncovered evidence of a drought that lasted half a millennium.”

“Droughts don't last that long,” Trey said.

“That's what I told him, and he said, ‘Why not?'” Elena widened her eyes. “He said just because we haven't seen one during the pitifully short time we've been recording history doesn't mean it's not possible.”

Trey was quiet.

“That drought did some serious damage, as you might imagine. Entire civilizations disappeared into the dust. So tell me: In a world that now holds seven billion people, what havoc would a five-hundred-year-long drought wreak?”

Now there was no sparkle in her eyes. “And weather? Drought? They're just blunt instruments. Bad luck helped along by climate change. The threat posed by these thieves of yours is a whole lot more . . .” She searched for the words. “Direct. Clever.
Real
.”

Still Trey didn't speak.

“Think about it,” she said. “What happens when there's no one willing—or left—to oversee our communications satellites? Man our hydropower plants? Open the locks in the Panama Canal? What happens when there are no firefighters willing to quell a fire before it goes out of control, or ambulances and tow trucks to tend to car crashes on the highway?”

The words hung in the air for a few moments.

“All you have to do to end our world,” she said, “is make people terrified to go to work.”

Her expression was bleak.

“And it will take about five days, not five hundred years.”

*   *   *

THEY SAT. TREY
could hear a machine grinding away somewhere down the hall, a phone ringing, cars honking on York Avenue below.

He said, “Where is Clare?”

“Oh, I imagine you've guessed. The government thing.” A waggle of her hands to signify meaningless hysteria. “They're working to shut the barn door.”

She saw his expression and sighed. “Okay. They enlisted her in some ultra-high-security effort that required her to drop contact with everyone she ever knew. Thereby solving two problems at once: confronting the threat and keeping her from blabbing to the public, which she certainly would have done.”

“They did the same with Jack Parker up at the museum,” Trey said.

“Yeah?” She flicked a glance at him. “Can't really understand why you and your girlfriend—” Her eyes gleamed. “Why you and your
skinny
,
gorgeous
new girlfriend are still being allowed to make noise in public. I guess because all you're doing is talking about public health.”

“She's not my girlfriend.”

“Whatever.” Her expression turned serious. “Speaking of which, where is she?”

“Sheila? She's heading down to the Chesapeake Bay to see some friends.”

A frown. “Trey,” she said, “from now on . . . keep her close.”

He looked at her. She was staring at the photograph on her desk.

“Don't be caught too far apart when the end comes,” she said.

*   *   *

THERE DIDN'T SEEM
like much else to say. Trey stood.

Getting to her feet as well, Elena said, “By the way, what did Mariama want?”

Trey wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly. “Who?”

“Mariama. Honso? She said you'd met when you were in Senegal.”

“Yes,” Trey said. Then, “Elena, I have no idea what you're talking about.”

His tone got her attention. She looked into his face, and her eyes went round.

“Mariama called me looking for you,” she said. “This was at least two months ago—over the summer. She called from—from Panama, I think it was. Said she'd be arriving in the States in a couple of days and needed to find you. I told her where to look.”

She took note of his expression and lifted her hands, an uncharacteristically defensive gesture. “Trey, she asked me not to say she'd called. She wanted to find you herself, show you something in person.”

Trey said, “I never heard from her.”

Elena's hand went to her mouth.
“Shit.”

He thought about the last time he'd seen Mariama, standing beside the colony of thieves. Saving him. “Did she say anything else? Give any clue at all?”

“No. Nothing.” Her mouth twisted. “I'm sorry, Trey.”

After a moment, he shook his head. “No. Not your fault. How could you have known back then?”

Still, Elena looked angry at herself. “Damn. I wonder what happened to her.”

Trey drew in a deep breath.

“I can guess,” he said.

*   *   *

AT THE DOOR
to her office, she put her arm around his waist. She'd always liked physical contact.

“Listen to what I'm telling you,” she said.

“I will.” He hesitated. “But I'm beginning to wonder if we've been wrong. Why so few attacks? Everyone's running around, hysterical, but where's the evidence?”