Streams of Babel (9 page)

But next, I am humiliated. The Centers for Disease Control confirmed that the California illness was linked to E. coli—bad spinach at a fast- food salad bar.
Oops.
Hodji says they knew this, even as I flailed e-mails to them. "Expensive" wore off, but "the Kid" has remained.

I won't look foolish again. I keep to myself these days that I think Colony One is in America.

Only one hit on "vinegar" has downloaded. When I chase it, I find only an antidote for the bite of an Angolan fruit fly. Very serene afternoon. The extremists are so content that for a few moments, the only sound in here is my normal asthmatic wheezing. When they make a few comments among themselves, Hodji takes occasion to mutter into my earpiece.

"Did you know there are three hospitals for every square mile in New York City? Did you know they could find the right asthma drug for you just by watching your lungs on a laptop for half an hour?"

He is in rare form today. I am not wheezing badly now, though that is unusual since my family died. Several weeks after their funeral, Hodji saw me get so bad as to collapse. Once I faint, fortunately, my chest opens up normally again. I simply
got up and resumed working, but it scared the life out of Hodji. He sent to Karachi for medicine, but it doesn't work for me. I need many tests, and thus his references to New York City hospitals.

My screen suddenly goes to black. I roll my eyes, listening through the
ssssssst
of the power loss. I glance over to the gruesome threesome. Their screen has gone to black, too, and they make groans of disappointment, despite that StarFind's rhetoric contained nothing new and exciting.

Uncle Ahmer comes out and stands behind them, scratching his head. I assess that he has rigged the crash to get rid of the extremists. He must want to tell us something important.

He holds up some cable wire and speaks in Arabic, in which they had been conversing. "We crashed this morning, also. I must rewire again. I'll try to have it done for tomorrow. You will come back?"

Their disappointment causes them only to drop some rupees beside their keypad and stalk outside with their Styrofoam coffee cups. Uncle Ahmer locks the door, puts up his closed-for-servicing sign, and moves for their money.

"Good men! They leave a tip!" He tosses one coin to me, pockets five or six himself, then drops the fake cable wire into Hodji's palm. "Roger is coming. He e-mailed half an hour ago."

I look out the window. It is almost dark. It is highly unusual that Roger will bring his blond head here before midnight.

"He says it's important," Uncle Ahmer tells us, and I can see opportunity flash in his eyes. When the Americans say it's important, there are usually larger payments coming. He turns to me. "But first, Roger wants to know if you found any more chatter today on 'Colony One' or 'Red Vinegar.'"

I shake my head, humiliated. "Why does he ask this every day lately? To disgrace me? I've seen nothing since the chatter I gave you three weeks ago—about the devil."

The chatter had been between Omar0324 and VaporStrike: "
Red Vinegar is a roaring devil so treat the devil with respect ... or it will suck your brains out through your face, also.
"

I had sent Roger and Hodji so much chatter on this mysterious target Colony One, and this substance Red Vinegar, that USIC inquired of me more and more—even after my New York water tower and California E. coli embarrassments—implying they do not think it is an idle threat or a hoax. Then, the second week in February, almost all chatter abruptly ceased.

"I ran my search every twenty minutes today," I say. "They have either contrived a new chat room on a site I have not found yet, or they're simply not discussing this threat."

My insides feel eaten. I don't like knowing that people's lives could end if I miss information. That is much weight to carry, to think of other sixteen-year-olds like me, who may live without their father or mother as I do now, if I don't continue building my searches. In that sense, Hodji is right. My job is too old for me.

But at the thought of Roger O'Hare coming, I force my spirits to bounce back up. Roger promised when next he comes to bring Drake's Apple Fruit Pies, Kit Kat bars, and Cracker Jack. I will make a huge pig of myself, and he will rub my hair and tell me what an idealistic and honorable man my father was and how I should move to America soon.

I won't tell him what I really think: Americans make lazy offspring, and I would not fit in over there. The Internet shows me this. Their teenagers go to school, and then to shopping or
a party or barbecue or a club and leave a huge mess for their mother or father, who make the wash and cook and clean and earn all the money. To behave like this, I would insult myself.

But there is something inside of Americans I feel I must not be seeing—at least the bighearted ones like Roger and Hodji. I know I am very important to these agents. I read gratitude in their faces when I give them intelligence. And I read torment, too. They want to fulfill promises made to my father back when they were FBI and he was a Karachi policeman looking to go to America. He made them promise to make sure I got my American education if something were to happen to him. Yet, as "Americans would shit themselves before letting a teenager spy on their turf," they would lose me as an information source.

To me, it is more important to be a v-spy, and besides, who wants to go to live in a place where one's parents died? I need to find some important intelligence so that I can prove my value here and now.

My computer has rebooted. I try my search one more time: "Colony One," "vinegar," "rivers," "run red," and click
GO.
I click into the chat room that has produced "Colony One" and "Red Vinegar." My eyes almost pop out of my head.

It is an Arabic post from Omar0324, who is chatting with VaporStrike in a room recorded in my search engines but not used by them recently.

Omar0324:
A woman died in Colony One tonight. As best as I can determine she was a drug addict. Not of much value to our goals. But it has started.

VaporStrike:
Her brains bled out her face, I suppose? Pwfaa. Forgive my irreverence.

Omar0324:
Forgiven. I have not gotten close to the hospital. Too risky. I have only Catalyst's hacking skills and my eyesight to prove things as of yet. Catalyst said she was DOA, and from the symptoms delivered across their handheld radios, I feel they will assess the cause of death as brain aneurysm.

VaporStrike:
I thought we established that Red Vinegar would not rear its ugly head until April.

Omar0324:
The weak succumb first. Two hours ago, an ambulance visited another house and took away another female. Symptoms I captured included only flu and severe headache, but I feel we will see—

I don't scream for Hodji. I want to stick the script under his nose accompanied by my humblest good manners. He will never call me the Kid again. I chase around for a few minutes but can only determine that VaporStrike is chatting from a U.S. server. It belongs to a café near New York City that I know well, called Trinitron. This probably means he is somewhere near that server, but the truth is, he could access it from anywhere on the globe. About Omar0324 I can determine even less. He has managed to hide the embedded codes of any server at all. I don't focus any disappointment on his tricks, to which I am accustomed. If Hodji and Roger are correct, and the location of Colony One is in Africa, then he is somewhere on the real Dark Continent. I am focused on my good luck. This is a very, very frank conversation, which is unlike them. They generally speak in codes that force me always to read between lines and suspect innocent chatter.

However, my luck evaporates as quickly as it came. I open a Word file swiftly to script the chatter, but to my amazement, when I switch back to the chat screen, only their names still show, but with blank spaces between. I know what I just read, and have never seen chatter not be where it was ten seconds ago. To my deepest shock, the blank spaces between their names indicate that their speeches are, like them, able to come and go via the black holes of an endless galaxy called the Internet.

They log off and are gone. I will catch them later, but for now I am stumped, and I have no script to show off to Roger.

SCOTT EBERMAN
FRIDAY, MARCH I, 2002
6:30
A.M.

THE SUN WAS barely up when I returned to the hospital after a sleepless night. I felt something was terribly wrong as soon as I walked into the ward where Dr. Godfrey had put Mom late last night. I knew he would be here starting rounds already, but nobody was in the nurses' station, despite that the phone was
ring-ring-ring
ing. I automatically flew to pick it up but never got farther than the "hell" in "hello" when I saw the medical convention outside my mom's private room.

I wanted to run toward it, but it was like one of those nightmares where the bad guy is chasing you and you're moving in slow motion. I could hear Godfrey's voice sounding off with something indistinguishable and nurse extraordinaire Haley Gibbs exclaiming, "—walked in here two minutes ago, and she was like that!"

Another nurse turned, put her hand on my shoulder, and pushed me back. "Scott, don't go in there."

Dr. Godfrey came flying out, still muttering, with Haley following on his heels.

He saw me. "Don't go in there."

It's like someone telling you not to surface in a swimming pool. But Godfrey's gloved hand replaced the other nurse's, and he pushed against the middle of my chest.

The Code Blue squad was in the cube. The all-too-familiar beeps and bumps and honks ground through my head.

"What the—" I froze, staring down. Godfrey's hand had left a perfect replica of itself in the middle of my T-shirt, dripping red in blood.

He tore off the gloves and dropped them into Gibbs's hand.

"Get him a scrub shirt," he said to her, which ought to have been the least of his worries, the least of my worries. But I'd seen this before, when my mind was focused on something medically horrible and complicated. My brain would flip, only for a nanosecond, to something less important, almost like a swimmer taking a gulp of air between strokes. I whipped off the T-shirt and flung it to Haley, who was unlocking the linen closet. And as I chased, bare-chested, after Godfrey I gave that bloody T-shirt one final look, sensing it was something I ought to keep as memorabilia for my children and grandchildren—or at least for myself and Owen.

Letting it go was like an admission that this situation, whatever it was, could resolve itself. It ain't over till it's over, we always said in the ambulance. Hell, we could even keep a Code Blue alive for hours, or days if we needed to, until we could think of something to bring it back to life. I turned my face from that T-shirt, sensing I would never see it again. But since I wouldn't be needing any memorabilia from this strange scene, chasing after Godfrey was far more important.

SHAHZAD HAMDANI
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2002
5:30
P.M.
KARACHI TIME

ROGER LAYS HIS gift box on my chair, but I cannot think of it yet. I have ranted my entire story in Urdu, which Roger does not understand. I don't even realize it until Uncle grabs hold of my forearm and translates to English.

"Omar0324 has just posted that a woman has died in Colony One. Her, um, brains bled out her face. Another is ill—"

"Let me see the script." Too calmly, Roger removes the head covering from his thick blond hair as Hodji runs around closing blinds. Roger's height alone is enough for people to make note of him if we are not careful.

"He doesn't have it. He says the chatter disappeared before his very eyes," Uncle finishes, raising his eyebrows like I may be a childish idiot.

I trudge on in English, despite that my spoken English is horrible. If you wonder how one's English can be horrible in today's world—especially for a person who knows many obscure Asian languages—the answer is simple: With a click of a mouse, almost any English translates to Arabic, and this is impossible with lesser-known languages. Because of its popularity, English is the easiest language in which to become lazy, and in my panic tonight, my tongue goes thick and awkward.

I stutter, "VaporStrike makes to be near the café Trinitron. That café near your New York, only ... subhuman."

"Suburban," Roger corrects me but fails to smirk or call me Kid. I detect he is interested.

"Omar I no can make to be somewhere."

"Bet he's in Africa," Roger mutters. He looks at Hodji, who has returned to his side, and repeats my statement: "A woman has died in Colony One. Her brains bled out her face. And a second woman is ill or dying..." Roger's blue eyes light in hope. "
Mmm,
lots of meat in that. Lots of clues."

"You feel you can find Colony One—based on that one statement?" I ask, having known the Americans too long to show much amazement.

Hodji does not have to remind me, but he does. "You gave us a script on StarFind when he said there was a fire in his school the night before, set by a bunch of unruly teenagers. Remember that?"

"Yes." They had no idea where on the globe StarFind was or who he was, but with that one tidbit, USIC located him. He's been under surveillance ever since.

I am wheezing badly, but I do not realize until Hodji starts to rub my back and he bangs on it just once. "Go look in Roger's gift box. Don't think about disappearing chatter right now. Take a break—"

"But you don't believe me!" I steer my face away from the Frost Glacier Freeze Gatorade he waves before me. Normally, with the athletic suck top, it is a favorite gift.

He holds up Drake's Apple Pies. I take them and stare at the packaging, wondering whether to devour them now or save them for more peaceful times. I look in the box as the three of them retreat to Uncle's office.

I can hear Uncle's here-come-the-dollars tone float out as I calm my chest by munching what I have found on top—Kit Kat bars.