Dew had one more call to make-Malcolm’s wife. He wondered if Malcolm would still be alive by the time Shamika flew in from D.C.
He doubted it. He doubted it very much.
8.
At lunchtime Perry sat in the bathroom stall, pants around his ankles, 49ers sweatshirt in a pile on the tile floor. On top of his left forearm, atop his left thigh, and on his right shin were small red rashes about the size of a No. 2 pencil eraser. Three other spots itched just as maddeningly; his fingers told him that similar rashes perched on his right collarbone, on his spine just below his shoulder blades and on his right ass cheek. He also had one on his left testicle-that one he tried not to think about.
Their itching came and went, sometimes fading in and out like a slowly turned volume knob, other times arriving with full-bore force like hitting the “power” button of a maxed-out stereo. Definitely spider bites, he figured. Maybe a centipede; he’d heard they had nasty venom. What amazed him was how he’d slept through such an attack. Whatever it was that had bitten him, it must have hit just before he awoke. That would explain why he saw no marks when he prepared for work-the poison had just entered his system, and his body was slow to react.
They itched and were a touch disconcerting, but all in all it was no big deal. Just a few bug bites. He’d simply have to discipline himself not to scratch, and sooner or later they’d go away. If he left them alone, they’d probably disappear. Trouble was, he had an awful time of leaving skin blemishes alone, whether they be scabs, zits, blisters or anything else, but his bad habit of picking at such blemishes wouldn’t help matters. He’d simply have to focus, have to “play through the pain,” as his high-school football coach used to say.
Perry stood, buttoned his pants and put his sweatshirt back on. He took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. It’s just a test of will, Perry thought. A test of discipline, that’s all. You’ve got to have discipline.
He left the bathroom and headed back to his desk, ready to work hard and earn his pay.
9.
Murray Longworth looked over the list of personnel who had enough security clearance to join Project Tangram. It was a short list. Malcolm Johnson was down for the count. That made Dew a solo operative, which is what Murray had wanted in the first place. But Dew had insisted on bringing in Johnson. Murray shook his head-that decision would fuck with Dew, probably for the rest of his life.
Casualties, unfortunately, were the cost of doing business. You sent flowers to the funeral, you moved on. Murray understood that. Dew, he never did. Dew Phillips made shit personal. That was why Murray was the number-two man in the CIA and Dew Phillips was still a shit-stomping grunt. A grunt in a nice suit, sure, but a grunt nonetheless.
That was also why five presidents had called on Murray to get things done. Secret things. Unsavory things. Things that would never make the history books, but had to get done anyway. And this time the President of the United States of America had asked Murray to find out what the hell was turning normal Americans into crazed murderers. Murray, from the CIA, mind you, and not the FBI, who should have handled a domestic issue. It was, in fact, illegal for the CIA to run this op on U.S. soil, but the president wanted Murray to handle it-if it was terrorism, it might require some creative tactics. Tactics that just might be just a smidgen outside the law.
Five victims to date in a plague that would throw the country into an unparalleled panic, and he had precious little information. So far he’d done a masterful job of keeping the lid on things-he had more than a hundred people at his immediate disposal, yet fewer than ten knew what was actually going on. Not even the Joint Chiefs had the whole story.
When Margaret Montoya had contacted the CIA with that first strange report, the call eventually landed with Murray. She wasn’t just some crank caller or some science-type doom-and-gloomer preaching about yet another pending global-warming catastrophe. She was from the CDC, and she suspected she might have stumbled onto a terrorist bioweapon. Her credentials and her urgency convinced enough people to push her through the phone maze, each level passing the call upward, until it reached Murray.
Margaret said she hadn’t gone through the proper channels in the CDC because she feared leaks. Murray knew that was only partially true-the rest of the story was that Margaret wanted to be the one tracking this bizarre killer. If she went through normal channels, she feared some supervisor would take the case away from her and grab all the recognition while Margaret was pushed to the wayside of anonymity.
He’d met with her, and it took only one look at her case files-and those pictures of Charlotte Wilson and Gary Leeland-to convince him that she was right; there was a new threat in town.
The best part of it all was her relative obscurity. She wasn’t some world authority on disease or some Nobel Prize-winner or anyone of note. She was a very competent epidemiologist who worked out of the Cincinnati CDC office; she wasn’t even high-ranking enough to be at the main CDC center in Atlanta. Murray knew he could monopolize her time-draft her, if you will-and only a handful of people would notice her absence.
He’d put people to work searching for references to “triangles” or anything else that might reveal additional cases. That search turned up Blaine Tanarive, who a week earlier had contacted Toledo TV station WNWO, claiming a “triangle conspiracy.” WNWO notes described Mr. Tanarive as “paranoid” and “irrational.”
Two days later, neighbors discovered the bodies of Tanarive and his family in their house. Tanarive was reported as being in a “highly advanced state of decomposition.” His wife and two daughters were also found dead, although their level of decomposition was not as advanced. Forensics showed that each of the women had been stabbed at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. WNWO then did a follow-up story on Mr. Tanarive’s phone call and the message of the “triangle conspiracy.”
A murder/suicide. Tanarive had no record of violence. Neither he nor his family had any history of mental illness. All the physical evidence pointed to Tanarive. Investigators wrote off the case as a sudden, tragic, inexplicable onset of mental illness. The case had been closed until Murray’s search for information related to “triangles.”
Margaret’s information, combined with the Tanarive case file, was all Murray needed to see. He’d taken the info to the director of the CIA, then called an emergency meeting with the president. Not a meeting with the president’s chief of staff, not with the secretary of defense, but a quiet little sit-down with the head honcho himself. Murray brought Montoya along for good measure.
Her report proved quite convincing. The pictures really captured the president’s attention: pictures of Gary Leeland’s blue triangle growths; pictures of similar, rotting growths on Charlotte Wilson’s corpse; pictures of Blaine Tanarive’s oozing, pitted, skeletal body, covered with that eerie green fuzz.
The president gave Murray carte blanche, anything he wanted.
Murray had the power to draft whomever he needed, but he didn’t want a big team, not yet. He had to keep things quiet, controllable. When the news of this hit the streets the panic would be legendary. More than likely the country would basically shut down; people wouldn’t leave their homes for fear of catching the disease, and those who did leave would flood the hospitals with everything from diaper rashes to flea bites. And Murray knew that sooner or later the news would get out. He had to gather as much information as he could before the panic hit, because when it did, things were going to get very complicated.