“It’s me, Mom,” I said.
“Sorry, I was just parking the car.” I heard an engine turn off in the background, then the sound of a door opening.
“It’s Neil,” I said. “I’m okay. I’m safe.”
“Safe? Were you in danger?”
“I was in Brasília, Mom. Haven’t you seen the news? The bombs and riots?”
“I haven’t had a chance to watch the news. Neil, your father… he…”
I felt a flood of worry. “What is it? Is he forgetting again?”
“No, but he’s… . I don’t know how to describe it. He’s not the way I remember him.”
“In what way?” Her comment sparked some old hurts for me. The man my father had been was the man she’d left behind. Now that he was back, did she already find him unsatisfactory? Did she like him better sick and needy? It probably wasn’t fair, but I had never entirely come to terms with my mom’s on-again, off-again involvement with our family.
“He’s more aggressive, more direct. He flirts with the nursing staff. He’s, I don’t know, just not the person I remember. Rougher. He scares me a little.”
I didn’t know what to make of that. It seemed natural to me that he would have changed somewhat. You don’t just pop back into your right mind after years of dementia without it affecting you. The lost years, the dependence on family, maybe even remembering doing or saying things that made sense at the time but were completely inappropriate. I could see how getting a second chance at life would make you want to live a little larger, take charge of situations, even flirt a little. It had to be a traumatic experience, a little like Rip Van Winkle, waking up from a dream to see how the world had changed around you.
I heard her car door slam, the sound of her footsteps on pavement, other traffic in the distance. “Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m just heading into the hospital.” As she said it, I heard the squeak and buffeting air as she passed through the hospital’s large revolving door.
“Is Dad still there?” I asked.
“Yes. They’re still keeping him for observation. Dr. Chu is concerned with the numbers she’s seeing and doesn’t think it’s safe for him to be on his own yet.”
“Dr. Chu? Isn’t that the same doctor who treated Paul?”
“The same one. She’s a little paranoid, if you ask me. She always wears a surgery mask when she checks on him, and she was pushing to get him moved to an isolation ward. I mean, I’m worried for him, too, but that seems a bit extreme, don’t you think?”
“Did she say why?”
“He still has traces of the infection in his body, and she’s concerned about it. Paul still does, too, of course, and he says he feels fine. In fact, it was Dr. Chu who originally told Paul it could stick around for years, wasn’t it? She seemed to think it was no big deal then.”
“It was. And if she’s concerned, I would be, too,” I said. “Mom, I’m afraid this fungus Paul picked up might be more serious than just a respiratory illness.”
“Oh, I know it’s serious. That poor girl Paul traveled with. But look at what it’s done for your father—he might stress me out, but I can’t deny the Alzheimer’s has taken a serious step back. Pretty much disappeared, from what I can see.”
“So he’s still pretty lucid? How much does he remember?”
“He’s here,” she said. “You can ask him yourself.”
I heard the sound of distant conversation and my mom saying, “It’s Neil.” Then my dad’s voice came on, clear and strong. “Neil! Son! Where are you?”
A warmth spread through me, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. It was real. My father, remembering me. It was almost like he had come back from the dead. “I’m in São Paulo, Dad.”
“You disappeared so quickly, I hardly got to talk to you. What’s happening down there? They had a coup? It’s all over the news here. Fortunately, they left my TV on a news channel. If it was daytime soaps, the Alzheimer’s might have been better.” He laughed, an easy, happy sound, and I was back in our home in Brasília, telling my father some dumb knock-knock joke I heard at school or delighting him with a Portuguese/English pun.
“Looks like a coup, yeah.” I didn’t know what was public knowledge, so I didn’t say anything more about the political situation or mention Venezuela and Colombia. “Looks like I might be down here a little while yet. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to get a flight home. I miss you.”
“I wish they would let me leave this stupid hospital,” he said. “I’m healthy. My mind is working again, as well as it ever did, if not better. There’s no reason for me to be here anymore.”
“Listen to your doctor,” I said. “And be careful how much you listen to Paul. Despite what a mycologist might think, it’s not a good thing to have fungal mycelia growing through your body. If Dr. Chu tells you to take medication, take it.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “Look, you get home as soon as you can, you hear? We have a few years of catching up to do.”
My next order of business was to submit to a debriefing by the CIA, a grueling five-hour session that felt more like an interrogation than an interview. I told them everything I knew, including my theories about Paul’s fungus. They were, to put it mildly, skeptical. I didn’t press the point. I would have doubted me, too.
When they finally let me go, I was ready for bed. Command staff and agency personnel had requisitioned nearby hotels, but before I could find out whether they had a room for me, Melody found me. “I have someone I want you to talk to,” she said.
I sighed, expecting another debriefing. “Who’s that?”
“Her name is Mariana Fernanda de Andrade,” Melody said. “She was until recently, a member of Dragões da Independência, the Presidential Guard Battalion, assigned to protect the vice president. We caught her planting a bomb in the Palácio’s parking garage, in the spot reserved for the presidential vehicle.”
“Is she—”
“Infected? Yes. I insisted on a full battery of imaging tests at the local hospital. A doctor there confirmed the presence of a fungal infection with deep incursion into brain tissue.”
“And you want me to talk to her? I’m no interrogator.”
“Believe me, the professionals have had their chance at her. I want to know what you see.”
I rubbed at my eyes. So far, working for the NSA seemed to involve a great deal of operating on insufficient sleep. “I’ll do it,” I said.
The prison stood on the other side of the city, a twenty-minute drive. It was old, like the neighborhood around it, and made of concrete and steel. The guards wore riot gear and combat boots and carried shotguns and automatic weapons. Two guards brought Mariana de Andrade out with manacles chained to her hands and feet and sat her roughly in the chair across the table from me. They stood behind her, their faces as grim as their black clothing, and their shotguns held diagonally across their chests. She stared at the floor instead of at me, but her expression was belligerent.
“Are they treating you well?” I asked.
She held up the thick chains and spoke English with a heavy accent. “Would you be treat well, you have these?”
I switched to Portuguese. “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I have no authority here. I just want to understand why a career soldier on protective detail for the acting president suddenly decides to betray her country.”
She made eye contact for the first time and responded in Portuguese. “Is that what you think? That I betrayed my country?”
“What would you call it? You swore to protect the president, and you just tried to kill him.”
“Vice president Gonzaga gave up his right to the presidency the moment he called for you.”