“For me?”
She made an all-encompassing motion, to the extent her chains permitted. “All of you. Gringos. Imperialists. You have three-quarters of the world in your pocket, but it’s not enough. You want to control Brazil, too.”
I watched her face, looking for anything unusual, any distinction between the real Mariana de Andrade and the influence of the fungus. “So, you think it’s appropriate to murder a leader who makes a decision you disagree with?” I asked. “I’m surprised you lasted in the service this long.”
“Not just any decision. This decision.”
“Why?”
“It’s our country. Not yours. When he gave it away, he lost his right to govern it.”
“Did anyone suggest to you that you should do this? Were you in any way prompted by César Nazif or his provisional government?”
“We’re all connected,” she said. The Portuguese word she used was ligados.
“Who are? You and Nazif?”
“Everyone who wants to protect this land and its resources is connected.”
“So you were under orders? Compelled in some way?”
“You intentionally twist my meaning.” Her eyes, which had drifted away to stare at the floor, found my face again. “It was necessary. It was right. It was the only thing I could do.”
I decided to try a different approach. “Do you know you have a fungal organism growing in your brain?”
She narrowed her eyes. “A what?”
“A fungal organism. You picked up a lung infection, which would have given you a bad cough for a while, maybe even put you in the hospital. Do you remember that?”
“I was in the hospital three or four weeks ago. I was coughing up blood.”
“The organism that caused that infection is still in your body. It’s been growing up into your brain.”
She shrugged. “I know. The doctor recommended a sugar-rich diet to help it grow.”
I gaped at her. “A doctor told you it was a good thing to have a fungus living in your brain?”
“Of course. He said his had been growing for weeks, and that he’d found that a diet high in carbohydrates and sugars helped increase its health and size.”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew my brother welcomed the idea of a fungal parasite, but he was a mycologist. He was weird. “Didn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, it’s not exactly a common thing.”
She smiled. “More common than you think.”
A Marine helicopter passed nearby, rattling windows with its chop. “Who is your doctor?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the noise.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, standing. “There are too many of us for you to stop.”
One of the black-clad soldiers behind her said, “The prisoner will sit down.” I realized the helicopter wasn’t passing by. The sound of its rotors was louder and directly overhead, as if it were landing on the roof.
The soldier took a step toward her, his hand on his weapon. “Sit down. Right now.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”
The second soldier raised his shotgun without warning and shot the first soldier point blank in the back of the head. The noise was deafening in the small, concrete room. The man’s face and neck exploded, showering the far wall with blood. I stumbled backward, falling onto the floor against the wall, adrenaline flooding my system. Mariana seemed completely unsurprised. She didn’t even turn around to see what had happened.
I heard nothing but a high buzzing sound and the pounding of my own blood in my ears. In slow-motion, like we were underwater, I watched the soldier turn his shotgun toward me.
“Stay where you are,” his lips said, though I couldn’t hear the sound. I didn’t move while he unlocked her chains and the two walked out of the interview room, or for long minutes after. By the time my hearing returned, the room was quiet but for the faraway sound of shouting prisoners and the beat of a helicopter’s rotors receding into the distance.
CHAPTER 19
Melody was furious. She showed it with a kind of quiet energy that did nothing to mask the inferno behind her eyes, a furnace I expected to explode on the first person not in her inner circle who did something she thought was stupid. She had been a kind of queen of intelligence, bullying the bureaucracy into effectiveness and solving the unsolvable. Now, her agency was utterly failing to anticipate the enemy, and none of the tactics she relied on were working.
“We need to test everybody,” she said. “All the agents, all the soldiers, the general staff, everybody. We need to know they’re on our side.”
Melody and Shaunessy and I were crammed into the closet-sized room they’d allocated her for an office. “Is that practical?” I asked.
“Not if we have to do PET scans or MRIs. We need a blood test, preferably one that doesn’t take a week of analysis in a lab to reach a conclusion. That’s your task for tomorrow. Check with the Brazilian docs who examined Ms. Andrade and see what they can tell you. Then find the Army docs and tell them we’ve got a potential epidemic on our hands. You said your brother has cultures of this thing?”
I yawned. I couldn’t help it. It was two o’clock in the morning, and the last time I’d slept had been in the back seat of a taxi. “He does, in his lab at UMD. I’m not sure if he’ll be willing to give them up, though.”
“He’ll have to. This is an infectious disease issue, so we need to get USAMRIID involved, and the FBI as well. This is a threat we can’t ignore.”
“Does Deputy Director Clarke know?” Shaunessy asked. “And General Cardiff?” Cardiff was the commander of the US forces in Brazil.
“They know,” Melody said, “but they don’t really believe me. The evidence is pretty thin, and it’s not something they’ve been trained to expect. If people were dying, and I said ‘pandemic,’ they’d have docs in HAZMAT suits swarming the place like flies. But people betraying their country because of an infection? It doesn’t compute. They don’t have a category to put it in.”
One thing they had in Brazil was good coffee. I refilled my disposable cup from the pot Melody kept going day and night.
“What was she like when you talked to her?” Melody asked, meaning Mariana de Andrade. “Could you tell? Did she seem drugged, or high, or like anything was wrong?”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t, and it was pretty creepy. She seemed perfectly lucid and rational. On the other hand, she considered it perfectly normal to have a fungal parasite sending tendrils through her brain, to the extent that she seemed surprised I would question it.”
“She knew?”
“Yeah. And get this—she said her doctor was infected, too. That he was giving her tips for how to help it grow.”
“We need to find that doctor. Shaunessy, contact the local police tomorrow. They should know how to pull her medical records.”
“My brother didn’t mind the idea of a fungal parasite either, but I didn’t think it was weird coming from him. I mean, it was weird, but fungi is his thing. It’s like a herpetologist kissing snakes. It wasn’t out of character. From Andrade, though…”
“To be fair, we don’t know what her character was to begin with,” Melody said. “But I agree. Weird.”
“I’ll call home first thing in the morning,” I said. “If Paul won’t give up his cultures, maybe my dad will allow a blood sample to be sent to USAMRIID.”
“I know a guy there,” Melody said. “You get your father to give his consent, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
I followed Shaunessy to the hotel where they were housing American staff, and the cheerful desk clerk informed me that all the rooms were full. “Come on,” Shaunessy said. “My room has a pull-out couch. Not much more than a foam cushion, from what I can tell, but it’ll be better than nothing.”