I apologized to Mei-lin as she wrapped her arm with bandages from a first aid kit, but she waved me away. “I was stupid,” she said. “I should have been more careful.”
“Are you okay?”
“It hurts,” she said, with a wincing smile, “but I’ll live. I can still drive. Let’s get your father to the hospital.”
We drove to Baltimore Washington, Mei-lin following behind in her silver BMW. Once there, I cut the tape off my father’s arms and legs and looped my arm around his elbow to walk inside. With Mei-lin’s help, we sidestepped a lot of the process to get him admitted, and she found him a room on an orthopedic floor. She said he would be less conspicuous there than, say, on a psych floor, where they would ask more questions about his condition. It wasn’t unusual for patients to end up on floors where they didn’t strictly belong, and she had told the floor nurses to page her if there were any issues. She wrote in his chart that he was a risk for violence and strapped his arms and legs to the bed with medical restraints.
“I have to go,” I said, apologetic. “They called me into work.” It sounded like a flimsy excuse, as if I was trying to run away from the situation. “They said it was important,” I added, lamely.
“Go,” my mother said. “We can handle things here.”
I took my dad’s iPhone with me and made sure Mei-lin had the number, so she could get ahold of me if she needed to. Not that the phone was permitted in the NSA facility, but at least she could reach me in the car. I gave my mom a grateful kiss and took off at a run down the hall. By the time I got on the road, it was almost noon. I hadn’t eaten anything yet that day, but it didn’t seem like the right time to stop for anything. I drove on to Fort Meade, where I made my way impatiently through security. In our basement office, I found a note from Andrew telling me to meet him in the War Room.
The War Room was a large conference area on the third floor meant as a command center in times of national crisis. Photographs of past directors of the agency decorated the wood-paneled walls, with the exception of the large projection screen at the front. Military and civilian agents packed the room. Andrew stood at the front, a tablet in his hand, making marks with a stylus that appeared on the screen behind him. The screen showed maps of both Brazil and the United States, along with a timeline.
Andrew spotted me and beckoned me toward the front. I stepped forward nervously, glancing at the rank insignias on the uniforms as I passed, and noting the preponderance of ribbons and stars. There were plenty of chairs in the room, but no one sat. No one smiled, either.
“What’s going on?” I murmured to Andrew.
“I told you it was big,” he said.
Everyone looked at me. I wished I could sidle away to a corner until I figured out what was happening.
“Two months ago,” Andrew said to the crowd, “we began intercepting messages between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional. These messages weren’t encrypted per se, but they were encoded using a little-known tribal language, a language with only about three hundred native speakers in the world. To call these native speakers ‘technologically backward’ is an understatement. Many of them have never even seen, never mind used, a cell phone or any other kind of modern communication device. Nevertheless, the covert communication between FARC and the ELN required an intimate knowledge of this little-known language. Mr. Johns”—here he waved a hand to indicate me—“identified this language and engaged the services of a retired Christian missionary, the only speaker of the language on this continent, to help us decipher these messages.”
It had actually been Melody who had engaged Katherine Wyatt’s services, but there was no point in correcting him.
“Over the past two weeks,” Andrew continued, “we have seen an exponential increase in the amount of traffic using this communication paradigm. Not all messages have employed the Johurá language, but most have been based on obscure dialects native to the Amazon basin. Many of these we have cracked, but some remain elusive. The crisis we are facing has less to do with the content of these messages than with their increasing and improbable prevalence. In the past two days—”
“The crisis we are facing,” said a lieutenant colonel, accentuating his South Carolina accent, “is American troops defecting en masse and an aircraft carrier that just went off the grid. Are we getting to a point that sheds some light on this situation?”
“In the past two days,” Andrew said again, raising his voice slightly but otherwise ignoring the interruption, “hundreds of thousands of messages of this type have been intercepted from all across the South American continent.”
“We know how fast these bastards are spreading,” the lieutenant colonel said. “This isn’t news.”
“But this is: in the last twelve hours, more than two hundred messages in the Johurá language have been intercepted from Los Angeles, Houston, and Denver.”
His words seemed to echo in the shocked silence that followed. I was stunned, too. If I was interpreting the numbers on his timeline correctly, use of the whistle language had spread in South America faster than seemed possible by any ordinary means. Would it spread just as quickly in the United States?
The room erupted into noise and shouted questions. “Have these people been apprehended?”
“Are we prepared for terrorist attacks in those cities?”
“Has the FBI been briefed?”
“How did these insurgents get past the borders?”
Andrew raised a hand to quiet them. “Hang on. I didn’t say there were insurgents. These aren’t Colombian or Venezuelan operatives sneaking past our checkpoints. These are, at least in the cases we’ve been able to check, American citizens, people born and raised within our borders. They’re grocery store owners, Boy Scout leaders, soccer moms.”
“Deep cover terrorist cells, then,” said a colonel.
“You don’t get it,” Andrew said. “These people are just who they seem to be. They’re not undercover operatives. A year ago, they were just as loyal to Uncle Sam as you are, though probably more interested in their kids and their favorite sports teams. These people have been compromised. Yesterday’s ordinary citizens are turning into today’s political zealots, just as our soldiers in the field are abandoning their loyalties and turning on their comrades.
“In Brazil, the attacks on our soldiers’ minds came through a fungal-based neurological agent spread through the air by crop dusters. We believe the same neurological agent is at work in these cities, but so far, the means of attack remains a mystery. As far as we can tell, no crop duster assaults have been employed in the United States, and yet people’s minds are being altered in relatively large numbers. It’s an epidemic. And it’s spreading, but we don’t know how.”
The room erupted with more questions and shouted opinions, but Andrew tucked his tablet under his arm and stepped forward. “Response strategies will be discussed through the usual chain of command. At this point, I will turn the briefing over to Mr. Terry Ronstadt.”
An overweight man with ruddy cheeks and a generously cut sports coat stood and took Andrew’s place at the front. “As most of you know, I am assuming command in place of Acting Director Clarke…”
I was surprised when Andrew slipped out of the briefing room, but I followed him without hesitation.
“Hey,” I said when we were clear of the room. “What’s going on? Are those numbers for real?”