She stiffened, and I quickly backed off. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just good to see you alive. We’ve all been pretty worried.” I wondered if it was the first bear hug she’d received in her career at the NSA.
She relaxed and smiled at me. “I’m pretty glad to be home as well.”
Shaunessy appeared around the corner, and I hugged her, too.
“What’s happening down there?” I asked.
“It’s a disaster,” Melody said. “Thousands dead on both sides, but the real problem is not knowing what the sides are. We can’t scan people fast enough to know who’s affected, and the need to double- and triple-verify all commands with higher-ups cripples the effectiveness of the chain of command. I have five minutes with the president at eleven o’clock, and I’m going to beg him to pull our troops out of South America. The Ligados control most of the country now, and all we’re doing by staying there is risking becoming part of them.”
“Besides,” Andrew said, “the war is at home now. If we don’t find a way to control this thing, it’s going to be just like Brazil right here.”
“The president,” I said to Andrew. “He’s safe?”
“In a manner of speaking. He’s alive, and as safe as we can make him. There were five attempts on his life last night.” I must have shown my surprise on my face, because he said, “That is not common knowledge. We don’t want the media getting ahold of that, if we can help it. Four of the attempts were pretty ill-conceived and never had much of a real chance. One, however, was carried out by an aide in the West Wing and very nearly succeeded.
“You were right, by the way, about your brother’s interview. He didn’t whistle, though. He just outright spoke the words when showing off his fluency in different languages.”
“How are things with your father?” Shaunessy asked.
I pursed my lips. “Not great.” I caught Shaunessy and Melody up on my father’s condition, his attempt to kill Mei-lin Chu, and his split-personality coded communication, seemingly without the knowledge of the other part of his mind. I also told them about my brother’s lab, the computers and samples we’d retrieved, and the booby-trapped door that had infected Mei-lin.”
“We have plenty of samples of the spores at this point,” Melody said. “Where are the computers?”
“I have them in my car.”
“Get them in here, right away. We have people who can take them apart down to their constituent atoms. Any information he had there, even if he deleted it, we’ll get it back.”
“The best information on those computers is probably biological,” I said. “We need to get it to the people who are trying to understand how this organism works and how to beat it.”
“I’m on that,” Melody said. “Including the docs at USAMRIID, the CDC, and several medical universities, we probably have two hundred doctors and mycologists working on one or more avenues, either trying to develop an easy test to know who’s infected or trying to come up with a reliable cure. Anything we find, I’ll make sure it gets into the right hands.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what can I do?”
“After you bring that stuff from your car? Do your normal work. Pore through all the South American traffic that Andrew has been ignoring while trying to do my job.” She flashed him a quick smile. “Very effectively, I might add. Good to know there’s someone waiting in the wings in case I turn into a fungus zombie.”
“Something to look forward to,” Andrew said.
When I headed out to my car, Shaunessy caught up to me. “Need some help?”
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s more than I can carry in one trip.”
I showed the guard at the entrance the paperwork Melody had filled out giving me permission to bring the equipment inside. He entered the information into his computer, logging it as an equipment delivery, and told me he would have to record the details about make and model and serial number before we could bring them inside.
On the way out to the parking garage, I said, “How bad was it down there?”
Shaunessy turned somber. “Really bad,” she said. “Melody talks about bringing the troops home, but I don’t know how realistic that is. There’s no way to tell how many of them are compromised. There’s been so much sabotage, no one knows what equipment can be trusted. Some soldiers have outright defected to the Ligados, or turned on each other, but there have to be more who are keeping quiet. It would take weeks to scan that many, and cost a fortune, even if every PET scan machine in the country wasn’t already running twenty-four hours a day.”
“How did you get out?”
She shrugged. “Melody, of course. Director Ronstadt listed her as a critical recall, and she said she wasn’t coming home without me.”
We reached my car and hauled the equipment out of the trunk. The machines were small enough that I could have managed by myself, but I was glad for the company.
“What do you think our chances are?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Of survival. Of preventing the United States from becoming the next Brazil and the same thing sweeping across Europe and Africa and Asia until half the population is dead and the other half has fungus in their brains telling them how to think.”
She was quiet for a time. “I think we can win,” she said.
I was surprised. “How?”
“It’s like a disease, right? We’ve had some pretty bad diseases before. Bubonic plague. Influenza. Does a lot of damage while it spreads, but we always beat it in the end. Ultimately, we’ve got a lot more going for us than a fungus. Reason. Creativity. Invention.”
“But it’s using our reason against us,” I objected. “Making it better, even.”
“No. It’s using our intelligence against us. Memories, analytical skills. That’s just network efficiency. This thing might be good at cognitive streamlining, but that doesn’t make it anything like human.”
“Doesn’t that make it better than human?”
“That’s what I’m saying. There’s a lot more to being human than being smart. The fungus gives people intelligence, but it robs them of some of the more important things that make us human. Our emotional connections. Our moral sense. Our devotion to country and friends and family. The kind of humanity it’s producing is a shadow of what humanity truly is.”
“True humanity is cruel,” I said. “Selfish, tribal, violent. We don’t need a fungus in our heads to kill each other by the millions.”
“I didn’t say we were good. I said we’re stronger without the fungus than we are with it. That’s why I think we’ll win.”
I thought about it, then flashed her a quick grin. “I hope you’re right.”
Back in our basement office, I logged in and flipped through the first batch of South American traffic. Some of them had been translated, many had not. From what I could tell, thousands of them hadn’t even been looked at. There were just too many, and too much else going on. I sat up in my chair and cracked my fingers. I had my work cut out for me.
The difficulty with encrypted messages is that you can’t tell if they’re interesting until after you crack them. Cracking them takes time. Not only that, but due to the way the internet had developed, all South American email traffic passed through a hub in Florida, which the NSA had tapped three ways from Sunday. That meant the NSA’s underground server farm recorded millions of messages from South America every day.
Usually, the vast majority of these could be ignored, since they had no known connection to any person or situation of political interest. Now, with any citizen a potential guerrilla warrior, any message could be important. Not only that, but the number of indecipherables—messages encrypted with no recognizable scheme—had grown by orders of magnitude in recent months.