“What are you driving at?” Andrew asked.
“There are millions of people living in there. What are they all doing? Hunting and fishing? Living off the land?”
Andrew rubbed at his chin. “I’m not saying it’s not important,” he said. “It probably is. But what significance does it have to us, directly? Is this a threat to our interests in some way? Do you think they’re mass-producing Neuritol there, or devising some new delivery mechanism?”
“Possibly,” I said. “I don’t know. There’s no message traffic coming out, so there’s no way to know.”
“Okay,” he said. “This is good work, good analysis. But it’s not going to get much traction. If there’s some direct threat we can defend against, then great. Otherwise, migration patterns? Interesting, maybe, but not actionable. Keep at it.”
Sighing, I returned to my desk. I called my mom to check on Dad, who said there had been little change. No more Morse code, that she could tell. Then I called Lauren to check on Mei-lin.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Lauren said. “She’s refusing treatment. She’s lucid and healthy. I could get fired over this, even lose my license.”
“Let me talk to her,” I said.
“Hang on.” I waited while Lauren presumably held a phone up to Mei-lin’s ear.
“Neil,” she said clearly. “Please tell her to let me go.”
“That’s not what you want, remember?” I said. “You’ve been infected. You’re not yourself anymore. Give the antifungals a few days to work.”
“You don’t understand what’s it’s like,” she said. “Neil, it’s nothing like what we feared. I can think clearly for the first time in my life. I can remember everything I ever learned—all my medical textbooks and classes; it’s all in there, only now I can recall it at will. I can tell you page numbers, what day I read it, what the weather was like. I can keep three different trains of thought going in my head at the same time.
“This isn’t a curse, Neil. It’s a gift. Please don’t take it away from me.”
A chill slid across my skin. She was so earnest, so persuasive. “This infection changes people,” I said. “It makes them kill. It makes them people they would never want to be.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone,” she said. “Just because somebody with a brain tumor turns violent doesn’t mean that all cancer patients are dangerous. We were wrong. I was wrong. I didn’t know.”
“You’ll thank me,” I said. “When it’s over, and this thing is out of you, you’ll thank me.”
Anger crept into her tone. “Look, I’m being honest with you. I’m not trying to trick you. I’m telling you what it’s like.”
“Put Lauren back on.”
“I’m not going to stay here. You can’t hold me against my will. Lauren, I don’t want to hurt you, but I will. If I start screaming, and threaten to sue, you won’t be able to keep it quiet. You know you can’t win this. Untie the straps.”
Her voice faded, and Lauren came back on the line. “What do you want me to do? I can’t keep her against her permission, no matter what she signed before.”
I sighed. “Keep her as long as you can. But you’re right. I think we’ve lost her.”
I hung up, feeling shaky and overwhelmed. Nothing we were doing was coming close to stopping this thing.
I ordered Pad Thai and kept on working, hunting for useful patterns in the message metadata. It bothered me that Andrew didn’t find my discovery significant, but I couldn’t really argue with him. There was nothing we could do in response. So a lot of people were relocating into the rainforest and apparently giving up technology. So what? But it nagged at me. It felt important, like a clue toward understanding the bigger picture of how the world was changing around us.
While I worked, I kept the internal news feed up on a side monitor. It was a service provided by the Office of the DNI to all the intelligence services that summarized news stories from the unclassified media with bearing on international politics or current intelligence crises. The media had a lot of journalists in the field around the world, and it wasn’t unusual for them to uncover something important before we did.
The news was unremittingly bad. The president of Mexico had been found dead in his bedroom that morning, apparently poisoned. An Arizona senator declared the Neuritol crackdown a plot by whites to keep Hispanics uneducated and disenfranchised, and encouraged Hispanics everywhere to stockpile the drug and give it to their children. Thirteen policemen died in San Antonio in a massive shootout after a gang calling themselves the Arm of the Ligados overran the federal building and took thirty people hostage, including the mayor. And three counties along the southern edge of New Mexico announced their independence from the US government.
At nine o’clock, I thought about leaving and stopping to check on my parents, but I knew visiting hours in the hospital would be over, and that the best way I could help them was to continue my work. The way things were going, we wouldn’t have much time before half the country sided with the Ligados and we were at war against ourselves.
Instead of going home, I stretched out on one of the makeshift beds my coworkers had made on the floor and caught a few hours of sleep as best I could. I woke the next morning to discover that the president had announced a national state of emergency and mobilized the National Guard in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
“It’s like they’re just toying with us,” Shaunessy said. “There’s this appearance of riots, race-related violence, protests of injustice. All things our country has dealt with before, though never on this scale. But it’s a lot more organized and sophisticated than it seems.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Riots are timed to break out at the opposite ends of a city simultaneously, stretching police response thin. We crack a cell phone message between gang leaders calling for a protest at a certain place and time, and we warn law enforcement… and then the protest happens an hour earlier and across town. The worse things get, the more we concentrate emergency powers in the hands of local mayors and governors. But how do we know they aren’t infected? In a few days, it might be our own National Guard keeping us out of the states we sent them to protect. Our reactions are too predictable, and these people are smart. I’m afraid we’re playing right into their hands.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How do they know what messages we can read and which ones we can’t? Are they just staging fake communications in hope that we’ll be listening?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that they seem to be outmaneuvering us at every turn.”
Frowning, I went back to my message analysis. One thing I had noticed the night before was that use of the Johurá whistle language, despite showing up in the United States, had been going out of favor in South America, and, on the whole, the messages delivered via that method were unimportant. It suggested that they were using a new language now, or a different scheme altogether, and the information was gradually spreading through the Ligados that Johurá was no longer a safe communication method.
But if so, how did they know? As far as I could tell, no NSA agents had been turned, and our ability to read the Johurá messages was a secret known to only a relatively small number of people. Was one of those people secretly infected, or otherwise compelled to pass information to the enemy? It was a chilling thought.