Back in the Wahzeek, I thrashed around for something to break the lock on the workshop while the emaciated sheep yanked at its rope. I found a hammer, tried it out, and the hasp shattered on the first blow. The stench had me doubled over and gagging. Face up on the floor, right in front of me, was Jack’s decomposing body. Stumbling out the door, I might have cried out or maybe it was Bashir I heard shouting. He was running toward me, yelling about dead people, a terrible disease, an evil curse. He had no sheep with him now. He slashed the rope on the one tied to the Wahzeek and shooed it away.
Starting the motor, Bashir blurted, “People dead. Terrible sickness here! We stay, we die also!”
“People! Where?” I yelled.
“No! We go now! This place bad. Get in car!” The engine roared.
I knew it wasn’t a disease. Besides that, we’d already been exposed. I needed to know exactly what had happened. “Wait! Just a minute. You won’t die! Please, just wait.”
But he already had the Wahzeek in motion, all four wheels spraying a cloud of dust as he accelerated.
From outside the workshop, I smashed two front windows with the hammer. I needed the fresh air to get back inside. I reminded myself the corpse on the cement floor was just that. Jack, my friend, was no longer there, and I needed to put feelings aside and get on with it.
Heat and insect life hadn’t been kind to the corpse, but I didn’t see the telltale black puddles around body orifices. Near Jack’s right hand lay an empty vodka bottle. Another bottle, half-full, sat on the workbench. A note was stuck to it with radiation hazard tape. “Do not drink the water. Do not fuck with us!” Was scrawled in English.
Jack and I both knew that the secret cargo he carried on his circuitous flights to northern Iran consisted of small quantities of nuclear material in heavy but portable containment vessels. On the floor by the workbench lay one of those vessels, open and empty. Jack had been killed, and maybe the others, gruesomely, to send me a message.
I groaned, heading out to the plane. I grabbed the Geiger counter I’d insisted Jack carry and noted the radiation outside the workshop, elevated but not dangerous. Inside was another matter. The vodka bottle on the workbench emitted enough radiation to overload the Geiger counter. I swallowed hard and swung the counter low over Jack’s body. It registered, extreme. He must have ingested whatever isotope the messenger was using as a calling card, but it wasn’t what killed him. Discoloration and a strange twist to his neck told me he’d been strangled. I kept a level head, but rage and guilt weren’t making it easy. I wasn’t going to rest until those murderous bastards were brought to justice.
A report needed filing, and the cleanup crew needed calling for this fatal screw-up. It was the best I could do to shut down emotionally and work through a mental checklist. I started by recording my name, the time and details with my cellular PDA in movie-camera mode. With the PDA’s built in camera running, I swept the Geiger counter over various radiation sources. At the huts I recorded the radiation levels emitted by the dead dog. I couldn’t find the chicken I’d seen pecking around earlier, but while looking for it, I came across a big iron hand pump giving off enough radiation to be dangerous. I pumped a bucket of water into the trough. The Geiger counter shot off the scale.
“Don’t drink the water…” I recalled the note and the empty containment vessel. The bastards poisoned the well! One of the stray sheep, hearing the pump, ran for the trough.
“You’re not dying on my watch too!” I intercepted the sheep, shoving it away. The poor animal was so thirsty, all I could do was kick over the trough and let the puddle soak into the dirt. The well was the only source of water for the villagers and their animals. I tried not to think about other corpses I hadn’t found. I didn’t go into the huts, and I didn’t look for the bodies Bashir reported. I saw no more dogs and none of the normally ubiquitous mules, but there was an empty stable. Perhaps most of the villagers fled with their animals when the deaths and illness started. I wondered how far they got.
I finished my report by saying I would tell Jack’s family that he had disappeared in the mountains he loved. They could never have the body. It would be treated as a radioactive hazard. I knew my employers would ensure the area was cleaned and that the incident in Kazakhstan would become a mysterious local legend.
I sent an encoded message via satellite phone to my employer and whispered a miserable goodbye to Jack. The sun was setting as I pulled the chocks from the wheels of the Storch. I didn’t want to be there when the cleanup crew arrived. I walked a few hundred feet through the grass, checking for obstacles impeding take-off. Found a couple more dead animals that must have drank the water.
“Throttle to the wall!” as Jack would have said. “Release the brakes. Feel the tail bounce, then just a touch of down elevator and you’re rolling! Wait for takeoff speed, let the stick come back…” and the Storch just leaped into the air. A moment later, the sun that set on the meadow came up in a reverse sunrise to the west as the Fi 156 Storch climbed into golden light above the mountains.
ONE
Solid overcast truncated Vancouver’s North Shore mountains. I knew that somewhere up there fresh powder was blanketing the slopes. Down where I sluiced my bike through the overflowing gutters, it was just this side of sleet: a fairly typical winter morning commute.
Hamilton Street lay two blocks ahead, but the double parkers in front of Urban Fair Fine Foods had traffic in a cantankerous snarl. I could jump the sidewalk and risk clipping one of several oblivious pedestrians texting their way to work or take my chances with the cube vans and cabbies. I chose the latter, snaking through and out the other side to a chorus of honking and expletives.
Swinging the bike onto my shoulder, I keyed in the entry code and ducked inside before the door could slam the back wheel out of true yet again. I hung the bike on one of the inside storage units, intended to encourage biking to work, and stomped up the stairs to the office. Sandy, our sole and temporary employee, a co-op student from Simon Fraser University, was already at her desk.
“Jessica Ducat, you’re late.” Sandy chided, hanging up the phone.
“Got texted at four in the morning.” I said, snapping off my helmet. “And not even my mother calls me Jessica. ‘Jess’ will do.” I unzipped, unclipped and worked at peeling out of my wet cycling gear.
“Well, Ms. Ducat, you’ll thank me when you see what I’ve got.” Sandy typed a series of commands and swung her monitor toward me. “Look, one of those IP addresses you wanted me to watch out for, made an appearance.”
“It was three in the morning. How did you notice it?”
“Actually, it was around lunchtime where this happened.” She corrected me. “I set up an app-to-text. You seemed pretty gung-ho about this stuff. Especially that one.” She pointed at an entry on her screen.
“Seventeen minutes and there’s even a post. Yeah, this could be it.”
“So, do I get the rest of the day off?” Sandy teased.
In my glorified storage locker of an office, I punched my workstation to life and logged in. The usual light smattering of email graced my screen. Nothing important, except to the senders. Contracts had become noticeably scarce since the disastrous events in Kazakhstan the year before. It was may fault. I just couldn’t muster interest in anything that wouldn’t lead me to Jack’s killers. I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t move on, and it was taking a toll on the business income. How much longer we could hold out, stress-testing the occasional network, was anyone’s guess.