The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 22

I locked my door.

Despite everything on my mind, I slept like the dead, and when I woke light streamed through the window, illuminating my bedroom. It was almost as if none of it had happened: my father’s Alzheimer’s, my brother’s infection, the deaths of thousands in Brazil. I dragged myself out of bed, afraid I would discover my father gone, or worse.

Instead, I found him downstairs at the breakfast table, dressed in jeans and a brown sports coat over a clean white t-shirt, eating a mix of scrambled eggs and potatoes with his usual liberal dose of malagueta hot sauce. I was no stranger to spicy food but just smelling his plate made my eyes water.

“If you can survive that breakfast, you can survive anything,” I said.

My dad harrumphed. “I just wanted to be ready.”

“Ready for what?”

He cut his eyes at me over a forkful of eggs. “You want to get me checked out. You want me poked and prodded and scanned five ways from Tuesday. It’s inevitable, I suppose. So, I’m ready. If we have to do it, let’s do it.”

“I’ll have to call Mom, too,” I said. “We can’t keep it from her. She’s afraid you’re dead.” In fact, I felt guilty for not calling her the night before.

“One step ahead of you,” my dad said. “Already rang her this morning. She’s on her way.”

I bit my lip. “There’s someone else coming over this morning,” I said. “Somebody to help with the poking and prodding. Or at least the scanning.” I swallowed. “The thing is, it’s Dr. Chu.”

“No.” He dropped the fork with a clang against the porcelain bowl. “No, Neil. Didn’t you hear what I told you? I tried to kill her. I still want to kill her. It’s like, I don’t know, an alcohol addiction, or gambling, or something like that. I can’t stop thinking about slitting her throat.” He spread his fingers like a helmet over his head. “It’s in here, and I can’t get it out. She can’t come here. It’s like putting a bottle of whisky in front of an alcoholic and expecting him not to drink it.”

I sat down in the chair next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll sedate you, if that’s what it takes,” I said. “But she’s the only person I know with both the knowledge and willingness to figure this out.”

The house phone rang. I crossed to the kitchen counter and picked it up.

“Hello,” I said. “Mom?”

“Neil!” It was a man’s voice.

“Yes?” I said.

“This is Andrew. Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday morning.”

“Sorry,” I said. “My phone is gone. I lost it in Brazil.”

“Well, you’ve got to get in here. We’ve got all kinds of things going down, and we could really use your help.”

“Are Melody and Shaunessy all right?”

“As of five minutes ago, they were alive, but it’s looking touch and go. You were the guy who cracked this whole Johurá thing, and we could really use another miracle right now.”

A key turned in the front door, and my mom entered. She looked both relieved and angry to see my father sitting at the breakfast table. I gave her a short wave.

“I’m a little tied up right now,” I said into the phone. “My dad…”

“I’m not kidding about this, Neil. This is life or death. It’s all falling apart over there.”

“I’ll get in as soon as I can,” I said.

“We’ll be waiting for you.”

Just as I hung up the phone, the doorbell rang. I opened the front door. Mei-lin stood on the stoop, her dark hair pulled back, looking trim and professional.

I hesitated. “My father is here,” I told Mei-lin.

“That’s great,” she said. “I need to get a look at him.”

“There may be a problem with that,” I said. “He’s been having some trouble with violent thoughts. Honestly—”

“It’s okay,” my father said.

“What?”

“It’s okay. She can come in.”

In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. He’d warned me, after all. And I knew how crafty an addict could be. It’s just that I didn’t associate those things with my father.

I beckoned Mei-lin through the door and introduced her to my parents, even though they had met her previously at the hospital. My dad put his breakfast dishes in the sink, and came around the table to shake her hand.

“Now, what I really want to know is how you are feeling, Mr. Johns,” Mei-lin said. “A fungal infection can be—”

I didn’t see the knife until it was too late. My father must have slipped it out of the dish drainer when he put his plate and fork in the sink. I wasn’t expecting deception, despite his warnings of the night before. Mei-lin was quicker than I was. As my dad slashed the blade up toward her rib cage, she brought her left forearm down to deflect it. The blade cut through her blouse and instantly drew blood.

I launched myself across the room, toppling a chair, and tackled him. He went down easily, a bundle of cloth and bones, and the bloody knife skittered across the floor. My mom screamed, but she had the presence of mind to snatch up the knife. Mei-lin left me to control my father, and rushed to the sink, pulling back her ruined sleeve and sluicing the wound with water from the tap. She swore as bloody rivulets ran down her arm.

I hauled my dad to his feet and pushed him into the chair, where, for lack of a better idea, I sat on him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” my father said, over and over.

I bound his wrists and ankles with duct tape. I felt like some kind of psychopathic kidnapper, but my father kept urging me to use more and to make it tighter. My stomach rose when I saw his face, so helpless and horrified by his own violence. I wanted to comfort him, and at the same time, I wanted to shake him. He didn’t struggle as I carried him out to my mom’s car.

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?”

“No time to stand and chat,” he said. “We’ll talk on the way.” He charged down the hall at a fast walk. My legs were longer than his, but I had to trot to keep up. “Brazil is a mess. American soldiers have been defecting left and right, and no one can trust the chain of command. All communication is compromised, and no one knows if their buddy might just decide to shoot them in the back of the head.”

He passed the elevators, turning instead through a narrow door that led to a concrete stairway. He barreled down the stairs at breakneck speed with me close behind. “One of our aircraft carriers went off the grid,” he shouted over the noise of our echoing footfalls. “Just disappeared, with no response. Thousands of people, and then nothing. We can see it from the satellites, so we know where it is, but we don’t know who’s in charge or what’s happening on board. We recalled the other ships in the battle group, and now the president has to decide whether we try to board the thing or just stay away until we know their intentions.”

We reached the bottom of the stairs, and Andrew used a numeric keypad to gain entry through a thick metal door. “Shortcut,” he said. He opened the door, and I found myself in the cavernous server room, the rows of hardware stretching off into the distance. We descended another short staircase to reach the floor. Andrew set off again, cutting a zigzag pattern through the racks and leaving me to keep up as best I could.

“What about Melody and Shaunessy?” I asked.

“I talked to them just before the briefing,” he said. “They seemed uncompromised, as far as it’s possible to tell such a thing. I told them to get out of there as soon as they possibly could.”

I gave my head an angry shake. “I shouldn’t have left,” I said. “I should be down there with them.”

Andrew spared me a quick, skeptical glance. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “You couldn’t do them any good there, and you just might be able to do them some good from here.”

We reached the entrance to our own basement room. I wasn’t sure I would have been able to distinguish it from a dozen other doors out of the server room, but Andrew seemed to know where he was going. I followed him inside.

The room looked like no one had left it in days. Tables were strewn with empty Chinese cartons and disposable soda cups. In one corner, jackets and a few chair cushions had been thrown on the floor to create a makeshift bed. Everyone looked haggard, with unkempt hair and bloodshot eyes. But despite their obvious exhaustion, there was an intensity to the conversations and the sense of a fiercely shared mission.

I logged in and found more than five hundred emails waiting for me. “Don’t worry about those,” Andrew said. “I need you to concentrate on the infection vectors into the United States. Forget about containment; we’ve got the CDC engaged and we’re mobilizing quarantine zones. I recommended that the president ground all flights into the country, but a few whistle language message intercepts isn’t enough to convince him. What I need to know is the source, and I haven’t had the time to study the data from that angle. There’s a pattern to how it’s spreading. I can feel it, but I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“What sort of pattern?” I asked.

Andrew sank into his chair and rubbed at his forehead. “If these were tourists coming home from Brazil, or immigrants from Venezuela, you’d expect to see vectors in any city with an international airport. But we don’t see that at all. LA and Denver and Houston are all affected, but not New York, not Chicago. Little towns in Arizona and New Mexico show traffic, and in general, with the exception of Denver, the intercepts are concentrated in the South.”

“Isn’t Denver one of the largest cocaine gateways?” I asked. I had learned a few things studying the drug trade with Andrew earlier in the year.

“Sure. But what’s the connection?”

“Neuritol.”

Andrew looked baffled. “What’s that? A prescription drug?”

“Didn’t she tell you?” I could have screamed. I understood why massive organizations like the NSA and the CIA didn’t end up sharing information very well, but within our own small team? Of course, Andrew hadn’t been around for those conversations, so he didn’t know about Neuritol, and he didn’t make the connection to the drug trade.

“Melody’s granddaughter, Emily, went to the hospital a few weeks ago with symptoms similar to those my brother experienced with the mycosis he brought back from the Amazon. Turns out it was a side effect of the new smart drug she was taking to improve her performance in school. The drug was called Neuritol, and it was distributed in used albuterol inhalers. I suspect it’s primarily a mechanism to deliver fungal spores to hosts in the US.”

Andrew stood again and paced as much as the cubicle walls allowed. “I remember something about her granddaughter being pretty seriously ill but nothing relevant to all this.”

I cursed myself for a fool. Why hadn’t we told the whole team? Why hadn’t we called reporters and drug experts and made a scene? It seemed like an unforgivable failure now, but I realized it wouldn’t have seemed nearly as critical at the time. The similarity with my brother’s symptoms had been a curiosity, something to investigate, perhaps, but I would never have guessed it was an attack vector for a foreign power. It wasn’t my first priority, and Melody probably didn’t want to tell the whole team about her personal family issues.

“How quickly can it spread from person to person?” Andrew asked.

“That’s just it. It doesn’t,” I said. “It’s not a virus. The spores have to be breathed directly into the lungs. People don’t produce new spores; they come from the original fungus, somewhere in the Amazon. This isn’t like a pandemic, which is why its rapid growth is so surprising. It has to be purposely spread.”

“The crop dusters in Brazil,” he said.

“Right. And if Neuritol is the means, it looks like the spread into the United States has been in progress for weeks, if not months. Paul was a chance infection. Their real strategy is to quietly infect through the illegal drug trade, probably through the same routes that cocaine takes from Colombia. In fact, it’s a good bet that the cocaine itself has been laced with fungal spores as well, unless there’s some chemical incompatibility there.”

Andrew pulled up a map on his screen that showed the various routes by which cocaine was smuggled from Colombia up through Mexico to different towns and cities along the US border and compared it to his list of cities and towns from which Johurá messages had been intercepted. “It fits,” he said. “That’s how they’re doing it.”

“What can we do to stop it?”

Andrew barked a short laugh. “That’s a question every administration since Nixon’s has asked, for all the good it’s done them.”

“But we have to do something.”

“We’ll warn the DEA, for sure,” he said. “Their usual investigative cycle won’t be enough, though. The advantage we have is that Neuritol is part of a category of drugs that’s already illegal. We just have to get it prioritized, and I’m pretty sure I can make that happen.”

“We can’t just work this one through channels,” I said. “It’s not just about the DEA or the FBI or the Department of Justice. Everyone in the country should know. We need people looking out for their loved ones, paying attention to what drugs they’re taking and how they’re behaving. We need city cops to be on the lookout, and social workers and school teachers. There are a lot of people out there who aren’t in intelligence services who could help.”

“What are you suggesting?” Andrew asked.

“We need to hold a press conference,” I said.

Andrew laughed. “Good luck with that.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re the NSA,” he said. “That’s not what we do.”

According to Andrew, since all our data was technically classified, I could be arrested if I held a press conference without the express blessing of the DIRNSA, which at this point, with Kilpatrick dead and Clarke MIA, was Terry Ronstadt. Ronstadt was, by Andrew’s description, the anti-Snowden: so security obsessed that “you could torture his mother, and he wouldn’t tell you his middle name.” Even so, Andrew promised to try to get permission.

While he was doing that, I left him with the number for my dad’s iPhone and drove back to the hospital to check Mei-lin’s progress with my father. My mom stood over the bed, clasping the rail with white knuckles. I came up next to her and wrapped my arm around her shoulders. She leaned her head against me.

My father’s eyes were closed. Mei-lin had sedated him, and his arms lay motionless against the Velcro restraints. “I wouldn’t have needed to,” she said. “The straps would keep him from hurting anyone. But he kept begging me to do it.”

I laid my hand against his forehead. His skin was papery and cold.

“As best as I can tell,” Mei-lin said, “the Alzheimer’s is attacking the fungus along with the normal brain tissue. Your father had an initial rush of memory and cognition improvement, because the fungal cells made connections that had long since been lost, imitating the intended brain function. Over time, however, the axons of the pseudo-nerves—the ones composed of fungal cells—have been affected just like the original.”

“How is that possible?” I said. “Fungi can’t get Alzheimer’s, can they? It’s like a maple tree getting dementia.”

“Remember the copycat quality of these fungal cells,” Mei-lin said. “They duplicate the cellular interface and a lot of the cells’ structure and function. Ironically, that makes them just as vulnerable to attack.”

“If it’s vulnerable, can we use that to our advantage? Is there some kind of drug or treatment that could push it back out of our brains?”

Mei-lin shook her head. “That’s just the thing. Those are vulnerabilities it gets from imitating the forms it finds in our own brain. Anything we did to fight it on that level would only harm our own brain cells.”

“So if we fight this thing,” I said, “it’s got to be by attacking the fungal nature of it. Attacking what makes it different, not taking advantage of the way it imitates our function.”

“That sounds about right,” Mei-lin said.

The iPhone in my pocket buzzed. I pulled it out and saw Andrew’s number on the screen. I turned away from the others and answered it.

“Hey, Andrew,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“They’re going to do it,” he said. “Ronstadt agreed to hold a press conference and tell them what we know about the epidemic. Though he’s actually going to brief the president, and the president is going to tell the nation.”

“That’s great,” I said. “What changed their minds?”

“I guess they know it’s leaking anyway. With our soldiers dying and American kids potentially affected, it can’t be kept under wraps. Better to release the information now, while they can still control the spin. Also, there’s some good news.”

“Good news?” That would make a nice change.

“We got our aircraft carrier back. The uninfected sailors, which apparently was most of them, staged a mutiny and took back the ship. No lives lost.”

“The first-ever mutiny on board a US aircraft carrier, and you call that good news?”

“Well, it’s better than it cruising up the Gulf of Mexico and attacking Miami.”

“True.”

“It’s a break, Neil. Maybe the first we’ve had. We’ll get these bastards yet.”

When I hung up, I turned back to see my mom staring at the television mounted high on the wall. On the screen, a pretty blond reporter interviewed a young man in a brown sport coat. The woman leaned forward, earnest and intent, while the man sat at his ease with one foot propped up on his knee.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

Mei-lin looked at the screen and then back at me. “Isn’t that…”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my brother.”