The Genius Plague

CHAPTER 16

The next morning, I woke to a steady rain outside my window. It was still the rainy season here, so it would rain most days, though rarely for very long at a time. It was also a good thirty degrees warmer than it was in Maryland, which would make for a nice change.

I found Kilpatrick at the breakfast bar, digging into a plate piled high with eggs, ham, couscous, tapioca crepes filled with requeijão, and fresh fruit. I sat across from him. “So,” I said. “What am I supposed to be doing today?”

“I think you know.”

“But what am I supposed to find out? What do you want me to ask him?”

“You’re a smart kid. I’ll leave that up to your judgment.” He produced a pen from a hidden pocket in his uniform and scribbled something on a napkin. He slid it over to me. It said, We can be heard.

I frowned. He hadn’t bothered to explain my mission to me ahead of time, and now, apparently, we couldn’t speak freely. “And what will you be doing?”

He munched on his eggs and didn’t answer, just looked at me over his fork. I gave up. Outside, the rain had stopped, and mist steamed from the wet streets. I could see the twin towers of the National Congress, and beyond them, the sparkling blue of Paranoá Lake. Somewhere over there, too far to see, was the Palácio da Alvorada, where the president of Brazil lived.

Brasília could be difficult to navigate on foot, since the city was pretty much designed for cars. The roads were almost all throughways, with no traffic lights or places for pedestrians to cross. Pedestrians had their own paths, often circuitous routes that looped around shopping malls or passed through long tunnels underneath the highways. For a tourist, it would have been nearly impossible, but I had grown up there. Half an hour later, I was strolling through the tree-lined greenery of the Campus Universitário Darcy Ribeiro. It could almost have been any university in the United States, though I saw a lot more mixed-race faces and a lot more bright yellow soccer jerseys.

Celso didn’t know I was coming. I had thought of texting him several times, first from the US, then once I was in Brazil, but it never seemed like a good time, and I kept putting it off. I found his dormitory address from the campus office. As I walked toward it, I realized I was half hoping not to find him. That he would be in class, or soccer practice, or better yet, on travel for the week to some other location. I didn’t want to meet a friend under false pretenses or try to manipulate him into giving me information the government of his country was unwilling to share.

Five years had passed since I last saw him, but I recognized him immediately. He was kicking around a soccer ball on the grass in front of his dormitory, only the ball was five times the size it was supposed to be. A half-dozen other young men and women fought for the ball, laughing and shouting in Portuguese and occasionally tumbling over one another in their attempts to maneuver the oversized ball with their feet.

Celso saw me before I said anything. He shouted and left the game to half-tackle me with an embrace. “Hey, parceiro! What are you doing here?”

I clapped him on the shoulders. “Look at you,” I said. “You never change.” He was shorter than me, athletic, and smelled of sweat and fresh grass. He wore a red and black striped shirt and a Yankees baseball cap turned backward on his head, and his smile was the same easy, devil-may-care grin I remembered from our youth.

He introduced me to some of his friends. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that although some of them smiled and shook my hand, others gave me openly hostile looks, especially when he told them I was from the United States.

“What’s their problem?” I asked Celso. “Did I interrupt your game?”

Celso shrugged, dismissing them. “They’ve got a thing about Americans.”

“Seriously? Why?”

“It’s suddenly the popular thing on campus. It’s all about protecting the Amazon. Americans come here, they talk like the rainforest belongs to them, or at least like it belongs to the world. They want to tell us how we should run things in our own country.”

I didn’t remember there being such fervor about the rainforest in the urban centers of Brazil when I had lived here. It reminded me of the anti-tourism sentiment that was apparently gaining traction in Brazil’s northern states. “What about you?” I asked.

He gave another expressive shrug. “Seems a stupid reason to hate three hundred million people,” he said.

“Will your friends give you a rough time, just because you hang out with an American?”

“Not any of my real friends.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting on the ground on one of Brasília’s many park-like plots of grass, eating skewers of hot roasted beef from a street vendor. I had forgotten how much I loved the food here. The sun burned through the haze enough to warm our faces. We talked about old memories, about teasing Celso’s white pit bull puppy and climbing onto the roof of his house to drop water balloons on his sisters and paddle surfing in the lake to check out the gatinhas in their bikinis and stealing all the soccer balls from the school’s equipment closet to pile them up inside the athletic director’s Fiat. He asked me about my parents and my brother and sister, and I said they were well. I told him about Julia’s new baby daughter.

We spoke English, mostly, with a Portuguese word or phrase thrown in where no English one would do. All the time we were talking, a knot of anxiety twisted in my stomach, even though none of our conversation had anything to do with his father or the Ligados or Brazilian national secrets. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to come clean.

“Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m working for the NSA now. I flew down here with the director, and the only reason he brought me was because you and I used to be friends.”

Celso raised an eyebrow, but his relaxed smile didn’t waver. “So he wants you to grill me. Find out what I know.”

“I guess.”

“He thinks my father tells me secrets.”

“He must. But what information he’s looking for, or why he thinks you would tell me, is beyond my ability to guess. So let’s just agree that I’m not going to press you for secrets and you’re not going to tell me any, and then I can just relax and enjoy my churrasco and reminisce about the old days.”

I looked at his face, the cheerful expression just as unconcerned and amiable as ever. And I realized that, despite the fact that I had showed up practically on his doorstep unannounced, he had never asked me what brought me to Brasília.

“You knew,” I said.

“Knew?”

“You already knew I worked for the NSA. You knew I was here before I showed up.”

He nodded, his grin broadening, and spread his arms wide in surrender. “Of course I did. What did you think? You flew in with the director of the NSA. You think nobody was watching?” He laughed. “Director Mark Kilpatrick shows up in Brasília accompanied by Neil Johns, who just joined the NSA a few months ago. So why is a brand new employee hanging out in Brasília with the director? Ah, maybe because he used to be an amigo of the son of the deputy commander of the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência. And so no one is surprised when you show up on campus.”

“Your father warned you I might be calling.”

“He did.”

I looked around. “Are there agents watching us?”

“Almost certainly.”

There were plenty of university students, but I didn’t see anyone in dark suits or sunglasses. In fact, nobody seemed to be paying any attention to us at all. The idea that I had probably been followed from the hotel creeped me out, though I had to admit that it gave me a thrill at the same time. I felt like a spy, even though I was just relaxing on the grass with a friend and eating churrascos.

“Sorry,” I said. “Pretty lousy of me, I guess.”

His smile was like a flashlight. “Forget about it. My dad’s an ass most of the time, and it sounds like your director is, too.”

We walked the campus and bought coffees and talked about his engineering degree and campus life and why neither of us had a girlfriend. I told him about my three failed attempts to get a college degree, and he told me all the reasons his dad was an ass, especially in how he treated Celso’s mother. The five years I hadn’t seen him seemed to melt away, and we were best friends again, simple and easy and comfortable together.

Celso asked me again about my family. Hadn’t my father been sick? And suddenly I was spilling the whole story, about Paul’s infection in the Amazon, his friend’s death and his recovery, his sudden and unexplained powers of intelligence and memory, his work in the mycology lab. Finally, I told him about my father’s Alzheimer’s, about Paul infecting him with the fungus without asking anyone, and about my dad’s miraculous recovery. All the anger and frustration came bubbling to the surface, and I spoke freely, though I kept the NSA and the Ligados and Melody’s granddaughter out of it.

It felt good to talk. “How can he be so smart all of a sudden, and yet so stupid!” I said. “What kind of person gives an experimental drug to his own father? Wouldn’t being smarter make you more careful? More aware of the risks? He’s acting like a teenager, like nothing can possibly go wrong.”

“Or like someone who cares more about his research than about the risks,” Celso said.

“Yes. That’s it exactly. But it’s not like him. He cares about the science, sure, but he’s always been a take-it-slow, don’t-publish-till-you’re-ready kind of guy.”

“Has he been acting strange in other ways?”

I shrugged. “He never seems to sleep. He trounces me at games I used to win easily.”

Celso grew quiet. He seemed to be brooding on his own troubles, but when I asked him what was wrong, he just flashed me his brilliant smile.

That evening, we ended up at Pôr do Sol, a nearby bar packed with university students. We sat at one of the square red tables and ordered Heinekens and Brasília’s staple bar snack, chicken croquettes. By the time the beer arrived, two girls had joined our table, friends of Celso, whom he introduced as Gabriela and Talita. Talita was dark-skinned, with her hair in thin braids, and reminded me of Shaunessy.

The girls were fun and laughed a lot, but other students gave us dirty looks. One guy went so far as to push roughly past, knocking into me and almost spilling my drink. I let it go, not wanting to get into a bar fight in my first field assignment for the agency. But the animosity worried me. It was completely counter to anything I’d experienced during my decade growing up in the city. A passion for Amazon conservation didn’t seem sufficient to explain it.

We tried to keep things light, but I could tell Celso wasn’t in the mood. Finally, we left the girls and slipped out into the street, which was nearly as crowded, with students drinking and laughing and dancing to the sertanejo universitário music piped through speakers from another bar farther down the street. Celso walked through the crowd like he didn’t see them. At the end of the road, he turned left, then climbed up a steep embankment.

When I reached him, he was standing at the rail of one of the thoroughfares that cut the city into straight lines. Cars thundered past, buffeting us with displaced air. From this vantage, we could just see the administrative region of the city, where the major government buildings stood. Celso looked out across six lanes of traffic like he might just make a run for it.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

He didn’t look at me. “I’m not supposed to tell you. He doesn’t want me to tell anyone anything, least of all an American agent.”

“Then don’t tell me,” I said.

He turned to face me, and the easy smile was gone. His eyes looked haunted. “My father has changed. He was never a nice man. You remember that. He was strict and had a temper. But now…” He looked back at the traffic, and his muscles bunched. “I think he’s been using his power to control who takes office. Putting surveillance on congressmen, blackmailing. Maybe even killing.”

“You know this?”

“I suspect. And it’s crazy nonsense. Suddenly he’s concerned about the environment, wants more protections in place for the Amazon, revoke logging rights, that kind of thing. He’s trying to ban all foreign tourism to the Amazon, can you believe that?”

“He’s killing people for this?”

“He never gave two reais for the environment until this year. And that’s not all.” Celso’s skin looked drained of life, the passing cars’ headlights casting strange, moving shadows across his face. “My mother has been missing for two months.”

“She disappeared?” I tried to say it gently. “Have you called the police?”

“The police are afraid of him, I think. He just tells them it’s nothing to worry about, that she went to visit her sister Rafaela in Salvador. But she’s not there. And she wouldn’t have left my father, not without a word to me.” He let the alternative hang in the air.

I stared at him, shocked, with no clue what to say. “Isn’t there a higher authority you can go to? Anyone who will listen?”

“I’ve tried. Anyone with enough power is too busy to care, or else needs his support. And what can I say? I have no evidence. I can’t even prove she’s dead.”

“Celso, I’m so sorry,” I said. Suddenly all my concerns about my father seemed trivial. I was embarrassed for sharing them, when Celso had a burden like this weighing on his soul.

“Another thing,” Celso said. “He’s too smart. My dad. Just like you were saying with your brother. He remembers everything he reads, does math in his head. He doesn’t sleep. And he figures out what I’m thinking before I say it.”

“Has anyone else noticed? Your sisters?”

“I don’t know. My sisters are in São Paulo, and they should stay right where they are.” Celso slapped the guard rail with his palms. “He scares me, mano. I think he killed my mom, and I’m afraid I might be next.”

“What about all your mom’s family? They must know she hasn’t been visiting her sister.”

“Most of them live around here, and they don’t talk to Rafaela, not since she married a Candomblé priest. They just believe my dad. That or they’re afraid of him, too.”

A muted thump sounded in the air, like thunder, but with deep enough tones to rattle my chest. “What was that?” I scanned the freeway, thinking there might have been a collision, but Celso grabbed my sleeve and pointed. Toward the southeast, in the direction of the capitol buildings, a column of black smoke rose into the sky.

“What is it?” I asked. “A fire?”

“More like an explosion.”

“Is it the congress building?” We were too far away to see clearly, but it was the right direction. A second boom vibrated through my bones, and this time the windows in all the nearby buildings rattled as well. A second column of smoke appeared, this one more directly east, at the edge of the lake.

“Minha nossa,” Celso swore. “It’s the Palácio da Alvorada.” The residence of the president of Brazil.

The cars on the freeway were pulling over now, and motorists joined us to stare at the rising pillars of smoke. The sound of a third explosion washed over us, this one distant and only noticeable because of the other two. A moment later, over the horizon to the south, a third column twisted into the sky.

“I can’t tell,” Celso said. He sounded shaken. “What is that one? The cathedral?”

I shook my head. “It’s farther away than that.”

“What then?”

“Hard to be sure. But my guess? It’s the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência.”

“My father’s there,” Celso said.

I flattened my lips into a straight line. “True,” I said. “And so is the director of the NSA.”