The last good man, p.13
The Last Good Man, page 13
Luke looked down at his watch. Three minutes left. The doctor wanted to make sure Ms. Jenkins was kept calm and put under no undue stress. When they had called ahead to the hospital to explain that they believed what Rosemary was suffering from was parasitic, the response had been that without a known cure, they could only make her comfortable in her final hours. Luke wasn’t about to make this woman’s last hours unnecessarily uncomfortable, so he turned over the questioning to Mia.
She spoke immediately. “Ms. Jenkins, thank you for speaking with us. Right now, you and only a few other people are known to have contracted this disease. We are trying to determine why Dr. Edemza, the doctor in charge of the examinations that day, has not yet fallen ill. Do you have any idea as to why that may be?”
The woman frowned up at Mia, and then her eyes softened before she spoke. “I don’t know the doctor very well, but he seemed nice enough. Have to admit he was acting a bit strange, though.”
Luke glanced around, working to place this new information into the narrative. “How so?”
“Well, for one, he was quiet. Reserved. Seemed like he was keeping to himself as much as he could. Didn’t come to the break room for dinner or even to just chat, things like that. Now, understand that I don’t know the man from Adam, but still. It seemed weird.”
Luke typed a note about this into his phone.
Mia continued. “Ms. Jenkins, I am a parasitologist by trade, and I have some ideas as to what might be causing this disease. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to cure it, but if you could give me some information about what it feels like… what seems to be happening, on the inside…”
Ms. Jenkins clawed at the edge of the mattress as she swallowed, for the first time squeezing her eyes shut. Luke noticed that her eyelids seemed to be swollen, as if popping out of her head.
Finally, she opened her eyes and looked at each of them in turn. “It’s… hell. Pure agony. I thought it was gas at first, and then indigestion. But it feels like whatever is in there is just getting stronger, as if there are a thousand tiny matches being lit inside of me all at the same time.”
Luke dropped his head. This thing doesn’t just kill, it tortures. They needed to find a solution. A cure.
It was too late for Ms. Jenkins, and they all knew it. But it didn’t have to be too late for everyone else. And how many others were there? How many people were out there growing this parasite inside of them? How many were unknowingly being exposed to it?
Luke had seen a couple news vans parked out front of the hospital as they’d driven in. Always interested in a story, the ambulance chasers must have somehow gotten word that a quarantine had been set up in the Albany hospital. If they found out that people were dying from an unknown disease, it would be only a matter of hours before the news agencies spun up a terror-inducing story that would alarm the masses.
One of the nurses knocked gently on the glass window behind them. Luke turned and flashed a thumbs-up sign. He knew he had a minute left, but it was a minute they didn’t need to waste. He had new information, and while it wasn’t much to go on, it was more than nothing.
Mia was already making her way toward the door, but Luke looked down at Ms. Jenkins one final time and smiled. “Thank you, Ms. Jenkins. I truly am hoping for a miracle, but rest assured I will find out what’s going on. I will get to the bottom of this.”
If she heard him, he couldn’t tell. Her eyes had closed once again and her bloated, swollen face seemed to already be in a state of eternal rest.
Luke let out a deep breath as he followed Mia through the door and prepared to doff their suits.
33
Shaw had waited back at the hotel while Mia and Luke were at the hospital. He’d only finished his own work an hour before, and so they all decided to get together in the hotel bar to discuss their next action steps.
He was in the bar now, just beginning work on a bourbon and Coke—a typical grizzled-detective libation that felt right just about any hour of the day—when Luke and Mia walked in. Shaw called them over and asked the bartender to bring a glass of wine and another bourbon.
Shaw shook hands with both of them and then they sat. He could read on Luke’s face that it had been an impactful day.
“I’m guessing by your face this is worse than we thought,” Shaw said.
Luke forced a smile as the bartender swung by with his drink. He took a small sip, winced, then answered. “Seven confirmed cases so far, five deaths. And we assume another two deaths are imminent. Hell, Shaw, we don’t even know how to test for this thing. Patients simply show up in the hospital complaining of abdominal pains. And the staff at the hospital told us their blood shows an extremely high level of sodium and lipids.”
Mia jumped in. “That’s because we now know it’s a parasite, something in the same genus as Osedax.”
“That disgusting little worm thingy you sent a picture of?” Shaw asked. “And you said someone designed it? That they actually created this thing in a lab?”
“That’s our working hypothesis and best guess so far,” Mia said. “Without another battery of tests and a barrage of new data, it will be impossible to tell for sure, but I’m pretty confident that’s what we’re dealing with.”
“That doesn’t seem terribly contagious to me.”
“But it’s one hundred percent deadly, as far as we can tell.”
Shaw shuddered. “How do we know we all haven’t been exposed to these creepy-crawlies?”
“Well, for one, we’re not dead yet,” Luke said. “We’re thinking it’s something that has to be essentially placed onto—or into—each host, individually.”
Shaw chewed on an ice cube for a moment. “So it seems that if someone did design this little bastard, they intend to wreak as much havoc on the US population as possible.”
Luke looked over at Mia, then back at Shaw. He took a longer sip of the whiskey. “Well, I’m not so sure that’s accurate.”
“Do tell.”
“Well, our working theory is that whoever released this doesn’t intend for it to wreak havoc. Not through the transmission at least. They’re going for fear, for targeted, specific infections. They want a calculated, controllable spread. For whatever reason, they chose to drop it into an ICE detainment center first.”
“Okay,” Shaw said. “I can buy that. For now, anyway. We need more information. We need to be testing for this thing way out on the front lines, long before people are symptomatic.”
Luke shook his head. “No. We have to remember Briggs’ directive: we are not here to try to fight this disease. We are not here to study it. If this really is an act of terrorism, we’re here to prevent more attacks.”
Mia frowned, but Shaw simply sat in silence as his ex-partner spoke. He saw that same flash of intensity inside Luke now, that same drive and brilliance that made him such a damn good detective. He watched in awe, excited to see his friend starting to return to his old self.
Luke continued. “It’s up to Immigration—to Briggs and his team—to fight this thing on the ground. It’s up to them to get with the CDC and figure out a way to stop it before it spreads. But Briggs needs us somewhere else, fighting the battle on a different front. He needs us to figure out who the hell made it, why they did so, and more than anything else, he needs us to make sure it’s not going to happen again.”
34
The Next Day
Luke woke late, still feeling tired but knowing that trying to get back to sleep was a lost cause. He’d showered, shaved, and sat on the edge of the bed watching Albany’s local news station fight over misinterpreted headlines about what might be quarantined inside the hospital. Thankfully none of the medical staff had spilled the beans, but Luke knew it was only a matter of time before someone filled them in on the few details they knew.
By the time he reached the lobby and found Mia, he discovered that she had already worked through two cups of tea and was starting on a third. He made himself a cup of coffee and joined her.
“Find anything useful in your studies this morning?” he asked.
She shook her head, not lifting her eyes from her laptop. “Nope,” she said. “Just working on some school stuff now.”
“I see.” Luke sipped the coffee and watched her work, wondering if she ever stopped.
She stopped typing, then looked up at Luke and smirked. “You’re probably wondering if I found anything useful to our case. I have not. Not yet, anyway. But I was up late last night studying this strain some more, and yes, I did find it useful.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t judging you for working on the day job if you’re worried about that. Are you always this syntactically correct?” he asked.
“‘Semantically correct’ is probably the phrase you’re looking for.”
Luke laughed.
“And yes, I am.”
She closed the lid of her laptop a minute later and pulled a yellow legal pad from her computer bag. She smacked it onto the table and then fumbled around for a pencil. “I was actually checking to see when the lab would be available at Syracuse,” she said. “So not technically schoolwork. I just needed to frame it that way when sending the email to make sure it’ll get set up properly.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “I’m assuming they’ll be open for new trials in a few days, for a small window, which won’t be soon enough—we need a full laboratory analysis on the worm, like, yesterday.”
“Can we have Briggs call in a favor somewhere?”
“Probably. Yeah. That’s something you can email over later.”
Luke shifted in his seat, feeling the sensation of forward progress coming over him. It was akin to the feeling he got just before cracking a tough case, the feeling of satisfaction and elation. This was a similar—albeit far more reserved—version of that.
Luke pulled up his emails and flicked through them. He rarely got emails of any importance these days, so it took no time at all for his eyes to land on one from a .gov email address. Someone from ICE, probably, he thought. He clicked it and the email opened.
As he read, the feeling of euphoria died. This can’t be true. He didn’t want it to be true.
“What is it, Luke?” Mia had apparently read the forlorn look on his face.
“I just got an email from a mid-level ICE administrator. I asked Briggs to send along anything they could find on Dr. Saiid Edemza.”
Mia waited.
“And it’s good news. We might have found our guy. I think Edemza’s the one behind all of this.”
“Really? Why do you say that?”
Luke paraphrased from the email. “Well, for starters, he changed his prescription deliveries a couple weeks ago. The drugs he administers, while working for ICE, to any detainees or immigrants—he changed companies.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know yet,” Luke said. “But it says here that Dr. Edemza had his medication service changed from a company called Pharland to one called AEG.”
“Well, that could be something, right?”
Luke agreed. “Yeah, it could be. I’ll look into the company a bit more. But it’s this next thing in the email that caught my eye.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, apparently, our friend Dr. Edemza is showing up in the FTO database.”
“The FTO?”
Luke nodded. “A list maintained by the government. FTO means Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
35
“This is Briggs.”
Derek Briggs was in a hurry. These days, he always felt as though he were in a hurry—assistants trying to keep his schedule in check, government meetings to kick the proverbial can down the road, and no shortage of general day-to-day work-related tasks and appointments.
But this week had been especially trying. The constant flow of information and misinformation—usually a casualty of a never-ending game of telephone—had doubled. It was like a Los Angeles freeway: no car was free and no one on it was getting their way.
He took a deep breath, listening for the voice on the other end of the line. The caller was one of the few people on the planet that had this personal number. His assistant had it changed every quarter, not because of spam or junk phone calls, but because keeping it “fresh” meant he was keeping his circle of informants up to date and on their toes.
“Briggs, this is Shaw.”
“What is it?”
“There’s been… well, not an incident, sir, but I think there will be.”
“An incident?” Briggs asked. “What the hell kind of incident? I’m up to my eyeballs in media requests from across the pond, asking about the Stermers and how they died. There’s… talk.”
Shaw ignored the comment and pressed on. “Sir, I’m in Albany, checking around for anything other departments might have come across.”
Briggs appreciated this man’s ingenuity—it was a good idea, trying to use the existing infrastructure to ferret out information that might prove valuable.
“And you found something.”
“I did, sir. Something came across the desk. Still not sure it’s anything major, but it was passed along through an encrypted network we all use—sort of like the Govscan.”
Govscan was the vernacular term for the nationwide database of conversations. A relic of the phone-tapping and privacy-encroachment debacle of two decades ago, Govscan remained in place as a useful second-by-second update tool. It was simply an encrypted website, accessible and shared by most federal-level organizations, updatable by any of them. Part forum and messaging board and part real-time espionage tool, Govscan allowed organizations like ICE to participate in an intelligence-gathering and sharing network. If a group like the IRS somehow came across information they deemed to be worthy of follow-up, they could submit it directly into Govscan, where an algorithmic engine parsed the data and extracted keywords, immediately cross-referencing the entry with other similar entries. Then a separate organization like ICE could get an update if a keyword in the entry matched one of their search terms—something that might help them track down illegal immigrants, for example. Many state police departments had begun building a similar network for police activity. In smaller states, where jurisdictional lines were bound by geography, having a real-time update tool had already proven valuable.
“Okay, what is it?” Briggs asked.
“A note—or a piece of one. In Spanish, and then coded further. We just caught a snippet of it, but it seems there will be ‘an event’ sometime in the next two days.”
“Shaw, that’s not much to go on. ‘An event.’ What does that even mean?”
“Sir, I’m still trying to find someone to get through the code and make sense of the whole thing, but they also mention the word ‘Dilley.’”
“Dilley?”
“Yes, sir. Dilley. Does that mean something to you?”
Briggs didn’t respond. Dilley. The word did, in fact, mean something to him.
Finally, he pulled the phone closer to his mouth. “Do me a favor and fill in the rest of your team—they’ll want to know as well.”
“What would you like us to do?”
“Well, it depends on what we’re dealing with. If you can decode the rest of the message, great. Either way, they’re talking about the location of ICE’s largest detention facility. It’s in a place called Dilley, Texas.”
Briggs gripped the phone tighter. He knew Dilley well. Back when he’d first started the job, he had traveled to the main ICE detention facility locations spread around the United States, both as a mission to come across to his constituents as a real, down-to-earth advocate of change, and to get a feel for the actual integrity of his organization’s efforts.
To his knowledge, none of his predecessors had visited the facilities, and most of them had never set foot in Dilley. The South Texas town was far too low on the totem pole of importance for those types, so it had been Briggs’ number-one priority upon accepting the role: get to Dilley, see the nightmarish conditions of the barbaric system with his own eyes, and then figure out how to change it. Figure out how to fix it.
So far, he had taken decent steps toward that goal, but he often felt as though he were living in a constant state of failure. The state of immigration in the country was beyond appalling, and though he had worked hard to change it, there was little visible effect so far.
Dilley was the predominant example of the current state of ICE affairs, so Briggs had made it his mission to know everything going on in and around their largest center.
“Shaw, figure out how to get the rest of the message. I want to know what it says. Don’t worry about Dilley—that’s something I can handle from here.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
Shaw hung up, and Briggs stared down at his phone for a few seconds before placing it back onto his desk.
36
Luke and Mia were on their way back to the ICE offices in Albany. Again. To talk to Dr. Saiid Edemza. Again.
Luke had told Mia about his first encounter with the man. The doctor hadn’t seemed to be hiding anything, and Luke was usually pretty good at finding the cracks in an interrogation subject.
But apparently he had missed something.
Mia had spent most of the morning studying up on the parasite, but she’d reached a point where they simply needed more data, and that data wasn’t coming in quickly enough.
The biggest surprise so far that day had come in the form of new cases: there was only one.
Briggs had sent an email to Luke informing him that there was only a single new active case. A man who worked as a janitor in the same office as the receptionist had come down with similar symptoms and was now hospitalized. Unfortunately, he was very likely to die by that afternoon, so Luke determined that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to make the drive back to Clinton.
They were happy to hear that there was only a single new case, but they also knew that there was still a lack of testing—they weren’t sure yet what to test for—and that the numbers would likely soon begin to swell.
