Fire Will Fall (4 page)

TYLER PING
FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2002
10:01
P.M.
LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

I
LAY ON MY BED
looking for the hundredth time at the cover of
People
magazine, the one from March featuring the four Trinity Falls victims. I imagine a lot of other kids stare at this picture, too. The reason? You look at them and think, "Could they
really
have this illness?"

You read this gag-inspiring list of autoimmune symptoms they live with, and you have to flip back to the cover again—and back and forth from the pictures to the writing. Their hair is so shiny. Their skin isn't dinged up. They don't naturally have a drop of ugly in them. But the universe has been known to play cruel jokes on people like that, and they stand as evidence.

There does appear to be something kind of wrong—but it's hard to pinpoint. You have to look closely. They're kind of pale and have what looks like a slight bruising at the corners of their mouths and around their eyes. You'd almost think it was shadows. Then, there's some sort of translucent or fluorescent factor to their skin that you can't help staring at. It's not gross. If you're a sci-fi head, you'd say they look a little radioactive. If you're a goth, you might say they look like pretty vampires. It almost looks like a strength instead of a weakness, but that's only if you're using imagination.

Reality is that they live like early AIDS patients who haven't hit the throes of it yet, only no magazine has had the audacity to make a comparison between their Q3 and the AIDS virus. Their drug protocol is very similar, and yet it's politically correct to hope that the Trinity Four, as they're called, will be cured relatively quickly. Q3 is a cruel virus, allowing them to feel normal on lots of days. But as soon as they get their hopes up that they're improving, they get flu symptoms and slamming headaches. I've got the inside scoop on them. For a number of reasons, the Trinity Four is personal to me.

I laid the magazine down on my chest, feeling sleep coming on. I was almost asleep, because I'm pretty regulated. I lie down at 10:00 and almost never see my digital clock hit 10:05. Tonight, I heard Shahzad Hamdani's keypad clattering from across the hall in my mom's old room. Hamdani is not regulated at all—up, down, up, down, all night, since there hasn't been a need for a schedule. In Pakistan, you're allowed to quit school after eighth grade, so Hamdani hasn't seen the inside of the Halls of Knowledge in three years, except for his first day of school in America, when he met me. Our hacking escapades got us in trouble immediately, and hence it was also his last day. He says that even in Karachi he did his best hacking and v-spying between two in the morning and sunrise. He generally knows to be quiet between 10:00 and 10:05, but once I'm out, I'm not an evil prick about his noise.

"Hel-lo?" I hollered across the hall to him. "My five minutes, please? Do I ask for a lot in this thing we call our life?"

"
Yerklun un stivach,
" he mumbled, or some such thing, which could mean anything from "one more minute" to "bite me" in one of the twenty or so languages he can converse in, not including dialects. It's a gift. He jokes that he was born crying in three languages.

I fought my compulsive desire to blast him, stuffed the magazine under my pillow where it belonged, and headed across the hall. The clincher wasn't
what
he was saying but the fact that he wasn't speaking English. Hamdani only forgets what language he's in when he's totally absorbed.

He was now staring into the glow of his screen, his light off. His profile glowed blue, and his fist was pushed up against his mouth as he thought. His hand flopped down on the mouse, and he drummed his fingers on top.

I reached for the switch and turned on the overhead, which only caused him to flinch and lean closer to the screen. "
Yerklun un stivach...
"

"English, dude. You're in America."

"Sorry. I am wondering if I should send to USIC this dead-dog article."

"I thought our interest was dead people." I scanned the wall in front of him, where my mother used to have a mirror. It's just a bare wall now, except that Hamdani has taped up hard copies of eight or nine recent news stories from MSNBC, most of them only a few paragraphs long. "Six Die as Mystery Illness Grips Cruise Line." "Food Poisoning Suspected in 11 Deaths at Mardi Gras." "Dengue Fever Claims 9 in Nepal Hotel District." "Mystery Disease in Tripura Claims 14 on British Military Base."

He finds the stories buried in worldwide news about dirty politicians, crimes, forest fires ... He hard copies any that might be the work of a terror cell looking to kill fifty or so people without attracting attention to itself. He then sends them to Hodji Montu, a USIC agent we're tight with.

I studied the picture of the skeleton in the middle of a dusty road. "What's so great about a dog corpse?"

He reads Spanish easily and pointed to a line of text under the picture. "Outskirts of Mexico City. Several locals are hysterical. They say the dog fell down in the road sick, and several hours later, this is what it looked like."

He enlarged the picture two hundred percent, and even in black-and-white I could see the bones lay in some sort of gloppy mound with a few hairs sticking out.

"Um...
ew?
" I plopped down beside him on my mom's bed—now his bed—yawning. "You know that's bullshit. Bodies don't deteriorate that fast. Aren't Mexican locals given to smoking homegrown marijuana?"

"They say it is the fourth such incident in as many days. They contacted a photographer from a Mexico City newspaper, who came for this one and photographed the deterioration." He spun up a PDF page that had been off the screen and pointed to a similar picture, only in this one you could still see it had been a dog. Had a tail, had some hair, but some internal organs were already showing.

"This was shot at hour two." He pointed.

Fat chance I would escape my usual nightmares tonight. The recurring one was my favorite: My mom reaches out to me through prison bars, crying, "
Tyler, you rat, how could you?
"

"Why can't you find your weird stories at ten in the morning? How did you even capture this swill?"

"I surfed," he said.
Duh.

I said that the Trinity Four are personal to me. The first reason is that as self-proclaimed v-spies, Hamdani and I look for members of ShadowStrike online. We follow them into chat rooms and try to script their chatter, and we give it to USIC. But they're not easy to find, and in the five weeks we've lived and worked here together, our search engines have coughed up
nada.
After ShadowStrike members were arrested in March for the Trinity Falls water poisoning, it seems that all chatter from extremists anywhere on the planet suddenly stifled itself. You'd think ShadowStrike was defunct, if you were an impatient type. But we know more operatives are out there, including two dangerous officers—one a scientist and the other a trained assassin—who escaped Trinity Falls by the hairs on their asses. OmarLoggi and VaporStrike were two log-ins we hunted constantly.

Our favorite game in the world is trying to find them online. But in the barren wasteland of online intelligence lately, Hamdani succumbs to surfing the news. ShadowStrike specializes in designer germs, hence Hamdani's charming collection of suspected Weapons of Mass Destruction on the wall.

"Don't be a smart-ass," I begged him. "It's late. How in the hell did you bump into dead dogs in your search for potential terror attacks?"

He slumped back in the chair, watching the edge of the keypad, blinking. It's the first clue I had that "I surfed" might have been a stalling tactic and not smart-assery.

His gaze turned to me with those big Pakistani browns, and he said, "I decided I would surf for the germ 'tularemia.'"

Ah. This is
really
personal. My eyes flew to the photo of the bones and glob pile, then looked down at my hand on the back of his chair. I knew how many scabbies were on that one hand, because I'd counted them a dozen times. Thirty-nine: four between my fingers, one under my pinkie fingernail, eleven on my fingers, thirteen on the back of my hand, and ten on my palm. The rest of our bodies were decorated, too. We have a little more in common with the Trinity Four than that we'd love to see the same guys caught. We had been struck, too, in a different way, though they have no idea.

"Obviously, this would be a far more stringent mutation of tularemia than what you and I were attacked with," he said.

"They're
sure
it's tularemia?"

"So they say."

"Who's
they?
" I wished I'd paid attention in Spanish class so I could read it myself.

He rolled the mouse around again until the other picture came clear. "In Mexico, they still get away with 'authorities say' over something like this. They are not panic stricken about emerging infectious diseases and terrorists like the Americans."

I wondered if "authorities' would be the Mexican government or American Intelligence.

"Maybe USIC already knows about the dead dog," I said. "But send it to Hodji anyway. Tularemia. That's gotta be ShadowStrike."

In the past two weeks, I could actually forget that Hamdani and I are infected with a strain of tularemia. The first day we were released from Beth Israel Hospital, I took down all the mirrors in the house or covered them with a towel. I am so used to looking at Shahzad's face that I forget to notice the hundred dots covering it, and I can't see my own face. We look more like chickenpox victims than tularemics, because we were struck with a waterborne mutation of the original that's about twelve times as potent in what it does to skin tissue. But our hundreds of bumpy dots haven't itched or burned in about ten days. They're just crusty. We have to sit on a pillow and toss around a lot while sleeping, but you can actually fail to remember for minutes at a time.

He printed out the first page but hesitated after opening an e-mail to Hodji Montu. Hodji rarely responds to anything we send to him with more than a grunt or rolled eyes on his daily visits to check in on us and make sure we're behaving. He's the closest thing we've got to a father figure between the two of us. We're not supposed to be v-spying. We're underage. And we're supposed to be recovering from our brush with death.

"Authorities found tularemia in tissue cells, according to this," Hamdani said. "But it is another mutation, apparently far stronger than what Catalyst had when he scratched us in the face."

"USIC has grown men who sit around all day and surf for people and animals turning up dead," I reminded him. "I'm sure they know about it."

"So, then, let us give them something they don't know..." he mused, and I took it more as a prayer to his Allah than a comment to me. He surfed again, this time for "dead dogs," "Mexico," and "April 2002."

I met Hamdani on a Thursday in early March when he showed up as a new student in my school, which he was supposed to start attending like a regular student. He'd just arrived from Pakistan. I've been an expert hacker for going on three years, and I can detect my own likeness with just a few lines of idle chitchat. That night, I captured his screen at this Internet café where USIC had set him up as a v-spy, scripting the chatter of a ShadowStrike guy seated twenty terminals away. I figured out what he was up to in a minute and a half. The next day I invited myself to the party by giving USIC track 'n' translate programs (TNTs) that they couldn't refuse. Hamdani and I captured phone and Internet chatter like crazy from my house on Friday, and I got some idea that it would be an adrenaline rush to see the terrorists we'd been scripting.

We went to a ShadowStrike recruitment party near Trinity Falls Saturday and pretended to be recruits. But we were acting too nervous and got skunked out by the leaders. Fortunately, Hodji had followed us and had the place raided—hence a lot of arrests were made. Catalyst was one of two recruiters there, though he never even got handcuffed. He took six USIC bullets in the head but managed to scratch us first.

The Trinity Four, as we call Rain, Scott, Owen, and Cora, know of Hamdani only as the Kid. That's his USIC nickname, which was alluded to in a
Newsweek
article in January. Hodji has been down to see them at St. Ann's. He gives us updates on them, and once or twice he has told them stories about serving as a bodyguard to the Kid in Pakistan while the Kid scripted chatter of dangerous extremists who were seated three terminals away in his uncle's Internet café.

The Trinity Four think he's now working from Nigeria or something. They have no idea I even exist.

Hodji would joke to us, "You'd think I was telling them about Peter Pan." He said it took their minds off their symptoms, hearing about a guy their age who could script chatter with the best of v-spies. They were told that the Kid had worked on Trinity Falls, but not that he and his new best friend took a hit while acting stupid down there.

Hamdani and I are USIC's biggest kept secret at the moment. We can't step outside. If one person saw us, they would think they had hallucinated. If two people saw us, it would create a national panic within about nine hours. Welcome to 2002.

"So, what's your take?" I asked. "You think ShadowStrike is in Mexico, injecting dogs with a newer mutation of tularemia to see what happens to them?"

We scanned his Google returns. "Nothing in the news, but..." He clicked on the International Organization for Animal Rights news page, where "Tulum Couple Charged with Killing Stray Dogs" was the headline. Not exactly something you'd come up with while surfing for strains of known WMDs. Whatever we find is usually by thin threads.

"Look at this." He breathed in awe. It was in English. I dove in.

"'A Tulum couple was arrested yesterday after neighboring farmers discovered a shed filled with animal remains. A scorching odor had plagued the area for days, according to local police, who questioned Alvarez and Maria Vincente, suspecting the source was on their farm. Though the couple denied any knowledge of the odor, police discovered the corpses in a grain silo.