Memories of the past summer were still fresh in her mind. Sulking down the boardwalk, her mother turning, hands on her hips, to look pleadingly at her husband, seeking his consent, his approval as she caught her breath from her tirade. Seemingly oblivious, the man puffed on his cigar, laughing with the newly met neighbor, a welder from Arizona, down with his family, one fence over. Their daughter had snuck out the night before, and she had tracked her down for two hours, creeping along in the family’s car, listening for her daughter’s laugh, asking passers-by if they had seen her. Nothing. Then ... in an alleyway, she had found her. Pressing some smaller boy up against a stucco wall, seemingly oblivious.
The girl, Sally, was mad that they had waited until dark to let her out of the house. They had kept her in one of the rooms all day, where she had tended after her cousin who had come down with the flu. It hadn’t been so bad, not at first. She had always liked her cousin, and got along with her great, but had been longing for sun sand and boys for weeks in school. Now, with the sun setting over the Pacific, she herded her younger siblings around a slender puddle, hugging the wall to allow a rapidly approaching figure pass. Tall, might be, ok verified cute, but no, I have to babysit these four, this sucks, maybe he’ll ... oh my god. Nice eyes, was he smiling? A tiny smile, so small, but a flash of understanding in his eyes, playfulness, and compassion for me in this my terrible fate. Now, let’s not get too dramatic. How can I get out of this next year?
He didn’t even feel the data transfer. Wasn’t supposed to, especially not walking past the Lincoln memorial in broad daylight. Oh wait, there it was, a scratching, in his lungs, like an oncoming, bad cough. Hacking, he began to make himself invisible. Not in the literal sense, but to the degree that anyone who knew him, who would be looking for him, heck who was probably already looking for him now, would have a very hard time recognizing him. After walking east, randomly, for about two miles, the man had thrown himself down a flight of stairs, badly spraining an ankle in the process, ripped his shirt, and purposefully fallen into in a stagnant brown puddle out behind a $Dollar$ Chinese restaurant. He had traded his jacket and five bucks for a tattered parka an old street bum had been sitting on. Limping, smelling of rotting cooking oil and rat shit, long hair disheveled, clothing torn and tattered, he forced back a smile. A handful of dirt caked his otherwise clean, healthy teeth, and pen ink would have to do until he got into New York City to make the transfer.
The man had a small time window before the courier, an older, nondescript Hispanic man, who had looked at him with eyes screwed against a sudden gust of cool wind, sold his description and whereabouts to the D.C. criminal underworld. In the meantime, a virus that contained strands of DNA was at the moment writing those strands onto the vast uncoded portions of his 18th chromosome, sinking them like shipwrecks into a sea of “COPY ME” viruses. Not only was the specific location of the information, now part of his DNA, known to only three people on the planet, but a special RNA protein compound was needed to extract the information, and only a handful of labs were capable of even attempting to manufacture it.
If you wanted to transfer data, across town or the globe, without virtually anyone being able to locate, track or extract it, this method was ne plus ultra. The only problem was that it was ridiculously expensive.
The price was worth it, considering the value of the data contained. As soon as the inhaled virus hit, it had imbedded critical segments of the DNA one hundred world leaders into the “COPY-ME” wasteland on chromosome 18. Data in hand, a competent and ruthless group of people could engineer diseases that would kill these people more or less quickly. Ransoms monies, blackmail, the whole deal.
But to entrust this information to one person, or even a handful of persons, had seemed foolish and arrogant. That is why they had piggybacked it onto a common cold virus, and a pretty nasty one at that. Let the cold spread, only a few people knew what it truly contained. They would still track the four original
The two men had met halfway up the stairs of a Metro entrance, at exactly the agreed upon time. Javier had asked him for a cigarette in his limited English, accepted the man’s lighter, and handed it back along with a sleek inhaler he had taken from his right jacket pocket. He had immediately returned the hand to his pocket, where his sweaty palm had gripped the cheap red plastic handle of a Chinese knockoff SAS flechette pistol.
There was a single charge in the inhaler, he knew, from what he could tell on the miniature readout display. With empty eyes he watched the man take his hit, and took back the inhaler. Turning, he walked down the stairs, extinguished his cigarette, running to catch an approaching train that would take him to the next station. His man waited there, in a van outside, with a cellphone, a steel box, a vial of phosphorus, and a change of clothes.
Sally had convinced her parents to send her to summer camp, one she had not been to yet. She had also convinced a poor girl she had met at the mall, who shared her build, but not her looks, to go in her stead. The poor girl had agreed at five hundred dollars, which she had withdrawn from checking. Three of her friends had arranged to ditch their parents that week as well, and the four of them were going to visit some seniors they had run into at the mall, who were crashing at one of their brothers’ lofts in the City.
She had gotten separated from her friends, somewhere north of Union Square, on their way back to the loft. Their laughter echoed off the canyon like walls, as her world began to spin. Suddenly on hands and knees, she came to puking expensive alcohol through the heavy grates in the diffuse blackness below. Looking to her right, she realized the pile she thought was garbage was instead a man, very close to her, who was getting ready to sneeze.
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