Dick brought the truck to a sudden halt on the shoulder, scattering gravel into the weeds.
‘Fucker,’ he said.
‘Fucker!’ his friends echoed.
They were all drunk. They had spent the night pouring down boilermakers at a country tavern. Their search for girls had been fruitless, and they had left in the truck with a bottle of cheap vodka and some Cokes, in time to hear Goss’s speech on the radio as they cruised the farm fields.
They didn’t need to talk over what was to happen. Rafe leaped from the passenger’s seat and seized the black boy by his shoulders. Donny kicked the boy between the legs, whooping excitedly as a cry of pain came from the boy’s lips.
‘What did I do to you?’ the boy cried. ‘Leave me alone.’
Donny’s fist crushed the boy’s nose before he could say another word.
The boy fell to the gravel shoulder. Donny and Rafe crouched over him, fists flying, while Dick aimed kicks at his crotch, one after the other, methodically.
‘Nigger.’
‘Fucker.’
They would not have done it if they had been sober. Even drunk they would not have taken the risk had it not been for Goss’s speech and their frustration at the tavern. But now they were out of control, beating the boy with all their strength. He squirmed and flailed under the blows, his struggles already getting weaker.
‘Kill the fucker,’ said Dick.
The boy’s eyes were beginning to glaze over. Rafe aimed a powerful kick at his undefended temple. Dick was kneeling to undo the boy’s fly.
Then something happened.
Dick’s hands froze in midair. His face, contorted in a grimace of hate, suddenly went blank. Off balance, he teetered and fell to the ground, his arms and legs rigid.
‘Dick? Are you all right?’
Rafe and Donny paused to look at him. Rafe, assuming the black boy had injured Dick in some way, aimed a hard punch and hit his unprotected stomach. The boy screamed.
Donny bent to look at Dick. ‘Fucker passed out on us.’
Rafe pushed Donny aside to get a better look at Dick, whose eyes were wide open. They were not the glazed eyes of a drunken man.
‘Bullshit,’ Rafe said. ‘No way. He’s not passed out.’
The two men stood swaying over their friend, swearing inconsequentially as they wondered what had happened. They did not notice the black boy as he crept away into the thick brush.
‘You don’t think …’ Rafe was scratching his head.
‘Come on, don’t bullshit me.’
‘You know … that thing … that sickness.’
Donny looked closely at Dick’s eyes. ‘Jesus.’
‘Let’s get him to a hospital.’
Rafe had jumped back in alarm. He seemed afraid of the inert body of his friend. He shook his hands as though to rid them of a contagion. ‘Fuck that. Let’s get out of here. We’ll call an ambulance.’
They hopped into the truck, suddenly sober. Rafe gunned the engine. Spinning the wheels on the gravel, he got the truck onto the road and hit sixty within a few seconds.
The roar of the engine subsided. The only sound was the wind in the weeds. The black boy was nowhere to be seen. The motionless white man lay on the shoulder, where a passing farmer would notice him before dawn.
Rafe would fall into drunken sleep before dawn. When he failed to awaken by mid-afternoon, his brother would become alarmed and call 911.
By then Donny would already be in the hospital, a victim of the mystery disease like his two friends.
WashingtonNovember 25
Karen Embry was waiting for a news conference to be given by the director of the CIA.
The director was a political appointee who had played a crucial fund-raising role in the president’s narrow election victory. His background was in business and advertising. He had not expected to end up on the hot seat in his new job, though he was aware of the embarrassments suffered by the intelligence community over the past decade.
But the Crescent Queen explosion changed all that. The public held the CIA responsible for not anticipating the terrorist threat and taking steps to prevent attacks. The agency’s fecklessness was one of the key issues cited by those who wanted a new administration in Washington.
So the director was on the defensive today as usual.
Karen had arrived at CIA headquarters a half hour early, and she studied her notes as other journalists set up video cameras and joked with each other. She had dressed carefully for the news conference. She knew the director liked women. She wore a fitted blazer with a short skirt. Her legs were her best feature, along with her eyes, and she knew how to show them off.
The director began the news conference with some routine details about the population of terrorists in European jails. His voice was hard to hear, and his syntax was slightly garbled as usual. Evasiveness had become part of his persona, like the character in Proust who became deaf when unwelcome things were being said to him.
He droned on as long as he dared and finally threw the session open to questions. Karen was the first reporter to raise her hand.
‘As you know, sir,’ she began, ‘the intelligence community has not gotten to the bottom of the Crescent Queen disaster.’
This statement was not a surprise. But it was a sore point with the director.
‘All I can tell you about that,’ he replied carefully, ‘is that we’re investigating. We will bring those responsible for the attack to justice.’
‘All the major known terrorist organizations have denied involvement in the attack,’ Karen said. ‘Isn’t that true, sir?’
‘Yes, but we suspect their denials are in bad faith,’ the director replied.
‘The intelligence services haven’t been able to prove that any terrorist group had either nuclear weapons or the missiles to deliver them, isn’t that true?’ Karen asked.
‘That’s true.’
‘Have you considered the possibility that someone else was behind the attack?’
The director raised an eyebrow.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘If we suppose for the sake of argument that none of the known terrorist groups was behind the incident,’ Karen said, ‘wouldn’t it be possible that someone else built and delivered the bomb, knowing that the existing terrorist groups would fall under suspicion?’
The director did not know how to answer.
‘We have no evidence that such a scenario is the correct one,’ he said.
‘But if it were,’ she pursued, ‘how would you proceed?’
The director was thrown. His professional role was to sift through data and find the most clear and obvious answer. He had no time for unlikely hypotheses, and didn’t really know how to deal with them.
‘All I can tell you is that we’re investigating all possibilities,’ he said. ‘The very fact that an outlaw organization possessed the technology to use a nuclear weapon’ – he pronounced the word nucular