But while this cabal’s lame-brained scheme, which they had goofily named “Operation Castaways’ Revenge,” was in a class of nuttiness by itself, the truth was, it was tinged with just enough real danger to give Hazeem a vague premonition of disaster. They weren’t in the Middle East anymore—they were in the Western Hemisphere, where even before 9/11 the United States did not put up with anti-American mischief, and post-9/11 had, as the Venezuelan dictator pointed out, spies everywhere.
So, yes, it was easy for Hazeem himself to chuckle at the loony ambitiousness of their plan: how they were going to find some poor sucker to carry Akhmed’s radioactive matzo balls into Miami and detonate them with conventional explosives from afar by radio transmitter, to kill many Jews and former Cubans and wreak havoc on American gasoline prices and create economic chaos and ensure the destruction of imperialist bullies and lay the groundwork for a rise of the oppressed and, not coincidentally, Muslims, and be El Maximo’s parting gift to the nation that had rejected him as a baseball pitcher. Easy for Hazeem to giggle at because he knew the degree to which these three so-called national leaders were such bungling boobs, and that their plan for international upheaval would eventually amount to nothing more destructive than Akhmed’s retarded little fart.
On the other hand, he also knew that America, not appreciating the inevitability of these three stooges running into one another and knocking themselves out cold, would, once it caught wind of Castaways’ Revenge, not find Little Buddy’s, Thurston’s, and Lovey’s bumbling incompetence the least bit funny.
There was something else that disturbed Hazeem, something ominous. When, as Cecilia was clearing off their table, the smirking Venezuelan greaseball, deliberately in plain view of everyone, stuck a five-hundred-peso bill down her bodice, his fingers attempting to massage her breasts (there could not be enough hot water in all of Cuba to wash away his filth), Hazeem for an instant had a dark premonition that perhaps at least one of these seeming nincompoops was not quite as incompetent as he appeared—that there was more cunning, calculating evil here than met the eye. A shiver ran through him. He feared for the innocent parador owner, who had overheard much—perhaps too much—and he feared for other unwitting witnesses and for innocent Americans.
And, yes, he feared for himself.
Five
A FEW YEARS EARLIER, HURRICANE OSCAR HAD RAVAGED Haiti. It was a strange storm—obeah practitioners believed it to be not the work of Shango, god of weather, but of Damballah-Wedo, the serpent Loa enraged by man’s ecological folly. It had spawned in November, late in the hurricane season, had come out of nowhere, and had moved, oddly, from northwest to southeast. Most unsettling of all, unlike other Northern-Hemisphere storms, it spiraled clockwise. No one could recall a hurricane ever doing that, although an old houngan, consulting cowry shells, claimed there had been one on the eve of Napoleon’s betrayal of Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Also unlike most hurricanes, which skitter across the Caribbean scorpion-like, Oscar hunted like a crocodile—crawling, lunging, feasting, fattening itself in the sun. And whereas normal storms soon lose force on land, this hellish beast grew more ferocious. First ravaging Port-de-Paix, then, clawing its way past Anse-Rouge and Gonaïves and tearing into the Artibonite valley, Dessalines, Saint-Marc, and Montrouis, it grew bolder as it mutilated the Haitian hills behind Port-au-Prince and Pétionville, devouring what was left of the tropical forest, rearing demonically on the mountaintops before retracing its murderous path.
Weakened from decades of deforestation, the overplant-ing of shallow-rooted tubers, and other desperate, shortsighted agricultural practices, what remained of Haiti’s topsoil was no match for the two-hundred-mile-an-hour fiend. Muddy torrents roiled down ghauts and gullies, hurling cows and pigs and goats, snapping palm trees, heaving tamarind trunks and banyan roots over washed-out ridges and ancient volcanic folds. When, five days later, Oscar, finally sated, slithered back to the underworld, the western half of Hispaniola resembled Hiroshima in September 1945. In satellite photos it was difficult to tell where land ended and ocean began, so murky was the coastal sea.
Over millennia, in most of the Caribbean, ecology had learned to deal with hurricanes. Trees, leaves, roots, branches, and fronds had evolved to spill fierce winds, to roll up, lean away, bear down. Birds and frogs and mongooses were born knowing how to burrow and deflect, hunker down and seek out, dig in and cover up. And when the storms passed, the land blossomed greener and more fecund than before, more melodious finches plumed brighter yellow, mammals emerged from their mothers’ wombs more lustrous and stout. Nature had destroyed the weak to make room for the strong.
Even months after Oscar, though, no finch-chirring or mockingbird-guffawing or grackle-cawing filled Haiti’s bruised skies. No mongoose-scurrying skipped through underbrush. No cooing of Zenaida Dove lullabied from low branches, no crowing of rooster pealed over dawn’s first yawns. No whistling of tree frog, braying of donkey, naying of goat, buzzing of crepuscular bug, burbling of rufous-throated solitaire, warbling of forest thrush, hooing of vervet monkey. In Haiti, nature, like politics, had never been allowed to evolve fruitfully. For two hundred years it had been a sick and dying addict, so weakened from self-abuse, it hardly had the will to curl up under Oscar’s demented beating, let alone strength to restore itself. The nutrients that nature had taken millions of years to give, the desperately poor Haitians had depleted in decades. Now when farmers gazed down at their fields, what they saw were endless stretches of glistening clay, exposed volcanic boulders, pointy stumps of truncated trees—rotting teeth and pyorrheaic gums. Without a healthy immune system, now when the land mutated it did so malignantly.
Which is what happened to a certain colony of termites.
Ordinarily the most adaptable of mandibled marauders, termites are hardy little brutes who, reproducing quickly and prodigiously and displaying adaptations of natural selection within a few brief generations, have survived almost since eels grew knuckles and crawled out of primordial slime. Yet even Haitian termites had struggled mightily during the decades the Duvaliers had klepto-crated the public treasury, forcing ordinary Haitians to chop down topsoil-retaining trees for fuel. With rich dirt washed to the sea, organic and mineral nutrients vanished. Those remaining plants whose fruits, fronds, marrow, and flesh the termites had depended on to feed their queens withered and fell. Turning their mandibles’ attention to roots, the gnawing little critters found those also leached of life—for, indeed, farmers had cut mere saplings for fuel, to peddle in Port-au-Prince for pennies a pound. Millions of termites—thousands of colonies—starved to death.
But a third of the way up the south slope of the mountains behind Plaine de Cul-de-Sac, one desperate termite population found salvation in the poop of runaway pink pigs. A unique alchemy of unusual waste matter—decaying non-indigenous pink-pig excrement, dead-root detritus, ultra-violet-bombarded prehistoric diluvial clay—the sudden disappearance of natural predators, and whatever supernatural forces the mysterious Oscar had brought to bear, visited a fortuitous mutation on this colony’s queen. Many worker termites died from the unholy enzymes and unique deprivations, as did their queen herself, but not before she had spawned a voracious, bloodthirsty brood of genetically altered offspring.
The first thing the brood did was eat alive those of the previous generation. They bypassed the carcasses of the already dead workers and went right for the living, separating individuals from the colony like skilled lionesses, hunting them down, ripping them limb from limb—not only to kill but kill with cruelty. These were infants hardwired in hell. Only Damballah-Wedo knew what a collective monster this unholy tribe would soon become.
Holy crap, Professor Leslie Fenwich thought as he sat on his toilet, thesaurus on lap, insufflating a joint and gazing out the window at South Loop rooftops. How was it possible? Diane seemed like a decent, if stupidly credulous, example of contemporary muliebrity. Sensitive, loving, committed to society and the planet. Member of PETA and the ACLU. Supported unions and Michael Moore and Greenpeace. Detested big business. Believed in