Laura Fisk took a lot longer to answer the door the second time. Even then, she left the safety chain on and shouted at him from inside. “I already told you—he’s in the mountains fishing!”
“I know about the cabin,” Duggan shouted back. “It’s important that I find him. I have information about Donald Westlake, but I have to tell Marty myself.”
An elderly woman tending her garden across the street lifted her head and regarded him like a deer calculating whether to freeze or bolt. Duggan heard the scrape of the chain and the door opened, this time wide enough for him to step inside. There were children’s toys strewn on the living room floor and dishes piled in the sink but no sign of actual kids. Duggan ignored the mess as he took a seat on the sofa. She was beautiful in a disheveled, unkempt way. He could tell from the way she glared at him that she was in no mood for friendly chitchat.
“I really don’t mean to bother you, Mrs. Fisk,” Duggan said. “Just tell me how to find him. It could be a matter of national security.”
“Hasn’t Marty already done enough for this country,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “He’s trying like hell to get his life back, but you people won’t let him.”
For the first time, Duggan detected a slight Western drawl.
“What people? Did someone else come to talk to him?”
Laura Fisk seemed perplexed. “I thought you said you were with the government.”
“I am,” Duggan said. “The Department of Homeland Security. My job is to make sure that what happened to Donald Westlake was an accident.”
“And why should I help you do that?”
“Because I’m starting to feel pretty sure that it wasn’t.”
Laura Fisk pursed her lips and reached for the purse beside her chair. “Mind if I smoke?”
“It’s your house.”
She acknowledged his comment with a shrug. He watched her pull out a Marlboro 100 and light it. “Is Marty a suspect?”
“I think Marty tried to save his friend.”
She took a long pull from the cigarette before speaking. “And who’s gonna save Marty?”
“All I can tell you is that I’m the only person who’s trying to find out who’s responsible. I don’t know who’s behind it or what side they’re on or where they’re hiding, but I’m running out of leads. My boss doesn’t even know I’m here. You and Marty are my last chance to find out what really happened in Afghanistan.”
Laura Fisk closed her eyes and took another drag from the cigarette. When she exhaled, the smoke made intersecting whorls in the air between them.
“He’s at Priest Lake, across the state line in Idaho. A friend of his has a cabin there. Take US 2 north for about two hours to Fifty-Seven, then follow East Lake Shore for about eight miles. You’ll see a wooden sign for Breuer on a dirt road. Take it to the trailhead. You’ll have to go on foot after that. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk to the cabin.”
She nodded to the door and turned away from him in the same motion.
“Thanks, Mrs. Fisk.”
“Anytime.”
She didn’t get up to let him out.
The road to Priest Lake took Duggan deep into a postcard flashback of the Idaho lake region, past dockside cocktail dives with neon martini glasses and stucco-sided motels shaped like cigarette cartons. At one point, a speedboat full of laughing teenagers tried to race him along a roadside river. A girl in a yellow bikini waved as the bow sliced into the turn and pulled her away, leaving a scar of white foam on the cobalt surface. Eventually, the Jet Skis and resorts thinned out to an occasional fishing skiff or wind-boarder, then the road lifted from the beach into a thicket of hemlock and cedar and he was there. Duggan parked next to a wooden sign that read “Breuer’s” and hiked up the slope, past patches of ferns and mushroom-studded stumps, across a trickling creek to a cliff-edged glen. The cabin faced a grove of ivory-barked aspens, but the deck out back had a sumptuous view of Priest Lake. He could understand why a man might come here alone to watch the water turn violet at sunset, the trees and solitude muffling the city racket and the silent screams of moving shadows on a remote-controlled camera feed.
“Can I help you?”
Duggan turned to the voice, which belonged to a muscular young man with cropped hair and a rash of blondish stubble on his jaw. It was easy to picture him kicking a soccer ball with Westlake and Wasson and the boys on the base. Fisk was half hidden by some bushes about ten yards back on the trail, meaning that he had watched Duggan for a while before deciding to reveal his perch. From the lowered tilt of his right hip and the way his hand hovered out of sight, Duggan guessed that his inquisitor was armed.
“Are you Martin Fisk?”
“Maybe.”
“Peter Palladino told me you had a cabin out here. Your wife told me where it was.”
“Is that a fact?”
“I need to talk to you about Donald Westlake.”
“I had a feeling you weren’t here to catch bass,” Fisk said. “Besides, there’s nothing you can tell me about Donny that I don’t already know, Mr. …”
“Jake Duggan, cyber-ops division of Homeland Security. Do you know who was sending those signals to Donald through his computer?”
Fisk’s posture shifted to the other foot. “Agent Duggan, would you do me a favor and turn around, take out your ID, and hold your hands up where I can see them?” Duggan did, and a few seconds later, he felt himself being patted down. Fisk returned Duggan’s credentials, holstered the gun in his jeans, and strode toward the cabin. “C’mon inside,” Fisk said, motioning to his guest to follow. “I just made some coffee.”
The cabin was obviously owned by a man of means—tastefully functional furniture in dark tones, a stuffed elk head, Bose stereo, the odor of burnt wood wafting from the wide granite fireplace, a stack of Esquire magazines on the floor, and a half-read copy of Drunk Tank Pink on the mantle. The book’s subtitle was And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave. Duggan took a seat on the Holstein cowhide sofa and waited for Fisk to fix their coffee.
“A pal of mine from college is doing pretty well on Wall Street,” Fisk said as he poured. “He got this place to remind himself where he came from. Unfortunately, he’s too busy making money to enjoy it. Kinda ironic, don’t you think?”
Duggan gestured to the book on the mantle. “Do you believe people can be influenced without their being aware of it?”
Fisk followed Duggan’s gaze to the mantle. “Hard to say. Is that what Palladino told you?”
“He told me that you came back from Afghanistan with nightmares and an aversion to loud music. He told me that you had to take down your own best friend.”
Fisk swiveled back to face Duggan. He was smiling, but the tendons on his neck were rigid. “Palladino’s a good man, but he’s a bit of a head case.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Yes.”
Fisk raised a bottle of whiskey over the coffee cups. “Black is fine,” Duggan told him.
“More for me,” Fisk said. He poured a couple shots worth into his cup and brought the bottle with him. Fisk sat and kept his eyes on Duggan as he drank. “You know, I come here to get away from people like you.”
“If it’s any consolation, I didn’t drive all the way out here to enjoy the view.”
“So why did you?”
“I was sent to your base at Kandahar to make sure that there was no terrorist involvement in the events leading to Donald Westlake’s death, particularly to certify that there was no evidence of a cyber breach by unauthorized individuals or foreign agents. I met the master sergeant, Quinn Davis, and talked to some of the guys in your unit. I did a diagnostic on Westlake’s laptop, but it was already wiped. Davis told me you were honorably discharged, voluntarily.”
Fisk’s gaze narrowed, but he kept his composure. “Did they tell you what Donny and I were doing on the base?”
“You were training the Afghans to fly their own drones. The air force couldn’t count on bringing Muslims to Nevada without attracting attention. So they flew you guys to Kandahar instead.”
“Correct.” Fisk took another gulp from his cup and topped it off again with whiskey. “But you didn’t come here to talk about drones, did you?”
“If you ever repeat what I’m about to tell you, I’ll deny it,” Duggan said.
Fisk shrugged. “I have a pretty lousy memory these days.”
“The Department of Defense wants me to certify that there’s been no cyber intrusion from outside, which is probably the case,” Duggan said. “I do think there was a breach, but it came from the inside. I think Donald Westlake was the victim of some kind of test, some kind of experimental research by the DOD. I think the military is responsible for what happened to your friend, but they’re trying to deny their involvement and bury the facts. I think that’s why you were discharged. I think that’s why you’re hiding out in the woods, waiting for someone to come along and try to shut you up.”
It was only when Fisk exhaled that Duggan realized he’d been holding his breath. “I’m really glad I didn’t shoot you,” Fisk said.
“Me too.”
Fisk’s upper lip twitched as he drained his cup. “You know I gave back my medal.”
“I heard about that.”
“Donny was a good man. He deserved better.”
“So do you. Palladino said you had an adverse reaction to the therapy that involved listening to loud sounds through headphones. The air force report said that Westlake was wearing headphones when the shooting took place.”
“It was that fucking music,” Fisk blurted. “That heavy metal shit. That’s when it all started.”
Duggan drank some coffee. “All what started?”
“He joined a group. They met on the base two or three times a week. He didn’t talk about it, and I knew better than to ask. Then I noticed the change.”
Duggan held his tongue as Fisk reached for the bottle again.
“His flying got a lot better at first. It was weird how almost overnight he was so much quicker and smoother on the controls. Lots of pilots take Adderall and other stuff, but this was different, a total game change. He was like a machine. He was so much better than me that I started to feel inadequate.”
“Did you talk to him about it?”
“He wouldn’t talk to me or anybody. All he wanted to do was fly drones and listen to that goddamned skinhead garbage. I mean, he even shaved his head to look like one. I followed him one night to a building on the far side of the base. No windows. Two guards posted outside the door. It creeped me out. Then …”
“Then what?”
“The bad stuff started. The headaches, the nightmares. He started messing up on the job, overshooting targets. He said he wasn’t getting enough sleep, but I knew that wasn’t the problem. I warned him, goddamn it. I told him not to do it.”
“Not to do what?”
Fisk was slumped down in his chair hugging himself, a crumpled, diminished version of the strapping, confident fellow Duggan had encountered in the woods.
“Like I said, he wouldn’t tell me. All he said was that he got an offer to join a special program, something that would earn him time off his tour, but he couldn’t talk about it. Not even to me.”
“And during this time, when things got worse, he was still listening to heavy metal.”
“All the fucking time.” Fisk sat upright, but his arms were still wrapped around his torso. “It didn’t make any sense. He was obsessed with it—hard-core head-banger crap. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who’s favorite band was Dave Matthews, for Christ’s sake. We all teased the shit out of him, but it freaked us out.”
“You and Wasson and the rest of the soccer crew?”
Fisk nodded. Then, more to himself than to Duggan, he said, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! Those lying motherfuckers! They made Donny their bitch, and then, when the shit hit the fan, I was the one who had to clean up their mess.” Fisk was holding his head in his hands and breathing hard, and Duggan started wondering if his questions and the whiskey had nudged him too far.
Fisk looked up at Duggan. “Do you know what it feels like to shoot your best friend in the head?”
“No,” Duggan said. ”I don’t.”
“Well, Agent Duggan, let me tell you something. I don’t know either.”
Fisk saw Duggan’s confusion and let it stew a few seconds before adding, “I pulled the trigger and splattered the shooter’s brains halfway across the base, but that wasn’t my best friend. Do you follow me, Mr. Cyber Cop?”
“Sorry, I don’t.”
“The man I killed wasn’t him—it wasn’t Donny. I saw his eyes when he left the barracks. And after he went ballistic, when I got close, I could hear that fucking metal music drilling through his brain. He knew I was standing behind him. I knew he could hear me yelling. I put the barrel of my gun against the back of his head, and he still wouldn’t stop. So my conscience is clean. If anything, I was doing him a favor.”
“How’s that?”
Fisk’s eyes were red but his gaze was defiant. “I’m saying that what I did wasn’t murder.”
“Why not?”
“Because the guy I loved like a brother was long gone. The Donny I knew was already dead.”
The bees buzzed furiously, fanning out from the hive, circling and attacking the intruder. It was impressive how quickly the insects had mobilized to repel the threat, each individual instinctively assuming its role in the frantically humming organism. Cara knew that even as the warriors pelted her bee suit in protest, a battalion of soldiers was heading deep into the hive, some to secure the precious stores of honey, others creating a last-ditch line of defense for their queen. The fact that this particular bee colony was situated on the roof of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco didn’t faze Cara or the bees.
“Shhhh,” Cara hushed soothingly. “I’m not here to hurt you. I brought you here, remember?”
The hotel’s managers had approached her years ago to advise them on a project to cultivate bees on the roof, partly to make sure that its elevated micro farm of herbs and vegetables would get properly pollinated and partly to help reverse the colony collapse disorder in the global bee population, which had plunged more than 90 percent since the 1980s. The hotel’s beehive colony, up to two hundred thousand bees that produced eight hundred pounds of honey annually, had since been successfully replicated at hotels in other parts of California, Washington D.C., Toronto, and even China. Tending to the bee colony always lifted Cara’s spirits, and for a few moments, she forgot all about the evolutionary biologists conference going on in the ballroom downstairs. She lifted out a honeycomb with gloved fingers, inspecting the concentrated nectar for color and viscosity.
“Dr. Park?” Eric, who had joined her on the roof, was standing back at a safe distance. “Sorry to interrupt, but you’ve got to get ready for the awards ceremony.”
Cara looked at her watch. “Oh, damn. Thanks, Eric.”
She followed him to the elevators and went to her room to change. A few minutes later, she was sitting with Eric and several hundred colleagues, all of them happily picking at goat cheese and arugula salad and sipping Napa wines. After some introductory comments, Cara’s name was called and she obligingly rose to accept her Beagle citation for innovative research. As Eric had predicted, the PHAROH experiment in Africa yielded data that advanced the understanding of hive-mind intelligence and stirred wide interest in the global community of evolutionary biologists. The applause reached her ears, but she took no pleasure in the acclaim and kept her remarks to a more or less perfunctory thank you.
What her applauding colleagues didn’t know, and never would, was that what she encountered in the Serengeti the morning after the PHAROH test had left her horrified and disgusted. The unspeakable trauma of what she saw that day in Africa followed her back to the US, where she spent weeks in a demoralized funk. Cara had initially resisted Eric’s entreaties to write a paper about PHAROH and their field experiment in Tanzania. Eventually, though, Eric convinced her that it was unscientific to dismiss an entire area of inquiry over a single inconclusive experiment. Plus, the United Nations was expecting something for its money, even if the result of their research would probably never bear humanitarian fruit. Cara had rushed to make the deadline for the conference, the theme of which happened to be emergent patterns in biological organisms. If a locust swarm could learn to defend itself even in midair, Cara posited in her paper, then maybe it could also be trained to do things other than ravage crops and grasslands. If the biochemical and environmental triggers that caused emergent behavior in locusts, bees, termites, and other animals could be harnessed and channeled, Cara concluded, then why couldn’t swarms be domesticated and trained like any other animal to deliver medicines or do other jobs that required large groups of small highly mobile messengers?
Writing the paper, along with doubling down on yoga on the weekends, fended off her nagging sense of failure, at least until she received a call from a man who identified himself as Barry Rodman at DARPA. He told Cara that he was a big fan of her work and that it was an honor just to be speaking to a scientist of her caliber. Then he asked if she would be interested in a grant to explore how bees and other swarming animals could be used to deliver lethal viruses, biological weapons, and even miniature explosives to enemy targets. She listened in disbelief to Rodman’s pitch before clearing her throat to interrupt him. How, Cara wanted to know, did the military know about the contents of a scientific paper that hadn’t even been published yet? Rodman declined to say, but he made it clear that a contract of this kind would be lucrative and generously funded. In fact, Cara was aware that bees and stinging insects had a history of being employed as weapons of war going back to the Romans, who had catapulted beehives directly into the ranks of advancing enemy troops. But what the military’s messenger was proposing was unlike any bio-weapon that had ever existed before. Rodman hinted that DARPA scientists were close to perfecting a way to train insects to follow instructions by interfering with their natural navigation systems. He added that PHAROH showed some very promising applications along the same lines. “What you’re doing and what we’re doing look like a natural fit,” Rodman excitedly told her. “We think the combination could double the speed of development and deployment. We already have a small testing facility in the Bay Area, so there’d be no need for you to travel.”
For Cara, the mere possibility that her research could be used to kill people instead of help them was so distressing that she had to force herself not to hang up. Instead, she apologetically explained that her teaching schedule and research workload had forced her to put PHAROH on indefinite hold. Besides, she added sincerely, “The damn thing doesn’t even work.”
“Before you say no,” Rodman persisted, “think of all the things you could do with a budget and a lab twice as big as the one you have now.” Cara politely but firmly told him she wasn’t interested, well aware that her negative response would probably have a deleterious effect on her career in ways that she would never discover. As disturbing as the whole episode had been, it was something else that was bothering her, something she feared might somehow be related to the DARPA offer she had rejected.
When she got back to her table, Eric, who had already imbibed more than his fair share of small-batch organic brews, was waiting with a fastidiously dressed woman who looked familiar. “There she is!” Eric announced, holding out a chair for Cara. “This is Rosalyn Cooper from the CDC. Ms. Cooper wants to talk to us about a possible collaboration.”
Cara shook the woman’s hand. “Nice to meet you. I recognize you from the beehive tour I gave earlier today, before the luncheon.”
“Yes,” Cooper confirmed. “That was lovely and very interesting. I think it’s wonderful that they serve the honey to the guests in the hotel.”
Eric held up the bottle in his hand. “Case in point: Honey Saison Beer, brewed with sweetness from Fairmont’s own rooftop buzzers!”
Cooper smiled at Eric. “Yes, dear, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” She turned her attention back to Cara. “I was fascinated by your suggestion that insect swarms could be cultivated and taught to perform specific tasks. As I’m sure you know, the bee population is suffering from a viral infection, one that moves very quickly from one infected hive to another. Well, I was thinking that what if the bees’ ability to transfer viruses was adapted for something good? I mean, could bees be used to inoculate vulnerable populations in remote areas where it’s physically or economically difficult to reach the target population?”
“Are you talking about training bees to use their stingers to inoculate humans?” Cara asked.
“No, of course not—I mean, eventually perhaps,” Cooper answered. “But initially at least, the bee-delivered vaccines would be introduced to crops that they fertilize and maybe even injected by their stingers into livestock, which also become food for people. There are some tests going on in Africa using specially treated mosquitoes to inoculate people against malaria, for example. But mosquitoes don’t swarm intelligently, and they certainly can’t be trained to zero in on a specific population or geographical area.”
“But maybe bees can!” Eric interjected. “And who knows, with any luck maybe we can pay back the little buzzers by curing the bee virus while we’re at it.”
“I have a budget for research along these lines,” Cooper continued, “and I can’t think of anybody who is doing more exciting work in this area than the two of you. Would you consider such a project with the CDC?”
Eric was already beaming. Maybe this is how it starts, Cara thought, meeting the right person at the right time with money to push the envelope, willing to try something daring and new, something that might actually move the needle. Maybe the science behind PHAROH could redeem itself by paving the way for bees to help people avoid diseases. Maybe the bees had brought her good luck; maybe this was karma payback for giving them a safe haven on the roof of one of San Francisco’s most luxurious hotels.
“We are very interested, Ms. Cooper,” Cara said. “I’ve also been thinking about what you said about bees transmitting viruses. Eric and I have been talking about developing a computer model that uses beehive migration patterns to make a predictive map of pathogenic viruses.”
“What if viruses are also following emergent models?” Eric exclaimed. “What if they have a form of collective intelligence that hasn’t even been identified yet?”
Cooper’s eyes were twinkling with enthusiasm. “I can give you access to our virus-tracking databases, assuming you decide to work with us.”
“Consider it done,” Cara said. “Eric will set up a conference call to discuss details and next steps.” The women shook hands again.
“A toast,” Eric intoned, hoisting his beer. “To the future of viral medicine, and God bless our winged friends on the roof. May they flirt with flowers forever!”
Cara felt a surge of gratitude for her young assistant’s dogged optimism. It was Eric’s refusal to abandon PHAROH and his persistence in getting her to write the paper, which, after a dark detour with the DOD, turned out to be the doorway to what she was seeking: an unexpected and much-needed chance to redeem herself with positive, purposeful work.
“Yes, long live the bees!” Cara chimed in as she tipped her glass. But there was a tinge of sadness in her voice because, based on her inspection, she knew the Fairmont’s hive colony was already dying.