VECTOR

Chapter 9 Fake out

CHAPTER 9

Fake Out

Claire stared at the text for a full minute before the meaning sank in. Ravi had not been on the plane from Pakistan.

What?

How was that possible? Claire didn't for a minute believe that Jasmine was playing a practical joke. The email had been real and detailed enough. Ravi had to be on that plane. But he hadn't been. Did he disappear in midflight? Claire opened her computer and typed out an email to Jasmine. Someone had lied, and if Claire had to bet, she would bet on Ravi. But winning the bet wouldn't obviate the problem of a man with incurable tuberculosis shaking hands with unsuspecting people in a foreign country. If Ravi didn't travel to Rome, where did he go? Claire was fairly certain that Oliver had the wherewithal to backtrack and find the flight Ravi had taken, but pulling that information from the system might be futile since there was a decent chance that Ravi had already landed somewhere. And Claire didn't believe that one sick man justified a worldwide alert. How many airports in how many countries? To Claire, the task was nearing the impossible range. She sent the message with a tap on the mouse.

What were the chances that Jasmine was online?

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Jasmine sipped tea and stared at her computer. The middle of the night was a fearful place. She should be asleep, alone and dreaming of Jacques, dreaming of the Eiffel tower and Montmartre and a city as romantic as the Arabian Nights. Without Ravi's snoring, she would sleep without fear, for there were times during her marriage where he hit her if she rolled over and awakened him. At one time, she had suggested separate beds, and he had beaten her for even mentioning such an abomination. It wasn't that he needed her close. It was that he needed control. The anger and the violence were always about control. She knew that, and yet, she also knew that if she fought his control, things would only get worse. Still, the middle of the night was no time to consider what had become of her marriage, no time to wonder how she had managed to survive in a relationship that offered no love. The middle of the night was generally reserved for that one short step from suicide, from despair.

She didn't know which would arrive first. The email that told her Ravi had been detained by the Italian authorities or an incoherent call from an outraged Ravi. She had no doubt that he would call her to complain and order her to do something. And she would. She would get him on a flight back to Pakistan, back to her, where she could oversee his death. She could not leave him in Italy, even in isolation. When he died, they would wonder why, and the pathogen was not so difficult to identify. Identification would engender more questions, questions that would lead right back to her and her job. She didn't doubt that at that moment her life would be over. She would disappear as surely as a puff of smoke. Her organization was described as a medical research lab. That charade had to be maintained at all costs, and she was merely one more liability.

She rose from the table because the laptop computer offered nothing she wanted to see, hear, or do. With millions of sites and millions of games and billions of people online, she could find nothing to keep her attention. There was Ravi, only Ravi.

Through the window, the sky was still dark and filled with stars. The stars had promised something at one time—before the arranged marriage. She had been promised long before she was ready, and she had kept her parents’ promise. She had married a man intellectually and morally her inferior, and the marriage was the ruination of her life. That most of her married friends suffered as much as she did made no difference. She longed for the freedom and love that her friend Claire enjoyed. The ironic part was that Claire had no idea how well off she was. Claire thought that some passing pinch on the ass was the most terrible thing in the world. Jasmine knew better. She couldn't even drive a car.

Dreams.

In a way, Jasmine felt woefully behind some sort of development curve. She had learned, later than most, about freedom, about respect, about being a self-contained person. She was some sort of Marco Polo, traveling about and discovering not only the wonders of the world but the wonders of human socialization. Certainly, she had read about America and Europe and places where women were “said” to enjoy great liberty, but she had discounted those tales as so much propaganda. When she looked around, she saw none of those freedoms. She saw only the living hell Ravi had constructed for her.

Dreams.

Paris had both opened her eyes and fed her dreams. There were women who didn't serve like slaves. There were women who were not regularly beaten. There were women who could end a relationship without kowtowing to male authorities. Her awakening had come late. Yet, she was thankful for it. The comedic part of her newfound epiphany was that the other women she knew didn't believe her. They thought she was spreading the lies of the West, like those clumsy videos that showed markets full of food, full of many, many kinds of food. Her friends told her there were no such markets. There were no indoor malls with hundreds of stores and merry-go-rounds and more things to buy than could be imagined. Jasmine could point to those stores and those goods online, but her friends merely smiled and shook their heads.

Dreams.

She turned from the window and returned to the table, the laptop, the message that wasn't there—yet.

Where was it?

She glanced at the clock and calculated that Ravi had already arrived in Italy. How long did it take for feedback to reach the U.S.? How long before Claire was informed? Messages traveled at the speed of light and still, they weren't fast enough. She had learned many aphorisms about the futility of waiting, but she couldn't keep herself from waiting. It was crazy.

When the laptop BEEPED, Jasmine stared. The message was from Claire. Jasmine stared, unable to actually open the message. She was paralyzed until she asked herself what she had to lose. She had started this ball rolling. She had to be the one who picked it up.

A click, a tap.

Jasmine read the short message quickly and shook her head. Surely, Claire had made some kind of mistake. Ravi had been on that plane. He had told her that, and he never lied about his travel. She read the message a second time. There was no ambiguity in the message. Yet, it made no sense. Why would Ravi lie about where he was going? Why didn't he want her to know? She knew Ravi was not married to the truth. He lied wherever and whenever he could. But he had to be in Rome. He had to be. Had he traveled on another passport? Jasmine had never seen a second passport, but that didn't mean anything. At times, she thought she lived with a total stranger. But Ravi had never been clever enough to really fool her. It was crazy.

Ravi had not flown to Rome.

That single fact stared her in the face. The Italians were not so inept. To think otherwise was to be foolish, and Jasmine was not foolish. If Ravi had not gone to Rome, where had he gone? Jasmine considered the possibilities. Either Ravi had never left Pakistan, or he had traveled someplace other than Rome.

If Ravi was still in Pakistan, where might he be? Of course, Jasmine knew there were thousands of places he could be, but she could not spit out a place where he should be. He had no real friends except his brother, and Ravi had never stayed with his brother before. Jasmine's sister-in-law seemed to hate Ravi almost as much as Jasmine did.

A mistress?

Certainly, Ravi might have a mistress; many men did. But that seemed improbable. He rarely disappeared for hours at a time or spent a night away from home. She was more than a bit aware of their finances, and she had never recognized the telltale signs of gift giving and expensive nights out. Besides, gossip was the mainstay of the wives she knew, and they would not pass up the opportunity to warn her of a rival or revel in her misery. Some would have congratulated her, but those were the ones who knew Ravi best. No, Jasmine pushed a mistress out of the equation. If Ravi was with neither brother nor mistress, was he still in Pakistan?

Not likely.

Which meant he had traveled to some other country, some other city.

But where?

Jasmine started to list the possibilities when she realized that it didn't matter. Trying to narrow the search only increased the possible outliers. As far as she knew, Ravi had no family outside Pakistan. Certainly, there were people he could reach through some convoluted network, and those people were stretched from Singapore to London. Knowing a few families and having access to the Internet allowed Ravi's web to encompass most of the earth. She was pretty sure Ravi wasn't interested in Africa or South America, but she could certainly be wrong about that. What thoughts danced through the head of a madman couldn't be limited by rational consideration. No, she lacked data. She might as well be asking where the wind came from.

And her problem had not been solved. All that had happened was that she had lost some time. Ravi still needed to be found and quarantined. Anything less would give birth to catastrophe. Time, time was not on her side, not now. Yet, she needed discretion. To tell all would be suicide. She might was well just add poison to her tea.

Time.

A small voice inside her head told her to just stop and let fate play its hand. Ravi would die. Perhaps some thousands or millions would also die. But thousands and millions died every year through a variety of agents. What would be the big loss? Yet, the tiny voice didn't add that Ravi would certainly be identified, and if the c*****e were bad enough, some powerful country might suspect that the infection had been purposefully initiated. That would lead to what…war? In such war, many more millions would die. No, she couldn't allow things to play out.

She stared at the screen and began to type. She had two items to emphasize. One was that Ravi had to be found no matter where he had flown. She might be able to find a way to discover that online, but she knew governments could determine that within minutes. If Ravi were still in the air, they might be able to interdict and grab him. If he were already on the ground, they would be that much ahead of the game. But they had to find him. Jasmine made that forcefully important. Just because they had missed him in Rome didn't mean they could call off the search. They had to find him quickly.

That was the easy part. The second thing she had to insist upon was the quarantine. It would do no good to simply place him in a cell and watch for a few days. When he became infectious, and he would, anyone who came near would be in danger. While tuberculosis had been dangerous enough to stop him from going into Rome, it was not serious enough to mount a worldwide search. Many people throughout the world had been immunized against TB. Keeping Ravi out of the general population was not so grave. No, Jasmine needed another, a better reason to lock up Ravi for a week or so. And while she was loathe to tell the truth, she knew more lies would not do. But even as she knew she couldn't hide the truth, she still wanted to use whatever discretion she had at her disposal. After thinking for a minute or two, she typed in the final words.

There was another minute where her mouse was posed over the send button. Once sent, the wheels of chance would click one more time. The entropy of the universe would change, and it would never retreat.

She clicked the mouse.

The message disappeared into the ether.