Fire Will Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

say."
    "Who's
they?
" I wished I'd paid attention in Spanish class so I could read it myself.
    He rolled the mouse around again until the other picture came clear. "In Mexico, they still get away with 'authorities say' over something like this. They are not panic stricken about emerging infectious diseases and terrorists like the Americans."
    I wondered if "authorities' would be the Mexican government or American Intelligence.
    "Maybe USIC already knows about the dead dog," I said. "But send it to Hodji anyway. Tularemia. That's gotta be ShadowStrike."
    In the past two weeks, I could actually forget that Hamdani and I are infected with a strain of tularemia. The first day we were released from Beth Israel Hospital, I took down all the mirrors in the house or covered them with a towel. I am so used to looking at Shahzad's face that I forget to notice the hundred dots covering it, and I can't see my own face. We look more like chickenpox victims than tularemics, because we were struck with a waterborne mutation of the original that's about twelve times as potent in what it does to skin tissue. But our hundreds of bumpy dots haven't itched or burned in about ten days. They're just crusty. We have to sit on a pillow and toss around a lot while sleeping, but you can actually fail to remember for minutes at a time.
    He printed out the first page but hesitated after opening an e-mail to Hodji Montu. Hodji rarely responds to anything we send to him with more than a grunt or rolled eyes on his daily visits to check in on us and make sure we're behaving. He's the closest thing we've got to a father figure between the two of us. We're not supposed to be v-spying. We're underage. And we're supposed to be recovering from our brush with death.
    "Authorities found tularemia in tissue cells, according to this," Hamdani said. "But it is another mutation, apparently far stronger than what Catalyst had when he scratched us in the face."
    "USIC has grown men who sit around all day and surf for people and animals turning up dead," I reminded him. "I'm sure they know about it."
    "So, then, let us give them something they don't know..." he mused, and I took it more as a prayer to his Allah than a comment to me. He surfed again, this time for "dead dogs," "Mexico," and "April 2002."
    I met Hamdani on a Thursday in early March when he showed up as a new student in my school, which he was supposed to start attending like a regular student. He'd just arrived from Pakistan. I've been an expert hacker for going on three years, and I can detect my own likeness with just a few lines of idle chitchat. That night, I captured his screen at this Internet café where USIC had set him up as a v-spy, scripting the chatter of a ShadowStrike guy seated twenty terminals away. I figured out what he was up to in a minute and a half. The next day I invited myself to the party by giving USIC track 'n' translate programs (TNTs) that they couldn't refuse. Hamdani and I captured phone and Internet chatter like crazy from my house on Friday, and I got some idea that it would be an adrenaline rush to see the terrorists we'd been scripting.
    We went to a ShadowStrike recruitment party near Trinity Falls Saturday and pretended to be recruits. But we were acting too nervous and got skunked out by the leaders. Fortunately, Hodji had followed us and had the place raided—hence a lot of arrests were made. Catalyst was one of two recruiters there, though he never even got handcuffed. He took six USIC bullets in the head but managed to scratch us first.
    The Trinity Four, as we call Rain, Scott, Owen, and Cora, know of Hamdani only as the Kid. That's his USIC nickname, which was alluded to in a
Newsweek
article in January. Hodji has been down to see them at St. Ann's. He gives us updates on them, and once or twice he has told them stories about serving as a bodyguard to the Kid in Pakistan while the Kid scripted chatter of dangerous extremists who were seated three terminals away in