Then he pisses over everything. He drenches the clothes and continues on to the bed, training the hot yellow stream on the pillow.
That done, he snatches the fire-engine-red hat from a bedpost and knuckle-walks into the hallway bathroom. The wall bolts of the sink creak as he pulls his weight onto it.
He looks at himself in the mirror and positions the red hat on his own head at a rakish angle. He crouches on the edge of the sink, opposable toes gripping the porcelain rim, staring at himself.
Attila sits blank-faced on the sink, motionless and tense, as he stares into his own glassy brown eyes, his rubbery, masklike face. Attila is confused, becoming more agitated by the moment. Something strange and awful is stirring in his soul. He feels alienated by his own reflection.
From the moment Natalie arrived, Attila had detected an odd, unsettling smell—a mixture of the apricot scent of her shampoo, her minty deodorant, even the slight acrid whiff of nail polish on her toes. There was something queasy, bad, sickening about the combination of smells on her. All those grubby odors mingled with the worst smell of all—the scent of her, her resentment of him, her disgust. He smelled that. He had smelled her contempt.
That’s why he had tricked her.
Attila returns to his cage. From the corner he retrieves what looks like a children’s toy tablet. It is a PECS—a Picture Exchange Communication System—a talking touch-screen laptop designed to help teach language to autistic children, which Oz has used in his experiments with Attila.
On the screen are rows of pictures, things that Attila might want, such as bananas, peanuts, balls, and dolls. Also scattered among the columns are pictures of faces displaying various expressions.
Again and again, Attila presses the picture representing himself, and then the face in the lower right-hand corner of the grid.
“Attila,
Book Three
HOME SWEET HOME
Chapter 34
MAUN TO JOHANNESBURG, Johannesburg to New York, New York to D.C. The chirping of the jet’s landing gear and the accompanying jolt of bumping wheels woke me up as we touched down at Reagan National Airport.
As we thudded along the runway I gaped out the window at the majestic and welcome sight of the Washington Monument’s ivory spire across the Potomac. I remembered coming down to D.C. from New York on Amtrak with my dad to see the sights when I was a kid. We would visit the Lincoln Memorial, throw pennies in the reflecting pool. Everything had seemed so solid then. So rational and safe.
I reached into the seat-back pocket in front of me and took out the DVR tape of the lion attacks that I’d smuggled out of Africa. That was then, I thought, shaking my head at it. This is now. Then I slipped the tape into my shirt pocket.
I turned on the iPhone I’d bought in the airport: my in-box was flooded with e-mails, and there were nineteen voice mails. During the layover in Johannesburg I’d been contacting every scientist I could think of who might have any interest in HAC.
I’d put out the Bat-Signal all over the world, and had managed to scramble together a last-second rendezvous with several of my allies before my meeting with Senator Gardner. This was our first shot at getting HAC taken seriously by the world, and I wanted to go over everything one last time to make sure we had our story straight.
I looked beside me at Chloe, sleeping peacefully with her head against my arm.
No wonder she was exhausted. We’d talked pretty much nonstop on our transcontinental trip back to the States, going over all possibilities about HAC. I was a little amazed at how quickly we also slid into more personal matters. Our childhoods, families, the kinds of things that really mattered.
Chloe’s mother had died when she was five. Her father was a career military man, an officer in the French Foreign Legion, who often left her on her grandparents’ isolated cattle farm in Auvergne. Her grandfather, a retired civil engineer turned farmer, opened her eyes to the wonders of the natural world—farming, gardening, and especially animals.
As the plane wheeled toward the terminal, Chloe woke up and, seeing me watching her, sat upright as she rubbed her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” I said as the seat belt light bonged off.
When we’d made it off the plane, I stopped in front of a breaking-news feed scrolling across a newsstand TV.
“What is it?” Chloe said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping CNN picked up on the animal attacks in Botswana.”
It was craziness, all right. But not ours. A girl with a shaved head, some sort of pop singer, was attacking a car with a broken umbrella while a dozen paparazzi recorded her every move.
KITTY KATRINA SHAVES HEAD, ATTACKS PAPARAZZI. HAS KITKAT GONE OFF THE DEEP END? shouted the crawler at the bottom of the screen.
“Who’s Kitty Katrina?” Chloe said, looking at the screen, confused.
I shrugged.
“Welcome to America,” I said.
Chapter 35
THE ROCKFORD HOTEL, where our meeting was scheduled to take place, is situated in a run-down, slightly sketchy area of southeast D.C. across the water from Buzzard Point.
We checked into separate rooms and dropped off our things. I showered and used the quick moment of peace and solitude before the meeting to call Natalie. It was early afternoon on a Wednesday, and I was pretty sure she was off work at the moment. Her phone rang until I got her voice mail.
“You’ve reached the voice-mail box of”—said a robot, and then a pause, and Natalie’s bright bell of a voice carefully saying her own name—“Natalie Shaw.”
“Please leave a message after the tone.”
“Hi, Natalie,” I said into the void, looking out the hotel window at the Potomac. “I’m back in the States. I saw your e-mail. I just wanted to talk things out. I’m in D.C. right now, but I’ll be back in New York tomorrow, I hope. Let me know what’s up.”
In fact, I was mainly worried about Attila. It had been almost a week since I’d left him. I hadn’t heard back from Mrs. Abreu, either. I hoped he was all right.
I had work to do.
“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Chloe asked as we entered the shabby hotel ballroom. The carpeting was criminally ugly—stain-mottled and worn thin in the heavily trafficked spots.
There was a small crowd milling around a table set with cheap hors d’oeuvres, water pitchers, and coffee urns. It was a sea of flannel, glasses, and beards, swarming around the free food as enthusiastically as the vultures I’d seen in the Okavango Delta.
