As usual, the beggar had appeared from out of nowhere, and when he realized Lindell wasn't going to answer him, he began shouting and waving his arms. 'What's the matter with you, pal? Too good for me, is that it? Mr. Won't-Even-Look-Me-in-the-Goddamned-Eye. Mr. So-and-So-with-His-Leather-Briefcase-and-His-Hundred-Dollar- Haircut.'

He followed Lindell across the street, the pair of them sliding around on the ice like a couple of jackasses, and when they reached the dirty snow heaped in the opposite gutter, he climbed over after Lindell and grabbed hold of his sleeve. Lindell shook him off.

'Whoa,' the beggar said. 'Whoa now.' He held his hands out in a sign of contrition, wearing those fingerless black gloves that were the universal trademark of the urban poor. What, was Lindell supposed to believe that they couldn't afford to cover their fingers? Was that the idea?

'Hey, look, man, I'm sorry. I was just trying to get a rise out of you,' the beggar said. 'You know how it is. But you've got to understand I'm your friend, don't you, buddy? And friends look out for each other, right? So how about you check those pockets of yours again for me? I bet you've got some change you can spare for a good friend.'

Lindell could see that his usual policy of fabricating a convenient distraction – pretending that he had spotted someone he knew down the block or that his phone had just gone off – and striding purposefully away wasn't going to do the job this time. He kept walking, though, plugging his feet one after the other into the hard crust of the snow. 'Listen,' he snapped out, 'you're not going to chisel anything out of me, so why don't you just leave me the hell alone?'

Immediately the beggar fell away, giving a tight little laugh. 'Yes sir, your highness,' he said. 'Right away, Your-Majesty-on-His-Holy-Goddamn-Golden-Fucking-Throne.' He made a saluting gesture. Lindell glanced back just long enough to see him looking around for his next target.

Sometimes he thought there must be something about him that attracted such people from an infinite distance. You know the way that certain wild animals will scout around for miles in search of the cleanest place to empty their bowels? Well, he was the cleanest place, and they were the wild animals. It was uncanny. In every railway concourse or shopping mall, he was always the guy trailing the long line of religious cultists behind him, a bright, exploding flare of bald heads, orange robes, and ponytails. The freaks and the con artists, the drug addicts and schizophrenics: inevitably, no matter where he went, they seemed to zero right in on him. Even here in the city he could not seem to avoid them, whether it was the beggar with his patchy beard and his hard-luck stories or that nutcase with the bird fixation and the Jesus signs.

He stopped off at the coffee shop for an espresso. It was a Saturday, or what everyone had decided to regard as a Saturday, and he knew that the Coca-Cola offices would be mostly empty. No receptionist waiting to hand him his messages, no marketing staff gathered for the morning meeting. He sipped his drink at a tall counter looking out onto the sidewalk and the alley and a snow-covered basketball court with two metal hoops dripping chandeliers of ice where their nets ought to have been. The ice would crack into a thousand daggers at the very first basket, he thought. Swish, crash, boom, and there would be a few less players on the court the next day.

When he was finished, he took the crosswalk to the building on the other side of Erendira Street, unlocked the executive entrance, and closed it again behind him. Inside, the lobby was dark and quiet, with the weird theatricality and canyonlike feeling of spaciousness that all office buildings possess on the weekend. He rode the elevator to the seventh floor. The document he was looking for was in the top drawer of his desk. He had known for weeks that it would be best not to leave the thing lying around, but it was only the night before, while he was sipping a scotch and listening to some asshole broadcasting his jungle music for the whole building to hear, that he had finally decided what to do about it. So far, fewer than a dozen people knew what was what (or some of what was some of what, he should say, since despite their expertise nobody in the corporation had been able to piece together the whole story), and all of them had agreed that there was no earthly reason for them to tell anyone else. What was the use of drumming up trouble, after all, in a place where there was only peace and ignorance – a place where the peace, in fact, was the ignorance, and the ignorance was the peace?

To his last breath Lindell would continue to deny any responsibility for what had happened. It wasn't his fault. He couldn't have changed a single goddamned thing. Still, it was a fact that whoever had introduced the virus had done so only a few months after he and the PR department had initiated their white powder campaign, and the possibility that the whole chain of events was somehow inspired by the campaign – or even in answer to it – had definitely crossed his mind. The consumer affairs division had received any number of complaints during the high days of the congressional hearings and the media fuss, including at least one handwritten letter promising total world annihilation, but Lindell had learned from experience that there were cranks and failures beyond number in the world who blamed their lousy jobs and poor posture and the general lovelessness of their lives on some multinational corporation or another and who had nothing better to do than place angry phone calls and write menacing letters. Such people rarely if ever had the balls to act on their threats, for the simple reason that they were already defeated.

Yet somebody had decided to use Coca-Cola as the distribution nexus for the virus. That much was beyond doubt. The only questions to ask were who and why?

There were people in the PR division who were convinced that Islamic fundamentalists were to blame, or some group of anarcho-environmental zealots, or even, though it had been suggested mainly as a grim little joke, the Pepsi Corporation.

It seemed likely to Lindell, though, that whoever had devised the virus had no real grievance against Coca- Cola at all. They were simply looking for the product with the widest possible reach in the global marketplace, the one that would disseminate the virus with the most efficiency, and Coke was it.

Some ten years before, in response to falling transportation costs on one side of the equation and rising rates of water contamination on the other, the corporation had decided to centralize its processing operations in a single plant on the upper coast of Venezuela. It was cheaper to purify the entire soft drink supply in one location and then ship it the length of the world than it was to manufacture it in some fifty different noncontiguous locations and attempt to purify it on-site. Lindell had never been to the Venezuela plant, so he didn't know much about its layout, but his best guess was that someone had broken into whichever building held the processing equipment and introduced the virus directly into the syrup tanks. From there it had been mixed and bottled and carbonated, and then packaged and shipped around the world. And from there, undoubtedly, it had been consumed.

Of course, a lot of this was just guesswork on his part. He had sat in on the initial meeting between the CEO and the Infectious Agents Squad as the only delegate from the PR department. The one thing the IAS officers had been able to say for certain was that the contamination patterns suggested the virus was closely linked with Coca-Cola and that they intended to continue monitoring the situation.

The rest of the conversation had been very short. Lindell remembered it in its entirety.

'How many people are we talking about here?' the CEO had asked. 'A few thousand? A few hundred thousand?'

One of the IAS officers had caught the other's eye, and they had both frowned.

'What? A few million?' the CEO said. 'We wouldn't want to guess, sir.' 'More than that?' 'As I say, sir…'

'So what are we supposed to do? Are you asking the company to issue a recall order? I presume you people are working on a cure – an antidote or something.'

'The virus is lethal. That's all we've been authorized to tell you.' His voice shifted to a lower tone. 'I can add that it appears to be spreading rapidly, and not only within the Coke-drinking population.'

It was a moment before the CEO realized what the officer was implying – that it was too late to do anything at all. That the situation was out of their control. That they would just have to watch from the sidelines and hope for the best.

The CEO let out a sigh. 'I'll be motherfucked,' he said.

'That may be, sir.'

And then the IAS officers had left, and the rest of them had sat around the conference table staring blankly out of their faces until someone broke the silence with a 'Jesus H. Christ' and the CEO had pledged them all to secrecy.

Just a few days later, Lindell was working on a contingency press release disavowing any rumors of Coke's connection to the virus when the weblines began reporting that the thing had gone airborne and waterborne. And a day or two after that, he was preparing a crisis statement for the CEO to read to the board of directors when he

Вы читаете The Brief History of the Dead
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