Free Code Orange by Caroline M. Cooney Page B

clear it and bought a bagel from a street vendor.

    “
Beowulf
really spoke to you, Mitty!” cried Mrs. Abrams joyfully. “As a topic for your paper for me, I suggest monsters in literature, to capitalize on that brilliant thinking.”
    Mitty debated saying “Huh? What?”or “I'm not sufficiently acquainted with literature to find the requisite number of monsters for a fair analysis.” He went with “Huh?”
    “Mr. Lynch tells me you're off and running on an outstanding report on smallpox,” said Mrs. Abrams. “Supposing you were to compare Grendel and the other monsters in
Beowulf
to the monsters of infectious disease?” Mrs. Abrams clapped her hands with excitement. “Smallpox!” she clarified.“Typhoid! Plague!”
    Mitty was horrified. He couldn't imagine the work such a paper would take. He wanted a topic that required no work. Most of all he wanted a topic with no fatal diseases.
    “Good,” said Mrs. Abrams.“That's settled.”

    Olivia IM'd. She was going to the girls' basketball game after school. Julianna was point guard. Zorah might be a starter. Did Mitty want to go?
    Mitty was not a big fan of girls' high school basketball. He wasn't a big fan of Julianna and Zorah either. He would have to think about this. “Tell you at lunch,” he wrote back.
    He didn't actually want to have lunch with anybody. He felt as if he had a new companion now, a very thoroughly lodged companion that would be with him until death. Variola major.
    At lunch, he was cornered by Derek, who would not shut up. Derek had decided it was not a crazy individual who had murdered poor old Ottilie Lundgren before she could finish reading her mystery novel, but a crazy country. “There's North Korea,” Derek began.“Talk about insanity.”
    There were whole continents that didn't interest Mitty, and North Korea was in one of them. Derek moved on to the Middle East, where the list of potential anthrax lovers was long: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. He named groups and causes, leaders and fanatics. Then he forged into Africa, where Sudan and Ethiopia were filled with crazed persons with appalling histories, where funding might come from diamonds in Sierra Leone, and where mercenaries were available from anyplace where there'd been a recent civil war, which was every place.
    Olivia began discussing how AIDS had invaded many African countries.
    Derek was annoyed. “I'm into terrorism, not sexually transmitted disease. My theory is that a rogue country is endlessly surfing the Net, looking for opportunities. Like investors endlessly researching profitable companies. The terrorists wouldn't specifically care what they found, anymore than you care whether your stock is in farm tractors or casinos—you just want to earn money. The terrorists don't care if they find anthrax or smallpox—they just want to kill people. So they get their anthrax or whatever, pick a place like Grand Central Station, send a million commuters into such a panic they never take a train into New York again, and that destroys the economy and brings down a mayor and a governor and a president, and of course you'd have plenty of Americans who'll be glad to see that mayor, governor and president brought down, so even though you're a terrorist and you're killing people, you'll have people on your side.”
    “No, you won't,” said Olivia sharply. “No matter how much people don't like the party in office—”
    “Your outfit will have operational security,” said Derek, raising his voice to drown Olivia out. “The guy in charge isn't going to scatter the anthrax. He's going to be a million miles away in the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan or Uzbekistan.”
    “The mountains of Afghanistan,” said Olivia predictably, “are not a million miles away.”
    Derek was now speaking exclusively to Mitty “The mastermind sends his instructions online. He's supervising his minions electronically, and if the minions die of anthrax, who cares? They were always