Cold Silence (16 page)

—

Protocol 80 had been theoretical, like a hundred other exercises that we'd worked on at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Rhode Island Avenue. And late some nights, on Grant Street, at the admiral's home.
My own kitchen cabinet
,
he called us as we pored over plans detailing food delivery in an outbreak, medical deployment, ways to distribute vaccines; ways, with transportation crippled, to move investigators around. Protocols for interviewing people who feared even the doctors sent to help.

Protocol 80 had been originally designed after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when lines of limousines had clogged roads out of Washington, filled with evacuating VIPs; heading for Mount Weather, the underground installation near Berryville, Virginia: 600 acres up top, 650,000 square feet underground, filled with lodging, radio and TV studios, even three 25-story buildings in which evacuees would live, work, and eat while running the government. In a nuclear attack, the limos would have been decimated. So we'd streamlined the process for those deemed crucial to get out.

“Continuity of government.”

Eddie quipped morosely, “Someone should have done this to Congress years ago. Quarantined 'em!”

In my head I saw what must have happened a few nights ago. I saw FBI agents working with lists of those to be evacuated, spreading out, knocking on doors, hustling frightened men, women, and children into idling cars in lightly falling snow.
Continuity of government
involves saving more than the President, Congress, and nine justices of the Supreme Court. It means saving the computer files of taxpayers, a Treasury Department midlevel clerk who heads up disability check delivery for veterans, the anonymous crucial cogs in the social security system, a scientist working on a secret chemical program, a spy master getting information from a high-level official in Iran, a rotating list of those deemed important at that particular moment, updated annually, a cast of thousands to be saved to guarantee the survival and operation of the Republic.

“Alpha,” I said. “Principal leaders to Mount Weather.”

“Beta,” said Eddie. “Congress to Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania,” which was another underground facility.

I saw more. I saw evacuation beginning in a two-story colonial in Bethesda, a Federalist home on Capitol Hill, a three-bedroom suite with lights blazing at 3
A.M.
, shared by three Congressmen, a Watergate apartment discreetly paid for by a billionaire Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for his mistress, who was asking, as he pulled on his pants,
Why can't I come, too?

The chosen would be hustled to designated triage hospitals; Georgetown or Walter Reed—for blood tests.
Healthy folks, step this way!
Babies crying. VIPs, some angry or scared, some meek and helpful, a few demanding special attention, which had happened in drills.

“Third group, Charlie,” said Chris. “Those remaining in the cutoff capital. Us.” She couldn't resist adding in a voice low with fury, “Ordering Las Vegas sandwiches.”

Her eyes swiveled to me. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry. But
sorry
is a pathetic word. It means nothing. It means too late, too stupid, too slow, too fatheaded.

“I'm not mad at you,” she said. “I can't believe I didn't stop you.”

“You couldn't have stopped me,” I said, trying to make her feel better. But it didn't come out right. It sounded aggressive. It sounded like I was telling her that I would have ignored her order even if she'd given it. And then I realized that I'd meant exactly that.

She turned red as Eddie's hand reached out and pointed. “Holy shit, One. It's a riot!”

“It's like Baghdad,” I said.

Aya said, eyes huge, “But it isn't Baghdad. It's here.”

—

Baghdad looting had looked different, of course. There we'd seen women wearing black chadors and veils carting baskets of oranges from a busted-up fruit stall, donkey carts loaded down with televisions, parades of men in short-sleeved shirts and sandals pushing hand carts piled with furniture, Lada taxis bulging with thousand-year-old museum artifacts, rogue soldiers rolling ergonomic office chairs out of a smashed-up furniture store.

Here we were stuck in traffic outside a supermarket parking lot where denizens of upper-middle-class Northwest Washington—high-level bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, even a Congressman's wife I recognized—fanned in a stream from the smashed Safeway windows with their gloved hands clutching bulging plastic bags, knapsacks, or cardboard boxes stuffed with loot. So many cars were trying to exit at the same time that traffic was blocked, the air filled with screams, shouts, horns.

“Must be one hell of a big sale,” Eddie said.

I saw an elderly woman fall and a man reach and pick up her mesh bag and run. I saw a Nissan Altima smash into a backing-up
Mini Cooper. I saw kids, roughly twelve-year-old identical twins, dressed in matching ski parkas, running between parked cars and carrying identical bulging canvas bags that read, SAVE THE PLANET. I saw a man in a police uniform breaking up a fight, but then I realized he wasn't doing that; he was carrying bags. He disappeared on foot as the first faint sharp edge of sirens became audible through the screaming and barking of a lone Labrador retriever in a car nearby.

“Hey, Eddie! That's Kendall Bates,” I said, recognizing a looter.

Bates was a State Department analyst who sat in on planning sessions at HS. Now he was dressed out of the movie
Fargo
, calf-high furred boots, ballooning green down parka, furred flap-eared hat, surgical mask slipped down off his panicked face, and his breath frosted as he threaded parked cars, heading our way, hauling bound-up starter fireplace logs in each hand.

I put my mask on and rolled down the window halfway and called, “Kendall!” He stopped, heaving, wild eyed, hearing his name, but needing a moment to place my face. Recognition replaced confusion. Bates was medium sized with a largish head, small eyes, and arms that seemed long, partly due to the too-short sleeves of the parka, partly because the wood weighed him down and made him slump, simian-like.

“Colonel Rush,” he said in his official State Department voice, as if we sat in his office over coffee.

All around us people were running. Bates looked down at his starter logs like a kid caught stealing chocolate bars in a candy store. He stood mortified and frightened, as if I'd arrest him, which I could not. I just asked, ignoring the loot, “What happened here?”

He relaxed slightly, seeing that I wasn't trying to stop him. I recalled that one time during a conference—
bioterror in the new century—
when he'd made reference to having three children, and living near here. He probably owned one of the big Victorian homes
nearby, expensive when heating bills came. He was probably planning on stuffing those chemical logs into his fireplace, trying to provide heat or light, or maybe he was trying to get ready in case the power went out.

He said, gasping from the running and the cold, “It was orderly. But then one woman started an argument by the vegetable section,
it's mine
. And then someone else started yelling about needing more food than other people. The guy had six children. How come childless couples got the same amount as him, he shouted.” Kendall's voice sped up. “Someone pushed me. Then Frank Carlyle, my neighbor, broke for the door without paying . . . and . . .”

He was heaving. A man with an overcoat open to a clerical collar ran by, carrying a stuffed shopping bag.

“The front window shattered. I guess someone threw something.”

The sirens—multiple ones—sounded very loud now.

“Get away, Joe. They're shooting looters on the news. But I'm not . . . my neighbors . . .
I'm not a looter
.” He looked down at the stuff in his hands. He said, “I'm just me. I'll come back and pay later. I will!”

“Sure you will,” Eddie said in a flat voice.

Washington as truncated capital, an instant, enormous, upside-down refugee camp for the once elite. I stared at Kendall Bates. Somehow he looked smaller than usual. Part of his job—until now—had involved facilitating food aid delivery to suffering nations. I recalled that one time in a meeting he'd complained that more guards were needed to keep aid from being stolen in southern Sudan.

“There must be order!” he'd said.

He ran now, past the priest, who was trying to unlock his car, Kendall's boots leaving skid marks in the clumpy snow.

My eyes fixed on the priest. The man's hands were shaking so
hard he couldn't get the key in the lock of his Mini Cooper.
A priest
. I stared, fascinated, as the admiral got us moving.

What was it about a priest? No, that wasn't it. It was something else,
triggered by
the sight of a priest.

“You said to try other avenues,” I said thoughtfully to everyone in the car.

Chris, hearing my request, grew quiet and then, shocked, erupted in a mother's rage. “I can't believe you're even thinking this!
I just can't believe you!
”

I could not fault her. But if we went to Georgetown, we'd be stuck there, so I kept my eyes on the admiral's in the rearview mirror. “Were you serious about what you said, sir, about other ideas? Little detour? Or not?”

“Oh, let's go!” enthused Aya.

“Not a chance,” snapped Chris.

“Admiral?”

“No.”

I wasn't surprised. And I was ready. I said, “You said we had to get to campus, but we don't have a mandatory arrival time. Once in, we can't leave. But we're not there yet. So how about
this?
”

—

Orrin Sykes sat in his Honda outside the Georgetown University Medical Center and fretted. Harlan Maas had told him that Joe Rush was supposed to be stationed here, had landed hours ago, and was on his way, but the man had still not shown up.

“I want confirmation that he goes inside,” Harlan had said.

The campus had been sealed by Marines, and anyone entering the sprawling complex had to use the Reservoir Road entrance. The grounds included a collection of redbrick hospital and research buildings, med offices, restaurants, a parking garage, the adjoining
college campus, and the Jesuit cemetery. McDonough Arena was set up to handle overflow patients. Student and faculty housing had been given over to med staff.

Sykes observed the grounds from a block lined with small attached townhouses, each featuring an identical patch of snow-dusted lawn. An assembly line of private shared student housing or midlevel bureaucrat homes.

“Once he goes in, he can't get out without a pass, and he won't get that pass,” Harlan had assured Sykes.

Sykes had to go to the bathroom. He used an empty mayonnaise jar and sealed it back up. He sipped water to stay hydrated. All vehicles bound for the medical center formed a line on Reservoir Road that inched toward the sandbagged guard booth. The line moved so slowly that Sykes could see inside the cars.

Why wasn't Rush here?

Then Orrin saw him.

Sykes pressed the glasses close. A Toyota 4Runner had just taken up position as eighth car in line. The back window was down. Rush was unmistakable, arguing with the four other people in the car, and Sykes matched the face of Eddie Nakamura to Harlan's provided photo on the front seat. There was Chris Vekey. And the admiral. And some kid.

Sykes felt relieved. They were here.

But suddenly the 4Runner halted, the argument grew animated, the back door opened, and Rush got out. Then everyone else got out, too. The argument was continuing. Sykes's consternation grew.

The four other passengers stayed on the sidewalk. Rush climbed back into the 4Runner, into the driver's seat.

Nakamura tried to open the passenger-side front door, but Rush locked him out. Nakamura knocked on the window clearly asking to get in.

“Shit!” Sykes said.

The other passengers began walking toward the driveway entrance, digging in their bags or coat pockets for ID.

The 4Runner broke from the line, made a U-turn, and headed back along Reservoir Road, toward central Georgetown. Rush was the only one inside now.

Sykes put the Honda in gear and pulled out from his space and rounded the corner, skidding slightly on slush. He could see the red brake lights on the 4Runner half a block ahead, where Rush turned onto Tunlaw Road.

Sykes reached for the encrypted cell phone as he followed Rush back up toward Wisconsin Avenue, in lightly falling snow, making sure to keep a block behind. He could not get closer without risking being spotted, since there were only two vehicles on the road.

It was easy to hang back and keep Rush in sight. Three minutes later, it became clear where Rush was going.

Rush figures things out
, Harlan had told Sykes.

Uh-oh
, Sykes thought, reaching to call Harlan
Maas.

“What do you want to know about leprosy?” the Very Reverend Nadine Huxley asked.

She was dean of the National Cathedral, America's intersection point between God and government. Here lay saints and soldiers, tributes to both heaven and earth. I'd entered the gray Gothic building beneath the gaze of rooftop gargoyles including the movie villain Darth Vader. He stared out beside traditional demons and monsters, set there after children across the nation voted to add a modern icon to the collection. Inside, stained glass windows depicted religious figures but also the Apollo 11 moon mission. Altar pieces in Saint Mary's Chapel showed the mother of Jesus near a statue of Abraham Lincoln, whose visage, in pennies, lined the floor. The Humanitarian Bay honored Saint Francis of Assisi and also George Washington Carver, who'd studied peanuts. Last time I'd been here, I'd attended the funeral of astronaut Neil Armstrong. Diana Krall had sung, “Fly Me to the Moon.” Not exactly religious fare.

Now I stood with Nadine Huxley in the Miracle Chapel, beneath
the window mosaic depicting lepers. Nadine was a small, trim blonde in black, with a clerical collar snug against her white throat. We both wore surgical masks. Behind us, all three rows of seats were crowded with worshippers, some of whom were clearly sick and should have been at the hospital. A man walked in behind me and knelt. His lips moved. I felt his eyes shift to me. He was praying.

I told the dean, “So far we've been concentrating on medical aspects. I'm curious about leprosy in religion.”

I knew Dean Huxley from her previous posting in Boston, where she'd returned from a leprosy mission in India, and addressed staffers at the Wilderness Medicine Program on treatment in poorer countries. I'd found her a brilliant and sensitive person, who managed to mesh a deep appreciation of the Bible with one of science. She had no problem mixing the biblical and the political, the biblical and the scientific. That's what I wanted to hear now.

“Leprosy?” she said. “In the Old Testament, it is basically a punishment. “The word itself is a translation from the Hebrew
tzoraat
, or ‘smiting.' Moses asks Pharoah to let his people go, allow Jewish slaves to exit from Egypt, and he touches his chest as a threat, as if he's leprous. Leprosy was punishment for
lashon hara
, slander. When Miriam mocks Moses, she is punished by God with leprosy.
Tzoraat
is often in the Old Testament. Read Leviticus. It's all over the place.”

“As a punishment,” I repeated.

“For ridiculing God's messenger, or message, yes.”

“And in the New Testament? The same?”

There were many more worshippers here than usual. Some watched Nadine. Others were engrossed in prayer. Smarter ones wore surgical masks and gloves against infection. Others ignored precautions, which was stupid, considering that this place drew the sick. I saw couples holding hands, parents who had brought children. What I saw was undoubtedly repeating itself in towns and cities all over the country. Churches, mosques, and synagogues
would be hosting a steady stream of terrified supplicants, seeking divine help.

Above us, in windows, lepers knelt before Christ, frozen in colored glass. The art commemorated events considered divine and, like Bible Fever as Admiral Galli called it, allegedly violated the laws of nature. Twenty-two panels showed impossible events, made true by the Lord. Jesus walking on the sea. The healing of the blind, the man with dropsy, the demonic, lepers.

“In the New Testament, leprosy is cured by prophets. It's an affliction, not a punishment,” she said. “In Latin, ‘
Et cum ingrederetur quoddom castellum, occurrerunt ei decem viri leprosy, qui steterunt a longe.
' ‘And as Christ entered a town, ten leprous men met him, standing at a distance . . .'”

I noticed that some of the people who had been praying were now listening to us. Some stared outright.

“Can we continue this somewhere else?” I asked.

“Are you here officially, Joe?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then we stay here,” she said, “for them.”

I sighed. “You said that in the Old Testament, leprosy was punishment for mocking God or his prophets. Have you ever heard of the Sixth Prophet? A person? A book? A mention? Anything at all?”

“‘The Sixth Prophet'? Why do you ask?”

“I'm not sure. I'm just asking.”

“Well, there are so many ways to answer that, so many prophets. Oral ones. Written ones. Minor ones. A prophet is an oracle of God. A prophet's primary duty is to convey the holy word. In the American Orthodox Church, Micah would be the sixth. He prophesied the birth of the Savior. In the Mormon Church, Joseph F. Smith was, I believe, its sixth prophet. Islam has twenty-five prophets. Abraham is sixth. Where are you going with this?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Is there a connection? The outbreak and prophets?”

I tried to remember the exact words that the two men in Somalia had been singing. I couldn't. I said, “I never knew there were so many prophets.”

She laughed. “Well, in three thousand years of history, you get a big list. Saint Anthony was a patron for Saint Anthony's fire, thought to be leprosy. Saint Bernard of Siena cured lepers. Saint Damian died afflicted. And those are so-called real prophets. There are plenty of false ones, coming out of the woodwork all the time. Cult prophets. Visit any asylum, you'll find a dozen prophets.”

“So Old Testament, punishment. New Testament, not.”

“Nothing's that easy. Jacobus de Voragine was archbishop of Genoa, thirteenth century. His writings charged that Emperor Constantine was punished by God with leprosy for persecuting Christians. So while the official version was cures, even churchmen pointed fingers.”

“Of all the diseases, why did this one stand out?”

Dean Huxley sighed. “Even into this century, leprosy victims have been shunned and stigmatized. Shut away. Mocked. It's a cruel, cruel disease. Leprosy was considered a test by God.
Mithraism
may be the earliest remaining human religion, Joe. It is still practiced in some places. It's thirty-five hundred years old. Mithras was a god, principle rival to Christ for five hundred years. The movement had similar sacraments. Adherents called their priests ‘father.' Early Christians attacked Mithraic cult temples, smashed their statues, destroyed their graveyards, killed believers. Many scholars believe that if Rome had not become Christian, today Mithraism would be one of the principal religions on Earth. What's the difference between a cult and a religion anyway? Some thinkers say the only difference is how many people belong.”

She looked sad, not because Christianity had won out, but because suffering had taken place.

I asked, “What did Mithraism have to do with leprosy?”

“Well, they had a sanctuary in France, near Bourg-Saint-Andéol. They regarded the spring there as having healing power. In the middle ages they brought people suspected of having leprosy there, stood 'em up by the bank, and had the town barber bleed them. They'd mix the blood with the spring water. If the blood remained red and liquid, the suspect was pronounced clean. What are you staring at?”

In some ways, the year might as well have been 1200. The pews might have been filled with peasants and dukes. The expressions on the faces around me were probably as similar to those long-dead people as the DNA inside them, and the bacteria multiplying in their bloodstreams.

“The window,” I said. “The lepers. Leprosy and religions. I'm thinking about what you said.
”

Nadine said with some delicacy, lowering her voice, “Joe, you look tired. Eddie called a few weeks back, and told me that you spend too much time alone in the woods.”

“Eddie is an asshole.”

“No, he's not. You know, Joe, the French writer André Malraux wrote that everyone is really three people: the one you show the world, the one you think you are, and the one who you
really
are.”

“So you know who I am but I don't?”

“I would never be that presumptuous.”

“The world was simpler when Malraux was alive.”

“It was never that.”

“Oh, I think you'll agree that we face a few new complex problems just now, Nadine.”

“Technically, yes. But in the end, complexity is something humans dream up to deny truth.”

I appreciated the concern but the preaching irritated me, especially now. “I'm not going to play this game so you can feel better, Nadine. There are more important things to do.”

Unfazed, she said, “You don't believe in God anymore?”

I shook my head. “Oh, I do. That's the problem. But he and I made a deal.”

“Which is?”

“I agree to keep making the choices he throws at me, and he agrees to keep me away from love.”

“What does one thing have to do with the other?”

I saw Karen, dead, in an abandoned house in Alaska. I was startled to have that image switch to a vision of Chris Vekey, which I pushed away. “I've killed people, Nadine. I'd do it again. Eddie thinks I feel guilty about it but he's wrong.” I poked my chest.
I signed the deal here.
I said, “No more dragging in other people.”

“Joe, we both know that you can't make deals with him, he doesn't work that way, and if you think you have, you're fooling yourself.”

“All kinds of new things seem to be going on.”

—

It was impossible for Orrin Sykes to hear what Joe Rush and the dean were saying. He'd knelt only eight feet from them, but they spoke in low voices, and the prayers around him were loud. Sykes wished he could get closer, but that might draw Rush's attention. He'd hoped that the cathedral would be one of those places where you could stand on one side of a room and, through weird acoustics, hear whispers on the other. You were always reading about
whisper corners
in castles or cathedrals.

There was no whisper corner here.

The prayers fell silent for a moment and Sykes watched Rush. Through the quiet he heard a single phrase.

The Sixth Prophet
.

Sykes rose and looked down at the worshipper beside him, a
heavyset jowly guy wearing a Washington Redskins hat and a jacket. He was a football fan and that had been his undoing. The condiments had been infected before Sykes arrived in Washington, during a game against the New York Giants. Hundreds of people putting mustard or ketchup on their burgers and hot dogs had consumed the bug. Orrin saw sores on the man's lips. The man had to know what was happening. He was staring up at the depiction of Christ. Sykes could read the moving lips, “Save me, save me.”

Sykes thought, with real compassion,
After you die, you will change into something new.

Sykes got to his feet and, with a backward glance at Joe Rush, made his way back down the nave and past the redwood-sized columns and beneath the soaring V-shaped ceiling, past the Woodrow Wilson Bay, where the remains of the Twenty-eighth President were buried. Past the Lee-Jackson Bay, which depicted scenes from the lives of U.S. Civil War generals. Past the Folger Bay, where windows honored eighteenth-century explorers who opened the American West.

Outside, the snow had thickened, and fell heavily, and Orrin Sykes left rapidly filling tracks as he made his way back toward the car. Rush was still inside. Sykes called Harlan, who went oddly silent when he heard the report. Sykes was unaccustomed to detecting any sign of doubt in Harlan. But when Harlan spoke, it was with the same soothing tones he used day to day back home.

“He
asked
about the Sixth Prophet, Orrin?”

“About the term. The words.”

“He's alone, you said. Major Nakamura isn't there?”

“No.”

“There's nothing in the reports I saw about this. No guard with him? Private car? You said you saw him arguing with the others in the admiral's car?”

“I don't know for sure. I think I saw it.”

“Did he phone anyone?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did he mention Columbia County?”

“I couldn't hear well. Everyone was praying.”

Harlan muttered something bitter, which Orrin could not make out, then said, “He was told to stay out of the investigation.
He's supposed to be out!
And he's still in the church now, but you left?”

“I thought you'd want to hear this right away.”

“Right. Of course.
But why is he asking? Does he know something? Or is he fishing?
”

Harlan gave Orrin instructions then. He knew that what he requested was risky, but it was necessary, he said. “If there's a way to talk to him, a way to pick his brain, that would help us very much, Orrin.”

“But there's people going in or out every few minutes. And you never know if someone will appear.”

“Remember those things you did in Iraq? That you confessed? I told you then there was a reason for everything, there's a reason you learned those skills. You must call upon those skills now. A skill is neither good nor bad by itself.”