Cold Silence (22 page)

“Let me give you a push, Joe. And thank you. Tell the admiral. Thank
all
of you for working so hard.”

—

Wisconsin Avenue was plowed along a single lane running north-south, so police or troops could pass. I was alone on the road at the moment, and felt exposed, but had little choice. If I could convince Burke or Havlicek to send people to Upstate New York, there could be Marines in helicopters there in an hour. If I couldn't, I had to go.

Turn left, and I'd head for the Pentagon or FBI, to try a direct appeal. Head down Nebraska, to Homeland Security? Burke had threatened to lock me away in Leavenworth. By now he'd probably issued orders to that effect. Or was he the one who had sent Robert Morton to kill me?

Turn right and I'd drive toward the Beltway, and Interstate 95, out of Washington.

I turned right.

Hell, I'll have a better chance if I stay away and hope that one of my messages gets through. There's no guarantee that even if one does, it will convince anyone. No guarantee that the traitor won't block it.

I stepped down on the accelerator gently. The one open lane had been salted. I heard the tires crunching on the granular result. On a normal day, I could make New Lebanon in eight hours. But now I could be stopped any minute by police or soldiers, even before I reached the Beltway.

Now, every block is a risk.

Driving, I pulled out Robert Morton's tape cassette. The Prius was ten years old, so the sound system gave riders the option of listening to cassettes as well as CDs.

HARLAN AT CHRISTMAS
.

I inserted the cassette in the slot, and listened, horror growing, as the Prius skidded north.

Major Edward Nakamura watched the striped curtain slide open in the emergency room alcove, and the next patient walked in. He tried to smile sympathetically at the woman, who was clearly terrified and sick and fighting panic. Eddie was exhausted from lack of sleep and worry for his wife and daughters and for Joe Rush. He'd been working for ten hours straight. He'd not eaten in eight. The scrape of the curtain sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. The announcements over the intercom seemed louder by the minute. A man was screaming out in the ER, “
How long do you have to wait for help around here anyway!”

Eddie said calmly, “I know you're scared. I'm going to do all I can for you. Would you mind undressing down to your underwear?”

The woman was forty-two, the admission form said, and had been in decent health only days ago. Now the face was ravaged, the symptoms identical to ones he'd been looking at helplessly for hours. Diagnosis wasn't complicated, a six-year-old could do it.

Any serious disease in your family? No. Any allergies to medicines? No. Onset of first symptoms? Four days ago.

He said smoothly, listening to her galloping heart, “Every patient we see adds to our knowledge about the disease. You never know when the big break will come. It could come at any time. Let's check your blood pressure.”

Then came the standard leprosy check. He poked the eight spots on her hands and feet to test sensation, which she lacked. He checked the eyes for inflammation, and found a forest fire of inflamed veins. Squeezed the base of the thumb, the median nerve. Checked the ulnar nerve for tenderness by the eyes, for a lack of ability to shut them.

What's the point of diagnosing the same thing over and over? What we really need is to kill it. The normal multidrug therapy has no effect at all against both the paucibacillary and the multibacillary strains. Complicate that with fasciitis, and the fucking third piece that the CDC finally identified today, the tiniest almost hidden fraction of norovirus DNA. Making it spreadable by touch and air. Making it the goddamn hydrogen bomb of man-made disease.

“Thanks so much, Mrs. Haverhill. Take your paperwork down the hall to the nurses' station. The helpful folks there will set up a bed.”

Yeah, except every bed is filled and we've got people coming in faster than we can handle them.

He took a break, which meant that he turned his attention from the endless patients to Joe. He had a cell phone connected into the encrypted emergency med network, and security network. He tried Burke's office and got the overworked fourth-tier assistant again, who'd been clearly ordered to keep Joe's and Eddie's calls away. He tried the Junior Senator from Alaska—a woman he and Joe knew from work there—but the office was shut and the Senator underground. He reached FBI Special Agent Ray Havlicek and got a noncommittal “We're aware of Colonel Rush's theory.” He called a D.C.
police commander and former Marine, who told him, after checking records as a personal favor, that “Rush is on a special list. We're to hand him over to the FBI if we get him. And he's wanted for murder, by us, Eddie.”

The commander added, somewhat harder, “He shot at cops, Eddie. The way things are out there, things getting worse, no one sleeping, tempers rising, I can't guarantee that if we find him, he'll be brought in alive.”

—

“Do you think I enjoy seeing so many people suffer?” said the warm, calm tones of Harlan Maas.

Connecticut Avenue was in slightly better shape than Wisconsin had been. There were two cleared lanes on each side, but traffic remained sparse. I passed locked-up strip malls and apartment buildings with private guards outside, or perhaps they were vigilantes. Traffic lights still worked, sending directions into an anarchistic void. The voice on the tape was soothing, therefore more terrifying. I thought I heard the voice catch, as if the man battled away tears.

“Do you think I enjoy knowing that we will have a role in children losing parents? Men and women with faces eaten away? Neighbors fighting people who they once considered their best friends?”

The road—if open—would take me into Maryland at Chevy Chase Circle, a few miles ahead. It would continue through residential suburbs until reaching the ramp to the Beltway, and I-95 North. I passed an apartment building where Army Rangers in biogear were arresting people; herding at least two dozen handcuffed men into a canvas-topped truck. Police and soldiers had opened mass detention centers, Admiral Galli's TV had informed me. Those arrested would be confined there, possibly for weeks, before they could get a lawyer. And that was if, the announcer said, courts reopened at all.

“Hopefully within a month, there will be a way to process these people. We can only wait and do our best,” the mayor had said.

When the Humvee swung in behind me, I was planning the trip: I-95 to Baltimore, then past Wilmington, Delaware. I'd exit on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, avoiding New York City. I'd hopefully figure out how to get gas. If not, I'd come up with another way to move. I'd stay on the west side of the Hudson River at first and make my way to Columbia County, and New Lebanon, New York.

As for the cult and compound, I'll wait to see the place first, then decide what to do.

In the little rectangle of rearview mirror, I saw the boxy Humvee swing onto the road, stay back, and follow.

Harlan Maas said, “I can't stop thinking about those poor sufferers; yet we must ask, why were these people chosen? The scientists in Somalia were out to disprove creation. Imagine! Making lies up about rocks and sediments to argue that human beings are descended from apes!”

What?

“The actors and directors making that film at Paramount would have mocked my father's work, if not stopped.”

It can't be this
, I thought.
Who is his father?

“The air base, where prayers were banned! The sports stadiums! Where thousands ignored Holy Sundays! My friends! The last time I came to Earth, I told my followers . . . Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Don't you think I know that we have done that? But there was no other way.”

He thinks he's Jesus Christ!

“When I see a little child, a six-year-old boy or girl, sick, I admit it, I ask myself, maybe we should stop,” said Harlan Maas.

I've got to get this tape to the right people!

The voice began weeping. I heard great intakes of air. The voice composed itself enough to begin speaking again.

“But this suffering will end all suffering for all of humanity. When the transformation is complete, those hurt will be whole. War and hunger will be memory. As we begin the last phase, I thank you for your faith and love. You are the special ones. You will lead the world into a new age of peace, love, and understanding.”

What does he mean, “the last phase”?

Something went wrong with the tape. It snagged and tore. The Humvee in the mirror closed the gap between us, but I did not speed up, despite the urge. My armpits were soaked. I stopped at a light and the sand-colored vehicle pulled up beside me. The soldier in the passenger seat wore sunglasses, and his face—with the helmet on and surgical mask—turned in my direction.

I reached and tried to remove the cassette from the player. A long, thin trail of snagged plastic film caught in the slot. When the Humvee's horn boomed beside me, I realized the light had turned green. But the tape was still snagged; the cassette dropped toward the wet carpet as I pressed down on the accelerator. The Humvee fell in behind me again. I saw the front rider on a phone, gesturing toward me, checking on my license plate, I guessed.

Harlan Maas, whoever he was, hung upside down in plastic, swinging back and forth and knocking gently against my right knee each time I hit a bump.

Ahead, some kind of portable traffic alert sign was coming up on the side of the road. The Humvee closed the gap again as I approached Chevy Chase Circle, the border with Maryland. Funny thing about those traffic circles. They were designed by Frenchman Pierre L'Enfant, George Washington's city planner. L'Enfant created traffic circles so that troops could gather there, to repel invaders or deal with rebellious citizens. And now a rebellious citizen, me, approached a traffic circle. The headlights on the Humvee flashed on and off. There was a loud-hailer on top but the soldiers did not use it. There was no way I could outrun a Humvee. I thought they wanted me to pull over. I was
preparing to do that, trying to think of a lie to tell them, when I read the words on the electric flashing sign.

MARYLAND CLOSED TO VEHICULAR TRAFFIC BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR
.
DO NOT PROCEED PAST CHEVY CHASE CIRCLE
.
VIRGINIA ALSO CLOSED
.
D
.
C
.
RESIDENTS
,
GO HOME
!
STAY SAFE
!

To turn back, you needed to go around the traffic circle. I saw a couple of cars—their drivers must have also been trying to flee the city—going all the way around and coming back toward me now. The faces inside these cars were furious or frightened; crying children in one car, a couple arguing in another. On the far side of the circle sat a line of idling Maryland National Guard vehicles, and troops ready to stop anyone attempting to enter the state.

I took a chance that the soldiers in the Humvee had not been trying to stop me, but to warn me. Nauseous with tension, I took a right turn into the circle. When it was clear that I was going back into the city, the Humvee peeled away and stopped on the far side of the circle, by the National Guard line.

Little soldier-to-soldier social call, now that duty was done.

I'd sweated through my shirt.

Safe, for the moment. But trapped in D.C.

As I headed back into the city, I had no goal except to get distance from the soldiers. I didn't touch the dangling cassette until I was a mile away. Then I pulled off Connecticut and onto a suburban-type side street. I was breathing hard, as if I'd just sprinted a mile. I hit the windshield wiper knob by accident, and the wipers slashed back and forth before I stopped them. When I tried to ease the tape from the slot, it ripped again. Three feet of tape dangled on one side, a foot long strip from the other.

Tape lay spooled in a mass on the wet carpet.

What do I do? I can't go back to the house. I can't turn myself in or
I'll end up in one of those detention centers, or in a military prison. I don't even know if the tape is audible anymore.

High above, I saw a lone jet leave a fading contrail as it angled into the blue, looking more like a vestige from history than a common sight. Looking as far away as Venus. The airport—any place with police and soldiers—would be out of the question. To board a plane, I'd need ID and a ticket that cost ten times the usual price, and even then, I'd need a medical check. Roads would be blocked. Military flight? Private airfield? I sat there thinking, with a pile of prepaid phones on the backseat, and my fuel supply draining away while I didn't move. I could not fly planes. At a private field I'd need a plane and a pilot. Did I know a pilot? I knew one in Alaska, and a few in Kenya. I had an old Parris Island buddy who'd retired as a major and now owned a small Cessna in Provo, Utah. They were all thousands of miles away.

I thought harder, spooling some twisted tape back into the cassette. Try to lie my way onto a private air base, if it wasn't guarded? Hope I find a pilot hanging around? Try to hijack a plane? Was I that desperate?

It was over.

Turn yourself in. Throw yourself on their mercy. Give them the ripped-up tape and hope they can fix it, and that they bother to listen to it. There is no other way.

Doggedly, I told myself there would be no harm in trying to find a private airfield. Maybe a bolt of luck would strike. Then I had a better idea. Not exactly a good one. Just better than anything else I'd considered so far.

—

As the Prius reached Anacostia, I realized that I wasn't the only one who had this idea. The onetime home for the Nacotchtank Indians,
on the banks of the Anacostia River, was named for that long-slaughtered tribe. They'd hunted black bear and deer in the woods that once stood here. I drove through an impoverished, ratty wasteland neighborhood famed for its street gangs and high crime.

Freight trains are still running
, the newscaster on WUSA9 had said. I hoped that she was still right.

Back during the Great Depression, tens of thousands of Americans had hopped freight trains to move around the country. Now as I cruised Anacostia's commercial strip, I saw more moving cars than elsewhere, and from the packed belongings inside, and nervous faces, I realized that these refugees sought the rail yard, too.

My GPS flickered on and off. Soldiers blocked some streets. Where to go? I saw several high-end cars circling around blocks, nosing around, backing from one street, gliding across a supermarket parking lot and into an alley. It was as if the cars were animals looking for a water hole, as if the vehicles themselves had a lumbering intelligence. They sought exit from the city in which they'd been trapped.