Cold Silence (8 page)

But they went to the heart of the project, as did the red phone by the window, the red phones in every building on campus, the damn need to get news from Africa tonight.

In this very room, Quaker settlers had gathered before the American Revolution to talk and share and pray, and now, Maas realized, the old spirit would infuse new work. All around him as he stepped down the aisle, he felt adoration and hope, welling love, trust, and warm delight.

“Oh, my friends! My family!” he cried, passing the silver plate, offering the syringes, watching eager fingers pluck and choose and hold up amber fluid to the light.

—“You will go to Paramount Pictures, Annie and Eddy!”

—“Washington, D.C. The little brown house! Fritz and Bettina. Make those dollars count!”

—“For you, Christopher and Eloise, air tickets to Disneyworld! Bring sweaters for the air-conditioning!”

But inside, he fought down fear, his mind going again to the communications shack and the screens there, and his watchers, who would be riveted to CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC. WAITING FOR NEWS FROM AFRICA TO START!

He was in agony that the red phone would ring again. It had happened before when he failed.

Everyone, even kings, are afraid of someone, Harlan Maas knew. And he was terrified of the voice on that phone.

But outwardly he smiled so the group would think that nothing was wrong. He stood tall. He was the embodiment of worldly confidence and gentle command. He rolled his left sleeve up to expose blue veins on his pale, thin arm.

Harlan announced, “Now, all of you! Let's line up and give each other the final round of
shots.”

Chris Vekey walked into the Wilson High School gym, and the sheer normalcy of it—after the horrors she'd seen last night—almost knocked her off her feet. For the next thirty minutes, for her daughter's sake and the sake of sanity, she'd try to block out the situation in Nevada and the photos from Somalia sent in by Joe Rush. Her experience told her she needed this short break. Her role as a mother filled her with protectiveness. She looked out at the smiling kids and her gut clenched up.

Meet Rush's plane. Find out if he's infected. Find out if he thinks the Somalis started it. The Sixth Fleet is in the Indian Ocean, ready to blow those fuckers to smithereens. Homza believes it's out of Africa. Consensus is, coordinated attack.

But in here, take a breath. For the next thirty minutes, another world. Eighty kids putting last-minute touches on exhibits that they hoped would win a prize and scholarship to college. Chris had worked in medical emergencies before. She'd worked in slums in Houston, and Los Angeles, and in shanty towns in Accra. She'd
learned a long time ago that in an emergency you took solace where you could find it or you lost effectiveness. You controlled your fears and grabbed the nap, ate the meal, did whatever the thing was that relaxed you, if you were lucky enough to get a few minutes to do it. That break made you sharper, and could, in the end, mean the difference between a win and a loss.

Burke had been livid when he'd learned she was here.

“You're where? A high school science fair?”

“Do you have children, Burke?”

“I don't have that joy, Chris, no.”

“I was up until four
A.M.
on Nevada. Rush doesn't get in for two more hours.
YOU need six hours of sleep to do your job, you once told me. I need four. So back off. This is my break. It's how I stay clear. There's nothing for me to do until he gets in and I assume you want me in top shape, right?”

Burke had backed down. He usually listened to any reasoning that made you better at your job. Well, as long as the person saying it wasn't Joe Rush.

Twenty minutes to go.

Burke had said, chilling her, “
Two nurses have come down with it in Nevada, twenty hours after treating the first victims.
”

Washington, she knew, was where too many parents forgot their children while concentrating on work.
Sorry, son, I can't see your Little League game because there's a key meeting at the Pentagon. But I promise that we'll have time together next summer. I know I said that
last
summer, but this year will be different.

Next thing you know, you shove your kid aside for a smaller meeting, not an emergency, and then something less important, and then to just write a memo, and before you know it, years have passed, the kid's on drugs, the kid disappears to college or some ashram and you never hear from her again. Tell a kid that they're unimportant long enough, they'll believe it.

The fair was due to open in fifteen minutes, 9:30
A.M.
, and the tenth graders competing for the opportunity to present at the World Science Festival in New York made frantic last-minute adjustments, as if this, a project, meant the end of the world. The work lay along four aisles of fold-out tables, between the basketball backboards and folded-up stands—a cornucopia of science dreams, mini-robots, racks of test tubes, jury-rigged computers, hydroponic tomatoes, and, Chris thought with pride, my girl Aya's project!

Washington! She'd lived here for twelve years now and was always struck by the way the city juxtaposed the mighty and the mundane. Nuclear war may be imminent but my kid needs braces. The economy grew by 4.5 percent but take the garbage out because it smells! The defense satellite system sucked up another billion dollars, and Ralph the plumber needs four hundred. I know you're the senator from Alaska, dear, but mop up that bathroom floor right now!

The gym smelled of coffee and wood polish and sweat from last night's b-ball game, where Aya had been a happy cheerleader. It smelled of the cupcakes that one mom had baked to bribe judges, and expensive aftershave from the few dads here, mixed with a cheaper kind from the teen boys.

And the projects.
How fast is your computer?
by Charles Jason, fifteen.
The race between solar-powered bristlebots
, tiny automats made from heads of toothbrushes.
How to block a Wi-Fi signal
.
What is smog made of?
Chris couldn't believe that fifteen-year-olds had come up with all this stuff.

Mostly moms at the tables with their kids, but a few dads here, too, clad in better-than-usual gray suits, which ID'd them as high-level government or K Street types. Chris batting away a sudden vision of a nineteen-year-old girl in Nevada, her face eaten away as if by acid . . . and at the same time watching Aya arrange connections between a homemade plywood box, two cheap seven-year-old Dell laptops rummaged from friends' basements, and a small red plastic
unit that looked more like a toy. Aya's poster. HOW I PROVED OUR SUPERMARKET LIED ABOUT FISH IT SELLS
.

Aya, only a few years younger than those hideously mangled drone crews out West, in new crisp jeans and a red Abercrombie sweater, behind her table, muttering words she'd been practicing for the judges. “Anyone can now do DNA experiments in their very own home, like I did!”

“Win or not, you're the best,” Chris told her daughter.

Aya's mood jerking back and forth, one minute filled with excitement over the science, the next fearful over the competition. “It's amazing, Mom. Used to be that if you wanted to do genetics, it was impossible unless you're rich. Like, just a centrifuge costs, like, six thousand dollars.”

“Don't say ‘like,' honey. Just say the words.”

“Whatever! Anyway, my Cathal Garvey does the same thing, spins samples, separates components. I saved my babysitting money. The Cathal cost only sixty bucks! And this little disk? See the slots in it? It spins tissue samples at 33,000 rpms, 51,000 g's, that's 18,000 more than the centrifuge, which costs a lot more!”

“I'm proud of you,” Chris said, meaning it.

“You can mix tomato genes with pig genes! Amazing!”

Chris grew aware of another mom looking with ill-disguised antagonism between Aya's exhibit and her own son's, a half dozen bits of labeled cocoa, wood, bananas, and brazil nuts. SUSTAINABLE CROPS FROM TROPICAL FORESTS
.

“Is this your daughter?” the woman asked sweetly.

“Yes.”

“What a beauty! She looks just like you! And what a smart exhibit! You probably helped her a little, I bet? Moms always want to help their children. It's so hard to resist. I resisted, though. It's the rules.”

“Aya did it all by herself.”

Bitch. Liar
, the woman's eyes accused.
You cheated.

But she was wrong.

And even if the woman had been right, Chris would kill to protect Aya. Aya was more important than anything else in her life. This child had started in her belly. She'd cherished that life from the first, when she was seventeen, pregnant, refusing to ID Aya's dad for her parents, not to protect the boy, but because she had no intention of marrying him. Why open that can of worms?

She'd never considered abortion, as her best friend suggested. She'd sat in the principal's office, heart slamming as she was stripped of the valedictorian title, told that she'd ruined her life, warned that fornication violated scripture. But never once did her commitment to the baby flag; not when she put herself through college, working in a toxics clean-up crew for double pay . . . not when other women her age went on dates while Chris hit the books. Never once did she feel less than lucky.

Because I made a life.

She pushed the fear about Nevada away. She would focus on Aya for the next eighteen minutes
.
She remembered her mother saying, years back, on a porch in Alabama, “Put the baby up for adoption. You have no idea how hard motherhood is.”

“I guess I'll find out.”

“It will be too late to change your mind. You'll already have a child.”

“I have one now, in my belly.”

Spending those last two months of pregnancy in Sulfur Springs, stared at by neighbors and friends and churchgoers in the supermarket, Chris was a more popular form of local entertainment than the multiplex; hearing whispers in ladies' rooms, giggles from other cheerleaders, warnings that she was a “bad influence” from friends who'd been ordered by their parents to keep away from her.

Stubborn then. Stubborn now, Dad told her these days. But at
seventeen, the words had carried anger. When he said it now, from back in Alabama, it was with enormous pride.

Oh, Aya
.

And then, after the birth, the terror when baby Aya had to be put on a respirator. The helplessness when Aya, age six, fell off a bike and broke her arm. The swelling feeling in her chest when the dental braces came off, and the teeth gleamed, white and straight. Aya was a straight-A kid now, popular, smart, a Web genius, and her phone rang at night with calls from boys who asked about more than homework. Aya going on group dates. Aya eyeing a Princeton University catalog last week. Aya saying,
I want to be like you, Mom, and help people. I want to figure out genomes. But I can start now. You don't have to be rich to do DNA research. A PCR costs only six hundred dollars.”

“PCR?”

Aya rolled her eyes, as in,
You don't know what it is?
“It's polymerase chain reaction, a way to heat up and cool down material. I know a guy at Genspace, the community lab in Anacostia? He built one with a lightbulb, an old computer fan, some PVC pipe, and an old Ardvino board.”

When did my daughter start speaking this new language?

Chris was awed. “Very impressive.”

Aya saying something else now, pivoting from one subject to another. Aya saying, “Are you going to go out with Joe Rush? You should.”

—

The heat flooded her face. She hoped she wasn't blushing. How did the kid come up with this stuff? Chris was sure that she'd hidden her feelings, but the face looking up at her, heart-shaped, blue eyes, cute copper-colored freckles, was canny, teasing, bright.

“Aya, where did that question come from?”

“I heard you talking on the phone this morning to Mr. Burke. I
wasn't eavesdropping! I was just passing the kitchen and I heard you say Joe's name.”

Joe. She called Dr. Rush
Joe
. She'd only met him once, when Chris brought her to Homeland Security on Parent-Kid Day. Aya glommed on to the guy. Even checked out Rush on the Net and somehow came up with a photo of his house in the woods and a group shot of soldiers in Afghanistan. The kid was an amazing researcher. But when it came to Rush, Chris would prefer that Aya laid off. Just the thought of Rush came with a flood of unwanted emotion, which she fought to keep off her face.

I'm in love with a man who kills people. And his background seems common enough knowledge at the top. Boy, I sure know how to pick them.

She wasn't sure how the feeling for Rush had happened. She didn't even see Rush that much, only in committee, a few hours every few months. Chemistry, that was easy to explain—the way her breath caught when he walked into a room, the way his shaving cream left a whiff of lime in his wake. The quiet way he moved and the way, when he was interested in something, he was razor focused. She'd spotted him alone one Sunday night during the Cherry Blossom Festival, 11
P.M.
, at the Jefferson Memorial, when she was showing out-of-town friends the sights, and he looked tormented and lonely, staring at the slogans cut into stone. The Lincoln Memorial was the famous one, the Parthenon of D.C., always shown in movies. But the Jefferson had always been her favorite, softer, almost hidden in trees, quiet, by the tidal pool. Joe had been staring at the words cut into white stone.
I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.
Then he had spotted her and smiled, looked embarrassed, and his mask went back into place.

Rush emanated confidence when he knew other people were there. Yet something bleak and pained was inside.

Chris had never had a problem acknowledging her animal side, and her animal side wanted him. In meetings she'd been struck by
the way Rush saw things from different angles, and the way he did not back down when he thought he was right. She was drawn to the maverick. She liked conviction. Her instinct told her, in spite of the terrible things she'd read about him, that he was
kind
, a sense bolstered by the loyalty that Major Nakamura and Admiral Galli and Galli's wife, Cindy, had for Rush.

How can Rush be guilty of the things that Burke showed me in the file?

“Mom, are you listening?” asked Aya.

“One hundred percent, honey. I am so proud!”