Cold Silence (9 page)

“Is Joe Rush coming back to Washington today?”

“What?”
She jerked. Chris hoped her daughter didn't see the heat rising in her face, sense the warmth in her belly. “How do you know that?”

“You said so on the phone. You like Joe, don't you? I do. Girls think he's cute.”

“What girls?”

“That time you brought me to the office, the secretaries were, like, swooning over him.”

“Don't say ‘like,' I said. And I enjoy being with everyone on the committee, not just Dr. Rush.”

“That's not true. You don't like Burke.”

“He can be difficult, I admit. But he's dedicated. Where do you get these ideas anyway?”

“Are you going to go out with Joe?” A giggle.

“You don't date people you work with.”

“How come you get quiet when his name comes up?”

“Concentrate on your exhibit, young lady.”

“Whenever you call me ‘young lady,' it means I'm right!”

Her physical reaction to Rush had started the first time she'd seen him, across a conference table. Bam! What was that expression from that old film?
The Godfather
? The thunderbolt? That was it.
Over the head! And working with him had only deepened the feeling. She had dreams about him. Her breathing caught when he entered a room. One time on M Street she'd gotten excited just looking at a male mannequin in a shop window wearing the same pullover sweater that he did. Ridiculous! And last Christmas she'd been in the Macy's Men's Department, and some salesman had been spraying guys with Rush's aftershave. The smell had hit her and . . .
stupid!

“Earth to Mom!”

“I'm listening!”

“Yeah? Then what did I just say?”

“I did not come here to be tested, Aya!”

Why was it, Chris asked herself, strolling again, looking at exhibits, why was it that with other guys after her, great guys, accomplished, smart, funny guys, athletes, a Nobel Prize–winning biologist, that Czech actor from the hit film
Mrazek's Island
, all those guys calling her up, sending funny or cute e-mails, or flowers, why did she have to fall for a semihermit with secrets, just because something inside her turned to mush when he came near?

Even in normal times, he didn't notice her, not in the way she'd prefer to be noticed, at least by him. He was polite and deferential, just as he was to everyone else, except Burke. He ran into her once at the Kennedy Center and barely said hello. Cindy Galli had sensed her frustration, girl to girl, and since Joe and Eddie stayed in the admiral's guest house when in D.C., Cindy had cooked a group dinner once, invited Chris, seated her beside Joe, prompted conversation with the sort of questions that a smart hostess asks when she wants two guests to hook up.

Nothing. Joe had poured her wine, asked about Aya, listened with interest to the story about Vietnamese refugees refusing to take pills that were colored red, then excused himself and went off to bed early as he'd been up since 3
A.M.
on a National Park Service evacuation—a
New Mexican hiker who'd come down with hantavirus. The guy had zero interest in her. Cindy had told Chris that night, at the door, that Joe had lost his fiancée last year. “He needs time,” Cindy had said. “He's a great person. He's worth the wait. So are you.”

Idiot! Fool! Can't you go for appropriate people, ever? I mean
, she thought wryly,
look at my history
.
First, the high school football player with the brains of an antelope. Then the married college TA who I stayed away from, because married guys are wrong, but I still had the crush, so I never went out with anyone else. One at a time. Then the Olympic swim champion who told me—four weeks into it—that he regarded women as gold medals. For six years, a few dates but nothing special . . . and now I fall for the killer in the file.

You go, girl.

As she looked over an exhibit titled, HOW GLOBAL WARMING CHANGES OCEAN CURRENTS, she recalled the way Burke had tried to poison the well for Rush a month ago.

Chris had been in his office to eye evacuation protocols: Congress, White House, Supreme Court, how to move government if the capital was threatened. Plans were made during the Cold War, when the threat was nuclear, and were updated annually, as the nature of threats grew and changed.

“In a protocol 80, you'd stay in the city,” Burke had said.

“But my daughter could get out first, right? There'd be advance warning. I could send her to my dad.”

“Chris, you know the deal. If there's advance warning, yes. If not, we're inside. But these plans have been around since the 1950s. Send her to Alabama, you can get a tornado. Tampa? Hurricanes! Eighty is a precaution, nothing more.”

Burke had gone back to details, which highways would be blocked off while motorcades made their way to the underground facility at Mount Weather, Virginia. Who goes if the President decides to stick things out in Washington. Who stays if the President leaves.

And then, excusing himself, Burke had “accidentally” left a manila file on his desk when he went to the bathroom. COLONEL JOSEPH RUSH in big black letters, sitting there, by Burke's Remington statuette, just a foot away. She'd opened the folder. She'd been unable to help herself. She'd felt manipulated and guilty.
No one's fucking perfect
, she'd told herself, knowing perfectly well that Burke would give her a few minutes to do what he wanted before wandering back.

When she'd seen the highlighted passages, her face had gone hot.

When Burke returned, his eyes flickered to the file, lying exactly as she'd found it. Burke's expression satisfied. Burke knowing that she'd looked.

COLONEL RUSH ADMITTED BEING PRESENT WHEN THE SUSPECT WAS TORTURED. HE PARTICIPATED IN THE . . .

And, another page, another incident, ALTHOUGH NORWEGIAN POLICE NEVER ID'D THE KILLER, RUSH ADMITTED, DURING THE DEBRIEFING IN WASHINGTON, TO STRANGLING . . . HUSHED UP . . . BEST FOR ALL CONCERNED IF . . .

I'm so stupid
, she thought now.
I'm making excuses for him and I don't even know what occurred.

The problem was, Burke didn't lie, and she'd glimpsed the file for only forty seconds. So what had really happened? What was the unhighlighted part? Why did Burke hate Rush so much? Or was Chris blinded by chemistry?

In love with a killer
, she thought again.

—

Over the last two days, after the initial call from Nevada, Burke had forced changes—ordering more FBI help, shuffling staff, sharpening control in case the emergency spread. Good precautions, Chris
thought, because she'd seen close up, in the Ebola outbreak in 2014, how a lack of coordination could make a manageable situation wild.

Right now it's only eleven dead in Nevada and forty-five in Somalia, awful, but hopefully containable, although someone's going to have to tell the families of those soldiers and civilians who died.

Nine minutes until she had to leave.

Seven.

“Good luck, Aya!”

“Mom, I'm so scared! What if I lose today?”

Chris thought,
You don't know what scared is, and I hope you never do . . .
Chris headed out for the parking lot, telling herself that Nevada and Somalia were nine thousand miles apart, and unrelated. But not really believing it. Back to work. Burke had sent agents in a Chevy Suburban to make sure she got to Andrews on time. They would drop her back here later to retrieve her car.

Burke had said, “You told Rush and Nakamura to take each other's blood?”

“Every hour. We'll analyze it when they get in.”

“And their flight time is nineteen hours?”

“Twenty, including the stop in Germany to drop samples at the lab. They'll take more blood in the air after that.”

“Well, the marker shows up eight hours after contact, so if they're clear when they hit D.C., they're okay, Chris. Otherwise, quarantine them and give them antibiotics.”

“Burke, you mean the ones that don't work so far?”

“Maybe they take more time to kick in. Have faith.”

She climbed into the backseat now, two FBI guys in front, the government being the last steady customer of that pathetic remnant of a once-great corporation, General Motors. The driver's eyes flicked to her in the rearview mirror, glanced at her ring finger on the seat top. He was checking to see whether it was bare. He was a handsome man, but Chris had no response.

They headed downtown in light post-rush-hour traffic, on Massachusetts, then took Branch Avenue toward Camp Springs. The juxtaposition of normal sights outside—a line of idling cars at the Japanese Embassy, a bakery truck near Dupont Circle, Diamond cabs at Union Station—mixed in her mind with dire
possibility.
A bolt of fear hit her for Joe Rush. What if, despite precautions, he was infected? There was no way to know for sure until she transferred his blood to the Andrews Air Force Base Hospital, where lab workers waited, clad in protective gear.

Just as they approached the base, the phone trilled. It was Burke calling from the White House, where he was getting out of a meeting.

Burke said crisply, “It's in South Carolina.”

“Where?” She felt sick.

“Charleston. A seventy-two-year-old retired ticket taker on the Long Island Railroad came into Grand Strand Medical Center last night. He and his wife both show the marker. Ray Havlicek has agents at their retirement community, going condo to condo, seeing if anyone else is sick.” Burke sighed. “Five hundred retirees in that place, and half of them together in a dining room every day.”

“Has the couple been in Nevada or Africa?”

“They visited a grandson in Galilee last week.”

“Are they quarantined?”

A sigh. “Now? Yes. But four hours went by before we learned they were there. And they sat in the waiting room for an hour before going in. Around other people.”

The car passed into the base, past guards, barracks, lawns, runways. Up in the blue sky, Chris caught a glimpse of silver, something small and fast, angling down. She checked her watch. This might be Rush. She was unclear which emotion was stronger, the catch in her throat at his arrival, or the constriction brought on by Burke's news.

Chris said, “It's a mistake not to announce it.”

“Not our choice. The President knows he needs to get in front of
it. But he's figuring out what to say. We hope we'll know more by tonight that will help him. Havlicek's trying to track down any other visitors to Galilee.”

She sat, stunned, looking out at the bright sun, the passing cars, the incoming plane,
normalcy.

Burke said, “Meanwhile, I'm asking key people to quietly move from their homes to the dorm at Homeland Security. Pack a bag. Come out to the campus when you can. Also, I'm relieving Admiral Galli. You'll run that unit.”

The breath caught in her throat. Burke continued. “General Homza thinks we're dealing with seeding.”

Seeding means that a hostile group is planting toxics in different places. A quiet attack, which spreads. An attack whose origin is harder to determine.

“Homza believes the capital is a likely target.”

“Aren't you getting ahead of things?”

“I hope so. That's my job.”

“What about Aya?”

Burke said, “You can move her in with you, or you can send her away. Look, it's just precaution, like drills. Terrorism alert level up everywhere. Airports. Amtrak. Federal buildings. I want my people in a protected area. If this gets worse, you're separated from the general population. Better to have your things at HQ just in case.”

“I want Rush to come with me to Nevada.”

Personally, I don't want him anywhere near me. He makes me crazy. But he's the best person for this job.

“He's out,” Burke said. “Plenty of FBI out West to help you.”

“Burke, he's smart. He sees things before other people, and in a different way. He stopped the outbreak in Alaska last year. He's an eyewitness in Somalia, and something he saw there might be relevant. You want me? I need him. Or is there some special reason you want him out?”

Daring Burke now. Daring him to say the thing out loud that he'd hinted at earlier.
If you want me to know something, spell it out. Don't go off to a bathroom and leave a file on a desk. Have some guts!

But Burke caved. Or acknowledged the logic. Burke said, “He's your responsibility then,
and
only if his blood work is clear
. But if he goes off on his own, I lock him away. You tell him that.”

“Have we identified the pathogen yet?”

“It's a hybrid. Chimera. They nailed some DNA, Gaines said, but not enough for full ID. Can't tell yet if it's lab made or natural. That may take some time.”

“And what part did they ID?” Chris asked as the car stopped beside a long runway, and ahead, through shimmering air, she saw Joe Rush's jet touch down, wheels puffing smoke, sun glinting off the windows flashing past.

Burke told her the basic component of the Nevada pathogen. The primary bacterial foundation of the thing.

She felt her legs go weak and flashed to Aya in her head, at a high school science fair, smiling, a kid, an innocent, her only daughter. Chris said, “Sweet, sweet Jesus.”

Burke sighed. “I'd say that's exactly
right.”

“Leprosy?” I said.

We waited in the plane for the results of our blood work, to see if we were infected. The fingers on my right hand had begun tingling, but I told myself that this was because, before landing, I'd fallen asleep on my hand. The troops surrounding our jet kept their distance, ringing us at sixty feet with M4s slung over their shoulders.

“Here we go again,” Eddie said. “Something we ate?”

The lone, small figure of Chris Vekey stood outside the window, on the tarmac, looking up as she spoke via phone.

I tried to ignore my anger and concentrate on what she was saying, but the truth was, if Burke and Chris had been open with us earlier, we might have spotted something in Africa that would help us now. But they'd hidden facts, delayed giving information.
Need to know
was the curse of Washington, creating a perpetual catch-up race during crises, a drumbeat of too late.

Now Eddie and I saw
leprosy
up on our screens, on our thumb drive medical encyclopedias. Right side showed a rogue's gallery of
photos—faces eaten away, fingers nubs, feet stumps—going back to 1850.

Eddie said, “The facts don't go with what we saw, One. You never get leprosy in groups.”

Chris's voice in my ear said, “Now you do.”

“It doesn't spread this fast. Normal germination after infection, one to three years. In extreme cases, six months. And it's rarely fatal.”

Chris said, “This strain is.”

I broke in, flaring at her, “The admiral is
fired
, you say? He's a good man!
You're
our boss now?”

“Yes.”

My rage crested. We'd been lied to and we'd been threatened with death in Somalia. We'd been forced to undergo radio silence on the long ride home because our multimillion-dollar communication system was on the blink—they claimed. I'd misjudged this woman, I saw. I'd thought she was different than the backbiting social climbers that populated the capital, self-serving know-it-alls who talked piously of policies and manipulated them for personal gain.

Chris Vekey, I saw, had waited for an emergency to ally herself with Burke, to force a good man into retirement, just when the country needed him. Now she blithely expected Eddie and me to snap to and obey her, pliant as toy soldiers. But we weren't that and had never been.

“Go to hell,” I said.

“What?”

“What you did to the admiral stinks.”

“Watch your temper,” she warned. Out on the tarmac, she was a stiff, glaring presence in a parka, her gamine face shocked, her voice snapping out in white smoky bursts.

I retorted that we were private contractors. We were retired from the service, here only because of private university ties. “Burke's lapdog”—as I called her—could not tell us what to do.

She stared up at me with a stony expression. But Southern women don't outmaneuver you with a bludgeon. They do it with a soft voice, a steel backbone. “Those Alabama girls can break the balls off a Rodin statue with a look,” Eddie once said, the truth of that made evident now.

“Colonel, for your information, once you signed on, you're bound by your agreement. If you violate that, and leave, fine with me. I'll make a phone call and where you'll
go
is Leavenworth prison.”

I said nothing, fuming. It was true.

Chris said, “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Her gaze did not waver. The voice in my ear was molten steel. “You and I and Major Nakamura are going to wait for your test results. If your blood work is negative, you're coming with me to Nevada to help track this thing. I want your eyes on the ground.”

“That would have been easier if you'd leveled with us from the start.”

“While on the job, you will function as effectively as if Admiral Galli remained in charge. Do you understand me?”

“I understand.”

“You'll ask the same questions you'd ask otherwise. You'll make the same connections. We're going to Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas. I'll forget your rudeness this once, because loyalty is an admirable quality.
You'll
give me one hundred percent or I'll lock you away so fast you won't know what hit you. Was there something else you wanted to say?”

“No.”

We broke contact. I went back to reading about leprosy. Eddie sat two feet away, grinning like an idiot.

“You sure told her,” he said. “No one pushes you around. You are one tough Marine, man. I must say, she may be Burke's lapdog but she's cute even when she bites.”

“Eddie, do me a favor. Shut up.”

—

The blood tests were late in coming.

Were we infected? Was the lab repeating the tests?

The tingling increased in the fingers of my right hand. I flexed them. Was feeling seeping back into them? I told myself,
You're imagining it. Just work.

“Leprosy,” I read out loud, “was so common in medieval Europe that one out of thirty people suffered from it. In extreme cases it killed, usually by blocking nerves, or causing gangrene or infection. Or victims had no feeling, so they cut or hurt themselves without even knowing it. Listen to this, Eddie. Until recently, it was believed that leprosy victims lost fingers or toes to the disease, but it turns out they'd accidentally damage themselves because they lacked feeling. In India, leprosy sufferers have lost their fingers and toes to rats.”

“Rats?”

“Yeah. The rats ate them while they slept. They felt nothing.”

But it wasn't just symptoms up on-screen, but the horrible social aspects.
The separating disease
, it was called. Throughout history, lepers had been shunned, forced from homes and families, called witches, hounded from villages, locked away in filthy hospitals, feared and stigmatized. I saw a shot of a leper hospital in Jerusalem, 1843, and another, hidden away in the swamps of Louisiana, and a leprosarium on the outskirts of London . . . virtual prisons for people who had done nothing wrong except fall ill.

Eddie read, “Some scientists think the Crusaders brought leprosy back to Europe from the Middle East. Some say it's the other way around. Either way, by 1300, hundreds of muddy French and Italian villages were filled with figures in dirty shrouds, wrapped in rags, tormented, hungry, and sick. By law they had to carry a bell, warning all in their paths that they were coming. Chanting, ‘Unclean.'”

Eddie shook his head. “I was sure this thing was going to be chemical, One. Toxic chemical. Not this.”

“Fifteen hundred years before Christ, Egyptian doctors recorded cases,” I read. “In ancient Greece, Hippocrates treated
sores and destroyed flesh.
The first medically proven case of leprosy was confirmed in 2009, from fifty years before Christ! A Yale team dug up a skeleton near Haifa, and radiocarbon-dated it. Perfect DNA match.”

“Says here ninety-five percent of people have natural immunity to leprosy, One. But over half the people in that camp caught it. So does the infection spread because of the other part of the chimera, the second part of the mix?”

Question after question. “Says you can't grow it in a lab, Eddie. Natural spread, you think?”

“Plus, if thirty percent of Europe had it at one time, what made it die out? Wait! It
didn't
die out. Numbers dropped in the 1600s, but shot up again two centuries later, mostly in England and Norway.”

“Why those countries?” I asked.
Is this a clue?

I read, “England and Norway were seafaring nations carrying on trade with India. Sailors brought it back. Then, in 1873 a Norwegian scientist, Armauer Hansen, ID'd the bug. That's why leprosy is called Hansen's disease today.”

Eddie looked up. “I'd rather have a ball team named for me. The Nakamura Angels!”

“Still two million cases in the world today,” Chris said outside, stamping her feet to keep warm.

“Two hundred thousand new cases a year.”

“But only a few in the U.S., and most of those are immigrants from Mexico,” said Chris. “Hey! Get this! The only other creature on the planet that carries leprosy is an armadillo. You can catch leprosy from eating their meat.”

I envisioned the odd-looking creature, “hillbilly speed bumps,”
in parts of the South. An armor-plated, semiblind insect eater, a remnant left over from the dinosaur era.

Eddie scratched his head. “Hey, Chris, about those victims in Nevada? Did any of them visit Mexico recently?”

“We'll ask. Look, Creech is the major operational center running Air Force drones overseas. Our attacks against Al Qaeda leadership, the Taliban, Somalia . . . the boys and girls who control those drones do it from Creech.”

“That doesn't sound like coincidence.”

She nodded. “Couple of drone pilots came into the base hospital. Then a mechanic and a pilot's girlfriend. All deteriorating fast. The docs thought at first they suffered from some crazy fasciitis . . .”

“Flesh-eating bacteria,” Eddie said, referring to the staph infections that could kill in a day, bacteria that got into open cuts then traveled through the fat layers connecting cells. The microbe had started out as fairly innocent, I knew. It caused nothing more serious than pimples or boils. Penicillin killed it. But in the 1950s, a new strain appeared. Its toxins caused tissue to deteriorate, and it wiped out red blood cells. That penicillin-resistant strain killed by brain abscess. It could enter the body through the tiniest cut, then spread so fast it could kill a healthy person—in extreme cases—in a day.

Fasciitis
was the nightmare hospital infection. You could pick it up in an ER, but unfortunate victims have also contracted it after swimming in the ocean, or falling on a dance floor. Some survivors lived only because doctors amputated their limbs to stop the spread of the infection.

I said, “But you don't get fasciitis in groups either.”

“I know. I'm just telling you what doctors initially thought. An ambulance was set to transport victims to Vegas. Better facilities there. But then two more people came down with it. Civilians in Galilee. Then another airman.”

“Did they all get moved to Vegas?”

She shook her head. “RDS,” she said, shorthand for
rapidly developing situation.
“At that point, judgment call. The base commander called D.C. No one knew if we had something contagious. The idea of bringing seven possible high-infection cases into a major metropolitan area didn't work, and Vegas doesn't have level four wards.”

“Montana's got one in Missoula,” I said, remembering that federal dollars built a unit at Saint Patrick Hospital there, in case staffers from the Rocky Mountain Lab in Hamilton ever came down with the deadly diseases they worked with, like Ebola.

Chris nodded. “Missoula was the call. But then more patients started coming in, and we found others in the barracks. Missoula can handle four. We had more. At that point it was clear that we might be under attack. That's why, when you called from Africa, the committee was already in session, trying to figure out what to do.”

“Under attack by whom?” I asked.

Chris looked miserable. “No one knows.”

“All the victims are still at Creech?”

“We modified the base hospital.” She nodded. “Rapid response team from Missoula flew in. FBI out of Vegas. Normal patients moved to an upper floor. The base closed to the public, personnel confined to quarters, Galilee sealed off. Only thirty people live there.”

Why is the blood work taking so long to come back?

Right now I'd keep exploring the one solid clue we had, which was:
Whatever microbe we face contains leprosy DNA.
So back to the thumb drive.

“Eddie, you said leprosy numbers fell in Europe in the 1600s, then shot up. What accounts for the initial drop?”

Chris suggested, “Could the contagion have evolved? A thousand years ago syphilis killed in months. Now, it takes twenty years if untreated. It evolved so human hosts could live longer. You think we're seeing that here, Colonel?”

“No. Because
leprosy never evolved
,” I read. “An NYU team
compared original strains with modern ones. Leprosy today is exactly the same as twelve hundred years ago.”

“Then what the hell do we have here? Mutant? Made? Or maybe it's finally evolved
.
”

I spotted a black Chevy coming down the road from the direction of the base hospital. My heartbeat sped up. Outside, Chris answered another call and listened and her face tightened and I saw fear in the way she straightened up. She did not want me to hear whatever she was saying.

We're infected.

But she was back in my ear. “Colonel, you two are clean.”

I started to relax. She added, “You'll wear a mask in flight, take one last blood test in the air. That will be over twenty-four hours since exposure. If you're good then, you can mix with other people. But we're not waiting. I'm coming aboard. We're taking off. Now.”