Spiral (16 page)

16

JAKE AND MAGGIE STOOD ON THE BACK PORCH, LEANING ON
the railing and watching the darkness. When they’d returned from Ellis Hollow, Maggie had shown the glowing fungi to her son. Dylan had been solemn, watching the red, green, and yellow fungi slowly pulse and fade. Two months ago, Dylan said, Pop-pop had been telling him about the latest Nobel Prize in chemistry. It was for the use of fluorescent proteins, how the genes for them could be inserted into any organism, and that organism would glow. He’d promised Dylan a demonstration. Apparently, this was it.

Maggie, with an assist from Dylan, had convinced Jake to stay. Her housemates were there, along with two boyfriends: Josephine, Eric, Yvette, Cindy, and Bryan. Yvette and Josephine had dinner going; everyone drank wine from old jelly jars. Jake was completely taken in by the conversation, the mix of warmth and humor, sadness and hope. The quiet but steadfast sympathy they all expressed to Maggie and Dylan. Jake had the strong sense of family, even if no bloodlines were shared. He knew that Maggie’s parents were both dead, and her aunt and cousins were not due until the funeral.

Afterward, Jake and Maggie had drifted away from the rest, onto the back porch, winter coats on and holding steaming mugs of tea. They’d swapped stories about Liam for the better part of an hour, missing him more with each one. The last story had been Maggie’s, about the time Liam had taken her fungus hunting in Treman State Park, a few miles to the west. “I was six,” she said. “Believe it or not, I found a new species. He named it after me.”

“Really?”

“
Cordyceps margaretae
. It makes an immunosuppressant that is sometimes used in transplant surgeries. I still get a little in royalties.” She laughed. “It was a setup, I’m sure. But he always denied it. Said I was the luckiest little girl he’d ever seen.”

The back door opened and Dylan came out, Turtle trailing behind. The two dissolved into the darkness of the yard, barely visible in the spare moonlight. Dylan stopped under the lights at the door to the greenhouse, then cupped his hands together and blew into them. He held his hands out, as if he was ceremoniously letting the breath go. After a few seconds, he dropped his arms and continued on inside the greenhouse.

Maggie saw Jake watching, puzzled.

“The spreading of the breaths,” she said.

“What is that?”

“An interesting little fact. How every breath contains every other one.”

“I’m not getting it.”

“Do you know how many gas molecules are in a breath?”

Jake started working on it. “Let’s see. Air is about a thousand times less dense than water. So—”

Maggie smiled. “Wait. I’ll tell you. About ten to the twenty-second power. And that’s about the same as the number of breaths in the world.”

“Okay …”

“It means that once Dylan’s breath spreads out, when someone, anyone, anywhere in the world takes a breath, it’ll have one molecule from that breath Dylan just released.”

Jake inspected the idea, looking for threads. “It must work the other way, too? Every breath we take in has a molecule from every breath anyone else ever took?”

She nodded.

“That’s disturbing somehow.”

“It can be.”

“You taught Dylan this?”

“Liam did.”

Jake heard a band of geese flying overhead. Heading south. “He was a helluva man, your grandfather. One of the few people in the world I truly looked up to.”

She turned to face him. “He really respected you, Jake. He thought you were a very decent man.”

“It’s an ex-soldier thing. Different armies, different wars, it doesn’t matter. There’s a bond.”

“It was more than that.”

Jake didn’t know what to say to that. Instead he watched Dylan at work in the greenhouse, a watering can in his hand.

“Can I ask you something?” Maggie said tentatively. “Something I always wondered?”

“Shoot.”

“Why did you join the Army?”

“You want the real answer?”

She laughed. “No. Give me the fake one.”

“Okay, I will. The fake one is that I needed money for college.”

“And the real one?”

“I thought it was the right thing to do.”

She took it in, nodding. “That’s more or less what Pop-pop said. Why he joined during World War Two. The Irish hated the British, had been under their thumb for eight hundred years. Some people called him a traitor.” She glanced at him. “What was it like?”

“The Gulf War? The thing I remember most is the sand. It got in everything, in your hair, in your bed, in the guns, in the food. You got used to the grind of it between your teeth.

“We spent six months in the desert, waiting, in the sand. I was a combat engineer. In the Forty-sixth Battalion. We were in support of the First Infantry Division. We made the bridges. The camps. The roads. We had it best, the engineers. We had something to do. We were always at work, putting up new forward compounds, improving the roads, clearing them after the sandstorms would sweep through. The combat grunts had it worse. They just sat. Waiting to fight. Digging foxholes, the sand filling them, digging them again. It was hell on them, you could tell. They got crazier, weirder.”

“How long were you there?”

“Almost six months. It was so damned hot, and as the invasion got close, every couple of days the bioweapons sirens would go off and we’d have to suit up. Everybody was sure Saddam had anthrax weapons, God knows what else. So we’d put on these full-body suits, gas masks, and sweat it out. You wanted to rip the damned thing off and at the same time you worried that some little microbe was going to sneak through a faulty seal and kill you.

“Then, boom, the orders come down. We’re on the move, going in, crossing the border into Kuwait. Our orders are to blast forward, destroying everything in our path. But the Iraqis have all these trenches dug, these bunkers of sand pushed up. It was a total pain in the ass. You could blow them up, but there weren’t enough bombs to do the whole thing. So the plan was send in the armored bulldozers, create a breach, then we’d send in mechanized units to get in behind them, then attack from the rear.

“But then someone had an idea. Use bulldozers.”

Jake looked up. “It was one of those ideas that had a kind of rough elegance. Why the hell not? Who needs to kill them with bullets when you can bury them in sand? All you need is a big shovel. The idea floated up through the chain of command, then came back down again.
Get your bulldozers ready.
”

Jake shook his head. “You know, we engineers, we’re one step away. We just built the roads. It’s different, building the roads.”

“It sounds terrible.”

“It was. The Iraqis didn’t have a chance in hell. Some saw us coming and ran. Others stayed, just disappeared as the sand swept over them, like a crab on the shore when the tide pushed in. The worst were the ones halfway between. They’d finally get what was about to happen, and they’d pop up, maybe thirty yards in front of the blade. But it was too late. Our orders were clear. Keep plowing.

“One guy I’ll always remember. He charged me. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. He had this stupid sidearm, he was running at the bulldozer, firing into the blade. He wasn’t even trying to hit me. He just kept firing into the blade. He was screaming. You couldn’t hear it, not for the engines, all the other crazy shit happening, but he was screaming, yelling, charging. Then he went under, like all the rest. He was gone.” Jake shook his head. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Sorry. Of course.”

But they didn’t talk about anything. They just watched the night, listened to the bits of conversation drifting in from the kitchen.

Out in the darkness, the slap of a closing door. Dylan emerged from the greenhouse, Turtle at his side. Jake watched closely as the boy crossed the distance to the house. “How are the tomatoes doing?” Maggie asked as he stepped up on the porch.

“Almost ready. I think I can pick them pretty soon.”

She pulled him close, kissed him on the forehead. “Good. Now go get ready for bed.”

Dylan turned to face Jake. He held out a hand. “Good night.”

The two shook formally. Dylan ducked his head and disappeared inside. Maggie watched her son go, took a breath, and looked gratefully at Jake before glancing away, suddenly embarrassed.

Jake smiled. “A question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“The spreading-of-the-breaths thing. How long does it take for the gas molecules all around the world to mix? How long until a breath makes it to, say, China?”

“Ten years. It takes about a decade for the air on the planet to get stirred completely.” She looked down at the deck, put her arms around herself. “So right now, Liam’s last breath is still mostly right here. Right around us.”

Jake nodded. “But less so with each day.”

They were silent after that, watching the darkness. Jake glanced over, catching her in profile, the slight subtle motion of her hair in the breeze. When someone died, all the relationships surrounding that person were shaken, had to be rebuilt in new ways to help fill the void. That’s what grief helped you do.

He wanted contact, to feel the warmth of her. He leaned toward her, and their shoulders touched. She kept looking at the woods, but he felt her body relax. On the railing, he placed his hand over hers, let it rest there. “You know,” he said, “it’s not just Dylan.”

“I know. But listen—”

Jake’s cell went off in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said.

She pulled her hand in. “It’s fine. Go ahead. Take it.”

He fished it out, and his pulse jumped a notch. “It’s Becraft,” he said to Maggie. He accepted the call. “Yes?”

“Professor Sterling? We need you to come down. Right away. It’s about the missing MicroCrawlers.”

“Did you find them?”

“Some of them, yes. The Onondaga medical examiner’s office just called.” Becraft paused. “Look. I’d prefer it if you came down.”

Jake looked to Maggie. “Tell me where you found them.”

“We just got Liam Connor’s autopsy report. They found four in his stomach.”

17

L
AWRENCE DUNNE MADE HIS PLAY. CHOOSING ONE OF THE
small black stones from the wooden bowl, he placed it with a sharp click onto the Go board. He tried to project authority, but it was a desperation move.

His opponent bit her lower lip, studying the pattern of stones arrayed in a gridlike pattern on the board. They were alone in a Motel 6, the yellow walls adorned with paintings of ducks and dogs. She was naked, sitting cross-legged on the bed. He sat across from her, as naked as she.

She clicked her piece down, smooth and white.

“Shit,” Dunne said.

Her wide smile lit up the generic room. “You’re mine.” She dove for him, knocking him backward onto the bed, scattering the stones.

Dunne wrestled her onto her back, enjoying the view. He allowed himself two indulgences, games he enjoyed whether he won or lost. The first was Go, the second this woman. Her name was Audrey Candor, née Pister. They’d met at Yale ten years ago, when she was an undergraduate student sitting in on his course on game theory and geopolitics. She was from Long Island, her father a Wall Street financier and her mother a minor movie star in the eighties. Audrey was married to the son of a rich diplomat from France, but Dunne and she had kept up their trysts over the years. She was smart, devilish, and unbelievably gorgeous. Dunne wasn’t an unattractive guy—he had a rakish charm—but she was in another category altogether.

He bent over her, staring down at smooth white skin and coal-black eyes. She wore a pale red lipstick, the kind he liked. Picking one of his black stones off the mattress, he balanced it on her nipple. She giggled.

“Run away with me,” he said. “We’ll crash a plane into a small Pacific island, live off fruit and berries. I’ll rig snares to trap wild boar.”

She laughed. “You’d better crash into an island with a Whole Foods.”

“You underestimate me. I can be a beast.”

“Show, don’t tell,” she ordered, pulling him down.

An unwelcome knock on the door.

“What?”

“Mr. Dunne? You don’t seem to be answering your cell. There’s a call from your assistant.”

“Get lost,” he said. His ringer had been very purposefully turned off. “I’ll be free in twenty.”

“Sir? He said Lancer absolutely needs to talk to you.”

“Holy Christ,” Dunne said, thoughts of the deserted Pacific isle long forgotten.

OUT FRONT A BLACK LIMO IDLED, TWO SECRET SERVICE AGENTS
at the ready. Three minutes later, Dunne was on the vehicle’s secure line with the President of the United States.

“Lawrence?”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“You need to get to Manhattan. Now.”

DUNNE WAS EDGY AS HE RODE IN THE SPEEDING LIMO, THE
police escort’s horns blaring as they headed for Reagan National Airport. The President had sounded rattled, his trademark confidence shaken. The two men knew each other well. When the POTUS had started his improbable run at the White House, Dunne had been one of his earliest supporters and his primary foreign-policy adviser on Asian affairs. When he’d won in a landslide that surprised even his dedicated supporters, the President had rewarded Dunne with the position of deputy national security adviser. He’d offered Dunne the national security adviser job, but Dunne preferred to stay out of the media spotlight, where he could focus on policy rather than polish.

Now Dunne was on the phone with the deputy director of the FBI, William Carlisle, who described the situation with the Times Square victim: “Twenty-three years old, Japanese. Recently had his middle right finger chopped off, the wound crudely cauterized. He was incoherent, raving, clearly under the influence of a hallucinogenic, as yet unidentified.”

“What do we know about him?”

Carlisle sounded as though he was reading. “Undergrad at Columbia, art major. Specializes in sculpture, small pieces made from bits of wire. Originally from Tokyo. Nothing else in his background is unusual. Father is a low-level diplomat at the Japanese embassy in Ottawa, mother a poet. A team’s interviewing them now. So far nothing remarkable about him, save one thing. You ready? The kid’s name is Hitoshi Kitano.”

For a second, Dunne thought he hadn’t heard right. He thought of the eighty-five-year-old man with the same name rotting in jail. “
Hitoshi Kitano?
You gotta be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

He still couldn’t believe it. For reasons unknown to Carlisle, Dunne had hoped the name Hitoshi Kitano would be forever relegated to the roll at Hazelton prison. He cleared his throat. “Any relation?”

“None. Nothing that we can find. There’s no connection. It’s either coincidence or—”

“Or it’s a goddamn message.”