But somehow he made it through the brambles into more open forest. His skin shrinking away from the expected impact of the bullet, he got to his feet. Stumbling, tripping, falling, pulling himself upright, stumbling forward again. So slow. Someone in a wheelchair could catch him. How could he outrun a bullet?
Fighting for breath, half blind, he didn’t see the stone wall snaking through the forest until he nearly fell over it. Stopped in his tracks, he raised his head and saw, perched atop the wall a few feet away, a little girl.
No more than six, she was dressed in blue denim overalls and a pink-and-white-checked shirt. A beam of sun made it down through the canopy and glinted off her blond hair.
“Run!” Harry yelled. Or rather, gasped. Thinking only of what a .457 round would do to her.
She stared at him, mouth open, not moving. Almost immediately, she was joined by three other people: a boy of about nine and an adult man and woman, all standing on the other side of the wall. They were wearing denim and flannel and carrying colorful daypacks. The man held a walking stick.
A young family hiking through the Vermont woods, coming upon this wild-eyed old guy with torn clothes and scratched-up face.
But they didn’t run away, as Harry had thought they would. They didn’t leave him alone again in the woods. Instead, as he came up to the wall and half climbed, half fell over it, they clustered around him, helping him to his feet, brushing him off, their voices sounding like birdcalls in his ears.
The people pursuing him were still there. He knew it. Right now they had their weapons trained on him, on all of them, as they decided what to do next. Harry’s only chance was that they hadn’t been cleared to take out any other targets or to kill in front of witnesses.
Maybe, at this moment, the chief of staff was deciding whether Harry—and this innocent family—would live or die.
Maybe it was the president himself making the decision.
The family was staring at him, all four of them. He knew he had to answer their questions, had to say something. But what? What? He’d never been in this position before. He’d never been the prey.
Finally he came out with, “Someone in the woods. A hunter. Took a shot at me. More than one shot.”
The boy and little girl seemed to think this was pretty exciting news, worth investigating further. But the mom gasped and put her hand to her mouth, and the man dropped his walking stick and swept his daughter off the stone wall and into his arms.
“Come on,” he said to his reluctant son. “Let’s go. Now!”
After taking a few steps, the woman looked over her shoulder. “Come with us,” she said.
A nice lady. She had no idea that if Harry went with them, the threat of death came, too.
* * *
THEY MOVED THROUGH the woods for fifteen minutes. The father tried and failed repeatedly to get cell-phone service. Harry found himself noticing the golden and orange leaves spinning to the ground in gusts of wind, the sun gleaming on dew-soaked spiderwebs, a white-tailed deer stopping to stare at them before trotting away, its tail lifted in warning.
He began to understand that the gunmen weren’t going to kill him. Not here, not now.
The forest thinned. They climbed over another stone wall and reached a road, a different one than Harry and his doomed crew had arrived on. Dirt, but graded and graveled, with SUVs and a scattering of cars parked along the edges. On the other side of the road a small lake glinted in the sun. A Volvo with a pair of kayaks on its roof came down the road, slowed, and turned onto a muddy track that led down to the lakeshore.
The father was on his phone, presumably with the police, reporting the presence of a dangerous hunter in the woods. When he finished the call, he turned his eyes on Harry. The man wanted to be rid of him, it was obvious, but he only said, “Did you park along here?”
Harry shook his head. “No—my car’s back in there, near where you found me.” He widened his eyes. “I’m not going back for it, not yet, no way.”
The father frowned, but couldn’t argue with this. “You have someone you can call? Who can rescue you?”
Rescue you. Harry almost laughed. “Sure.”
Then he patted at his pockets. “Oh, hell,” he said. “My phone’s back with my stuff.”
Gone, along with everything else his team had brought. His team itself. Their bodies long gone by now. By the time the police arrived, there would be no sign he and his men had ever been there.
No, that wasn’t true. An expert forensic team would surely be able to find evidence that people had been shot there, but who was going to call out a forensic team after a report of some hunter mistaking a hiker for a deer? The cleanup would be good enough to fool the forest ranger or low-level badge the state of Vermont would send to check out the scene.
“Listen,” Harry said, “is there any chance you could give me a ride to someplace with a phone?”
Thinking, Someplace with lots of other people around.
The man frowned again and exchanged glances with his wife.
“Don’t worry about it,” Harry said, starting to turn away. “I can walk or hitchhike.”
But the wife was shaking her head. “Of course we’ll take you,” she said, smiling. “We can’t abandon you here after you almost got shot. We’re going to Ludlow. Is that okay?”
“That’s just fine,” Harry said.
He had no idea where Ludlow was, but it didn’t matter.
Anyplace was better than here.
* * *
LUDLOW WAS CARS, cafés, art galleries, a ski mountain gearing up for the season, and hordes and hordes of leaf-peepers wandering around.
Perfect.
Thank God for Vermont, Harry thought. All these tourists, and still old-fashioned enough to have a line of pay phones outside a supermarket. Someone had even scratched Worship God on the silver coin boxes, just like they used to do in New York City back when there were pay phones everywhere.
Harry had memorized the number he was about to call. He’d been thinking about using it for days, ever since Anthony Harrison had given that speech. Telling Axelson about the stiffs, about the secret lab that had been operating all those weeks ago. Showing him the card he’d had found, the one that said, Philanthus???
Proving that Anthony Harrison was right: The president’s men had known about the bugs for weeks or months and hadn’t told anybody.
Of course, back then Harry had been interested in the financial side of things. He’d thought his information would be worth a fortune.
Now it was all about survival.
He dialed the number. It went to voice mail, a calm voice saying merely, “Axelson.”
When the beep came, Harry said, “My name is Harry Solomon. You know who I am. I got something to tell you you’ll want to hear. Call me within ten.”
He read out the number, then hung up and stood there. Years ago, you had to guard your pay phone from all the other people who needed to use it, but no longer. Now half the crowd milling past were stuck to their cell phones, the rest patting their pockets to make sure theirs were still there.
He didn’t think the COS’s men would kill him in public, not now. But he knew they’d have no qualms about muscling him into a car, driving him away, and making sure no one ever saw him again.
It was just a matter of time.
Call me back, you bastard, he thought.
The phone rang.
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE FOUR OF them sat in a corner booth in a chocolate restaurant down below Union Square. Until Mary Finneran had said that Kait wanted to eat at one, Trey hadn’t even known that such a thing existed.
To him, a restaurant that came equipped with bubbling vats of chocolate near the entrance, napkins made to look like milk, dark, and white chocolate, and a menu offering little but chocolate foods seemed like a sign of a civilizat
ion about to crumble. Then again, a lot of things did.
The four of them: him, Sheila, Mary, and Kait. Uncharacteristically, it was Sheila who was doing most of the talking. Sheila and Mary. Trey guessed that Mary did her part to keep any conversation going, but it was strange to see Sheila so relaxed and animated.
Or maybe “relaxed” was the wrong term. “Comfortable” would be more accurate. In between sips from a nonalcoholic chocolate martini, she was describing everything she and Trey had been doing these past days. Every once in a while she’d ask Trey for a detail, or for backup on some assertion she was making, but mostly he was extraneous to the conversation.
This was fine with him. He was all talked out. If he never had to utter a word again, it would still be too soon.
For two weeks, he and Sheila had done what they could to bring reality—or at least a touch of it—to the media coverage of Anthony Harrison’s blockbuster speech. They’d called the networks, CNN, MSNBC, public radio, positioning themselves as experts, offering to describe the process, the risks, the way those risks could be minimized.
When you could safely remove an implanted larva, and when you couldn’t.
At first they’d been a hot item, in demand, but soon attention had begun to drain away. Trey wasn’t surprised. Absent some new infusion of energy, some new headline, no story captured the public’s attention for long. Not an epidemic, a tsunami, a terrorist attack. Nothing. Not these days.
When reports of new attacks fell off, then stopped almost entirely, he had known their time was up.
They were sitting in the chocolate restaurant waiting for a science reporter from the New York Times. Trey hadn’t put it into words, but he had the sense that this interview would be the last big one, a postmortem for all of their efforts.
He missed Jack. But Jack was gone, in some secret research lab in Florida. Since the government had spirited him away, they’d heard from him just once, a voice-mail message saying he was fine and working hard.
“Not that it’s gonna make the slightest bit of difference,” he’d added.
* * *
WAITING, TREY DRANK his coffee—at his insistence chocolate- free—and watched Kait, who was sitting opposite him by the window, taking sips from a cup of hot chocolate filled with melting marshmallows (and served in a marshmallow-shaped white mug) and working on a chocolate pizza. She was a neat eater, cutting the gooey brown crust into bite-size chunks before transporting them, one by one, via fork to her mouth.
“When I was your age,” Trey said, “I would have been wearing that thing by now.”
Kait’s eyes flickered to his face for an instant. “Grandma told me to keep it off my blouse,” she said. Her quiet voice matched her solemn, oval face, dark eyes, and fair skin. Her blouse was white and dotted with little yellow, blue, and red flowers.
Mary, in the midst of her own conversation, heard and said, “You’re darn tootin’ I did. That shirt is new, and I’m not made of money.”
She turned back to Sheila. Trey and Kait looked at each other, and Trey said, “Grandmas are always listening, aren’t they?”
“They sure are,” Kait said.
Her gaze strayed over his shoulder. He turned to look and saw that there was a TV perched above the restaurant’s counter. It was tuned to ESPN, which was showing highlights from a soccer game. A player in a white uniform scored a goal with his head.
“I play soccer on my school team,” Kait said. “My new school. In Charleston.”
Trey nodded. “What position?”
“Striker,” she said. Then, hesitating, she added, “I score a lot of goals.”
“That was my position, too,” Trey told her.
Kait’s brow knit. “Really? But—” She closed her mouth again.
Trey thought he knew what she’d been about to say. “You’re surprised that I played soccer, because most people my age didn’t.”
Kait nodded. “That’s what my da told me.”
“Your da was right. Most kids in the United States didn’t. Not back then. But I didn’t spend all my time in the U.S. when I was a kid.”
She thought about that. “Where, then?”
“Brazil,” Trey said. “Kenya. England. Other places, too. My dad was a doctor, and we traveled a lot. But the places all had one thing in common.”
“Football.”
Trey smiled. “Yes, their football. Soccer. I knew when I was, like, six, that if I was going to fit in, I had to play.”
“Me, too,” Kait said. “Now.”
Her eyes growing distant.
“Is it helping?” he asked. “Soccer?”
She hesitated, then said, “Yes. I think so. But—”
Again the words cut off. Trey said, “But what?”
She compressed her lips, her gaze reaching his eyes, then quickly away. “It’s just,” she said, “you know? The other girls? They’re like, you know, all really . . . blond.”
Trey smiled. “Well, you can’t blame them for that. Some people are just unlucky.”
She stared at him for a moment, then actually laughed. Beside her, Mary looked startled.
“Being different is only a problem,” Trey said to Kait, “if you want to be just like everyone else. And who wants that?”
He saw her working it through. After a while she gave a considered nod. “I never did . . . before,” she said.
“Then why start now?” He pointed at himself. “Look at me—I’m doing fine, and I’m not like anybody else.”
“You can say that again,” said Sheila, who’d apparently also been listening.
* * *
THE TIMES REPORTER was named Becca Shaw.
Seeing her curly blond hair, Trey glanced at Kait. She gave him a wide-eyed look, and when he raised a finger to his lips, she let loose with a small, stifled giggle.
Becca Shaw was smart, serious, interested. Pulling a chair up to the head of their booth, she withdrew a tiny digital recorder and a well-used notebook from her black shoulder bag and began to ask pointed, relevant questions. She worked through the history of Trey’s discovery, touched on Sheila’s tragedy without crossing any lines, made sure she got every detail right about the thieves’ life cycle.
She also took advantage of the Finnerans’ presence to ask about their own encounter with the wasps. Answering, both Mary and Kait were clear-eyed and coherent. Trey wondered if he’d have been capable of as much, if he’d been in their shoes.
“I just wish I hadn’t agreed to sit there on TV during Harrison’s speech,” Mary said, repeating something she’d said to Sheila. “This isn’t about politics. It’s a health issue.”
Becca Shaw opened her mouth to say something, then closed it and, frowning, shook her head.
It’s both, Trey knew she’d almost said.
It’s always both.
* * *
“LOOK,” KAIT SAID. “On the TV. It’s Mr. Axelson.”
“Oh, joy,” Mary said.
Trey and Sheila turned to look at the television above the counter. Someone had switched from ESPN to CNN, and on the screen the familiar figure stood in some scrubby field behind a cluster of microphones and a scroll that read, “Breaking News: Statement from the Harrison Campaign.”
Becca Shaw was already standing beside the counter, asking a waiter to turn the sound up. He was working the remote as the rest of them joined her.
It was a press conference, and Axelson was listening to a question when the sound came up.
“Look at his face,” Mary said.
Kait tilted her head. “He’s . . . happy.”
It was true. At first glance, Axelson’s expression seemed to convey nothing more than his usual interest and intelligence as he listened. But if you looked beneath, you could see more. If you knew what to look for—his posture, something gleaming in his eyes, the way hi
s hands grasped the edge of his lectern—you saw a kind of fierce joy.
“He looks like he’s afraid he’ll fly right up in the air if he lets go,” Mary said.
“Shhh.” Becca Shaw was leaning forward, as still as a dog pointing toward the hunter’s prey.
On the screen, Axelson nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. President Chapman and his administration have known for weeks—months, maybe—that these creatures pose a deadly threat, but have gone to great lengths, criminal lengths, to hide their knowledge.”
“Do you have proof?” someone called out.
“Yes, we have proof,” Axelson said, pausing between each word and enunciating very precisely. “Incontrovertible proof of a cover-up.”
Even through the screen, it was impossible to miss the excitement that rippled through the crowd of reporters at the press conference. Voices shouted out. Axelson let them go on for a few seconds before raising his hands.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t explain yet.”
Beside Trey, Becca Shaw was holding her breath.
More shouting voices, angrier now. The communications director was unfazed. “In the Harrison campaign, we believe in doing what’s right for America, not just what’s right for us,” he said. “Or the press.”
“As opposed to the Chapman campaign,” Mary said in a low voice.
“At this moment,” Axelson continued, “our campaign manager, Ron Stanhouse, and other members of our team are meeting with their opposite numbers at the White House. Until we learn the results of this meeting, we consider it unwise—unpatriotic, even—to detail what we’ve learned in the past days.”
He leaned forward, the camera coming in close to his face. “But let this be understood,” he said. “I am here today to tell you that the president’s reckless actions have led to American deaths. Instead of protecting us—his sworn duty—he has put us, as a nation and a people, in harm’s way.”
Axelson stared into the camera. “Let it be understood, President Chapman,” he said. “Anthony Harrison will keep America safe. And you will be held accountable.”
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