A military emergency. That was a totally inadequate term, Mike thought, but it wasn’t like he had a better one. The apocalypse? No, the spiderpocalypse! He snorted. Okay. That was sort of funny.
He was sitting on an Adirondack chair on the lawn, a spreading view of the point and the dock and the water before him. The first hint of dawn whispered over the lake, and it was warm enough that he was comfortable without the light jacket he’d borrowed from his ex-wife’s husband. The sky was a mix of stars and scattered clouds. The clouds, pinned against the night sky, were like smoke from a campfire, and Mike thought the name Soot Lake seemed suddenly appropriate. He heard the call of a loon and then, a minute or so later, the lonely splash of a fish. It was terribly peaceful here. Maybe when all this was over, he’d take Dawson up on his offer to loan him the cottage. Would that be so weird, to be friendly with your ex-wife and her new husband? Honestly, the more time he spent with Dawson, the more he liked the man. It would be good for Annie, he thought, to see the adults in her life working hard to like each other, and it would be good for her to see him and Dawson getting along.
Like she was summoned by the thought, Annie stepped out from the front door of the cottage. She was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt. He was pleased to notice that the sweatshirt was the one he’d given her for Christmas, a zip-up hoodie with the agency’s acronym emblazoned on the back. It was too big for her, but it was thick and warm and she’d grow into it. Though, if he thought about it, it was sort of odd that the agency would have sweatshirts at all. But it had, online, what amounted to a gift shop that agents could order from: sweatshirts and T-shirts and baseball caps, pens and coffee mugs and even Frisbees, all bearing the agency letters or seal.
She leaned against the door frame, lifting one foot to rub the back of her other calf. She scanned right to left until she saw him, sitting on his chair. She stretched and rubbed her eyes, then padded down the steps and across the grass toward him. The moon and stars were silver rivers of light against the breaking dawn, and Annie positively glowed. For a moment he couldn’t believe how big she was, how she didn’t look like a little kid anymore, and then, in the shifting light, she looked young again.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said. “Sorry. I keep forgetting. I know you’re too old for me to call you beautiful all the time.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“Couldn’t sleep?”
“No. Can I sit on your lap?”
“Of course.”
She settled on his lap and leaned against him. She pulled her hood up and then brought her knees to her chest and tucked her sweatshirt over her legs so that only her feet were sticking out. He grabbed the strings of her hood and pulled them tight so that it scrunched around her face. She giggled and stuck her tongue out at him and then he used his hands to peel the hood loose again.
They sat like that, just the two of them, staying quiet for five or ten minutes as the sun slowly started to breathe light into the sky. The clouds took on depth, and the first oranges and reds painted themselves onto the world. The water was still ink-black, flat and featureless in the calm of morning. Mike could feel Annie’s gentle weight against him, her soft breathing counting out the morning for him. Just when he thought his daughter had fallen asleep, he felt her shift.
“Did you see any last night?” She was whispering. Or trying to whisper. She was eight—no, nine now, Mike realized, cringing at the mistake—and wasn’t very good at whispering. It didn’t matter, though. They wouldn’t hear her inside the cottage.
“Any what?”
“Any bad guys.”
“Oh,” he said.
“That’s why you’re out here, isn’t it? To keep the bad guys away?”
“No bad guys. It’s been quiet. Uncle Leshaun was out here most of the night. I took over around four. What time was it when you came out of the house?”
“Maybe five thirty?” She was quiet for a minute then said, “I know. I know about bad guys. I know about the spiders. And I know the president said nobody could travel anymore.”
“What else do you know?”
“I’m not a baby,” she said.
She wasn’t angry. It was just a declaration. The statement of a little girl who was old enough to know that she didn’t really understand all that was going on. She might not be a baby anymore, but she was his baby. She’d always be that, no matter how old she got. She was sitting on his lap, curled up under her sweatshirt, leaning against him. There was no feeling more comforting to him than holding his daughter. He pulled her tight against him and let his chin rest on top of her head.
“I know,” he said. He was surprised to hear the slight hitch in his voice. “You’re a big girl. I’m proud of you. You know that?” He felt her nod. He felt her breathing in and out, but the rhythm was off. Was she trying not to cry? She shifted her weight.
“It’s okay to be scared,” he said. “This is scary.”
“What did they want?”
“Who?”
“Those men on the boat,” she said.
“You saw that? I thought you were reading.”
“I heard the motor.”
“I don’t know what they wanted,” he said. “I think a lot of people are really scared right now. Not every person makes good choices, and sometimes, when people are scared, there are people who try to take advantage of that fear.”
“Bad guys.”
“Bad guys,” Mike said. He liked how simple it was for her. Bad guys and good guys. In her book, he was a good guy, and he liked that too. “Leshaun and your mom and stepdad and I are all here. We’re all going to work together to keep you safe. No bad guys. Okay?”
“What about the spiders? You’ll keep me safe from the spiders?”
He should have expected the question, but for some reason he hadn’t. It took him by surprise, and he felt poleaxed. He wanted to reassure her, to tell her everything was going to be just fine. Bad guys or spiders, the bogeyman in whatever form, he’d keep it all away from her. He was her dad and she was his beautiful Annie, and there was nothing on earth that would get through him to her. But he knew it wasn’t true. He’d known it in his bones from the minute he’d held her, slippery and crying in the hospital. He’d never felt a fear like that before. She was wrapped in the hospital blanket, mewling with her eyes closed and covered in some sort of gel that the nurse had swabbed on her eyelids. She’d been so unbelievably tiny. Weightless, almost. Fanny was smiling and drained, sweat still spotting her hairline, and he’d looked down at his daughter and felt fear like he’d never felt before.
The other guys at the agency—and some of the women, too—joked about what they’d do when their daughters were ready to date. Cleaning their guns in front of the boyfriends, showing up at prom with a SWAT team, or just, you know, killing the first couple of boys your daughter brought home. It was a version of the same fear, Mike knew. Worry over the understanding that there would come a time when their children moved beyond their orbit, when their little girls became young women and went out into the world, a place where they could no longer be protected. But Mike had always wondered what the hell they were thinking. Did they honestly believe they could protect their children before that? Sons or daughters, did they truly believe they could keep the world at bay even a little bit? Because even in those first moments in the hospital he’d understood how much of the rest of his life was out of his control. This little thing in his arms, this tiny package of feet and hands and mouth and ears and nose was so fragile. No matter what he did, there’d always be something out there to be scared of, and not just when his daughter started to date, but now, standing in the hospital, holding her as a newborn, and now, at two in the morning on the day of her second birthday, rushing her to the emergency room with a fever of 104, and now, when she comes home crying from kindergarten because her butterfly didn’t hatch, and now, explaining to her that even though he and mommy love Annie very much, they no longer want to be a mommy and daddy together, and now, sit
ting in this chair in the unseasonable warmth of early May, holding her on his lap, and knowing there was absolutely no truth to the promise, knowing there was no way to keep her absolutely safe.
But that didn’t stop him from saying the words.
“We’ll keep you safe,” he said. “Promise. Okay? I promise. I love you.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
The sun poked above the horizon.
The White House
Manny signed the paper and then handed it back to his aide. “And if Congressman Wilford calls again, tell him to go fuck himself.”
“Literally tell him to go fuck himself, using that actual language, or do you want me to be polite about it?” Sharon Robinson had been working for Manny long enough to know to ask the question. He’d had aides before who would have taken such a statement as a suggestion and replace his salty language with something more politic, telling the congressman only that Manny was unavailable.
“Literally,” Manny said. “I literally want you to tell him to go fuck himself. In fact, I want you to literally tell him to go fuck himself, to unscrew his tiny dick and shove it up his own ass, and then I want you to tell him that I said he is a total shithook.”
“Okay,” Sharon said. She typed his words into her tablet. “Shithook.”
Congressman Wilford truly was a shithook, in Manny’s eyes. Even at the best of times, Wilford, a fourteen-term congressman, was the sort of pork-ladling asshole who made Manny embarrassed to be in Washington. But this wasn’t the best of times, and he’d had the temerity to call four times since Steph had authorized the Spanish Protocol. He wasn’t calling because he was worried about the country or the safety of his constituents, but because he wanted to twist Manny’s arm over a boondoggle for which he’d been trying to get federal funding for more than a decade. A casino project built and owned by Wilford’s brother. According to Congressman Wilford, the time had never been better to build a casino in his district. Why, after all this was over, the country was going to need some good news! As long as you had to rebuild the overpass and the bridge, what better time to put a new exit in, one that, conveniently, would lead directly to this proposed casino?
“Scratch that,” he said. “Tell him to literally go fuck himself, and then tell him I said he’s a swizzle-sticked, dickbag, shithook excuse for a human being and that I hope spiders come out of his toilet and eat their way into his body through his ball sac.”
“That seems a bit harsh.”
“Fine. Forget the part about the spiders.”
Manny took a sip of his Diet Coke. He was, he realized, not in a particularly good mood, which was no surprise given the stress. He looked at Sharon as she typed out his response to the congressman. Sometimes he wondered if she suspected that he and Steph were sleeping together. If she did, she never even hinted at it. That was one of the things that made her such a good aide. She was smart and he never had to second-guess the decisions she made in his stead. In fact, the only fault he’d ever been able to find with her was her inability to come up with creative ways of cussing out people on her own. Not that he usually swore at congressmen and senators. Well, not all the time. Not as much as he wanted to. But maybe a little more than he should. Okay. He had a problem with his temper.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“You’ve got a meeting with Director Gibbons at two.”
“What about?”
“He’s got a CIA contractor who claims he might have a weapon that would be effective against the spiders.” She shrugged. “Gibbons said it sounds kind of crazy, but it’s the same guy they used for Project Dark Cloud.”
“And remind me, what was Project Dark Cloud?”
“The thing with the GPS satellites last summer.”
“Ah. I liked that. That was pretty slick.”
“Gibbons said the contractor is an odd duck, one of those survivalist types, but also brilliant, and it might work, and if so, it’s probably scalable. Also, Gibbons said that he heard from his counterpart in MI6, and he’s making all kinds of noise about Peru, and you need to talk about that as well.”
“Peru?”
“Yep. Sorry, I don’t know more. I didn’t actually talk to him. His assistant to my assistant, and then my assistant to me, and then me to you. You know how it is. But, evidently, it’s important enough that he’s insisting on a meeting with you and the president. Two o’clock.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
She looked at the clock on her tablet. “You’ve got fourteen minutes of quiet time until your phone call with the Israelis. Close your eyes or something. You look like shit.”
“Thanks, Sharon. I’ll remember that the next time you ask for a raise.”
She walked out of his office, giving him the middle finger as she closed the door.
Manny decided she had a point. He looked like shit and felt like it. What he wouldn’t give for a simple political scandal or trade crisis to deal with. He slipped his shoes off and then lay down on the couch. Fourteen minutes. He took deep breaths in and out, in and out. Years ago, when he and Melanie were in couples counseling, their therapist told him the best way to meditate was to quietly say the word one over and over again, and so Manny whispered the word to himself with each breath.
Jesus, he hoped that the director of the CIA’s weirdo contractor really could deliver some sort of spider-killing machine. He imagined a giant box emitting heat rays, the spiders melting away. A death cube.
Peru.
What had Sharon said about Peru?
He sat up quickly, then felt a little lightheaded. Hadn’t Melanie also mentioned something about Peru?
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland
Simple pleasures. Simple pleasures. That had been her mantra since she’d moved her lab into the NIH building. Thirty minutes of running laps around the building—a whole posse of Marines watching her the entire time—or fifteen minutes of watching sports highlights. She knew that other scientists and entomologists around the globe were studying the outbreak, trying to find the answers, but it felt like the weight of the entire world was on her shoulders. Not just Manny and Steph, but, oh, seven billion people all needing her to figure out what was going on with these spiders. There wasn’t much time for her to decompress, so she’d tried to make sure she could at least have a few simple pleasures to help her relax. Like lunch. It was weird to have the US military tasked with your personal safety, but the upside was that even her most simple requests were fulfilled with stunning alacrity. She couldn’t vouch for the battlefield prowess of the American military, but if the Pentagon ever ran short of money, it could turn itself into a mean takeout delivery service. She’d asked her minders for Thai at noon, and by twelve thirty the conference table was decked out with Pad See Ew, Panang curry, ginger shrimp, Thai fried rice, Rad Nah, and . . .
“Seriously? Who ordered pad Thai with just tofu in it?”
“I like tofu,” Julie said. “And we’ve been eating a lot of meat.”
Melanie shook her head, heaped up her plate, and sat down. She wanted to enjoy the food, but the conference table didn’t do it. Admittedly, this had not been the most uplifting week or so of Melanie’s life, and there was something dispiriting about fluorescent lights and conference tables, particularly when it was an incredible spring day outside, the sort of weather that made her appreciate living in Washington. But inside, the fluorescent lights buzzed and washed everything out.
Julie was shoveling the pad Thai into her mouth as she stared intently at her laptop. She had an idea about predicting swarm points, and she’d been running numbers all morning. They’d argued over whether or not to include the report from Chicago in the data set: there’d been a hatching in the subbasement of a luxury boutique hotel down near the Magnificent Mile, but for some reason, the spiders were not aggressive. According to the reports, the spiders had hatched from a man’s body that was found in the bowels of the building, but then they’d only sort of crawled around and
scared the shit out of the night manager, who was the one who called it in. Also, the guy was claiming they had red stripes. Red stripes! There weren’t any photos, because the Chicago authorities’ immediate reaction—which, Melanie thought, was probably reasonable enough, albeit absolutely infuriating—had been to burn the entire building to the ground. Melanie told Julie to include it in the data even if the report seemed sketchy. Julie’s idea was better than nothing, and nothing was what they had. She was ready to grasp at any straw. Including, she thought, as she looked out the window and saw the helicopter shoot in low and straight, this young woman.
The helicopter landed in the cleared-out parking lot ringed by military vehicles and a woman climbed out. From her perch, high up in the building, Melanie couldn’t tell what the woman looked like. Could barely tell it was a woman. And when, five minutes later, Teddie Popkins was finally ushered into the conference room, Melanie was surprised at how young she looked.
“Are you even out of college?” she asked. “What are you, twenty?”
“Well, that’s a condescending way to start things off, but I’m twenty-three. I graduated two years ago.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just exhausted,” Melanie said. “Do you know why you’re here?” She saw Teddie glancing at the plastic takeout containers. “Go ahead. Help yourself.”
Skitter Page 21
