by James Abel
“The Napoli Volcano Special.”
Half the patients here might be dead in twenty-four hours, and some asshole was denying someone a sandwich?
I ordered a nurse, “Get food for everyone. I’ll pay. I don’t care if someone has to drive to Vegas. Get her what she wants, however you do it. Captain, we’ll do this.”
One lone tear oozed out of his left eye, smearing a track.
I said, “I promise that I’ll tell you personally if I learn more. If I’m not here, I’ll call. Now, Dr. Okoye? You think I could get a ride into Galilee?”
Outside, he sighed. “You’re a good person, Joe.”
Chris sat stiffly in the Humvee beside me, moon man and woman, in our suits. More ambulances pulled up. She knows the truth about me. She knew about Joe Rush and the subject of revenge. Giving a patient sandwiches makes no difference on Judgment Day. A gift of prosciutto and peppers means nothing when weighed against the big questions, and Chris Vekey knew it.
Half an hour later, we found a clue.
EIGHT
Loading the old Honda Accord for the attack on the capital, Orrin Sykes suddenly felt doubts about the success of the mission. He was horrified by the emotion, even though Harlan had told him it might occur if he was away for too long. Harlan had instructed him on what to do about it.
You are my special warrior, Harlan had said.
Sykes was staying in a rented detached garage/apartment behind an empty Tudor-style home for sale in Northwest Washington, a woodsy neighborhood off Nebraska Avenue. He’d driven down in the secondhand car, and the apartment had previously been used by other people from the farm. He was alone here.
He closed the trunk, getting a last view of the Mossberg M1014 combat shotgun and the uzi with grenade launcher. Those were for defense, if he was interrupted today. Harlan had told him not to be taken alive. But today’s actual weapon fit in his pocket.
Sykes, fighting doubt, climbed the stairs and went through the open door into his one-bedroom apartment.
Sing the songs if you become frightened, Harlan had told him. Purify your thoughts.
Sykes ran a cold bath and dumped in six trays of ice cubes and got into the tub, naked. Back in New Lebanon, doubters sat nude in the snow sometimes, or were whipped while they sang. Sykes rocked back and forth. His teeth chattered. He cleared his head. He was ashamed that he’d even experienced doubt. He felt calm return, and discipline. Harlan was right.
Naked, he toweled off. I am not cold, he thought.
Sykes’s hit on the capital would be the group’s third, he knew, and the effects of the first two attacks should be showing up anytime. There was always a lag time between infection and outbreak.
“The Hebrews went into Canaan and displaced those peoples to create Israel,” Harlan had preached last night to a rapt audience back home, and over encrypted Internet to Sykes. “The armies of Mohammed carried his words on horseback. The Crusaders brought truth by sword.”
Inside the apartment, Sykes had stocked a month’s worth of food and ammunition. Harlan had seen the government plans to isolate the city if the disease got bad. Sykes had U.S. Army self-heating meals, a first aid kit, batteries, water, soap, syringes, bandages, throwaway cell phones, and boxes of Juicy Fruit gum, his weakness.
“Each prophet raised armies of the righteous,” Harlan had told the group last night.
Now, the innocent-looking pill vial went into Sykes’s black over-the-shoulder Tumi bag—the same sort carried by thousands of commuters—along with today’s Washington Post, a manila folder of articles about today’s Capitol Hill hearings, and a legal pad. He’d look like he belonged.
Harlan had said, “The armies of past prophets numbered in the thousands and the tens of thousands. But in this vial is an army of millions.”
Harlan was more than just Orrin’s teacher. Harlan had saved Orrin, and Orrin loved him. Harlan was his past and future. When near Harlan, Orrin felt an all-consuming peace that he had never known before. It was inconceivable that this feeling could be anything but right. He would do anything to keep the feeling.
Now Orrin upped the garage door and backed the Honda out into wintry Washington, draped with light snow. At this moment, he knew, people in the compound in Upstate New York were destroying old computers. Piling laptops and desktops on the ground to be smashed by sledgehammers, the wreckage soaked with gasoline. It would be burned, the plastic melted, the files obliterated, to be replaced by new memories that Harlan had ordered inserted into other computers, unpacked two months ago. The old experiments would be copied into the new computers. The dates on the experiments would change. Anyone reading records later would find real details but false dates. It would look like years-old work had started recently.
Sykes turned the car onto Military Road, a tree-lined thoroughfare of private homes and a strip of park. His heart roared with pride and anticipation. The Honda merged into light midmorning traffic, late commuters, shoppers, a private school bus. Alerted by radio about road work blockages, he planned to take 13th Street toward his destination.
Harlan had told him, “You are the only one I trust to send out alone. Everyone else goes out in pairs. Will you be okay by yourself?”
“If I get lonely, I’ll listen to the tapes. Can I ask a question, Harlan?”
“You need not ask permission, my special friend.”
“Where did we get the money for all this, the compound, the animals, the weapons? I mean, it cost a lot of money. We used to be broke.”
Harlan had smiled and touched Orrin’s wrist and Orrin had actually felt power and goodness flow into him, even through the thick leather of Harlan’s glove.
“Oh, my dear friend. HE provides.”
Military Road intersected with 13th near the Maryland line, and he turned right to stay inside city limits. Thirteenth was a gauntlet of detached homes that brought him toward the Mall. Orrin floated toward his fate as Harlan, on tape, rode along. The old tape recorder whirred on the passenger seat.
Harlan’s voice sounded strong, in Latin.
“‘Cum autem descendisset de monte, secutae sunt eum turbae multaem.’ Matthew 8:1–4. It means, ‘And when he had descended from the mountain . . .’”
Sykes’s lips moved silently, following along. He knew the next words. “‘Great crowds followed him.’
“‘Et ecce leprosus veniens, adorabat eum, dicens, Domine’ . . . ‘And behold, a leper, drawing near, adored him, saying, “Lord, if you are willing, you can cleanse me.”’”
Sykes’s lips formed, “‘Jesus touched him, saying, “I am willing. Be cleansed.” And his leprosy was cleansed.’”
The Honda glided into a snowy urban fog. For a moment Sykes missed Upstate New York—his friends, his lovers, the certainty of knowing each minute what you had to do. Until Harlan, Orrin had known rage but not direction, logic but not clarity, resentment but not reason, what passed for happiness sometimes, but not peace.
Sykes saw himself at eighteen years old. He saw a headline in the Crystal Lake, Illinois High School paper. SYKES WINS STATE SHOOTING CHAMPIONSHIP. ORRIN, OUR HERO!!!
Sykes passed Logan Circle at P and 13th, and turned left on busy Massachusetts Avenue, which would skirt downtown on its way toward Union Station and Capitol Hill. He kept to the speed limit. The vial in his pocket seemed alive.
Harlan said on tape, “The ancient Jewish general, Flavius Josephus, beat the Roman army. He outmaneuvered them, enraged and taunted them, and then, besieged finally, he slipped from doomed Jerusalem and went over to their side and wrote a history. The Hebrews were a little people, but their determination stopped an empire. Their tenacity changed history.
“Josephus wrote, ‘And King Uzziah put on a holy garment and entered the temple to offer incense to God. But that was prohibited. Only priests could do it. And a great Earthquake shook the ground, and the rays of the sun fell upon the K
ing’s face. LEPROSY seized him, as punishment.’”
Harlan said, “‘Uzziah died in grief and anxiety.’”
Massachusetts Avenue was a corridor for thousands of human drones who served the anonymous, insatiable needs of the capital. Sykes and the bacterial bomb kept to the speed limit. He eyed D.C. cops on the roadside, waiting to pounce on speeders. Near Union Station, traffic went stop and go. Harlan reached the part about the Koran. He was a charismatic speaker, but the prophets he quoted all seemed to speak with the same tone, as if Moses WAS Jesus WAS Mohammed and they all turned into Harlan Maas.
“Verse 5:110, chapter 5, Siral l-merdah—‘Allah will say, “Oh Jesus of Mary, remember my favor upon your mother . . . Remember when I taught you wisdom and the Gospel. Remember when you healed the leper with my permission . . .”’”
Remember? Sykes approached the heart of the empire as surely as a bacteria rides an artery toward a heart. Harlan’s voice became a mélange of other voices, old ones that had led Sykes on his journey from obscurity to rage, shock, failure, and finally, belonging.
—IS THERE NOTHING THIS BOY CANNOT DO?
—ORRIN SYKES TO STAR IN THE SPRING PLAY!
Sykes sauntering the polished cinderblock halls in Crystal Lake, Illinois High, accepting accolades from boys, adoration from girls. Sykes unremarkable scholastically, but his talents were physical. And physically speaking, he and Carol Ann Held spent long, sweet afternoons in her bedroom, since her parents both worked, and were not at home during the day.
Portrait of a future killer. A normal kid. A Chicago Cubs fan, who liked detective shows on TV. A kid like a million others, who nobody beat up, nobody abused, who dreamt of being famous. Sometimes he was in Hollywood in the dreams. Sometimes in battle. Sometimes the Olympics.
“You’ll go far,” his guidance counselor said.
When did the trajectory alter? Later, lying in a trash Dumpster in West Hollywood, watching a gray rat crawling near his feet, he’d decided it started when he announced to Grandfather that college was out. He’d join the Army, he said, as they sat one morning in the sunny breakfast nook, Sykes smiling, Grandfather frowning, which was odd, as he thought Grandfather would be proud.
—Orrin. Don’t do it.
—YOU served in the Army, Grandfather.
—Which is why I know a bad war when I see one. The President can’t make war. Only Congress should do it.
Grandfather arguing, pleading, finally coming up with something that swayed Orrin, which was, “If you join the Army and don’t like it, you’ll be stuck.” Grandfather suggesting a compromise. “I’ll call your uncle Merrill. He can get you into Iraq, but in a way that, if you hate it, he’ll get you out.”
Six months later Orrin manned a plywood desk in a trailer near Baghdad, processing pay forms on a computer. Sykes working for Uncle Merrill’s company—DIAMOND & SPEARHEAD—providing drivers and guards to convoys bringing supplies to troops, and aid to Iraqi towns. They did the same job as soldiers. They got four times the pay.
“We do good,” Uncle Merrill said.
Like all D&S personnel, usually former soldiers, Sykes had gone through basic training, under two former Marine sergeants. He impressed the sergeants with his shooting, quickness, and fearlessness, at least during the training.
BUT ALL I AM IS A FUCKING CLERK, BECAUSE UNCLE MERRILL TOLD THEM TO KEEP ME AWAY FROM FIGHTING!
His opportunity came when a planeload of guards was held up in Newark due to engine trouble. The company was shorthanded but a food convoy still had to go out.
An hour later, Sykes, wearing body armor, sat beside the driver in the third truck in the convoy. The trip was supposed to be easy. Convoys had taken the same route ten times before. Just before the first truck blew sideways, Ray Charles sang “Georgia on My Mind” on CD. The next moment, the second truck in line—in front of Sykes—almost went off the embankment. It stopped, smoking, blocking the road. Orrin jumped out of his cab. He’d spotted bursts of fire coming from behind rocks. His pulse pounded in his forehead. There was no time to be afraid. Instinct and training took over. He lay on his belly beneath the truck, firing three round bursts at the men on the roadside, as shouted orders came over his headset.
Orrin heard the whine of bullets and the smack of impacts on the truck. He saw an Iraqi rise up, a portable missile tube over his shoulder. He pulled the trigger and held the M4 as steadily and surely as he had when he won the marksman championship back home. The man fell back as the projectile left the tube, but shot up, trailing smoke as it flew harmlessly into the sky.
IS THERE NOTHING ORRIN SYKES CANNOT DO?
He didn’t get sick until it was over, didn’t smell his own shit until the ambushers had run. Then he saw the carnage. Guys he had played poker with last night sprawled by trucks. Guys calling for help, one man cupping his half-torn genitals, another clawing at his shredded face. Sykes fought off nausea. He rushed to help. He’d been taught how to use the morphine. He soothed the wounded. He watched the light disappear in one man’s eyes.
And then, as the medics came, he rose and spotted something odd on the ground, by the first overturned truck. Boxes labeled FOOD had fallen out, split open, and their contents lay scattered all around.
But it wasn’t food. Sykes walked among scattered handheld Game Boys and sat phones. He went to a second box and opened it with his knife. It contained bottles of Tito’s Vodka. Not food. Not aid. Not medicine. Vodka.
He opened another box. There wasn’t food inside that one either. The box was filled with pink iPhones.
That night former Sergeants Robert Delaney and Arnold Hasselbach visited Sykes’s trailer, sat down with him, acting less like noncommissioned officers, more like pals. They handed him a fat white envelope.
“You’re a born soldier,” the ex-sergeants said.
“I don’t want this money.”
“Yes you do. You did well today. Don’t spoil it. Hey! Is that your grandfather in that photo, Sykes? Back home?”
“Are you threatening me?” Sykes said.
“Don’t be a hard-ass. You were a hero. Money is gratitude. Why are you here if not for that?”
Sykes shook his head. He didn’t want to look at the envelope. “Those guys we killed were gangsters, not soldiers.”
“They were terrorists.”
“I killed four kids over vodka!”
“You saved your buddies, Sykes! Man up!”
From then on, two convoys went out each week, and Orrin Sykes did a good job protecting them. He rode shotgun on the lead truck. He was promoted and got a raise. One day he killed a civilian driving toward them in an old Ford Fairlane. After the violence was over, they found a dead baby in the backseat, also shot, and no bomb. Another time he and other guards shot it out with ex-Iraqi soldiers when negotiations over some stolen iPhones went bad. Sykes killed two men. Hasselbach gave him an extra thousand that night.
“Hey, man, there’s nothing you can’t do,” Hasselbach said.
He started drinking away bad feelings. Hasselbach gave him some cocaine, and later sold him more. Hasselbach smiling and praising but always watching. “We’re the tip of an iceberg, Sykes. Take the money. Go home. Spend it on that girlfriend in the photo. You blew away some bad murderer dudes, man. You saved American lives.”
Six months later he was out, living in Los Angeles, burning through the $68,000 cash. There were medical terms for his condition—the hours spent playing games at a computer, the inability to get a job, the laughter he heard when he couldn’t perform with women. Some days he didn’t even go outside. He drew the curtains in his little studio on Havenhurst Street. He sat in the glow of a screen. The money trickled away.
IS THERE NOTHING ORRIN SYKES CANNOT DO?
But there was, apparently, because casting agents turned him down. “You’re not good on camera.” The payoff money ran out. He remembered the laughi
ng face of a beautiful young actress at a swimming party in Beverly Hills. The girl leaning close, green eyes glowing, bikini snug, body filled with vitality. Half-drunk that day, he’d been going on about a wrestling award, trying to impress her. “You’re from where, Orrin? Crystal Lake? You weren’t even a big fish in a little pond! You were a protozoa in a little puddle!” She’d turned away, as if he were already gone.
Now as Sykes reached the Capitol area, the images came faster, like flipping cards. Carol Ann on the phone when he called her from L.A. “I’m getting married! You disappeared!” Sykes in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, blood on his face, but he could not remember why. Sykes waking in a men’s shelter to find a skinny guy, pants down, trying to rape him. Sykes in a jail cell. Sykes too humiliated to call Grandfather for money to get home. But finally he did, and did not even hear a dial tone, just a recording. The line was disconnected. He hesitated before calling Uncle Merrill, but knew he had to get out of L.A.
“Hi, Uncle.”
“You piece of shit! Your grandfather died asking for you! You ran away from the job! You ran away from Carol Ann. Go fuck yourself. Don’t call me again, loser.”
Now, in D.C., Sykes got turned the wrong way for a few minutes and steered the Honda along Independence Avenue, past the Museum of the American Indian and the Air and Space Museum. He made a U-turn. The road rose back toward Congress, past bomb barriers ringing the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, hydrant-shaped concrete blocks designed to block a car bomb. The gaps were large enough for a trillion microbes to float through.
But Sykes was still in the past, remembering the months after that phone call. Each time he’d thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Each time he knew he’d hit bottom, the bottom dropped out again.
Sykes saw himself in a police line-up, but the woman whose purse he’d grabbed failed to identify him. He saw himself breaking the lock on a gas station men’s room door for a place to sleep, in Omaha, near a rail freight yard. He saw himself standing in a concrete spillway in Buffalo, gazing at a billboard announcing Warner Bros. Pictures’ Academy Award nominees. Sykes a full-fledged member of the academy of failure.
