Cold Silence

by James Abel

  “Yes, in the New Testament, it’s cured,” I said.

  “We could sure use a few miracles now,” Morton said.

  The man has a gun in his car. So he’s the suspicious type to start with. But why would a suspicious person offer a stranger a ride during an infectious outbreak, and risk contagion? I bet Robert Morton’s fingerprints are on these cassettes.

  I shrugged, and said, “You said it! The lepers appear before Jesus. Jesus touches them, and they’re cured! I wish we had something like that now.”

  “He didn’t cure all the lepers,” Morton said. “Just the ones who deserved it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at those windows in the cathedral. The men he cured were believers. It’s not like Jesus cured bad people. You had to have the right things in your heart.”

  The friendly curiosity in the eyes was back.

  I need to get some sleep, I thought, and said, “You’re right. I had not thought of it that way.”

  “What else did the dean say?” he said.

  The gun oil smell seemed stronger. We warn ourselves of danger in different ways. I wished I could remember more of the song that I’d heard in Somalia, and which also may have been sung in Nevada, where the outbreak had started. I couldn’t remember more. Anyway, I was a poor singer. I couldn’t carry a tune. But I recalled the cadence of the music, even if I could not summon specific notes. Four low notes followed by two high.

  Hell, try it.

  I looked out the window, as if bored or tired. I tried to reproduce the musical notes in my off-pitch voice.

  “Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, MMMM MMMM!”

  “That a song?” he asked.

  “Was I humming? Sorry! My girlfriend says I do that all the time. Drives her crazy. I don’t realize I do it. The tune? Just something I heard recently. Catchy.”

  “Heard? Heard where?”

  “Overseas and out West,” I said, a bland enough answer if he didn’t know what I was talking about, but a threateningly specific one if he did.

  “Overseas?”

  “In Africa. I was stationed there.”

  We were less than a mile from the hospital, crawling along on a deserted street in the dark. If he was going to try something, he needed to do it fast. When we reached the hospital, I’d try to get the guards to somehow detain him. Then we could question him, and if he was simply Good Samaritan Robert Morton, he’d be allowed to leave.

  On 37th Street, we passed row townhouses and parked cars and bare trees and an empty block-sized park. He made a right turn onto a smaller side street. There was no reason to do this. The hospital lay dead ahead on the straightaway. But the side street was darker, and narrower, and more private.

  Go for it, I thought.

  I clicked out of my seat belt to give me more room to move. He didn’t seem to notice it, but if he was a professional, he’d noticed it all right.

  “Who is the Sixth Prophet?” I said.

  “Excuse me?” His voice was lower. “The sick what?”

  “Not ‘sick’. Sixth. The Sixth Prophet.”

  “What are you talking about . . . Hey! Those are the same kids who hit your car!”

  My gaze flicked right and I caught his blur of speed. He was fast, but he’d moved a fraction of a second too soon. His left hand was up, drawing the pistol crosswise from the hiding space between door and seat, bringing it up between belly and steering wheel. It had never been in the glove compartment. He would have blown my face off if he’d waited that extra fraction of a second. But the fraction gave me a chance to react.

  BOOM . . . BOOM . . .

  I parried his wrist and the pistol fired twice. A Glock 9 sounds like a firecracker in open air, like a bomb when detonating inside a car. The decibel level of the shot is actually higher than many shotguns and rifles. There was a hot, searing pain along my jaw. A fraction of an inch closer . . . My eardrums seemed to cave in. I could barely hear except for firing. Or maybe I didn’t hear it, maybe I just felt shock waves.

  The car was straying sideways as our hands rose and fell; parry, hit, parry, parry. Holes appeared in the windshield, fringed with white. The laminated glass didn’t shatter but each shot webbed the areas around the holes. The Honda bounced off a parked car and kept going. His foot was off the accelerator, but the car remained in gear.

  BOOM . . .

  An ejected shell bounced off my forehead.

  I parried again.

  His face seemed huge, inches away, all yellow teeth and onion breath. He was screaming something. I smelled urine. I could barely hear and then I heard one word, virus . . . A flash of headlights swept past and something big rumbled by. Our front grille bumped into a parked Smartcar. Its alarm went off. The Honda pushed the tiny vehicle against the curb as we fought.

  BOOM . . .

  Eddie and I had spent a week at Quantico once, taking an Israeli Krav Maga course, focused on combat in enclosed spaces. We’d fought with an instructor named Gilboa inside a Volkswagen Passat, in a broom closet, in a roach-filled crawl space, in a rocking cabin cruiser off Virginia in a storm.

  Counterattack as quickly as possible. Neutralize and counterattack! Gilboa had screamed in his Israeli accent.

  Who are you? I shouted in my head, but got no answer. The gun was not in his hand anymore. He must have dropped it. Or I’d knocked it away. This man was ten years younger than me, and very fast. He went for my eyes with a two-finger strike. He tried under the chin and bridge of nose hits with the heel of his palm. I went for his throat with my elbow. The back of my neck slammed the dashboard. The whole car smelled like a campfire now.

  I thought, Bring him in to Burke!

  Probably only a few seconds had gone by. An extra surge of adrenaline hit us as high beams raked the car, and somehow my side door was open, and as we tumbled out, locked together, a new voice, enraged, was screaming, “You hit my car. Fuck you! You rammed my car!”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw, across the small, shadowed lawn, the golden rectangle of an open front door and a woman standing there with a phone in her hand. BOOMBOOMclickclickclick. Robert Morton must have retrieved his gun and now it was empty. The car owner’s face—the guy above us—had exploded in red and he fell away. I could hear the woman in the doorway screaming. I was going for Robert Morton’s eye sockets. I was trying to blind him with my thumbs.

  The police and Marines had extra patrols out around the hospital. I didn’t realize they’d arrived until the loud hailer warned us to stop fighting and stand up and put our hands in the air. Two pairs of headlights up the block had stopped, set low, so they were cop cars, not Humvees.

  The police behind those cars would see two floodlit men at each other’s throats, a third on the ground, shot, a wife in a doorway screaming. I had no ID. It had been taken away. I had no weapon. Burke knew I was AWOL and had threatened to put me in Leavenworth. The police were taking suspects to holding areas, locking them up for days. No lawyers during the emergency, Galli had said. No phone calls. Normal arrest procedure on hold. Everyone making up process as they went along, not as in the unit’s already useless war games.

  Robert Morton was getting up, standing. Was he giving up? No, he was running off, pointing back at me. Why didn’t the cops just shoot? I heard him shouting, “He tried to hijack me! Help! He has a gun!”

  I tried to stand but my knees buckled. I groped and the gun was in my hand. It will have his fingerprints on it, I thought. Snow was falling upward suddenly. Little puffs blew into the air from the ground. The police had seen the gun and misinterpreted.

  A fuselage of shots slammed into the Honda.

  Robert Morton was gone.

  I dropped behind the car, shouting that they shouldn’t shoot, that I was a Marine, that I’d dropped the gun and if they stopped firing, I’d come out.

  But they were
coming at me from two sides. Maybe they’d not seen me throw the gun away in the dark. Maybe they’d seen but they were angry or scared or didn’t care. I shouted that I was giving up. I started to stand but someone fired and I dropped down again. There was something glinting in the snow, which had fallen from the Honda. It was one of Robert Morton’s music cassettes. I shoved it into my parka pocket. It might have his fingerprints on it, if I get out of this alive.

  I crawled backward, keeping low.

  The angle of the shots hitting the Honda changed. The police were on two sides now, coming through the yards. They were tired and scared and on triple-shift duty and the woman in the doorway kept screaming, “He shot him!”

  I scrambled back but the woman was pointing at me. She could see me clearly from her vantage point. I reached some bushes as behind me I heard her high-pitched screeching, “He shot my husband! He shot Larry!”

  “That man murdered my husband!” she screamed. “He’s getting away!”

  FOURTEEN

  Chris Vekey hated herself at that moment. She could hardly believe that she had phoned Burke’s office, turned in Joe Rush, telling the assistant that Rush was AWOL. Now she sat at a fifth-floor window in the Georgetown campus dorm given over to medical personnel and families, hearing Aya typing on her Mac in the other bedroom of the suite. Outside, the storm had worsened. Moments ago, through the open window, she’d shuddered as she heard gunshots from beyond campus, in the residential neighborhood nearby. People out there were starting to fight. The flood of incoming patients was increasing. She saw a copter in the sky and a stabbing searchlight. The campus was an island of order, but increasingly, she knew, if a cure wasn’t found, that island would become more isolated, the city around it more barbaric, the sense of order mere memory. Stunned by the speed of the deterioration, she thanked Burke in her mind for his foresight in ordering medical personnel to safe places.

  I had no choice, Joe. If I hadn’t told Burke that you left, he would have punished me, too, when he found out. I warned you. You’re crazy if you think I’d do anything to separate myself from Aya.

  But she felt wretched for doing it.

  She was freshly showered and dressed in clothing that Aya—thinking ahead—had brought from their condo when the admiral fetched her: gray wool pantsuit, white blouse, flat-heeled shoes, all under the white lab coat and new ID designating her as complex staff. The clothing would reassure patients and families. She no longer had access to Burke but now it was time to go help people. She’d be planning space use on campus, food distribution, bed assignments, and decontamination procedure when staffers exposed to the sick went back to their families in the dorms.

  Knock . . . knock . . .

  Ray Havlicek stood in the hallway outside. Surprise!

  “I’m on campus checking security. We’ve got some VIPs checking in. Thought I’d drop by, see if you and Aya are okay.”

  She’d always liked him. Dating him had been a mistake, but he was smart and athletic and handsome, attributes she liked in a man. Unfortunately she’d felt no chemistry. He’d made it plain that he felt otherwise but had been a good sport when she told him after several dates—a movie, a Kennedy Center play, kayak day on the Potomac—that she’d prefer to stay friends.

  “Thanks, Ray. Want a tour? Two pretty big bedrooms here, kitchenette. These students live in a hotel. It’s not like when I went to school.”

  “The Hilton!”

  “I’m about to make rounds, Ray.”

  “Heard from Joe, by the way?”

  She started. Havlicek said, “Yeah, Burke told me about it. I sent some agents over to the cathedral, to pick him up. He’s in trouble.”

  “Don’t you need your people elsewhere?”

  Havlicek shrugged. “Burke doesn’t want people to think they can just walk off. You know. Make an example of Joe.”

  She felt hot. “Oh.”

  She needed to stop thinking about Rush and concentrate on her job. She was here to calm people by systemizing their fear, giving them the illusion that order meant control. She’d expected to see lots of patients but still had been shocked by long lines at the gate, by all the people waiting for triage. The obviously sick ones would be sent to Building A, possibly infected to Building B, families turned away but names, addresses, and phone numbers recorded for the FBI. Go home and wait. If your loved one is sick, people will come for you, too.

  “Mind if I make the rounds with you?” Ray said. “Might as well do the tour together.”

  “I’m glad of the company, Ray.”

  Burke’s aide had told her, Thank you for the warning on Colonel Rush.

  The praise burned in her stomach.

  Chris Vekey asked Ray to wait one last moment, put a benign expression on her face for Aya, and crossed the shared living room to say good-bye. She knocked at Aya’s bedroom door. The girl sat at a desk by the window, where students had once solved chemistry problems. Aya even looked like she was doing homework, leaning forward, concentrating so hard that she’d not registered that Chris stood behind her. Then she saw Chris’s reflection in the window. She turned and moved the laptop sideways. In the light of the desk lamp, her face was alarmed. Aya tried to smooth it away. Chris knew the expression. Aya was up to something. She hadn’t been doing homework.

  “I have to go to work, Aya. Be back in a few hours.”

  “Where’s your mask, Mom?”

  “I’ll put it on when I get outside. Ray is here. Want to say hi?”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing, Aya?”

  “Just reading . . .”

  But the panic was unmistakable. Aya was an honest kid, so when you questioned her about legitimate activity, she got angry. When you caught her doing something wrong, the wide-open eyes gave her away. Chris bent over the computer. There was no time for Aya to change what was on-screen. But when Chris saw what was there, she frowned, because it did not explain Aya’s look of guilt.

  Chris looked down on an eight-year-old article from the AP wire.

  Cult leader says group will leave Vermont after Animal Rights activists force closure of basement lab.

  The caption read, Is research torture?

  “Aya, what is this?”

  “I was just scrolling around.”

  Chris stared at Aya, who had showered and had a towel around her head and was barefoot on the carpet. She wore an overstuffed bathrobe with a Moose logo on the left side. The normal cute expression was back, the light blue eyes innocent. The girl’s posture was forced casual, arm thrown over the back of the chair. Aya had a habit, when nervous, of tucking in her upper lip, and she did it now. She’d be a lousy poker player, Ray Havlicek had once said, back when Chris dated him. Aya’s face was one constant tell.

  “You’re chewing that lip, Aya.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, just turn on the electricity, Mom. Get out the water board.”

  Chris told Aya to get up and she sat down at the computer. She hit Previous and the article disappeared and now she saw a six-year-old article titled, “Cult Charged with Animal Torture.”

  She hit Previous again.

  “What is this, Aya?”

  The girl’s face was set. “It was an assignment we got before the outbreak. Ms. Jefertson is such an animal rights activist. Like, she was always going on about them. Like, I think she likes animals more than people. Like, she’s not like married you know. I bet it’s a substitute!”

  “Don’t say like. I’ve told you a hundred times.” But Chris experienced a second bolt of suspicion. Aya had said the word like so many times just now that it was almost as if she wanted Chris to pay attention to it. Diversion!

  “Whatever, Mom! So she made us do a report on animal abuse around the United States. I might as well finish it in case the emergency ends and we go back to school. You told me to think positive. So I am.”
>
  Something was off but there was no time to deal with it. If Aya was doing schoolwork, Chris would not get in the way. If Aya wanted to regard the emergency as temporary, Chris could only give thanks for that.

  It’s going to get a lot worse first, either way.

  Havlicek the gentleman held the suite door open for her. Zipped into her white hooded Andrew Marc parka, a $99 clearance sale purchase, she stepped out with the FBI agent onto the snowy campus and headed beneath vapor lights toward the hospital complex. Ray wore FBI blue.

  “So you haven’t heard from Joe,” he said.

  “Nobody has. He should have been back by now.”

  “Well, my guys missed him at the cathedral, I found out.”

  They stopped at mid-campus, by the Jesuit graveyard. Its tilting, worn headstones marked the remains of priests who had died over three centuries, in trouble spots around the world. “I once wanted to be a priest,” Havlicek said as they eyed the gathering of dead: Jesuits who had died of the flu in World War One, tending soldiers; Jesuits who had perished of cholera in Haiti; Jesuits who had given their lives fighting outbreaks, or who’d been killed by the Soviets, or died of old age there in Georgetown, their final resting place only two hundred feet from a hospital, as if those buildings were doorways to the next world.

  Joe Rush came into her head.

  I had no choice, Joe. You asked me to choose between Aya and you. There was no choice.

  Chris fought off the stab of misery. She felt as if she’d destroyed a relationship, yet she had never been Rush’s lover, or the recipient of any of his affections at all. Not that that would have changed what she had done. Not for a second.

  “Chris, I think Burke plans to reinstate you,” Havlicek said. “He might even send you to Virginia, get you out of the line of fire here. Maybe I can pull some strings and get Aya sent there, too.”

  “You could? Really? My God, Ray! Thanks.”

  “No problem.” He smiled. He had a very nice smile. “Anyway, let me know if you hear from Joe.”