Cold Silence

by James Abel

  Even at 9 P.M. more ambulance headlights rolled into the horseshoe-shaped driveway. Extra ambulances had arrived from outlying suburbs, and moved past the guards in a stream. The line of cars grew longer at the entrance. Masked nurses escorted patients to designated buildings. New arrivals to triage, in the Medical and Dental Annex. Clearly sick to the hospital, which normally held six hundred beds but had been expanded. More beds were being set up in the Dahlgren Memorial Library and Davis Performing Arts Center. Military station in Building D; Chris’s office in the Lombardi Cancer Center.

  She told Havlicek, “We’ll add beds in the field house, too. But we may need to open up another building.”

  From the searchlights a few blocks off, and sirens, she surmised that another police action was going on. They heard shots. Havlicek explained that after an initial period of laxity with civil disobedience, “police and Marines are now responding with extra force.”

  “Ray, I thought Burke was crazy when he told me to move in here. But I guess he knew what he was doing.”

  “He does. Believe me. He does.” Ray paused. From his expression, she thought he was about to get personal. It made her uncomfortable. “Chris, remember when we were going out, our talk about bad timing?”

  “I do. But not now, Ray, please.”

  There are no good choices. If the disease gets out of the wards, then this campus will be the worst possible place to have my daughter. I can’t send her into the city. It’s too late to send her to Dad, and even if I could, I’m not sure whether things will get bad down there, too. Maybe I should be nicer to Ray. Shut him out more gently. He’s a good guy. He can get Aya to safety.

  “I’m just upset,” she said.

  “No, it was stupid of me to bring personal stuff up. No problem at all,” Ray said, smiling, palms out. A pal.

  He stayed with her for one last stop before going with her to her office. At the front gate she checked the line of walk-ins that stretched down Reservoir Road toward 37th Street. Two hours ago she’d found one of the guards mistreating people, shouting, pointing an M4, scaring little kids and making them cry. She’d had the man transferred to the hospital. She’d told the Marine captain in charge to make sure that his soldiers treated the frightened people with kindness. At the time, she’d thought that Joe Rush would never treat strangers badly. He was good with frightened people. He was just bad with normal people. Go figure, she thought.

  “Must be four hundred people out here,” Ray said.

  They stood on the “safe” side of the razor wire. The line was seven deep out there and Havlicek’s shoulder brushed hers. The scene reminded her of bread lines she’d seen at refugee camps in Syria, in Haiti, in New Orleans.

  She started to turn away when she spotted something familiar. She shielded her eyes with gloved hands to cut out the vapor light glare. A man in midline wore a dark parka, hood up, and had his head down, his hands jammed in his pockets. She was not sure what had caught her attention. Then he inched ahead and she realized that was it. Rush moved like that, favored one side, because of his amputated toes. Left side dipping slightly, then coming back up fast.

  The man shuffled forward, face away from the street, where a police car was slowly approaching, shining a side light down the line. The man seemed to make himself smaller. The car rolled past. The man’s head came up and followed the receding car and the vapor light turned a flash of face green.

  It’s Joe! He’s hiding from them!

  The thumping in her chest happened when he was close whether she wanted it to or not, whether she was angry at him or glad to see him or puzzled, as she was now. Why is he standing in line instead of announcing himself at the gate?

  “Why exactly did he say he was going to the cathedral?” Havlicek asked, as if sensing that Joe was on her mind.

  “He wanted to ask the dean about leprosy and religion.”

  She started to tell Havlicek that Rush was here. But she stopped. The throbbing in her head spread down into her intestines. All she had to do was say it and point and she’d be reinstated at her old job and Aya might be in Virginia. People like Burke thought in terms of rewards.

  Rush took two steps forward with the line. Havlicek was saying, “Religion? What does religion have to do with it?” The police car was coming back down the block, and this time its spotlight paused here and there on the line. Rush turned away, very slightly, not enough to attract attention. You had to be watching to see him do it.

  Chris remembered the gunshots she had heard ten minutes ago, and she remembered the helicopter. Mentally, Chris measured Rush’s place in line against the stop-and-go speed with which the line moved. He looked as if he’d been here for . . . about ten minutes. No, she thought. It couldn’t have been for you.

  Her breath floated into the night as mist, as she turned to Havlicek, looked into his face. Havlicek’s full attention was on Chris. His soft smile.

  “You can really get Aya to Virginia?” she said.

  “There’s going to be a second wave sent down, once people are tested and disease-free.”

  Rush had eased himself to the outer edge of the line. Rush ambled away from the line, into and across Reservoir Road. Rush was a diminishing shadow moving out of the streetlight, into the darkness of Glover-Archbold Park, one more person tired of standing on line, or changing his mind about checking into the hospital, one more lone individual on a night filled with emergencies, going off alone. She saw a gate guard watch him go. No big deal.

  “Thanks for trying,” she told Havlicek.

  “I’ll come back and check on you guys again,” Ray said, and squeezed her arm. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  She hurried into the main hospital building. Instantly, the sounds of mayhem echoed off the cinderblock walls: babies crying, someone shouting over a public service announcement, an apology for long waits in the emergency room.

  I never saw you, Joe. I hate the choices you give me. Funny, but maybe if Ray had not offered Virginia, I might have told him. But it sounded like a deal. You’re on your own, Joe, whatever you are doing out there, whatever you have done.

  FIFTEEN

  I slipped unnoticed into the small bamboo garden behind the admiral’s two-story house. The massed shoots and high picket fence blocked neighbors’ views of the yard. The key was where he always left it, under the metal flowerpot on the screened porch. I let myself into the kitchen and punched in the alarm code, 1776. Eddie and I had been guests there so often that we knew the system. We came and went as we pleased.

  Robert Morton knew I was going to be at the cathedral. Who is the traitor?

  Grant Road, where the admiral lived, was in Northwest D.C., named after the general who won the American Civil War. It was a lovely narrow street off Nebraska and Wisconsin, a tree-lined Americana where neighbors knew each other, shared cookouts, watched out for each other’s properties, even helped each other shovel snow. The neighbors knew me as a regular guest there. If they saw me, I hoped they’d think nothing of it.

  Could the traitor be Chris Vekey? She told Burke I’d left. Could it be Burke? Once Burke knew, others would, too.

  The house had been left heated at fifty degrees, which, after four exhausting hours outside, seemed like a luxurious seventy. The air vent system hissed; the stainless steel refrigerator sighed. Pinprick tingling in my fingertips indicated some warmth returning. In winters I usually feel extra chilled where my amputated toes had been. Once you get frostbite, as I had in Alaska last year, the sensation always surfaces in cold.

  Or is it possible that Robert Morton was waiting for me at the hospital and followed me? That would still mean I could be dealing with a traitor inside the investigation.

  Normally, a drive from the hospital here would have taken no more than ten minutes. Metro busses made the trip from Tunlaw to Tenley in double that. But I’d needed hours to walk a mere 3.5 miles and stay clear of polic
e and soldiers. I’d circled around an apartment building fire on Fulton and Wisconsin, as an exhausted, understaffed crew of firemen tried to get it under control, and pajama-clad residents watched. I’d ducked behind a parked Chevy Tahoe to avoid a gang of young men, judging from their laughter, who were smashing car windows with tire irons and baseball bats. More widely spaced headlights connoted Humvees patrolling near Macomb Street, where looters had sacked the Safeway. I moved through backyards and alleys, slid past lit homes and abandoned ones, used side streets paralleling Wisconsin, zigzagged my way toward the best place I could think of that might provide a temporary place to hide.

  Ray Havlicek knew I was going to the hospital, and could have had someone waiting for me. Burke knew. Their assistants probably knew. Who to trust?

  I fell into a chair at Galli’s kitchen table and tossed a plastic RadioShack shopping bag on top. Out spilled what I’d run off with through the store’s bashed-in front grille. Other looters had gone for computer components and audio systems. I’d taken prepaid disposable cell phones, the last twenty on display. I’d been one more figure in the half dark, hunting supplies amid a maze of crushed display boxes, tangled wiring, and rifled cash registers. No sirens outside, just flashlight beams amid the grunting and footfalls of other people’s desperation.

  I thought wryly, At least the looting was predicted in our old war games. Other than that, it’s make things up as you go.

  In the fridge I found sliced ham, Swiss cheese, dill pickles, and romaine lettuce, shoved a food mass between two slices of seven-grain bread, and started wolfing it down. I guzzled water from the faucet and found a bottle of Maker’s Mark Bourbon in the liquor cabinet. Sticking with water would be smarter. I poured bourbon into a ceramic mug and sprawled at the table. I clicked the TV remote that operated the SONY flat screen on the wall.

  Let’s get the big picture.

  CNN exploded on, with its usual head-churning montage, ten shots at once, and a running national death toll on the bottom, numbers rising one by one, jumping ten, then a pause, then thirty more, then fifty. TAMPA AND LOS ANGELES UNDER MARTIAL LAW, the banner read. Gas gouging in nine states, mob sacks hospital in Orlando for medicine after a rumor spreads that there’s a cure there . . . Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York holding round-the-clock masses. Survivalists in Idaho peering out of a barbed wire fence, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “We’ve been preparing for twenty years,” one said.

  NATIONAL DEATH TOLL: 22,856.

  I clicked to NBC, and overhead shots of highways, nothing moving in Chicago, National Guard monitoring the interstate in Tennessee, blocked to all but official traffic by the governor, everything normal in Oklahoma City. Some airports open to disease-free essential personnel, others closed. Food convoys snaking down I-95, the East Coast corridor, driven by Marines.

  CONFIRMED TOTAL CASES: 84,749 so far.

  Christ.

  I saw the nation in colored swatches, red for highly infected areas, with crimson blobs covering Los Angeles, Reno, and New York City; light blue connoting disease-free North Texas and splashes of Deep South and northern Maine, Denver, Indianapolis, Galveston, Santa Fe.

  Europe and Asia almost disease-free, with U.S. flights barred from entry.

  Pulsing green marking avenues of spread: highways, air travel lanes, ship and rail routes.

  Freight trains moving, an announcer said. Passenger trains not.

  Fox News broadcast a timeline: infected areas yesterday, with brown marking the previous day, pink the day before. PBS showed a rolling montage of disaster: Dallas ambulance attendants taking away dead on gurneys; Brooklyn homeless, faces eaten away; gas gouging on I-80, $41 a gallon; a faith healer tent rally in Mississippi, hallelujah; doctors arrested in Madison, Wisconsin, for selling salt tablets labeled antibiotics.

  “Beware of charlatans,” the announcer said. “There is no known cure to the Bible Virus. Go to a designated triage center if you become ill.”

  The moving banner offered bullet points. POPE ASKS WORLD TO PRAY FOR AMERICA. U.S. SIXTH FLEET ORDERED TO STAY FAR FROM HOME, TO KEEP SAILORS SAFE.

  As I clicked to local news, I unwrapped the first disposable cell phone, or more accurately, needed a scissor to cut the damn vacuum wrapping off. Whoever invented this stuff probably worked for Homeland Security. It was harder to open than a vault at Chase Manhattan.

  All the networks simultaneously switched to the underground government complex beneath Virginia, an hour from where I sat. I saw the President interviewed by a blond ABC reporter, famed, Vanity Fair had said in a profile, for her “sympathetic eyes.” Both people sitting with legs crossed, in maroon leather chairs before a roaring fireplace, as if they were at the White House, not on a set designed to look homey a hundred feet belowground.

  UNDER MOUNT WEATHER.

  “God is with America,” the President said.

  “Sir, would you comment on the latest Wikileaks report that you’ve okayed a plan to bomb terrorist camps in Mali and Nigeria?”

  “The enemy doesn’t need spies. Just Wikileaks,” the President joked.

  “Don’t you think the public has a right to know war plans?”

  “If you’re asking whether they need to know everything that happens every second, no. I make decisions based on hard information, after consultation with some of the best prepared security staff on Earth.”

  “Then it’s true. You’ve authorized massive attacks in retaliation for the infection.”

  “You shouldn’t spread baseless rumors.”

  “I’m not the problem, sir.”

  The President didn’t look particularly safe in his bunker. He didn’t look confident. He looked exhausted.

  “Why don’t Americans trust each other anymore?” he said.

  —

  The sandwich tasted better than a sirloin steak at Peter Luger’s. The quiet was a blanket. When I opened my eyes, I was slumped in the chair, and the clock told me that I’d slept for hours. It was 4:30 A.M. I smelled like a man who’d sweated through his outerwear.

  I needed a shower. But first I trudged into the den, my missing toes throbbing. I turned on the admiral’s computer, muted the sound, and found local news, for the headlines. Then I rummaged through the admiral’s collection of DVDs for one of his favorite documentaries, A History of the Potomac River, which we’d watched together the last time I’d stayed overnight. I inserted the DVD so the TV could show it, and scrolled to a four-minute segment I recalled where the only sound was the capital’s river, swelling over rocks, falling into pools, turgid, pure, unadulterated, turned-up sound.

  Only then did I call Eddie’s number. He picked up on the second ring.

  “One, where the hell are you? Are you okay? It’s four forty in the morning. Do you need help?”

  “C-c-cold out here,” I said.

  “What is that I hear? Water?”

  “Eddie, someone came after me,” I said. “At the cathedral. Someone was waiting. The song. The Sixth Prophet. Remember the song? We need to get to Burke or Havlicek. Or both, because someone told them I was there.”

  I meant, Tell as many people as possible because one of them is a traitor.

  “Who came after you?”

  “He said his name was Robert Morton. One guy. Alone.”

  The scene on the computer switched from weather to local crimes, video recordings. Have you seen these suspects? A store video froze looters in a Best Buy. A gas station video showed thieves turning on the pumps, waiting with five-gallon containers to fill them up.

  Eddie said much, much too patiently, “Come in, One. We’ll explain together. I can meet you. I’ll get a car. You and me, man, Uno and Dos, just like back in the sunny Korangal Valley!”

  I froze. In Korangal Valley, Afghanistan, we were separated and sent on different missions. Eddie’s telling me that someone is t
here with him, listening in right now.

  “Gotta go,” I said. “I’ll call back in five.”

  I hung up, pulled out the SIM card, and smashed it with a hammer I’d taken from a tool kit beneath the sink. Eddie was not allowed to leave the hospital grounds. He’d never come and get me. He’d warned me that we were being monitored and now I knew what I had to do to protect him.

  It was not to call him back.

  Because if someone sent Robert Morton after me, or if that someone got reports from whoever had listened in to us now, I’d put my best friend in the line of fire if I told him more.

  I cursed. I would call Eddie anyway. I hoped he knew enough to change his room after this, add locks, bar his door, watch his back as he moved around the hospital complex. The crushing weight was a ball in my lungs. But Eddie and the admiral would have access to people I didn’t. Eddie and the admiral might get through and get a response when I could not.

  I couldn’t stop myself if I wanted to at this point.

  I was punching in his number again with the next cell phone when, shocked, I saw myself on the computer screen. The footage had been shot from a police squad car. I was holding Robert Morton’s pistol while Morton ran away. There was a dead man—the man whom Morton had shot—lying on the curb. A woman, his wife, screamed and pointed at me from the house.

  I felt a barb move into my intestines. I heard my breathing pick up. They say cameras can’t lie. This one zeroed in on me, then switched to a rape attack near the Dupont Circle Metro entrance. Have you seen these men? Call this police phone number if you have. Reward!

  When I’d first called Eddie, I’d hoped there was little chance of anyone on his end having the ability to track me, at least not quickly. All the better equipment would be allocated to major security—for terrorist suspects, interstate hijackers, gasoline thieves, or border crossings; to the larger emergency, not street crimes in Washington, D.C.