Cold Silence

by James Abel

  But if the problem is our own people, and they feel threatened, they’ll use every means to find me. They’ll make up a bullshit story. They probably have the power to do that.

  “Joe? I lost you there for a second,” Eddie said when I reached him again. His voice was calm.

  He knows exactly what I’m doing. Take the risk! The more who know, the better. There will be good people in the mix. I’ll hope Eddie gets through to one of them.

  I ran down the story quickly, watching the second hand on the wall clock move. A man saying he was Robert Morton had tried to kill me. He’d shot the homeowner near the hospital complex, on 37th Street, not me. He’d punctured my tires and offered me a ride. He’d grilled me about the progress tracking the disease, and attacked me when I asked about a “Sixth Prophet.”

  I sound lame even to myself, I thought, but pressed on.

  “The police will have that car, Eddie. They’ll have his prints. Hair. DNA!”

  “Come in, Joe, and we’ll both tell them.”

  I pictured Eddie in a room with police or FBI agents. Guys in suits. Guys with access credentials, guys who could move around legally, not like me.

  “The . . . river . . .” I gasped. “Cold here. Sleepy.”

  I smashed the phone to bits, in the process chipping off the top of Cindy Galli’s Shaker-era antique wooden table. I’ll pay you back.

  I tried the admiral and got his voice mail. Leave a message. I did. I tried Burke, and reached an assistant to an assistant, who sounded distracted as I ran down information. I heard a yawn. I was talking to someone so low down in importance that he thought I was a random nut. So much for access.

  Try Havlicek. But the number he’d had days ago was disconnected. Ray was probably using a new phone.

  By now someone at the FBI or in Burke’s office had probably recognized me from the police video.

  I need sleep. I should lie down . . .

  But then I remembered Chris Vekey, who had told investigators that I’d gone to the cathedral. What else had she told them? That I stayed here when in Washington? If they knew that, sooner or later someone would swing by.

  Has she already told them?

  There were no good choices, only gradients of risk.

  Get out. Now.

  At dawn, the storm was over. Bright rising sun tinged five fresh inches of unplowed snowfall outside. The street was deserted. I saw no car tracks. There was one last thing to do. I turned on the desk lamp at a kitchen window overlooking peaceful Grant Road. I’d head out the back door if I saw even one car turn onto the block, whether it looked like an unmarked or not.

  The kitchen computer was a Hewlett Packard, Galli’s day-to-day home model, not an encrypted machine, which required a password to get in. Maybe Eddie had sent me an e-mail. Maybe I’d gotten a relevant message that way. There was nothing of note there but I laughed when I saw that even in a time of national disaster, SPAM came through. A stranger named Brad wanted to friend me. A newsletter invited me to the annual dinner of the board of the National Emergency Disaster Group. I was about to click off when I saw a message from Aya Vekey, hours old.

  I tried to call you, Joe, but there was no answer. I just saw you on TV and hope you are okay. I bet the police shot first!

  I thought, I have two solid supporters, her and Eddie.

  I couldn’t find anything on those names you gave me, but I really, really tried. I’m sorry.

  I thought, That’s okay, you did your best.

  I tried to find records from SUNY, and those men you asked about from Africa, but the school is closed. The university website is up, but to get student addresses it says you have to call the registrar. They’re closed.

  Don’t worry about it, I thought.

  Then I looked up other stuff you asked; Sixth Prophet and Cults. There was a cult called the Branch Davidians in Texas. They had a shootout with the FBI in 1993 in Waco, after a 51-day siege. Their leader David Koresh said he was the Seventh Prophet. I thought if there’s a seventh, there must be a sixth, but I never found out who they said it was.

  Nice try, Aya, I thought, impressed with the kid’s inventiveness. The Branch Davidians had been a violent offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, believing that an apocalypse was imminent, and Koresh had been a charismatic leader, but he had been dead for years.

  Cults, I thought. Back at Wilderness Medicine, two months ago, at Harvard, Eddie and I had sat through a talk by a visiting Tokyo professor named Goro Akiyama, a Japanese expert on the cult Aum Shinrikyo, and their multiyear effort to secure biological weapons.

  “Genetic manipulation is easier and cheaper than it has ever been,” he’d said, while we eyed a photo of Shoko Asahara, the chubby, bearded, benevolent-looking academic and business failure who somehow had convinced highly educated followers that he could levitate, and that the apocalypse was imminent. “They tried to jump-start a global war by releasing poison gas in Tokyo in 1995,” Goro said.

  “At its peak, Aum Shinriko had over two thousand members, many of them Ph.D.s. It is still listed by the State Department as a terrorist group. They allegedly have members in Russia,” Goro went on.

  “Or in the U.S., Marshall Applewaite, the bald, avuncular fanatic believed he was the son of God. His thirty-three followers in 1997 committed suicide at his order, thinking that would release their souls to join aliens in space,” Goro said, showing slides of the dead laid out with their feet facing in the same direction, their shirts and trousers all the same, their expressions benign.

  Cults, I thought again. Charles Manson’s followers had believed he was the reincarnation of Jesus, and had gone on a rampage in California. Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple in San Francisco, had led almost a thousand followers in Guyana, South America, where they’d poisoned themselves at his command.

  Each leader predicted apocalypse. Each exerted life and death influence over followers. Each, Goro had told us, created an isolated culture composed of a hodgepodge of existing old religious belief, mysticism, and the notion that the leader alone had answers to universal questions, and that they could gain enlightenment by joining up.

  After Goro had left, one of the Los Angeles–based doctors in the department had taken me aside in the cafeteria. “Chicken Littles.” He’d sighed. “You can scare yourself to death with this stuff. It will never really happen.”

  And now Aya went on in her e-mail, I couldn’t sleep after that horrible segment of you on the news. I was almost asleep and found this blog from Pakistan. It’s from the sister of a man named Tahir Khan, who police say killed himself by jumping off a balcony in Florida. She didn’t believe it. She said her brother was pushed.

  I sighed, thinking that this was the type of worthless tripe you got when you sent out a kid to answer a crucial question. She got distracted. She didn’t focus. She lacked experience to weed out dumb stuff and pass along the relevant. You couldn’t fault her. She was fifteen.

  As I reached out to shut off the machine, my eyes slid over her next few words.

  Miriam Khan said Tahir Khan had gotten mixed up with a dangerous cult near Albany, New York, at SUNY . . .

  My hand stopped moving.

  Tahir was a science major, just like those other names you gave me. And he went to the exact same college!

  My heart beat faster.

  Tahir’s sister said he took the money he inherited from his father and gave it to the cult leader, a man named Harlan Maas. She said Maas bought an old Quaker meeting camp in New Lebanon, New York with the money, and made it a compound for about eighty followers.

  My breath caught in my throat.

  Tahir e-mailed his sister that he was scared of Maas, and thinking of leaving. She never heard from him again until the Pakistani government contacted her. Police in Florida had traced the fingerprints of a suicide. Tahir was Muslim, but quit that religion. Miriam said Harl
an Maas had crazy notions about the end of the world. I e-mailed her but got no answer.

  I stared at the screen.

  Joe? Ready for this? Tahir Khan studied LEPROSY at SUNY! Uh-oh. Mom is coming.

  The message ended.

  There were no other e-mails from her since then.

  But now that I knew the blog existed, I found it easily and read it. Aya had hit the high points. There was nothing more to be learned this way.

  I told myself, Erase this e-mail and don’t respond. If there’s a Washington connection, and they’re in my e-mail, if they know she’s looking into things, I may have doomed the kid. If I don’t respond, she’ll have a better chance.

  First Karen in Alaska, then Eddie. Now Aya.

  I knew where the admiral kept his 9mm home defense Glock 17. I stole the admiral’s five thousand dollar inherited antique watch. I’d need funds or valuables once I left this house. I made turkey and ham sandwiches and wrapped them in foil, filled a thermos with coffee, and shoved it all in an old knapsack. I took the admiral’s Russian flapped hat from the front closet, and a waist-length Thermolite ski jacket to give me a different look. I riffled the pockets of my old parka for gloves. That was when I felt the sharp edge of the cassette box I’d taken from Robert Morton’s car. I’d forgotten it. There was a label on the spine, in faded blue ink, in script.

  HARLAN AT CHRISTMAS.

  The force of the connection—HARLAN—made my knees weak. Stunned, I dropped into the chair, heard my own breathing. Was it possible? Was it conceivable that Goro Akiyama’s prediction had come true . . . and all the suffering had been caused by eighty people on a farm in New York?

  NOT Iran or Al Qaeda? Not any of the bad guys on the target board? Not the people whom the President is about to attack? Or is it more complicated? Is there a connection between that farm and Washington, D.C.? Because someone here went after me at that church.

  I heard myself laughing. It was a harsh, abrasive bark. I remembered what Eddie had said once after one of our Wilderness Medicine sessions, in a Mexican restaurant in Cambridge. Want to bet, One, that the world won’t be destroyed by Doctor Evil in the end, but by Bozo the Clown?

  Well, I thought, taking the cassette but leaving the plastic container on the kitchen table, they’d need DNA equipment, but that costs only a few hundred dollars. They’d need a way to spread the disease. A few vials could do that. They’d need samples of leprosy, but Tahir Khan had been a researcher. It wasn’t proof in a court of law, but it was enough just now for me. I felt my throat go dry, and my heart beat strong and steady.

  In the kitchen the TV was still on as I considered turning myself in and appealing to Burke directly. Would I even reach him if I tried? Holy shit! The numbers just shot up!

  NEW PROJECTED DEATH TOLL: 65,000–80,000.

  PROJECTED INFECTED ESTIMATED: 270,000–360,000.

  On the CNN map, the red ovals were bigger. Perhaps whoever was reporting numbers had changed interpretation, or made an error accounting for the sudden jump, or, as I hoped, was overstating things.

  At what point, I wondered, would those numbers start rising as fast as the WORLD POPULATION totals on the electronic sign in Times Square; single digits becoming triple, climbing at slot machine speed, a backward countdown to total disaster, digits rising instead of falling to reach the point of no return.

  —

  I wrote a long note, and left it on the table with the plastic cassette holder. I shotgunned an e-mail out to Eddie, Burke, Havlicek, and Homza. I cc’ed the head of the Wilderness Medicine Program, and a major general I knew in the Marines. I said I’d leave the empty cassette container—hopefully bearing Robert Morton’s fingerprints—on Galli’s table. I took the cassette itself.

  How to make friends with your boss: Break into his house. Steal one car and leave the other for vandals. I’ll pay you back, Admiral. I’ll buy you new cars.

  Albany, New York, would, on an average day, be a seven or eight hours drive away, requiring one Prius refill, if the tank was full to start.

  I knew about the mudroom corkboard where Galli hung extra keys to Cindy’s ten-year-old Prius. I left a hand-scrawled IOU for $55,000 to pay for all I stole. If money was still in circulation when this was over, and I was alive, I’d be happy to pay. If it wasn’t, the loss of two cars and a watch and a pistol was not worth mentioning. Neither was the extra cash I riffled from a kitchen closet, and jewelry—more barter material—that I stole from upstairs.

  The Prius started right up in the garage, but the tank was only half full. I’d worry about fuel later. The day had a beautiful, dazzling, post-storm glow, soft cottony snowfall on trees, the kind of white you see in urban areas before cars dirty it, the Currier & Ives winter wonderland effect.

  Even if I manage to reach New Lebanon, what then?

  A Prius is a low-slung vehicle, so despite front-wheel drive, getting out of the snowy driveway was difficult. I had to back up and change direction twice, and gun the engine when the tires spun in five inches of fresh fall. Grant Road was no better. It rose slightly on the way to Nebraska Avenue. I slid sideways and slowed and went to a lower gear and almost made it to Nebraska when I got stuck. A door opened on a one-story ranch house on the right and a bulked-up figure in a parka emerged and headed for me with something long and metallic, glinting, over his shoulder.

  I fumbled for the Glock. But I saw with relief that Galli’s neighbor carried a snow shovel, not a rifle. He rapped on the window. I recognized him from block parties. His name was Fred Gray and he worked as a lobbyist for the American Tobacco Consortium. The soft-spoken joke teller didn’t look particularly happy now. I rolled the window down and his worried look changed to surprise.

  “Joe Rush! I thought you were the admiral!”

  “He let me borrow his car.”

  “He and Cindy are still at Georgetown Hospital?”

  “That’s where I’m going,” I lied, realizing that this man had not seen my face on the news, didn’t connect me with anything wrong. It turned out that something much more important was on his mind. He’d come out to ask Galli a question.

  “Our daughter, Celia, is stuck at college, in Iowa. The TV says she’s in a clear zone, but last time I looked, that red area is almost in Ames. She’s in her sorority house. She says they have food for four more days.”

  “Thank God she’s safe,” I said.

  “Do you think she’ll be all right?”

  He knew I didn’t have an answer. He was too smart for that. But I gave him what he wanted, assurance. “Everyone’s working hard to figure out this thing,” I said.

  “Let me give you a push, Joe. And thank you. Tell the admiral. Thank all of you for working so hard.”

  —

  Wisconsin Avenue was plowed along a single lane running north-south, so police or troops could pass. I was alone on the road at the moment, and felt exposed, but had little choice. If I could convince Burke or Havlicek to send people to Upstate New York, there could be Marines in helicopters there in an hour. If I couldn’t, I had to go.

  Turn left, and I’d head for the Pentagon or FBI, to try a direct appeal. Head down Nebraska, to Homeland Security? Burke had threatened to lock me away in Leavenworth. By now he’d probably issued orders to that effect. Or was he the one who had sent Robert Morton to kill me?

  Turn right and I’d drive toward the Beltway, and Interstate 95, out of Washington.

  I turned right.

  Hell, I’ll have a better chance if I stay away and hope that one of my messages gets through. There’s no guarantee that even if one does, it will convince anyone. No guarantee that the traitor won’t block it.

  I stepped down on the accelerator gently. The one open lane had been salted. I heard the tires crunching on the granular result. On a normal day, I could make New Lebanon in eight hours. But now I could be stopped any minute by police or soldie
rs, even before I reached the Beltway.

  Now, every block is a risk.

  Driving, I pulled out Robert Morton’s tape cassette. The Prius was ten years old, so the sound system gave riders the option of listening to cassettes as well as CDs.

  HARLAN AT CHRISTMAS.

  I inserted the cassette in the slot, and listened, horror growing, as the Prius skidded north.

  SIXTEEN

  Major Edward Nakamura watched the striped curtain slide open in the emergency room alcove, and the next patient walked in. He tried to smile sympathetically at the woman, who was clearly terrified and sick and fighting panic. Eddie was exhausted from lack of sleep and worry for his wife and daughters and for Joe Rush. He’d been working for ten hours straight. He’d not eaten in eight. The scrape of the curtain sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. The announcements over the intercom seemed louder by the minute. A man was screaming out in the ER, “How long do you have to wait for help around here anyway!”

  Eddie said calmly, “I know you’re scared. I’m going to do all I can for you. Would you mind undressing down to your underwear?”

  The woman was forty-two, the admission form said, and had been in decent health only days ago. Now the face was ravaged, the symptoms identical to ones he’d been looking at helplessly for hours. Diagnosis wasn’t complicated, a six-year-old could do it.

  Any serious disease in your family? No. Any allergies to medicines? No. Onset of first symptoms? Four days ago.

  He said smoothly, listening to her galloping heart, “Every patient we see adds to our knowledge about the disease. You never know when the big break will come. It could come at any time. Let’s check your blood pressure.”

  Then came the standard leprosy check. He poked the eight spots on her hands and feet to test sensation, which she lacked. He checked the eyes for inflammation, and found a forest fire of inflamed veins. Squeezed the base of the thumb, the median nerve. Checked the ulnar nerve for tenderness by the eyes, for a lack of ability to shut them.

  What’s the point of diagnosing the same thing over and over? What we really need is to kill it. The normal multidrug therapy has no effect at all against both the paucibacillary and the multibacillary strains. Complicate that with fasciitis, and the fucking third piece that the CDC finally identified today, the tiniest almost hidden fraction of norovirus DNA. Making it spreadable by touch and air. Making it the goddamn hydrogen bomb of man-made disease.