by Mark Alpert
This seemed to get through to him. The president closed his mouth and lowered his head and looked down at the big oval rug beneath the sofa. The bluster drained out of his face, leaving it pale and deflated. His jowls sagged below his jawline. “Shit. You think that’s what he did? You think that prick is recording me?”
Vance shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe not yet. But we have to take precautions. We have make sure this doesn’t happen again, understand?”
The president kept looking down at the rug, which had the Great Seal of the United States woven into the fabric. He ran a hand through his disheveled hair, making it even more of a mess. “Christ, I don’t believe this. I just wanted to take a fucking nap. I lay down and closed my eyes for a second, just a second. And then…” He raised his head. There were tears in his eyes again. “What the hell’s wrong with me? I used to be so tough. I never had any of these problems before.”
Vance sighed. He didn’t have the patience to go through all the explanations again. The president’s illness was a type of frontotemporal dementia, a disease that slowly destroyed the brain, similar to Alzheimer’s but with more effects on behavior and emotions. It was caused by a rare genetic flaw that disrupted a crucial brain protein, and there was no effective treatment. The White House doctors had explained all these details to the president, but the information had never really sunk into his mind. He’d refused to accept the bad news, which meant that Vance had to repeat it to him over and over. Better to change the subject.
“How about some dinner? That might take your mind off your problems. I could ask the stewards to bring you a cheeseburger? Or maybe a taco bowl?”
“Goddamn it!” The president rose from the sofa and pointed at him. “You were supposed to fix this, Vance! You said if you had enough money for the genetics research, you could come up with a cure!”
“Okay, calm down. Your voice is getting loud again, and you don’t want—”
“I gave you billions and billions of dollars! I transferred money from all over the budget to your department. So where’s the fucking cure? What the hell did you do with all that money?”
The president stood in front of him, almost nose to nose, red-faced and glowering. Despite his illness and all his infirmities, he could still be brutally intimidating. And when he got into a rage, he forgot all the distinctions between his friends and his enemies. In fact, he directed his most vicious contempt at his friends, because he was convinced that they’d all betrayed him.
“Answer me, Vance! You said you’d have a cure by now. So are you a liar, or are you fucking incompetent?”
At that moment Vance hated the president more than he hated anyone else on earth. But unlike POTUS, Vance knew how to keep those feelings to himself.
“I’ve told you before, the CRISPR treatment isn’t ready yet. The results from the initial experiments were promising, but there were some very serious side effects. We can’t give you the injections until we’re sure they’re safe.”
“I don’t care about the side effects!” The president pointed at himself. “I mean, look what’s happening to me! How could the side effects be any worse than this?”
“You won’t have to wait that much longer. We’re about to start a new phase of the experiment, and in just a few weeks we’ll have some more results.”
“A few weeks? Are you nuts? I’ll be dead by then! I’ll be under the fucking ground!”
Vance wished he had a gun. He wouldn’t shoot the president. No, that would be stupid. But if Vance had a gun right now, he’d cock it and hold it against the president’s forehead. He wouldn’t pull the trigger, but he’d threaten to, just to get the narcissistic asshole to shut up.
He was still daydreaming about this plan when he heard a knock on the door to the Oval Office.
“Uh, Mr. President? Mr. Keller?” The voice on the other side of the door belonged to one of the Secret Service agents. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Vance looked over his shoulder, alarmed. The Secret Service men were under strict orders not to disturb them during the president’s mental-health crises. The agents could make an exception to the rule only in the event of a national emergency—a major terrorist attack, an earthquake, a nuclear war, and so on. Which meant that something very bad had just happened.
Vance strode toward the door and opened it. The pair of Secret Service men stood in the corridor, looking nervous. Standing just behind them was the vice president.
Under ordinary circumstances, the veep was the blandest man in Washington. He was usually dull and dim and slow, his face vacant and colorless under his neat thatch of white hair. But now his brow was furrowed and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. As soon as he saw Vance in the doorway, he elbowed past the Secret Service agents.
“I need to see the president.” His voice was firm. There was even some emotion in it. “Right now.”
Vance gave him a cordial smile. “What’s wrong? You look upset.”
He nodded. “I am upset. And I have every right to be.” He craned his neck, trying to look over Vance’s shoulder and peer into the Oval Office. “Where’s the president?”
Luckily, POTUS had retreated to the adjoining room, where he ate most of his meals. That gave Vance the freedom to invent a good excuse. “He’s in the middle of a phone call. With the prime minister of Japan. I’m afraid it’s going to be a fairly long conversation. Can you come back later? Or maybe wait until tomorrow?”
The vice president shook his head emphatically. “No. Tell him to get off the phone.”
This was shocking. The veep was a stickler about rules and courtesy, so for him this behavior was totally outrageous. Vance grew worried. “Listen, maybe we should go to my office and try to—”
“No, I want to talk to the president. About the Palindrome Project.”
He said those last two words very loudly, probably louder than they’d ever been spoken. Vance grimaced as they echoed down the corridor, making the Secret Service agents prick up their ears and stand a little straighter. The vice president wasn’t supposed to know about Palindrome.
He nodded again when he saw Vance’s reaction. “Yes, I know about it. I received a letter this afternoon from the attorney general’s office, delivered by messenger. And then I turned on my television and learned that the attorney general had resigned and left Washington without even holding a press conference. That’s a strange coincidence, don’t you think?”
Vance kept his face blank, but his stomach was churning. The AG had played a clever trick. He must’ve written the letter to the vice president in advance and arranged for someone to deliver it if he got arrested. Evidently, the attorney general had hoped that the veep would go ballistic and make enough trouble to bring down the administration. Then the vice president, out of gratitude, would free the AG from federal prison.
And everything was proceeding according to the AG’s plan. The veep’s colorless face had turned as pink as a pencil eraser. “Here’s the thing that really ticks me off, Vance. You’re going against God. It’s right there in the book of Genesis, chapter one, verse twenty-seven: ‘God created man in his own image.’ And no man has the right to change that, either through genetics or anything else.”
Vance had to think fast. The vice president was openly discussing Palindrome in the West Wing corridor, so what was to stop him from revealing the existence of the project to The New York Times or The Washington Post? And if he got the religious conservatives riled up over this issue, the Republicans in Congress might finally find their backbones and turn against the president. So the situation was dire. It demanded an immediate, forceful, decisive response.
“Okay, I hear you loud and clear. I’ll go get the president. Just wait here for a moment.”
Vance turned around and marched into the Presidential Dining Room.
POTUS sat in a chair at the head of the long table, covering his face with both hands again. When he heard Vance come into the room, he lowered one hand, revealing th
e left side of his quivering mouth and a wet, frightened eye.
“Did he go away, Vance?”
“Shut up and listen. You’re going to do exactly as I say.”
SIXTEEN
Jenna hid in Prospect Park until nightfall. She sat under the trees on Lookout Hill and waited until the last rays of twilight flickered through the foliage.
It was a miracle she’d made it this far. After she left Green-Wood Cemetery, she was an easy target for the FSU’s surveillance network. There were security cameras at every intersection in the neighborhood, and a whole fleet of quadcopter drones buzzed overhead. She heard a clatter of running feet as she raced toward Prospect Avenue, and she assumed it was a squad of men in black uniforms. The noise was very close, just around the next street corner.
But they weren’t FSU officers. It was a crowd of civilians running toward a supermarket. Someone had shattered the market’s glass doors, and people were coming out of the store with armloads of bread and milk and cereal boxes. There were so many looters in the street that it was easy for Jenna to lose herself in the crowd. She sprinted another three blocks and reached the edge of Prospect Park, which was even bigger than Green-Wood and full of hills. After climbing over a wrought-iron fence, she dashed up Lookout Hill, one of the park’s densely wooded sections, and dove under the cover of the hundred-year-old trees. She could still hear the drones buzzing overhead, but their cameras couldn’t see her through the thick canopy of leaves.
Was her escape really a miracle, though? Or was it a matter of luck and geography, not divine intervention? Jenna wasn’t a good Muslim anymore—she’d stopped following the Islamic rules twelve years ago, after her mother died—and science was a much stronger force in her life than religion was. And yet, as a scientist, she always tried to be open-minded. Although there was no convincing scientific evidence for God or miracles, she couldn’t disprove their existence either. So as she rested on the hilltop, she recited a prayer of thanks, the second prayer she’d said in the past twenty-four hours, after a whole decade of disbelief: Praise be to Allah, lord of the heavens and lord of the earth, lord and cherisher of all the worlds.
Jenna knew Prospect Park well. When she was a girl, she came here often with her parents and Raza, sometimes to visit the zoo, sometimes to feed the ducks in the lake. She’d always felt comfortable here, and right now it was probably the safest place in all of Brooklyn. Although mobs of looters and rioters were tearing through the nearby neighborhoods—she could hear the screams and sirens and car alarms—no one but Jenna was on Lookout Hill this evening. It helped that the woods were still soaked from the storm the night before.
After sunset, she sat for another half hour on the damp ground. She was waiting for the sky to get fully dark, but she was also using the time to make her plans. She wasn’t sure where the FSU had taken Abbu and Raza, but the most likely place was Rikers Island. The Feds had rounded up thousands of New Yorkers over the past three months, and Rikers was the only jail big enough to hold that many detainees. Jenna couldn’t go near the island, though, without getting arrested herself. And for the same reason, she couldn’t go to the federal courts to challenge the detentions.
What she needed was an ally, an advocate. If she could get a powerful lawyer or government official to draw attention to the illegal treatment of her father and brother, then maybe the FSU could be forced to release them. But Jenna had no money for a lawyer, and she didn’t know anyone in the government. She was a nobody, a nonentity, a penniless, friendless, unemployed fugitive.
She wasn’t completely empty-handed, though. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the iPhone that the New York Times reporter had handed her. She couldn’t access the video stored on the phone—Keating hadn’t revealed his password—but she remembered the instructions he’d given. He’d told her to deliver it to a woman named Tamara, most likely a fellow reporter or editor at the Times, who lived at 168 Prospect Park West.
That was the best option. First of all, it was the right thing to do. The world needed to know about the massacre at Bay Parkway. Second, if The New York Times revealed the video of the bloodbath, plus the details of the Palindrome experiments, then the FSU might be pressured to release all their detainees. The newspaper was the perfect ally for Jenna. And the apartment buildings on Prospect Park West were right across the street from the park, only half a mile from where she was hiding.
Soon the sky turned black. The power was still out all across Brooklyn, and the woods on Lookout Hill grew prehistorically dark, as pitch-black as they were two thousand years ago. Jenna stood up and groped her way down the hill. She stretched her arms in front of her and reached for tree trunks in the darkness. She stumbled over loose stones and patches of mud. She couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead, so she guided herself by sound rather than sight, heading with trepidation toward the noisy crowds of rioters.
She hiked under the trees for the next twenty minutes. Then she reached the low stone wall at the western end of the park and crouched behind it. The moon was rising behind her, illuminating the blacked-out neighborhood. When she peeked over the wall, she could see the apartment buildings across the street, most of them stately and elegant and four stories tall. Park Slope was one of the nicest parts of Brooklyn, where a two-bedroom apartment could cost a million dollars and most of the residents were doctors, lawyers, or bankers. But the rich folks weren’t on the street tonight. They were in their expensive apartments, huddled behind locked doors, while the refugees from the storm walked up and down Prospect Park West.
They weren’t rioters, not really. They were ordinary men and women, old people and teenagers, even some toddlers trailing after their parents. They’d looted supermarkets and bodegas, but only because they were hungry. They ate the stolen food as they walked down the street, ripping open packages of cold cuts and bags of tortilla chips, guzzling bottles of water and Coke and beer. The storm had ravaged so much of Brooklyn that it seemed like half the population was newly homeless. They couldn’t go back to their flooded neighborhoods, so they milled across Park Slope, adrift and exhausted.
All at once, though, the mob started running. At first Jenna thought the FSU was chasing them, but there were no officers or armored Strykers in sight. The refugees shouted at one another and converged at the intersection of Prospect Park West and 13th Street. Then they ran farther west, stampeding toward the commercial strip on Eighth Avenue. Someone must’ve spread the news that another store was being looted. Within minutes, the whole crowd hustled off. The street in front of Jenna was deserted.
She looked left and right to confirm there weren’t any cops nearby. Then she climbed over the stone wall and raced across the street and took cover in the doorway of one of the apartment buildings. Because the streetlights were out, she had to squint to read the address number above the door: 176. She was close. She headed north, scurrying toward the next doorway down the street. That building was Number 174. She kept going.
The funny thing was that Jenna had once dreamed of living in this neighborhood. Two years ago she became friends with another researcher at her lab, a biochemist named David Weinberg. He lived in Park Slope, half a mile from here, in an apartment his parents had bought for him. Jenna started dating David, even though he wasn’t Pakistani or even Muslim. (He was Jewish!) It was a bit daring of her, but her father didn’t mind—he really liked David—and after a year she started thinking seriously about marrying him. But she worried about leaving Raza. Although her father could care for her brother without her help, Jenna had always handled the nighttime duties: reading books to Raza, singing lullabies, doing everything she could to help him go to sleep. He clearly loved this nightly ritual, and so did Jenna. She couldn’t bear the thought of giving it up.
For months, she agonized over the decision. In the end, though, all that emotional turmoil was for nothing. Last winter, David broke up with her. He gave her a lame excuse—“we’re growing apart”—but Jenna suspected it had something to do with
her troubles at work. She’d become a pariah at the lab after she’d objected to the human testing of CRISPR, and David didn’t want to be associated with her. He was ambitious and angling for the lab director’s job, and their relationship was hurting his chances. So he dumped her, which ended Jenna’s dream of living in Park Slope. But she wasn’t heartbroken. David had turned out to be a jerk, and she was glad she’d seen his true colors before it was too late. Counting her blessings, she decided to swear off men for a while.
Now she crossed 12th Street and dashed toward the entrance of a large brick building that took up half the block. This was Number 168. On the right side of the doorway was an intercom panel with about twenty buttons, each marked with a name tag printed in Gothic lettering. Next to Apartment 3A was the name Tamara Carter.
Jenna pressed the button. No answer. She pressed it again. Still nothing. Getting desperate, she leaned on the button until her index finger started to hurt. Then she remembered: if the power is out, the intercom won’t work.
Chagrined, she rubbed her finger until the pain went away. Well, that was stupid.
After some thought, she stepped away from the building’s entrance and backed up until she stood near the curb. Then she looked up at the windows on the third floor. The shades were drawn and the curtains were pulled shut, but behind them she saw soft, wavering lights, probably from candles. Most of the building’s residents seemed to be at home. It was just a matter of getting Tamara’s attention.
She looked to her left and right again. She felt nervous and exposed. Now that every cop in Brooklyn was looking for her, the last thing she wanted to do was draw attention to herself. But she didn’t have a choice. She drew in a deep breath.
“Tamara? Tamara Carter?”
Jenna’s voice echoed against the brick façade. She thought she saw a shadow move behind one of the curtains on the third floor, but nothing else happened. Clearly, she needed to get louder.