by Mark Alpert
The president smiled and nodded for a few more seconds. Then he lowered his head and abruptly changed his expression. He closed his mouth and narrowed his eyes and beetled his eyebrows. The change was magnified on the giant video screen behind him, which turned his face into a twenty-foot-high totem, somber and ominous. “Okay, we need to get serious for a minute. I came to New York today because we have a very big problem in this country. And I think you know what the problem is, right? The corrupt Democrats are doing everything they can to sabotage our efforts. They’re a bunch of liars and crooks and obstructionists. You wouldn’t believe how much damage and misery they’ve caused.”
He frowned and shook his head, looking deeply disappointed. His supporters murmured their assent, quieter now.
“We’ve seen some of that horrible damage right here in New York. The Democrats have devastated this city. Instead of deporting the illegal aliens like they should’ve done, they put out a big, friendly welcome mat for them! And you can guess what happened then, right? The illegals stole all the good jobs from American citizens, and the murderers and rapists ran wild in the streets. Look what happened just last night in Manhattan. Did everyone see the riots on television last night? Did you see what those people did to the stores and apartment buildings?”
The president waited out the chorus of agreement from the crowd. Then he shook his head again. “It made me sick to my stomach. Those people are animals. But I have something even more upsetting to tell you. I’m very sorry to have to say this, but my advisors have just confirmed the facts beyond any doubt.” He paused and narrowed his eyes even more, turning them into furious slits. “Last night, the vice president went to Gracie Mansion, the home of New York’s mayor, to discuss the security situation. And during that meeting, the rioters attacked the mansion. Those animals killed the mayor and the vice president.”
Twenty thousand people gasped. They all inhaled at once, and their cries echoed across the stadium. Although Colonel Grant had started spreading the cover story the night before, and the officials in the Pentagon and the Secret Service and the FBI had already digested the news, this was the first public announcement of the deaths. The president pressed his lips together, trying his best to look grim and incensed. He knew the truth about the veep’s death—Vance had given him a rough outline of it, excluding a few of the gory details—but he was good at revising the truth to suit his own needs. Now he played the role of the grief-stricken leader, the man who would acknowledge the nation’s anguish and use it as a springboard for decisive action.
“I want to say a few words about our late vice president. I truly loved that man. From the moment I met him, I knew he was a true patriot, a God-fearing American hero. His deep Christian faith was an inspiration to us all. And I’m gonna tell you a secret: I was planning to support him in next year’s presidential election. Although I love my job very much and wish I could stay in the White House for at least another term, I would’ve gladly handed it over to a man like him. He was one of the very few people in the country who could be trusted with the position.”
Citi Field had gone silent. The stadium was so quiet, Vance could hear the sniffling and weeping of the more emotional supporters in the crowd. He sensed they were restraining themselves in deference to the president. In their hearts, the people wanted to rage and wail, but they were so desperate for guidance and consolation that they bit their lips and stifled their cries. They hushed themselves so they could listen to their leader. They wanted to hear every word.
“I don’t have as much to say about Mayor DeMarco. I didn’t know him so well, and I don’t want to say anything negative about him at a time like this. But I think everyone will agree that the Democratic leaders of New York failed miserably. They created the horrible situation we saw on television last night. And it’s my responsibility as president to protect the American people. So you know what I did?” He paused again for dramatic effect. “I fired those failing Democrats. I put New York under martial law, and I sent our terrific army to the city to restore order. And our soldiers did a tremendous job.” He turned and pointed at the generals behind him. “So let’s give a big hand to our men in uniform. They’re the best, right?”
The applause was thunderous. It was so loud that the stage shivered under Vance’s feet. He looked again at Mr. Scruffy Beard and the other disguised hippies, thinking they might choose this moment to take off their red campaign shirts. Presumably, the president’s opponents wanted to demonstrate against martial law, and this would be the ideal time to stage their protest, while the rest of the crowd was congratulating the generals. But the malcontents did nothing. Their faces were blank. They looked uncertain, intimidated.
Meanwhile, the president reached for the microphone on his lectern. It was a wireless mic, so he was able to remove it from its stand and take it with him as he stepped away from the lectern and walked across the stage. He headed for the row of military men, but kept his eyes on the crowd. “Now I have to warn you, folks: The battle is just beginning. We’re gonna need more soldiers to keep the peace in New York. We have to get this country back on the right path, and that means I’m gonna order more military operations over the next few days. I’ve already asked Congress to hold a special session later this afternoon. And I’m counting on the full cooperation of everyone at the Pentagon too.” He turned toward his generals, looking half at them and half at the crowd. “So are you with me, guys? Are you gonna do your duty and follow my orders?”
The generals didn’t say anything at first. Although they were all smart, competent officers with decades of experience under their belts, they’d never been asked to affirm their loyalty in a public arena like this, so they had no protocol for how to respond. After a couple of seconds the men turned their heads ever so slightly toward the highest-ranking general among them, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was tall and brawny and completely bald. He exchanged a nervous look with the other officers, communicating without words. Then he stepped forward and saluted the president.
“Yes, sir! We’ll follow your orders!” The joint chairman’s voice was deep and booming, clearly audible to most of the crowd, even though he didn’t have a microphone. “We’re proud to serve under your command!”
The president nodded, but he didn’t seem fully satisfied with the response. His blond eyebrows still hung grimly over his narrowed eyes. He stepped closer to the joint chairman. “And what happens if one of your deputies doesn’t like my orders? What will you do if there’s insubordination in your ranks?”
There was another brief pause. Vance looked up at the jumbo video screen and noticed that the joint chairman’s bald scalp was sweating under his officer’s cap. “We will respect the chain of command, sir. Anyone who doesn’t follow orders will be relieved of his duties.”
“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.” The president nodded again. Then he stepped a couple of yards to the left and pointed at another general farther down the row, a pale, pudgy officer with gray hair. It was General Miller, the army chief of staff. “Because this officer here has been insubordinate. He refused to follow my orders to send more troops to New York City!”
Murmurs of surprise spread across the stadium. They gathered force as the thousands of supporters stared at the pair of men on the video screen, the president fuming and reddening as he pointed at Miller, who opened his mouth in shock. POTUS was doing an excellent job, following all the instructions Vance had given him and adding a few nice touches of his own. He was a natural-born actor. Even with a degenerative illness ravaging his mind and body, he could still deliver a convincing performance, as long as he was injected with enough amphetamines beforehand.
The president leaned toward General Miller and poked him in the chest. His finger jabbed one of the medals pinned to Miller’s uniform. “This man objects to using army brigades to fight the rioters and insurrectionists. He doesn’t care about all the Americans who were killed in the riots, including our wonderful vice president
. Instead, he sympathizes with the criminals and illegal aliens who rampaged through our streets last night!”
Miller shook his head. “That’s not true! I—”
“He’s a fake general! He’s not protecting America. He’s siding with our enemies!” POTUS stepped to the right, pulling the microphone away from General Miller to prevent anyone from hearing his denials. Then the president turned back to the joint chairman. “I want you to arrest General Miller immediately. Remove him from his command and replace him with someone who will fight for America!”
Now the crowd roared so ferociously, the whole stadium shuddered. Although Citi Field was only half full, the president’s supporters generated enough sheer volume to make up for all the vacant seats. They threw their hearts and lungs and souls into the effort, twenty thousand people screaming as one. At first it was just noise, just a storm of voices, without any meaning or message. But after a while it coalesced into a three-word chant, a deafening waltz that blasted out of the stadium and reverberated over the borough of Queens.
Vance listened carefully. The chant was so loud and throbbing, it was hard to understand the words. Was it “Four More Years, Four More Years”? Is that what the crowd was saying?
No, that wasn’t it.
“LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!”
The jumbo video screen showed the president, General Miller, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, arranged in a tense triangle. POTUS was still pointing at Miller and staring at the joint chairman, waiting for an answer. Miller turned his head to the left and right, trying to appeal to the generals standing beside him, but the other officers avoided eye contact. The joint chairman also refused to look at him; instead, he looked in the opposite direction and gave a hand signal to someone offstage. A few seconds later, a pair of military policemen marched over to General Miller. Each MP grabbed one of Miller’s arms, and they led him away.
The crowd stopped chanting and started applauding. Twenty thousand supporters cheered and hooted and clapped until their palms were red and stinging. Vance looked one more time at Mr. Scruffy Beard and his friends, wondering if this was the moment when the protesters would finally cry foul. He waited for them to rip off their campaign shirts and unfurl their banner and denounce this latest abuse of power, this public purging of the dissenter who’d opposed the president. It was their best chance to get noticed and make a statement. Maybe one of them would shoot video of the protest and try to upload it onto Facebook or YouTube.
But the hippies didn’t do any of those things. They didn’t seem angry or anguished or outraged. In fact, they were indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd. They were clapping too.
* * *
Vance made sure that the president’s speech didn’t go on too much longer. After half an hour POTUS started to tire, and his voice grew hoarse as the stimulating effects of the amphetamine injection faded. He repeated himself a few times and scowled at the teleprompter and made a couple of ugly throat-clearing noises. So Vance gave his father-in-law the wrap-it-up signal, and the president stepped away from the lectern. He waved at the crowd again, and they cheered him off the stage.
Major Weston left too and went looking for Colonel Grant. But Vance remained on the stage while all the supporters filed out of Citi Field. Most of them returned to their chartered buses, which revved up for the long trip back to upstate New York and central Pennsylvania, but several thousand made their way to the subway station and rode the Number 7 train back to their homes in the city. Vance marveled over the fact such a large group of New York City residents had come to the rally, and not one of them had tried to disrupt the president’s speech. It seemed like a statistical impossibility. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d staged an event that was so trouble-free.
Once the crowd was gone—it took almost an hour for everyone to exit the stadium—Vance climbed down from the stage and walked across the tarp-covered baseball field, which was littered with discarded VICTORY signs. He headed for the section where Mr. Scruffy Beard had stood, and after several minutes he found what he was looking for: the banner that the hippies had smuggled into Citi Field. They’d abandoned it on the ground, folded and hidden beneath one of the signs. Vance picked up the banner and unfurled it. Painted on the long strip of white cloth in neon-blue letters were the words WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS.
He was still studying it when Grant appeared. The colonel grinned as he hurried across the field. His mood had improved dramatically since Vance had last seen him. “Good news, sir! We have preliminary results from the blood tests. The research team did the analysis in record time.”
Vance dropped the banner. He’d ordered Grant’s team to randomly select a hundred people from the crowd and get blood and tissue samples from them at the stadium’s medical station. “And?”
“All the samples tested positive for the virus. Everyone was infected.”
Vance turned his head and gazed at Citi Field’s entrance hall, the rotunda that everyone at the rally had passed through on the way to their seats. Early that morning, Grant’s research team had installed aerosol sprayers and fans on the rotunda’s ceiling. The equipment was designed to spread the airborne virus to the crowd. Thanks to the unique features of this engineered microbe, they’d achieved a transmission rate of nearly 100 percent, infecting everyone except Vance, Grant, and all the other top officials who’d been vaccinated.
But infection was only the first step. Vance looked Grant in the eye. “What about the DNA tests?”
Grant’s smile grew wider. “We found genetic changes in most of the tissue samples. And the changes were more advanced in the people who’d arrived earliest at the stadium. Within an hour the virus started producing CRISPR molecules inside the cells of the infected people and inserting the Serenity sequence into their DNA.”
Vance smiled back at the colonel. This explained why no one in the crowd had disrupted the president’s speech, not even the people who’d brought the protest banner. The virus had seeped into their brains and remodeled their cells. It had altered their neurotransmitters and receptors, making subtle tweaks to the biochemistry that governed their behavior. They were the same genetic changes that had tamed Al-Qaeda terrorist Hassan Mohammed, but now they’d pacified twenty thousand people at once.
This is revolutionary. Vance trembled, full of awe and triumph. This is going to change the world. A golden age of harmony is at hand.
“And all the people who attended the rally are now actively infectious?”
Grant nodded. “That’s right. Now they’ll go home and spread the virus to all their friends and families. And the genetic changes will spread with it.”
Vance shook his head in wonder. Phase Three had begun.
TWENTY-FOUR
Frazier was humiliated. Although he’d made plenty of mistakes during his years in the army and the Federal Service, he’d never been jailed before. Now he sat in one of the Research Center’s detention cells, where they usually kept the prisoners that the Palindrome researchers were experimenting on. And the worst part was, he deserved it. He’d fucked up royally.
Thirteen hours ago, at 2 a.m., he’d emerged from Room 17 and raised the alarm, informing his fellow FSU officers that Raza Khan was dead and his father Hamid had escaped, apparently with the help of Dr. David Weinberg. Frazier alerted the guards at the Rikers gate and ordered them to stop Weinberg, but the guards reported that the scientist had left the jail complex in his car fifteen minutes before, accompanied by an older man whom he’d identified as one of his research colleagues. When the officers asked Frazier why he hadn’t tried to stop the escapees before they left Room 17, he told them the truth: he’d blacked out while questioning Weinberg and Hamid, and by the time he’d regained consciousness, Raza was dead and the fugitives were long gone.
Needless to say, no one believed him. After a heated discussion, Frazier’s fellow officers led him to the detention cell.
The first round of questioning took place t
en minutes later in Frazier’s cell, and it was relatively brief. The interrogators—a pair of FSU officers who worked in a different division of the agency—asked Frazier if either Weinberg or Hamid Khan was armed. “Not to my knowledge,” he answered. Then they asked if he knew where the escapees were headed. He replied that he had no idea. Then they asked the most important question, the one that had been on their minds all along: why did he black out? Did Weinberg and Khan overpower him? And if so, how the hell did those two measly creatures manage to subdue a genetically enhanced soldier?
Frazier had no answer. Or rather, he had an answer, but he couldn’t say it. It was just too fucking bizarre.
The interrogators left his cell, and then the doctors came in. It looked like they were willing to at least consider the possibility that he’d really lost consciousness. So they poked and prodded him and took samples of his blood and piss and skin, probably for DNA testing. Then they left him alone, and he napped on the cell’s bunk for a couple of hours. Shortly after dawn, though, the interrogators returned and asked him the same questions, this time with greater hostility and skepticism. Frazier was tempted to tell them the whole story, including all the strange details he still didn’t understand—the confrontation with Raza, the sudden immersion in the kid’s memories, the picnic on Coney Island Beach that ended so horribly. But he kept his mouth shut. Better to seem uncooperative than to make them think he’d gone crazy.
There were two more rounds of questioning, one in the late morning and one in the early afternoon. Then, at 3 p.m., Colonel Grant himself stepped into Frazier’s cell. The two FSU interrogators came in with him, but after a few seconds he ordered them to wait outside in the corridor. Once they were out of earshot, Grant stepped toward Frazier’s bunk and pointed at him. The colonel’s face was hard and unforgiving.