by Alex Irvine
Koopman considered this for a long time. “From one angle, you could call it cowardice. I understand that. But there’s something else you have to understand, if I have not already explained it clearly enough. Thanks to associates in various intelligence communities, I suspected there was an active plot to release a bioengineered virus. But I did not know anything beyond that—no hints of who was doing it or when it might happen. All I knew was that the plot existed, and that elements within the government also suspected it—and were supportive of it, if you can believe that. To raise the alarm in public would have caused a panic without materially changing Amherst’s plan. He might have moved, gone underground to a different lab. Also there was a strong possibility that . . . well, you know what happened to Bill. He wasn’t the only one. As I said, there are rogue elements in the government and military who saw a possible catastrophe as a means to power, and I could easily have ended up dead. So I took another approach, hoping someone would be interested enough to run down the truth. Then the virus was released, and a number of people in a position to have suspected Amherst’s project began dying, so I . . . well, I went dark, as I told you. As dark as I could get, in the Dark Zone. The only people who would know my location were certain Division personnel . . . and whoever followed the bread crumbs I left in the book. Which you managed to do.”
“Five months too late,” she said. “And how many millions dead?”
Koopman was quiet for a long time. In the end all he said was, “Well. I don’t think I could have changed that. But I tried to do something.”
Conflicted, April watched him. The dimming light from outside seemed to lengthen the shadows under his eyes and along his jaw. She understood what he was saying, but that was in her mind. In her gut she blamed him: for Bill dying, for her dogged hunt through the dying city for clues that would lead to “Warren Merchant,” for her belief that in meeting him she would somehow learn the great secret behind the Dollar Bug.
But her feelings didn’t matter. April had gotten what she needed from Koopman. Some answers, and some more questions, and a path forward. April got up and paused, feeling like there was something else she should say. She and Koopman had a strangely intimate connection by way of the book. But he knew that as well as she did.
In the end what she said was, “Do you know how I can get out of Manhattan?”
“I can reach out to someone,” he said, after a pause so long she’d become certain he would say no. “But not until morning.” Outside it was dusk. “Look,” Koopman added, “as determined and resourceful as you are, you still don’t want to be out in this area after dark. Stay the night here. In the morning, if you still want to go, I’ll put you in touch with someone who can help.”
6
AURELIO
Aurelio watched the open storefront on Fifty-eighth until night fell. The woman didn’t come out. Twice he saw people on the street pause in front of the storefront, as if considering whether or not to go in. If they had, he would have followed, but both times they went about their business. A block north, near the barricades separating the Dark Zone from the southern end of Central Park, he heard a brief burst of gunfire. A minute later, another single report, this time a shotgun.
He called in to the nearest JTF safe house, over on Madison. “Diaz here. Shots fired along the Fifty-ninth Street DZ barricade. Any JTF involvement?”
“Negative.” Diaz recognized the voice of Ed Tran, the intel officer working out of that safe house. “No JTF presence in that area.”
“Acknowledged, Ed. Diaz out.” He looked back at the storefront, and then at the building’s upper floors. There was a dim glow on the third floor, as if one of the rooms in the rear of the building had a light on.
Something about the situation was bugging him, but he couldn’t figure out quite what. He pinged the safe house again. “Ed, can you run an address for me? One-one-seven West Five-eight.”
The JTF kept meticulous records about the locations of their various assets, be they scientific, technical, or logistical. It was unusual, to say the least, for a JTF asset to be housed in the Dark Zone, but that was one thing that could explain why whoever lived there didn’t have visible security. There could be a guard detail inside, or other active security measures installed.
“Recorded as the location of Koopman, Roger,” Ed came back. “Status unclear. I don’t know who he is or why we’re tracking him.”
“Can you find out?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks, Ed, I’ll call you back.” Diaz shifted his weight and considered his options. He heard another shot from near the barricade. Sometimes random assholes got drunk on home-distilled booze, or high on industrial solvents, and just shot into the air . . . but more often than not, gunshots meant trouble.
Whoever she was, the woman inside that building wasn’t going to head out into the Dark Zone by herself at night. Diaz knew that much about her from watching her move through the area in daylight. She knew it was dangerous and she knew how to handle herself. She would stay holed up, or shacked up, with Roger Koopman until morning.
And if she didn’t, Diaz thought as the shotgun boomed again, she was on her own. He couldn’t sit here watching the door when there was an active firefight nearby.
He slid out of his cover and headed around the corner onto Sixth, moving quick with his G36 held low. More shots came from just around the corner to the west on Fifty-ninth.
When he got to the corner he looked left. The HUD embedded in his contacts picked up a single running figure, heading west. Male, not visibly armed. Aurelio sighted on him out of reflex, then let him go. No way to know whether he’d been involved, or why.
There were bodies in the street just inside the Dark Zone wall. One slumped against the Jersey barriers that formed the base of the wall, with corrugated sheet metal and plywood above it, topped with razor wire. Other parts of the DZ’s perimeter were made from shipping containers butted up against each other, or other construction materials. It all depended on what the JTF had available when they were walling the DZ off in December.
Two other bodies lay close to each other in the middle of the street. A third was twenty feet or so away from them, straddling the curb in front of a burned-out hotel. Aurelio thought he saw motion there. He moved forward, thinking he didn’t have the field medical equipment he would need to treat a bad gunshot wound. Even so, he had to see if there was something he could do. And if the wounded person survived, she—Aurelio was close enough to see it was a woman—might be able to tell him what had happened. Random street violence wasn’t really the Division’s main concern, but a new organized gang or militia was a whole different story.
When he was within twenty feet or so of the woman, he heard a faint scuff behind him on the sidewalk. He just had time to duck his head and start leaning to the left when something hit him hard, high on the right side of his back. His backpack took some of the force, but Aurelio still went to his knees. He rolled to his right, instinctively assuming the attacker was right-handed, and therefore a roll to the right would be away from the next blow. He was right. A metallic clang sounded on the sidewalk where he’d been a moment before. Aurelio looked up. Towering over him was a mountain of bald and bearded hate, one of the Dark Zone’s resident sociopaths. He held a crowbar and was already rearing up for another swing.
Still sitting, Aurelio brought up the G36. He squeezed off a short burst, letting the recoil walk the fire pattern up from the target’s legs to his upper torso. The crowbar clanged on the sidewalk a second time, falling from the target’s hand. He folded up and dropped where he stood.
Aurelio stood and turned a full circle. The HUD embedded in his contacts displayed no other people on the street. He glanced back at the man he’d just shot, making sure he was going to stay down. There wasn’t much doubt. Two ragged exit wounds in his back told the story, and even if he could have survived those, Aurelio’s first sho
t had punched through his left leg just above the knee.
This wasn’t the same man who had been running away in the other direction. Too big, and there was no way the guy could have run around the whole block and come up behind Aurelio so soon. So there was at least one other witness to what had happened, but Aurelio put that aside for now. He stepped up to the woman and squatted at her side.
She was dead. The left side of her torso, under a leather jacket and flannel shirt, was shredded by a load of buckshot. Near her, in the gutter, lay a small black automatic.
He turned to examine the other bodies. None of them wore any kind of uniform. The two lying in the street were facing each other. One of them had the shotgun, the other a Glock that looked like police issue. At a glance it looked like they’d killed each other. The third man, crumpled at the base of the Dark Zone perimeter wall, had clearly met his end courtesy of the same crowbar that had nearly caught Aurelio in the back of the head. Two deep valleys showed in his skull, one along the left side just above the ear and the other right along the crown. Either would probably have been fatal.
So what he had was an apparent encounter between two hostile groups of Dark Zone residents. It happened all the time. If he’d gotten there two minutes earlier, he might have made a difference—but on the other hand, he might also have gotten killed, and for all he knew both groups were drug runners or human traffickers.
Sometimes the Dark Zone made Aurelio a little depressed. Out in the rest of the city, he could see signs that the work and sacrifice of the Division was making a difference. In here, not so much.
He headed back down Fifty-ninth and out through a checkpoint just north of the memorial, along the eastern edge of Central Park. “Housing on your brick thing is cracked,” one of the JTF guards noted as he passed.
“Thanks,” Aurelio said. “I’ll check it out.”
Thirty minutes later he was at a JTF safe house in the building that had once housed the 92nd Street YMHA. He checked in with the JTF duty officer, just as a professional courtesy, and got something to eat. Then he cleaned the G36 and looked at the ISAC brick. The housing was indeed cracked, thanks to the crowbar, but it wasn’t going to fall out.
Diaz let out a long breath. It was sixteen hours since he’d left the JTF safe house down in Murray Hill. He wondered about the woman who had gone to visit Roger Koopman. He wondered about the man he’d seen running away from the gunfight. He wondered how Ivan and Amelia were doing. Pretty soon he was going back to DC.
That was his last coherent thought before he pulled off his boots, stretched out on a cot, and fell asleep.
7
VIOLET
Dinner in the Castle was catch-as-catch-can, with small groups of people clustered at small tables or sitting on the floor around their plates. The main gathering area was on the second floor, in a huge hall lined with windows. Violet and the rest of the kids were down at one end, a little bit away from the main groups of adults but still close enough to hear some of their conversation. They had learned that this was a good way to learn things the adults didn’t want them to know.
Tonight’s dinner was military surplus MREs, with extra salad of dandelion greens. They were bitter and none of the kids liked them, but they ate everything on their plates anyway. They’d learned about hunger in the weeks after the Dollar Bug hit. Some of them might have been picky eaters before, but none of them were now.
Junie was at a table near one of the gallery’s big windows, deep in conversation with three other adults. One of them was Mike Walker, who had led a group from the Mandarin Hotel to the Castle after the flood. That was almost three weeks ago, Violet realized. She was already starting to think of the Castle as home.
“We have to be careful,” Mike was saying. “There was already pressure from over toward the Capitol, and now they’ve taken over the Air and Space Museum. Won’t be long before they come here.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Junie said. “We don’t have anything they want.”
“They’re not just bandits, Junie. They don’t want to steal anything from us. They’re lunatics who want power. So they’re going to go looking for people they can have power over.” Mike talked like a teacher, always explaining everything in small stages. It bugged Violet, and she thought it probably bugged Junie, too.
“I know who they are, Mike. And I think if we keep our heads down, just go about our business, we can trust the JTF to keep things under control.” Junie cut a glance over at the kids. Violet looked away quickly, but not before Junie had seen her watching. “Anyway, this is a conversation for another time.”
Mike looked over at the kids, too. “If you say so. Seems to me they should know.”
Junie set down her fork a little harder than she had to. “They know a lot more than is good for them already. We’re the adults. We should protect them when we can.”
“Junie, there are mass graves two hundred yards outside the window. Protect them from what?” Mike leaned in closer to Junie as he spoke, but he was still looking sideways at the kids.
“We should go somewhere else,” Amelia whispered. Wiley and Saeed started to gather up their plates. Then the others did, too. Violet waited as long as she could, but Mike didn’t say anything else and Junie was staring at him. Violet could tell she was mad.
Even though the conversation made her uneasy—like it always made kids upset to see their parents fighting, only none of them had any parents—Violet didn’t want to go yet. She wanted to know more about what was going on around them. After all, they were the ones who were going to be dragged off to some new place if it wasn’t safe here anymore. She knew there were different groups in the city, and they fought with each other. Some of them just seemed to be random crazy people who wanted to ruin everything, but there were others who wore uniforms, or at least dressed kind of the same. They had a goal. Power, Mike had said. That got Violet wondering about the president again. Who was in charge?
Was anyone in charge?
Shelby was pulling on her arm. “Come on, Vi,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
* * *
• • •
All of the kids stayed in one big room up on the third floor, all the way at the east end. There were windows looking out in three directions: north over the Mall, east toward the Capitol, and south toward L’Enfant Plaza. There weren’t enough couches for all of them, but they had sleeping bags and pillows, along with rugs dragged in to cover the stone floor. It wasn’t too bad. For a while, Violet had gone to sleep every night thinking about her old room in the house on School Street in Alexandria, but she didn’t do that as much anymore. Tonight, though, she couldn’t get it off her mind. Was anyone living in the house now? Was there another kid sleeping in her bed, playing with the stuffed animals she still kept even though she never really played with them anymore?
Probably not. Probably the house was empty, with broken windows and its rooms all messed up from people looting it. In the first couple of days after things started to get bad, Violet’s parents had reported to a quarantine site. Her mother was already sick then, and her father caught the Green Poison soon after. Both of them were dead two weeks after Black Friday. The people running the quarantine site had kept her there for another two weeks, putting her with other kids. Other orphans. She made a point of using that word because it was true and she had to face the truth. Her parents were dead.
Saeed was in that first group of kids, too. Some of the others were claimed by relatives, but Violet and Saeed got cycled out of the quarantine and into the Mandarin Hotel camp. That was where they met the other kids. They’d been together since.
They finished their food without saying much. All of them were thinking about what Mike and Junie had said, but none of them were ready to talk about it yet.
Noah took their dishes back down to the kitchen and they all brushed their teeth. The adults were very strict about this. There were
n’t many dentists around, and apparently people could die from infections in their teeth. Violet had never known this.
It was well dark by the time they all got done with their bathroom stuff. Their room had a couple of candles. The rule was, they had to put them out before they bedded down or the adults would take them away, and Amelia was in charge of that. So she waited until all the other kids were wrapped up in blankets or sleeping bags and then she blew out the candles and stretched out on her couch.
Then it was only a matter of time. Violet didn’t mind talking about things, but she didn’t want to be the one to start. So she was glad when Ivan said, “If we move, our dad won’t be able to find us.”
“Sure, he will,” Amelia said. “Don’t worry.”
“I don’t think we’ll have to move,” Saeed said. He always believed the best. “Or if we do, we’ll be able to go back to the hotel once the flood’s gone.”
“The hotel’s going to be ruined,” Wiley said. “Everything will be under, like, a foot of mud, and there’ll be mold everywhere.” He had relatives from New Orleans who had told him stories about flooding from Hurricane Katrina.
“Then we’ll go somewhere else,” Saeed said.
“Yeah,” Shelby said. “But where?” Her parents were diplomats or something from China. Sometimes she talked about her uncle in Beijing who was going to come get her, but they all knew that wasn’t happening. There wasn’t any fuel to fly airplanes, except once in a while they saw a military jet or helicopter. China might as well be the moon.