Tom Clancy's the Division

by Alex Irvine

  Now the world was a mess and she would probably never go that far again. Seeing the pictures of fabulous faraway places depressed her. She would never get to the Taj Mahal or the pyramids or the Great Wall of China.

  She couldn’t even go around the block by herself.

  Violet closed the book and sat in the cool dimness of the library. She heard people walking in the atrium between the library and the Castle’s main doors. They were talking about the supply run they’d just been on. “Tell you what, we’re going to have to start going farther. There’s nothing left around here,” one of them said. Violet recognized the voice and could picture the man’s face—red hair, sunburned even in April, missing one of his bottom front teeth—but she didn’t know his name. “If we could get across to Alexandria, though . . .”

  “Be easier if we could go up toward Maryland, wouldn’t it?” The second voice was another man Violet could picture. He was Indian, or maybe Pakistani, with a thick mustache. And he was really tall. She remembered his name. Dileep. He’d worked for the government, but she couldn’t remember what he did.

  “No, man, the whole area around that . . . well, you know what happened at that quarantine site over past the Lincoln Memorial?”

  “Yeah, that was bad.”

  “Real bad. And it’s worse now. I don’t think the JTF even goes over that way unless they’re in vehicles. But we could probably get across the bridge and see what we can find in Virginia.”

  “I’d go,” Dileep said.

  “Yeah, we’ll talk to Junie and Mike about it. One way or another we have to figure something out. We got, what, a hundred mouths to feed?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Yeah. Can’t do it with dandelion greens and whatever we can grow in the courtyard. Anyway, I’m gonna go find Junie. Later, Dileep.”

  “All right, Darryl. Let me know how that conversation goes.”

  Violet heard clomping boots on the stairs. Then she heard the front door open and close. Dileep must have gone outside.

  So the adults were starting to worry about food. That wasn’t good. They had a pretty big garden, and the JTF had made sure they had seeds, but the other man—Darryl—was right. The garden wasn’t going to feed a hundred people.

  The door opened again and Violet heard all of her friends come in, complaining about being hot and thirsty. She got up and made it out into the atrium before they went upstairs because they were waiting for Wiley. Even though his wound wasn’t very bad, it still hurt when he moved fast.

  She’d meant to tell them about the conversation between Darryl and Dileep, but instead she said, “Guys. What’s the farthest you’ve ever been from home?” Pointing at her own chest, she added, “Toronto.”

  Ivan and Amelia had visited their mother’s relatives in Zacatecas, Mexico, once.

  Wiley and Noah had been to Florida and Chicago. “I’m not sure which one is farther,” Noah said. “I think Chicago.”

  Shelby said San Francisco, where her parents had lived before their work brought them to DC.

  “I was born in the Sudan,” Saeed said. “So technically this is the farthest I’ve ever been from home.”

  “Jeez, you win,” Wiley said. “Violet, why were you thinking about that?”

  “Because I was wondering if we were ever going to be able to go places again,” Violet said. “I mean, I don’t want to bring everyone down, but I got thinking about . . . there’s this tower in Toronto, it’s, like, the tallest building in the world. Or it was until a couple of years ago. You can go up in it and look out, and it feels like you can see forever. So I was thinking that one time I was, like, a thousand feet in the air, and maybe I won’t ever be again. And I was in another country, and maybe I won’t ever be again. And . . .” Her eyes were starting to prickle and she took a deep breath. “Anyway. That’s why I was thinking about it.”

  “I bet we will,” Ivan said.

  Shelby nodded and added, “Yeah. Everything’s going to get better.”

  Just like that, Violet snapped back into big-sister mode. She’d never been a big sister before the virus, but she had to play one for the little kids. “I bet you’re right,” she said. “Everything’s going to get better.”

  “It’s not going to get better for me if I don’t get a drink of water,” Saeed said. “I’m going to dry up and blow away.”

  They went upstairs to the kitchen. It was too early for lunch, but the cooks gave them some snacks and a gallon jug of water. They went out on a balcony on the shaded side of the building, looking north over the Mall. The air was hazy enough to make the outlines of the White House a little fuzzy. To the right was the Capitol, with barricades all around it. There was a stretch of the Mall between them and the Capitol where a lot of people had been buried right after the virus happened. It was in front of the Air and Space Museum.

  Saeed was looking in that direction, too. “That’s where I’d really like to go,” he said.

  “The museum? It’s, like, full of bad guys with guns now, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Saeed said. “Space. I don’t want to be a thousand feet in the air. I want to be a thousand miles in the air. A million. And I’m gonna do it. There’s been plagues before. Everything always gets better in the end.”

  Maybe, Violet thought. But she was also hearing Darryl’s voice in her head. None of them were going to get anywhere if they didn’t have enough to eat.

  21

  AURELIO

  The sun was going down when the empty semi pulled into a truck stop just off Interstate 83 in Harrisburg. “We’re here,” the driver said. His name was Abdi. During the ninety-minute drive, swerving to avoid abandoned cars the JTF hadn’t had the time or manpower to clear, Aurelio had gotten his life story. Born in Somalia, spent most of his childhood in a refugee camp, came to the States just in time for the virus to tear apart any vision he might have had of the American Dream. “But hey,” Abdi said. “I’m breathing, man. And I have a job.”

  It was more than a lot of people could say. Aurelio shook Abdi’s hand. “Thanks for the ride,” he said and climbed down out of the cab. Abdi got out, too, heading around the front of the truck to check in at the JTF logistics office to see what he would be hauling next.

  Interstate 83 ribboned away to the north and south. Aurelio ached with the realization that he could get on it, head south, and be through Baltimore and into DC in four or five hours. He could find Ivan and Amelia, feel their embrace, the strength of tiny arms wrapped around his shoulders.

  But instead he was headed the other way, west and north, because that was his duty.

  They would be okay, he told himself. They were with a group, and someone was looking after them. They would be okay. “Abdi,” he said. “Is all the JTF command in that one office?”

  “Far as I know,” Abdi said.

  Aurelio walked over to the office and introduced himself. He mostly needed a place to stay for the night before he kept up his pursuit of Ike Ronson. The duty officer pointed him to a makeshift barracks in a repurposed motel just north on the access road. Aurelio got there and the guard on duty issued him a room. The first thing he did was turn on the faucet in the bathroom. Nothing. That figured. Most places didn’t have running water. New York was an exception. For all the bad things about deploying there—ongoing violent chaos, scarcity due to the blockades, recurrent threat of the virus returning to a close-packed population—at least it had running water.

  So Aurelio was looking at a bucket shower in the morning, but at least there was a bed. He sat on it, bouncing a little. Months of sleeping wherever he could find a flat spot had conditioned him to love any place that had a bed. This would be a good night’s sleep if he could somehow stop himself from thinking of his children.

  That thought returned him to the elevator lobby south of Duane Park. All those dead people. Dead kids. Aurelio had seen plenty of de
ad people in the months since the plague had struck, but none of the people in that lobby had to die.

  In his mind, the evidence was clear: bodies all bunched together, with no sign that Ronson had mounted any kind of defense from the elevator lobby, or even covered them while they got out through the parking structure. Ike Ronson had killed those civilians by running out in their moment of need. Whatever else Aurelio was doing, he would make sure Ronson answered for that.

  His comms pinged. Diaz answered and heard Lieutenant Hendricks’s voice. “Agent Diaz. I found something that might be of interest to you.”

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I’m sending it to you now. A little background: This was an encrypted transmission. ISAC didn’t initially pick it up, but I looked at Ronson’s comms records and found a conversation from oh six forty this morning that didn’t match any of the recorded audio we have from him. So I went back to that time and heard static on his channel. I clipped the static and ran it through some decryption utilities. Most of it was still garbled, but I sent you the parts of it that are intelligible.”

  “Care to give me a sense of what’s in there?”

  “I’ll put it this way: I was skeptical of you this morning, Agent Diaz. I am less so now.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” Hendricks ended the transmission and Aurelio saw a blinking icon on his watch face, indicating the audio file. He tapped it and listened.

  Sentinel, this is Mantis . . . intercepted comms . . . left Manhattan . . . engage and assist . . .

  That wasn’t Ike Ronson’s voice. So Ronson must be Sentinel, and the other person was Mantis.

  Then Aurelio heard Ronson: You said Michigan? More squeals and garbled noises followed until the other voice, Mantis, returned.

  Frequency switching . . . Mantis out.

  The audio clip ended.

  Aurelio played it again, but couldn’t hear anything new. He wondered if Hendricks was going to keep working on it. Counterintelligence was a big part of what she did, so Aurelio figured she would. In the meantime, he had learned a couple of things.

  One, Ike Ronson was loyal to someone other than the Division.

  Two, his contact with that other organization called herself Mantis.

  Three—this one was speculative, but Aurelio felt pretty solid about it—Mantis had sent Ronson out to find someone who had left Manhattan.

  Four—also speculative—someone was going to Michigan. Was that Ronson, or the person Ronson was supposed to engage and assist?

  Questions: Who was Mantis? Who was Ronson looking for, and why? Where were they going?

  Only one way to find out, Aurelio thought. He knew Ike Ronson was headed west, so that was the way he would go. Even if he had to walk all the way to Michigan.

  He stretched out on the bed and realized he was hungry. Back at the truck stop was a JTF commissary, mostly to feed the drivers. Aurelio went out and made a pass through it, gathering up sandwiches and coffee and candy bars. He took all of it back to his room and sat, thinking about what he knew and what he intuited, wondering if he should trust his instincts here or if he should let Ike Ronson go his way. What did it hurt, a single rogue agent? Aurelio didn’t have to chase Ronson all the way to Michigan, if that was where he was going. There was plenty for him to do in New York or DC. Hell, there was probably need for a Division agent right there in Harrisburg. Anywhere there were still people, there were still problems.

  Aurelio took off his boots. Since the virus, he had realized that he could only really relax when his boots were off, because if he was secure enough to take them off that meant he didn’t think any action would be called for in the immediate future. Right then, on the edge of a truck stop in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he felt that. There were going to be a lot of problems to solve in the morning, but he couldn’t solve any of them right then.

  What he could do right then was sleep, but sleep was a long time in coming. He lay on the bed, replaying the snippets of decoded conversation between Ike Ronson and the mysterious Mantis. Who was she? What group did she represent? What did they want?

  And how had they lured Ike Ronson away from his oath to the Division?

  Aurelio tried to check Ronson’s location, but ISAC returned a last known location instead of a current location: still Stroudsburg. ISAC’s coverage was spotty sometimes outside big cities. There were booster nodes in secure locations across the country, designed to ensure the stability of the network, but they didn’t ensure perfect reliability in mountainous terrain or during electromagnetic storms. So maybe it was because of sunspots, or maybe Ronson was staying in Stroudsburg for some reason. What that reason might be, Aurelio could only imagine.

  Was he looking for someone? That would account for the left Manhattan . . . engage and assist part of the communication. But there was nothing else to suggest who Ronson might be looking for, and the only lead he had on Ronson’s destination was the possibility he was going to Michigan. But where in Michigan? Detroit? Lansing? Aurelio couldn’t think of any military installations in Michigan other than decommissioned air force bases up in the northern part of the state.

  Sure would help if I knew who he was looking for, Aurelio thought. Because then I might be able to find out why that person was going to Michigan, and that would narrow the destination down. It occurred to him that Ike Ronson might not know why he was supposed to be looking for the target. He probably had more information than Aurelio did, but that wasn’t a very high bar to clear.

  He was drifting, getting sleepy even though his mind kept doggedly circling the few clues he had. It was time to let it all go for the night. In the morning maybe ISAC would have a current location on Ronson. Maybe Lieutenant Hendricks would call with more decrypted audio. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  Gotta put some miles behind me tomorrow, Aurelio thought. Get this done and get to DC.

  But first he had to wind himself down and get to sleep.

  22

  IKE

  The JTF convoy he’d caught on with had only gone as far as Stroudsburg, where they were setting up logistical support for some kind of mission in the Delaware Water Gap. The field commander had asked Ike if he could come along and lend a hand, but Ike had begged off, citing a higher mission priority. Which was true, even if it wasn’t an SHD-sanctioned mission.

  “You sure?” The JTF officer was young and nervous. Ike had him pegged as a high school ROTC kid who’d ended up at one of the service academies but never seen any real fighting until the virus hit, and now he didn’t know what to do. “We’ve got a terrorist group that’s going to blow one of the I-80 bridges near here, and we need to find them fast. If I-80 is out of commission, our supply lines into New York get a lot longer. People are going to suffer.”

  Ike thought it over. “You have any idea where they are?” Maybe he could at least offer some advice.

  The officer got out a map and spread it on the hood of a car, holding one corner down against the breeze. Ike put a hand on the other side. “They’re somewhere in this area,” the officer said, his fingertip tracing a rough circle that included a big swath of forestland around the Delaware River. “They attacked a convoy a month ago and got hold of some C-4. We went looking for it, and managed to learn about their plans, but the last team we sent out didn’t come back.”

  Ike looked at the map, tracing hiking trails and noting places where the wilderness edged up against small towns. He also saw at least four bridges within ten miles of where they stood. The JTF force wasn’t big enough to protect all of them, unless the group of terrorists was very small. They couldn’t count on that. “Where was that team the last time you communicated with them?”

  “Right there.” The officer tapped a spot just north of I-80, where Old Mine Road passed a couple of small islands in the river.

  In thirty-six hours Ike had to call in to Mantis. She would want to know wha
t kind of progress he was making. On the other hand, if he bailed out on a mission like this, the JTF officer would gripe about it, and that might get back to other people who knew what had happened back in Manhattan. So far, the countermeasures he’d gotten from Mantis had stopped ISAC from tagging Ike as a rogue agent. His watch was still orange and he still had access to ISAC heads-up information. But a bad report on this, especially if someone did blow up the bridge, would have a lot of people looking at Ike.

  Probably it was worth a brief side trip to avoid that. And if he could do some good along the way, well, so much the better.

  “Okay,” Ike said. “I’m going to need a few things.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Thirty minutes after sunset, Ike was moving fast through the woods that ran parallel to the Old Mine Road, headed for the spot the JTF officer had pointed out. He found it without much trouble. Scorch marks from explosions were still visible on the asphalt even in the fading light. Shell casings of several different calibers littered the road, and the cleared buffer on the forest side, but not the river side.

  Ike headed into the woods, working steadily uphill in the dark. A fifteen-minute hike brought him to the Appalachian Trail, which ran north all the way to Maine and south all the way to Georgia. But he had a feeling the terrorists and their C-4 were a lot closer than that.

  They wouldn’t be on the road, because it was too easy to see them. They probably wouldn’t be at one of the bigger campgrounds farther north in the park, because other people would be there, too, and it would be too difficult to keep their secret. But there were plenty of small, informal campsites just off the Appalachian Trail. Ike figured the terrorists would be at one of them, probably within a few miles of the bridge they were planning to blow.