by Alex Irvine
“Understood, Mantis. It would be easier if you told me what you know about where she’s going.”
Mantis paused. This was the moment where they decided how much they were going to trust him, Ike knew. And based on their decision, he was going to know more about how much he could trust them.
“Our assessment is that her likely destination is the North Campus of the University of Michigan,” Mantis said.
“That’s useful,” Ike said. “It would be more useful if—”
“That’s all we’re going to share at this point, Sentinel. Proceed to Ann Arbor. Intercept and assist April Kelleher while ascertaining her objective. Those are your orders. Is that understood?”
“Understood.”
Mantis ended the transmission.
Ike was maybe ninety minutes by bike from Ann Arbor, if he kept a lively pace. He looked outside. The weather was holding for now, but there were clouds in the west. He kicked through the looted ruin of the store for a while, hoping to turn up something he could use, but the people of Dundee had been thorough. Other than new socks and underwear, he came up empty.
Still, that was something. He got changed and wheeled the bike outside, mapping April Kelleher’s potential routes in his head. If she was on foot, she would have to go through Toledo, and then common sense dictated she would come up U.S. 23, which ran straight north from Toledo to the east side of Ann Arbor. Ike could see it from the parking lot of the store as he checked his tires.
The wild card was Lake Erie. Ike had largely avoided unnecessary human contact on his trip across Ohio, but going through Toledo he’d seen a lot of boat traffic on the river, and some vessels headed out onto the lake. Before the automobile, boats had been a lot faster than land travel. It was by and large the same now, for people who weren’t going to do a hundred miles a day on a bike. Ike wasn’t going to do that for much longer. He was eating like a horse to keep up his energy, but even so, he didn’t have access to the kind of calorie intake necessary to ride that hard. Once he got to Ann Arbor, he was going to leave the bike behind for a while.
If he succeeded in the mission, he had a feeling he wouldn’t need it. Mantis’s group had access to a lot of hardware, including vehicles. He knew that from her recruitment pitch, and he believed it because it fit with her access to advanced technologies—like the ISAC countermeasure that was still keeping his watch face orange and his name out of ISAC’s rogue agent roster.
Ike felt he was close. Close to understanding who Mantis’s people were, and close to becoming part of their project.
All he had to do was get to Ann Arbor before April Kelleher, and then make sure not to miss her when she arrived.
Which brought him back around to the lake. If she went by boat, it would probably take her up to Detroit, so she would be coming toward Ann Arbor from the east along Interstate 94. That highway intersected U.S. 23 just on the edge of Ann Arbor. Ike used ISAC to pull up a more detailed map of Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan’s North Campus was also off U.S. 23, but farther north than the I-94 interchange. If Kelleher knew to go there, and she was coming from the east, she might enter Ann Arbor from farther north.
This was a tricky problem. Kelleher could be within a couple miles of his location right now, or she could still be approaching Toledo, or she could be on a boat somewhere in Lake Erie.
He ran through the possibilities one more time and decided that, whether she was going by land or water, she was going to be coming into Ann Arbor from the east. So his first task was to get there. He would figure out the rest of it from there.
He reached the I-94 interchange at around oh nine hundred and looked around. There wasn’t much to see, just miles of empty roadway and a few abandoned buildings sitting in acres of weedy parking lot. A movie theater; what looked like a self-storage place with rows of aluminum sheds. To the south was mostly parkland.
Farther north, Ike came to another interchange, where Washtenaw Avenue crossed under the highway. A large shopping center sprawled just to the west, and in the parking lot there was a JTF field base. He circled down the ramp and approached. If April Kelleher had already arrived, she might have checked in with the JTF to ask questions. Or she might not have. One problem Ike had was that he didn’t know how much she knew. It was possible she was going to make a beeline directly for a particular location, with a specific goal in mind. It was also possible she was in more or less the same situation he was, with an objective in mind but a lot of uncertainty surrounding the final steps toward achieving it.
The sentries at the JTF base hailed him and he waved back as he dismounted and walked his bike up to the checkpoint. “Where you coming from?” one of them asked, just making conversation. They looked well rested and calm. They even had recent haircuts.
“I’ve been on the road a while,” Ike said. “I’m looking for someone, wondering if she might have checked in here.”
“Most passing civilians don’t,” the other guard said. “Unless there’s some kind of problem. Which there hasn’t been much in this area. Most of the people left in Ann Arbor are down by the football stadium. That’s where the main JTF base is. It’s on the south side of town, over that way.” He pointed.
Ike filed that away. If the main JTF presence was on the south side of the city, and his operational objective was to the north, that was good. Less chance of a problem when he found out what Kelleher was after and the time came for action. “You have ISAC interface here?”
The first guard nodded back at the mobile command post. “Sure. But most of the SHD stuff is concentrated in Detroit and Lansing. When we see you guys around here, it’s usually guarding stuff around campus.”
“Well, North Campus,” the other one said.
“Where’s that?”
The first guard pointed west. “Quickest way to get there from here is to take Huron Parkway. You’ll find it about a mile up Washtenaw. Go north; when you cross the river you’ll see Fuller Road. Take a left and you’ll see the signs. Probably four or five miles from here.”
“Thanks,” Ike said. “What if the person I’m looking for was coming from Detroit? Which way would she take to get there?”
“Probably the same way, since she’d be coming out 94,” the second guard said. “But if she was coming on M-14—”
“Why would she do that?”
“Like if she took a wrong turn and ended up—”
“Don’t listen to him,” the first guard said. “If she’s coming from Detroit, she’s coming out 94 or Michigan Avenue. Either one goes right through Ypsi. That’s Ypsilanti, the next town east. Then she’d end up either right here on Washtenaw, or she would go up 23 just like you did and get off by the river. Then, just like I said, up Fuller Road.”
Ike was struck by how mundane this conversation was. Two guys arguing about directions. He got sentimental for a moment, imagining a United States in which the guys arguing about directions weren’t also carrying M16s and trying to maintain the social order.
That, in the end, was why he was doing what he was doing.
“Listen,” he said. “I need to ask you a favor. This woman I’m looking for. She’s about five-seven, white, has red hair, and is probably carrying a Division-issue backpack. Her name is April Kelleher.”
Telling these guys her name was a bit of a risk, but Ike figured she was already on the JTF and SHD radars because of her interaction in Cleveland. So he probably wasn’t giving away anything he shouldn’t.
Also, the information was having its intended effect, which was to get the JTF guards engaged. A lot of them saw Division agents as commando superheroes, and if a little hero worship could get Ike what he wanted, that was fine.
“So she’s one of yours?” the second sentry asked.
“No,” Ike said. “That’s one reason I need to talk to her.” That wasn’t exactly true, but the implication that April Kelleher was some
kind of dangerous fugitive would also hook the JTF sentries. “If you see her, don’t give her a hard time. Raise me via ISAC. I’m Ike Ronson.”
“Will do, Agent Ronson,” they said in unison.
“Thanks, guys.” Ike raised a hand and pedaled away, feeling fairly certain that the sentries would spread the word to other JTF elements in their area. If Kelleher came in from the east, someone would notice and alert Ike.
That meant he could cover the southern approach. Riding back down 23, Ike settled on a railroad bridge in a town by the name of Milan. Just to his north was a small prison, just to the south an abandoned auto parts plant. The presence of the prison set alarm bells ringing in Ike’s mind. He’d tangled with the gang formed from escaped prisoners of Rikers Island, and there was no reason to believe a bunch of angry men with no prospects or family ties would behave differently here. So if Kelleher was going to run into trouble along the way, this was a likely spot. Engage and assist, he thought.
There were lights burning in the town as the sun went down. Most of them were concentrated in the small downtown just to the west, but Ike saw people on the factory grounds, too. Other signs of human presence were visible in the cluster of machine shops and auto repair places across the highway from the factory.
If Kelleher was walking, she would still be at least a day away. But she’d clearly found ways to travel faster between New York and Cleveland, so Ike wanted to be ready immediately. He would hunker down in this spot and watch until by his calculations she would already have passed at a walking pace. If he hadn’t seen her by then, he would go back to Ann Arbor and start putting plan B into action . . . whatever plan B turned out to be.
He had thirty-six hours before his next report to Mantis. With any luck the whole mission would be wrapped up by then.
31
VIOLET
The day after the dinner meeting, the Castle was like an anthill. People in a hurry everywhere, breaking up into teams with different jobs that to Violet seemed to spend a lot of time getting in each other’s way. They’d voted by a big margin to place their trust in the JTF, so they were doing what the JTF suggested: fortifying the Castle.
Junie and Mike decided they should establish a barrier around the whole block including the Castle and the two museums surrounding its garden grounds to the south. So one team was making trips to nearby streets, breaking into cars and pushing them into a line that stretched from Twelfth Street past the Sackler Gallery over to the corner of the Arts and Industries Building. Another team was building walls, from plywood, scrap lumber, and scaffolding taken from construction sites, to cover the gaps between the Castle and the two flanking buildings. Those walls were done pretty fast, before lunch, and by early afternoon a line of cars stretched along Independence Avenue, with a gap right in the middle so people could get in and out. “We’ll start setting guards here at the entrance,” Mike said as he helped get the last car into line. “If we have time, we’ll also get a scaffolding wall up behind these cars.”
If we have time, Violet thought. She was watching from behind the line of cars. Were they going to be attacked? She heard hammers pounding all over the place, as other grown-ups put plywood sheathing up over the ground-floor windows of the Castle and the other two museums. Violet hated to lose the light inside the Castle, but she had to trust that the adults knew what they were doing.
Other crews were barricading the ground-floor doors of all three buildings, making sure the only approach to the Castle was through the south entrance. They spent the whole day working, and that night the kids were so nervous none of them could sleep. Junie didn’t come to visit them, like she often did when she knew they were scared, and that made things even worse. Probably she was still busy with stuff, but Violet wanted to be one of the things Junie was busy with. Most of the day, their only interactions with adults had been running to get things and being told to stay out of the way.
At dinner that night, Mike and Junie had given everyone an update on the progress. The ground floor of the Castle was fairly secure, and so were the spaces between the Castle and the other two buildings. In the morning they would finish covering the windows on the ground floors of the other two buildings—“hardening” them, in Mike’s words.
All of the kids had seen gun battles in the months since the virus. Now, up in their room in the dark, they were all wondering whether they were going to live through another one. “You know who’s going to help?” Ivan said. “The Division.”
“They will,” Amelia agreed. “They always do.”
They sure had over at the pond, Violet thought. But nearly too late. Still, everything had turned out all right. If only there was a number you could call to make sure the Division was coming.
Of course, then there would have to be phones. And only the JTF and the Division seemed to have any kind of phones or technology anymore.
“The JTF can see us from the White House,” Noah said. “If anything bad happens, they’ll be right here. It’s going to be okay.”
“But where do we go if it isn’t? We need a plan,” Shelby said. For such a little kid—Violet thought she had just turned nine—Shelby was really hung up on plans. Maybe they made her feel more secure. Violet, on the other hand, felt more secure when she felt like nobody was lying to her. Sometimes making a plan was like telling yourself a lie, if you didn’t really have any way to make the plan work.
“We should go to sleep,” Wiley said. “I’m tired. I got shot, remember?”
“Wiley got shot, everybody,” Saeed said.
“I guess it makes you tired,” Amelia joked.
Some of them laughed. Some of them were too jumpy to find anything funny. Violet just wished she could go to sleep and wake up in a world that looked like it had before Black Friday.
* * *
• • •
The next day, bright and early, they were back to work. The adults kept them so busy it was hard to find the time to worry about anything. Junie made sure everyone had extra to eat if they wanted it, breaking into some of their stores of canned treasures like fruit cocktail and spaghetti with meatballs.
Then, in the middle of the afternoon, Sebastian returned.
This time he was alone. Violet and the other kids were carrying stuff for the adults shoring up the line of cars. Even Wiley was feeling better enough to help carry scrap lumber and pull nails out so the wall crew could reuse them. Violet saw Sebastian approach the entrance to the grounds, between a big black SUV on one side and an older white SUV on the other. He knocked on the hood of the black SUV. “Hello? Mike or Junie around?”
He saw Violet and said, “I believe I recognize you from the carousel.”
It took all of her courage, but Violet said, “Hello.”
“Can you get either Mike or Junie for me? I’ll wait right here.” He leaned casually against the black SUV’s fender and Violet hurried into the Castle.
She found Mike helping to haul a bookshelf from the library over to a window in the other side of the building. “That man from the other day, the one with the flag tattoos,” she said. “Sebastian. He’s here.”
Mike nodded. He looked grim. “Okay, Violet. Thanks. Is anyone else with him?”
“No, he’s alone.” Violet walked with Mike out the door.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “You go find the other kids, okay? Keep them away in case there’s trouble.”
“He’s all by himself,” Violet reminded Mike.
“Maybe he is, and maybe he isn’t,” Mike said. “He could have a dozen people with him around the corner. Just do what I told you, okay?”
Violet veered away to where Wiley and Amelia were pulling nails from lumber, down by the Sackler Gallery. “That guy Sebastian from the carousel is back,” she said. All three of them crept up along the line of cars until they were close enough to see and hear what was happening, but still far enough away that Mike wo
uldn’t stop what he was doing and tell them to leave.
“This isn’t the response I was hoping for after our last conversation, Mike,” Sebastian was saying as they came within earshot.
“There are a lot of threats in this city, Sebastian,” Mike answered. “We had one of our kids almost killed by roaming thugs not even two weeks ago. Now we’re hearing there’s a group over on Roosevelt Island that’s some kind of cult trying to spread the virus all over again? We want to stay out of it. All of it. We’re going to grow our gardens, and keep ourselves safe, and hope that everything returns to normal.”
“Nice idea,” Sebastian said. “Not really doable in the current situation, though. Sooner or later, everyone’s going to have to choose a side. The government’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. The JTF is overwhelmed and can’t even keep order half a mile from the White House. Nobody’s coming from outside to help. If you’re relying on those institutions to help you, you’re already out of luck.”
He was still leaning on the SUV, and Violet noticed he was doing something with his finger on the hood. It looked like he was doodling some kind of image, but maybe she was just imagining it.
“That’s a hell of a sales pitch,” Mike said.
Sebastian shrugged and grinned. “Facts are facts, Mike. We’re the only people in Washington, DC, who can keep order. Without order in Washington, DC, there’s no order in the United States of America. Without order in the United States of America, those states aren’t united anymore. If we don’t hold things together, by any means necessary, the American experiment is over. Plain and simple. And I don’t know about you, but I refuse to let that happen.”
“Agreed,” Mike said. “I don’t want it to happen, either.”
“Then you need to reconsider some of your choices.” Sebastian dropped his sunglasses back into place. “I sure don’t begrudge you the right to self-defense, Mike. For yourself and all the people under your care. But you might consider—and consider carefully—who you think you’re protecting yourself from. Because once you decide you’re protecting yourself from someone, that person has no choice but to consider you an enemy.”