by Alex Irvine
He rubbed his fingertips together and then rapped his knuckles on the hood of the car. “Guess that was kind of a long speech. Anyway, you take a few days to think about it. I’ll come back by and we can continue this conversation when you’re not so busy.”
Sebastian strolled off down Independence. Mike watched him go. Then he turned and saw all of the people working along the line of cars looking at him. “Better get back to it,” he said. “I’m not sure how much time we have.”
Everyone got back to work. Wiley and Amelia returned to their pile of lumber. Before she went to join them, Violet had to know what Sebastian was doodling. She stepped out between the two SUVs and stood on her tiptoes to get a better view.
Drawn in the dust on the hood of the SUV was a crude sketch of an American flag.
32
AURELIO
Aurelio had meant to get up in the morning and keep going after Frank stitched him up and found him a place to stay in Sandusky, but his head had other ideas. When he fell asleep, he didn’t wake up for nearly sixteen hours. By then it was early evening, too late to hit the road again, so he had lost an entire day. The fisherman who had offered him a place to sleep was gone, out on the lake. His daughter and another woman who Aurelio took to be a family friend were eating dinner as Aurelio came out of the back room in the fisheries research center where they now lived. Several other people occupied different parts of the building, on Sandusky’s small harbor with marinas on either side and a ferry pier a block to the west.
Aurelio remembered the woman’s name—Jackie—but not the girl’s. “You hungry?” Jackie asked him. “I bet you are, the way you slept.”
There was a big platter of fried fish on the table. Aurelio sat and thanked her. He ate and got his thoughts together, wondering how far April had gotten while he’d been recovering. His head still hurt, and his eye was swollen, but Aurelio didn’t think he had any cognitive problems. If he had a concussion, it wasn’t a bad one. Or if it was, he wasn’t feeling all the lingering symptoms yet.
“Riley ought to be back soon,” Jackie said. “Me and Maddie are going to go mend some nets. We’ll be right outside. You relax.”
Aurelio nodded. He finished his fish and checked on his weapons and gear. Jackie didn’t strike him as a thief, but it paid to be careful, and it was always possible that he’d lost something during the fight under the turnpike bridge. Better to know now than go looking for it later and find it gone.
Everything seemed to be there. He packed it all up again and set the pack by the door, along with the G36. He still had a sidearm. As he walked outside, smelling the sharp clean air off the lake, his HUD lit up with an incoming call. “Agent Diaz.”
“Lieutenant Hendricks,” he answered, surprised to hear from her.
“You were out of signal range for a while,” she said. “ISAC has been compromised. We’re not sure how, but we believe one of the booster towers has been destroyed. For the foreseeable future, you should count on a reliable signal only in areas where there is a strong JTF presence and signal overlap.”
“Understood,” Aurelio said. Here in Sandusky, he was probably in the effective ranges of JTF bases in Cleveland, Detroit, probably Toledo and Ann Arbor. “Glad to hear from you.”
“You might not be when you hear what I’m about to say,” she said. “The short version is this: Ike Ronson is looking for a woman named April Kelleher. She is on her way to Ann Arbor, and she was in Cleveland twenty-four hours ago.”
Aurelio did the math. If she was on foot and pushing her pace, she was probably passing somewhere very close to Sandusky right now. But if she had gotten from New York to Cleveland in ten days, she was probably finding ways to travel faster than walking.
He had to assume she was ahead of him.
“Okay,” he said. “April Kelleher. Do you know anything about her? Like why she’s going to Ann Arbor?”
“We know more than you would expect from a random civilian,” Hendricks said. “But we do not know why she’s going to Ann Arbor. Here’s what we do know. We intercepted another conversation between Ike Ronson and his handlers, and managed to decrypt part of it. That’s where we got her name and her destination. At about the same time, we received a report from an agent in Cleveland recording an interaction with a civilian carrying Division gear. From his description of her, and his recorded statement that she identified herself and gave her destination as Ann Arbor, we consider it highly likely they are the same person.”
Highly likely, Aurelio thought. Intel officers could never just come right out and be certain. He was out on the pier now, watching Jackie and the girl mending nets as the afternoon sun lit up Sandusky Bay in orange and gold. “Makes sense to me,” he said.
“Here’s where we take an operational interest. I ran the name April Kelleher through our systems, and we’ve got recorded contacts between her and a scientist by the name of Roger Koopman, who has done some consulting and research for the JTF scientific wing.”
That name rang a bell. “Koopman. He’s got some kind of hideout in the Dark Zone, doesn’t he?”
“That’s him, yes.”
“I’ll be damned,” Aurelio said. “This woman is white, a redhead, carrying some SHD gear?”
“That’s what the agent in Cleveland reported.”
“I saw her in the Dark Zone three or four days before Ronson bailed on the city hall op,” Aurelio said.
“Then you probably saw her around the time she last talked to Koopman. Whatever he told her, it set her off on this trip to Michigan.” Hendricks paused and Aurelio heard rustling in the background, as if she was shuffling files around. “Kelleher’s husband, Bill, was a biotech researcher working for a company called SBGx. He was murdered shortly after Black Friday, possibly because part of his work involved the synthesis of a class of drugs known as broad-spectrum antivirals. Koopman has access to that information, and also was kept abreast of our own research into a vaccine or treatment against Amherst’s virus. Our team, led by Dr. Jessica Kandel, had successfully modeled a potential treatment, but they were unable to synthesize it. They did, however, transmit their models to a facility in Ann Arbor. Is this all coming together for you, Agent Diaz?”
It was. “So someone thinks Kelleher knows about a possible vaccine, and that someone sent Ike Ronson after her.”
“That’s what it looks like from here.” Again Lieutenant Hendricks paused and shuffled through papers. “We’re not certain, but we consider this evidence more than sufficient to suggest a course of action to you—knowing, of course, that under Directive 51 you are free to do as you see fit.”
“And what would that suggestion be?”
“Whatever Ike Ronson is after, whatever April Kelleher knows, it is our assessment that he should not be permitted to communicate it to his handlers,” Hendricks said.
“That would be my assessment, too, Lieutenant Hendricks,” Aurelio said.
“Where are you now? I’m seeing Sandusky, Ohio, but as I said, ISAC has been less reliable over distances these past few days.”
“ISAC has that right. I’m in Sandusky, but one way or another I’ll be in Ann Arbor tomorrow,” Aurelio said. “Do you have Ike Ronson’s location? I can’t find him.”
“ISAC has a last-known of Toledo, but we can’t pin him down.”
Aurelio had been monitoring ISAC as she spoke, and he was getting the same result.
“I looked a little harder at the encryption on those transmissions,” Lieutenant Hendricks continued, “and it seems he’s got some kind of countermeasure that’s interfering with ISAC.”
“That’s some high-end gear,” Aurelio said.
“Indeed it is,” she agreed. “Whoever he’s working for, they’ve got top-end tech and they are not aligned with the goals of the SHD and the JTF. This mission just got a lot more important, Agent Diaz.”
Not to me, Aurelio thought.
To me it was important from the beginning.
“Understood, Lieutenant. I better get moving.”
“Agreed. Good luck, Agent.”
Aurelio broke off the transmission and took a moment to process what he’d learned. First, there was possibly a vaccine against the Green Poison. That was astonishing all by itself. Everything he’d done as a Division agent had always happened under the cloud of the potential that the virus would mutate and return. But a real vaccine would end that threat. It would mean a true stable rebuilding of America could begin.
And this April Kelleher, whoever she was, might be leading a corrupted Division agent straight to it.
He walked out to the end of the pier. He was more than a hundred miles from Ann Arbor. Two long days on foot. And he needed to get there faster. “Jackie,” he said.
She paused in the middle of tying a knot. The girl looked up, too. Aurelio was a little embarrassed that he still couldn’t remember her name, but he had more pressing things on his mind.
Aurelio gestured over at the ferry terminal. “That ferry. Where did it go?”
“Used to go up to Pelee Island, on the Canadian side of the lake,” she said. “But the boat’s been gone since winter, and nobody can go to Canada anymore. The whole border, land and water, is sealed up tight.”
“Okay,” Aurelio said. “But are there any other ferries? There must be lake traffic, right? Since hardly anyone has cars anymore.”
Jackie stood up and stretched, then started rubbing her hands. “Sure. You go out to Cedar Point, there’s a couple of ferries that run along the lakeshore there.”
She pointed across the bay, and Aurelio noticed the towers of roller coasters and other amusement park rides, glowing in the late afternoon sun. The amusement park was on a barrier island. Aurelio followed the dark line of the land against the water, around to the east, where a causeway connected it to mainland Sandusky a mile or so from where he stood.
“I know they go over to Cleveland and Toledo from there. Might even go to Detroit if the weather’s good,” she said.
* * *
• • •
Aurelio said his good-byes to Jackie and got across the causeway and out to Cedar Point before it was fully dark. The landscape of towering steel frames, swooping and curling back on themselves in the twilight, was eerie and sad, recalling the time when people had the safety and leisure to do things like take their kids to amusement parks. It would happen again, Aurelio thought. He would do his part to help.
He navigated through the park, looking for the shoreline. On the open-water side of the island was a long, empty beach with a few boats run aground. They weren’t going to help him.
On the other side, facing the bay, he found a large marina. Dozens of boats lay sunken by winter storms at their moorings, but out at the end of the longer docks a few larger boats were tied up. Aurelio walked past a boathouse and restaurant, smelling fried fish. A group of people inside were eating and talking. He saw other human figures on the boats and decided to go there first. They would have the information he needed.
“Hello,” he called when he got close to the end of the dock. There were three boats moored bow to stern, facing to the left, where a channel to the bay was visible between two breakwaters.
A deckhand on one of the boats stopped coiling ropes. He was in his thirties, wearing only canvas shorts. Sandy hair curling down over permanently sunburned shoulders, sleeve tattoos. He leaned on the boat’s gunwale and said, “What’s up?”
“I was told there are ferries here,” Aurelio said. “I need to get to Michigan fast, like yesterday. You know who I can ask?”
“Ain’t nobody going to take you tonight,” the sailor said. “I’m going to Toledo tomorrow if that’ll suit you.”
“I need to get to Ann Arbor. And I don’t mean to seem melodramatic, but there are lives at stake.”
“I’ve seen you guys before,” the sailor said. “I didn’t figure it was a pleasure cruise. Listen, I got to go to Toledo tomorrow, but that boat there belongs to a woman by the name of Bryn. She’s inside. If you’ve got something she wants, she’ll take you to Detroit first thing.”
“Bryn,” Aurelio repeated. “Got it. Thanks.”
“Rock on,” the sailor said. He went back to his ropes and Aurelio went into the restaurant.
There were only four women in the group gathered around a long table with bottles of whiskey and plates of fish bones. The entire group looked up when Aurelio came in. They clocked his gun and his gear and they got quiet. “I’m looking for Bryn,” he said.
A stocky woman with a gray crew cut paused in the middle of taking a sip of whiskey. “You found her,” she said.
“Mind if we talk for a minute?” Aurelio asked.
She knocked back the whiskey, poured herself another, and said, “Sure.”
* * *
• • •
Bryn wanted to help, but she also had herself to take care of, so to avoid a long negotiation Aurelio made her an offer he didn’t figure she would refuse. “You get me to Detroit in the morning,” he said, “and I’ll give you this.”
From his pack he pulled a Glock 19, careful to move slowly so she could see he was holding it by the barrel. He dropped the magazine out and ejected the round from the chamber. “Practically new,” he said. “I kept it as a spare, but it’s yours, with two full clips, if we can get going before sunrise.”
“You got yourself a deal,” she said, and the next morning, with dawn just beginning to glow in the east, Bryn was casting off with Aurelio standing in the stern. Her boat was maybe forty feet long, an old wooden beauty with a retrofitted engine that burned coal. “I don’t know if you saw the coal docks over in the harbor,” she said. “When the virus hit, everything shut down, and there was all this coal sitting there. I got together with some friends and we spent part of the winter working on the old March Hare here. Now I got a living, as long as the coal holds out.”
“With any luck, things will be getting better by then,” Aurelio said. He wondered why she’d named the boat March Hare but didn’t ask.
“I got a feeling things aren’t getting better,” Bryn said. Black smoke pumped out of makeshift exhaust stacks cut into the stern. Aurelio moved away from them. They got out into the lake, and Bryn accelerated. “We’ll be in Detroit in six hours unless the weather comes up,” she said.
That would make it eleven o’clock. Then it was fifty miles or so from the Detroit waterfront to Ann Arbor. Aurelio didn’t like that schedule, but he didn’t see any way around it. He would just have to hope April Kelleher was on foot, and Ike Ronson hadn’t found her. ISAC wasn’t telling him anything about Ronson other than a more recent last known location: in southern Michigan, north of Toledo but south of Ann Arbor. Briefly Aurelio wondered what had happened to ISAC. Something was definitely wrong. Real-time tracking was gone; battlefield HUD was gone. At least Aurelio still had map assist and static database access.
Bryn steered directly northwest, and soon they were out of sight of land. The lake was a little choppy, but not bad, and as the sun got higher the dawn breezes calmed. It was a beautiful day to be on a boat, Aurelio thought, wishing he could enjoy it. But the press of his mission—and behind it the ever-present anxiety to get back to DC and be closer to Ivan and Amelia—made it difficult to think of anything else. Bryn kept up a steady stream of conversation, ranging from fish to the political situation in Sandusky to conspiracy theories about military convoys she’d heard about, passing through Ohio on their way east. This last caught Aurelio’s attention, but when he asked about it she didn’t have any details. “Just something I keep hearing about,” she said. “Probably your people.”
Could be, Aurelio thought. He let it go and watched the lake.
After about three hours they could see Michigan. “We’re making good time,” Bryn said. “Might be in Detroit in five hours instead
of six.”
That was better, but it still put Aurelio in Ann Arbor well after midnight, and exhausted from a fifty-mile forced march. Not a good way to go into a potential combat situation with another trained Division agent, if that was where things were headed.
As they got closer to the shore, he spotted a river mouth, with a golf course on one side and a swampy expanse of open land on the other. Bryn angled the boat more directly north, toward the broad opening of the Detroit River. “Gonna be a little slower now because we have to fight the current,” she said. The boat chugged ahead.
Aurelio saw a boat ramp and landing near the golf course. “Bryn,” he said. “Can you drop me there?”
“Depends on the water,” she said. “I doubt anyone’s been dredging the channel. Better to go on up to Detroit.”
Aurelio’s watch spawned a regional map. If he got off here, he was thirty-seven miles from Ann Arbor. That cut two or three hours off the foot march, plus more than an hour off the boat time. “Please take a look,” he said. “There are a lot of lives depending on me getting to Ann Arbor fast.”
She looked doubtful, but she eased the boat in closer to the shore. “Don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t risk running aground.”
Angling back north again, they passed a small group of houses along the river. Then Aurelio spotted a marina. “Hey. There,” he said. “There’s a channel.”
Bryn slowed down. “That’s a tight squeeze, but okay. What I’ll do is ease right up to the mouth of the channel. I’m not going in there, though. No telling if other boats have sunk, and by the time we find out it’d be too late.”
“Works for me,” Aurelio said. “As long as I can jump.”