Tom Clancy's the Division

by Alex Irvine

She slowed the boat to barely a walking pace, working it close to the mouth of the marina channel where an open picnic area faced dense woods on the other side. The engine growled as she nosed into the channel, getting the boat momentarily out of the current flowing out of the Detroit River just to the north.

  The minute the boat was close enough to the edge of the channel, Aurelio jumped. His boots crunched on gravel and he turned to face Bryn. “Appreciate it,” he said. “You still going up to Detroit?”

  “I came all this way,” she said. “Might as well see if I can make the trip pay for itself. Plus, there’s still coal in some of the piles up at River Rouge. Take it easy, Agent Diaz.”

  “You, too, Bryn.”

  She reversed the boat out of the channel mouth and chugged away north into the main flow of the Detroit River.

  It was a little before nine in the morning, and Aurelio was thirty-seven miles from Ann Arbor.

  33

  APRIL

  She spent the night in Sylvania, a suburb right on the Michigan state line, north of Toledo. The truck driver hadn’t wanted to leave her in the city. “Around the river, it’s pretty rough,” he said. “I know you got a gun and all, but still. You get out to Sylvania, you’ll have the whole place to yourself. Then you walk straight up 23 to Ann Arbor.”

  She’d taken his advice, holing up in a patch of woods between a golf course and the highway. She didn’t sleep well, but she slept some, and then she was up with the birds and walking. She had food and water enough to get where she was going, and she set a brisk pace. This close to the goal, April could feel the momentum building toward finally understanding the truth about Bill. And maybe—was it possible?—maybe she was going to find out whether the BSAV existed.

  May was a beautiful time of year. April couldn’t help thinking it was more beautiful without smokestacks and car exhaust choking out the smells of growing things on the breeze. That was maybe the opposite of survivor’s guilt, this impulse to look on the bright side of a pandemic that had killed millions of people just in the United States. She wished she knew how things were in the rest of the world, but over the past months it had been all she could do to stay alive herself. Maybe now that things were getting a little better—at least in some places—she would have the space in her head to wonder about things beyond her next meal and next place to sleep.

  She saw groups of people in the fields on either side of the highway, planting crops by hand or plowing with horses. Life went on. If the BSAV was real, and the Dollar Bug could be exterminated, it would keep going on. The survivors of the pandemic had a second chance, a clean slate.

  If, that is, some kind of government still existed to keep people from breaking apart into a thousand different factions fighting over territory and resources. That was still an open question. Every town she passed through, she saw a few people going about their business. Some of them saw her, too, but none of them bothered her. Maybe they were scared off by the Super 90, or maybe they just didn’t wake up in the morning with bad intentions. Either way, by the early afternoon, making pretty good time, she got to a town called Milan. On the edge of the highway, a sign warned:

  PRISON AREA

  DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS

  Good advice, April thought. But she was more likely to be a hitchhiker than pick one up. All the same, she started watching her surroundings more carefully and she carried the Super 90 in her hands instead of slung over her shoulder. She’d seen what the Rikers gang had done in New York, and if there was going to be trouble here, April was going to be ready.

  She was between a soda bottling plant on the left and an auto parts factory on the right when she heard a sharp whistle from the direction of the factory. Not a wolf whistle; a signal. She looked in that direction and saw three men standing on the roof of the factory, pointing at her.

  Then she looked in the other direction and saw three more men coming out of the bottling plant. They cut across the brushy margin between the parking lot and the highway toward her. April kept walking, not wanting to be between the two groups of men when either one of them got close. The men coming from the bottling plant broke into a run. They were maybe fifty yards away.

  When they got out onto the pavement, April turned to face them and leveled the Super 90. “Now, hold on, sweetheart,” one of them said. The other two sidestepped, like they were trying to get around behind her.

  “I shoot people who call me sweetheart,” April said. “Back off.”

  His eyes shifted away from her, to something over her shoulder. With chilling certainty she understood he was making eye contact with someone behind her.

  April pulled the trigger, bracing herself against the Super 90’s kick. At less than twenty yards away, the load of buckshot punched holes in him from collarbone to navel. The other two men with him dodged away to the side and April ran north, looking to her right to see who was coming from the factory side.

  Bad news. There were at least six of them. Not close enough for the Super 90 to be effective, either. She planted her feet and fired three times at the closest of the men on the bottling plant side. He went down, but the other one was angling across the road to join the factory group. Safety in numbers . . . and she only had four shots left.

  There was no way she would be able to get all of them before they were on her.

  She turned and ran again. April was pretty fast, but she wasn’t going to be able to outrun a group of men while carrying her pack and gear. The idea behind running was to draw them into a closer group. Ten steps down the road, she spun around and unloaded the last four shells into the group of pursuers. She saw blood flying, but she didn’t stop to count the bodies. She dropped the Super 90 and ran.

  One of the worst things she noticed in the split second before she turned and ran again was that one of her pursuers had an AR-15. If they’d wanted to kill her, they already could have.

  That meant they weren’t planning to kill her.

  You’ll end up married, the sailor back in Buffalo had said about the Jamestown Aryans.

  Hell I will, April thought. She had a knife. As she ran, passing under a bridge, she unsnapped its sheath and drew it out.

  Another hundred yards ahead of her was a railroad trestle, and just to the right of it a farmhouse. The house was empty. There was no one in sight.

  Wait. She saw someone moving at the side of the railroad trestle, skidding down the embankment toward the level of the highway. She saw a gun.

  Before she had a chance to see more, someone tackled her from behind. It was a perfect football tackle, both arms around her thighs. She went down hard on the asphalt, but before the man could get his weight on her, April spun around and drove the knife underhand into his ribs. A sound partly cough and partly groan came out of his mouth and he let her go. April scrambled back away from him. Three more men were almost on her, including the guy with the AR-15. He held it pointed at her.

  “No more running,” he panted.

  Then she heard a gunshot and his knees buckled. He hit the pavement on his knees and pitched over forward. One of the other men picked up the gun, but he didn’t know where the shot had come from.

  In her peripheral vision, April saw something moving. She stepped to one side, away from the motion, and a man exploded into view. April caught an orange circle and the ISAC brick on his pack.

  A Division agent.

  He went in low as the shooter fired over his head, the barrel of the AR-15 kicking up. Using some kind of judo move, the agent wrenched the shooter over and planted him face-first in the ground. Somehow in the same motion he produced a gun. “Wait,” April said, but by the time the word left her mouth he’d shot her attacker twice in the back of the head.

  The other one, the last of her pursuers, backed away as the agent walked up to him with the gun leveled. “Hold on, man, we weren’t—”

  The agent shot him in the ch
est, and again in the head when he hit the ground.

  Then he looked back down the road. April saw bodies back there, and also some men still moving. One was up and limping back in the direction of the factory.

  “Pretty good work,” the agent said, looking back toward April. “Looks like you had three KIA and four or five wounded by the time I got here.”

  He walked over to the dead man with April’s knife stuck in his left armpit. Rocking the knife back out, he wiped it on the dead man’s back. Then he walked over to April, flipped the knife over so he was holding it by the blade, and held it out to her. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were one of us. But you don’t have a watch, and I don’t see the lenses. So maybe you should explain where that pack and the Benelli came from.”

  When she gripped the knife, he let it go. She cleaned it again before she sheathed it. Then she walked past him, back down the road to where she had dropped her gun. “His name was Doug Sutton,” she said as she passed. “He died saving my life.”

  She picked up the gun and turned around. He was right there. Tall, dark haired, with a short beard against pale skin, lean like a distance runner but with a bit more muscle.

  “I was about to say you guys are like superheroes,” she said as she reloaded the Super 90. After this load, she only had a dozen more shells. “But you killed those guys even though you had them down.”

  “I don’t see a jail anywhere around here,” the agent said. “Actually, that’s not true. There’s a jail just up the road. But what I meant was there’s no correctional facility where I could safely convey a violent criminal. So, you know.” He shrugged. “Plus, they were going to kill you. Sooner or later.”

  He stuck out his hand. “Name’s Ike. Ike Ronson.”

  She shook. “April Kelleher.” Then she noticed her right hand was covered in the dead man’s blood.

  “Where you going, April?” Ike asked as April scrubbed her hand on roadside weeds and then on the leg of her pants.

  “Ann Arbor.”

  “Huh.” Ronson looked her over. Not like a guy checking her out, but more like he was appraising her fitness for some kind of task. “Why Ann Arbor?”

  She thought of all kinds of lies she could tell him and then decided to tell him the truth, or at least part of it. “Mostly to find out who killed my husband.”

  “Huh,” he said again. “You’re coming from . . .”

  “New York.”

  “So even though phone networks have been down since December, you heard about your husband getting killed in Ann Arbor, and now you’re going there to find out why.”

  “No, he was killed in New York. I saw it happen. I’ve been looking for his killers since then, and I think the answer is in Ann Arbor.” She was starting to feel the pressure of her lie of omission. What if she told him about the BSAV? He was a Division agent, right? They were supposed to help, and this Ike Ronson had just saved her life.

  On the other hand, she remembered one of the first clues she’d teased out of Roger Koopman’s book: There are divisions in the Division.

  “I can go with you if you’d like,” Ike said. “Seems like you shouldn’t be traveling alone.”

  “I got this far,” she said, a little defensively. Maybe she wasn’t a Division agent or a commando or anything like that, but she’d survived the Dollar Bug and now she’d made it, what, almost six hundred miles out of New York by herself.

  “You did,” the agent agreed. “On the other hand, no offense, but I don’t think you were going to get much farther.”

  This was fair, even though she didn’t want to admit it.

  Ike was watching her, like he could see her think. “If you want to come along,” April said, “I’d be glad for the company. You sure you don’t have another mission or something?”

  “I’ve got other things to do in Ann Arbor anyway,” Ike said with a grin. “We go together, I’m killing two birds with one stone.”

  34

  VIOLET

  The day after Sebastian visited, Junie gathered all the kids and said they were going on a trip. “Where?” Amelia asked.

  “We’re going to see some other people,” Junie said. “Some of them left the same hotel you did when the floods came in, but now they’re settled farther away from the men at the Capitol Building. So we’re going to see what their situation is like.”

  It had the air of a field trip at first, with Junie as their chaperone. She led them to the Smithsonian Metro stop, with four armed men escorting them. The men came with them down into the Metro stop to make sure they wouldn’t run into any trouble. “It’s getting harder to go anywhere on the surface,” Junie said. “So we’re going to take the Metro. Only we’re going to do it a whole new way, without using a train.”

  The floodwaters were starting to recede, but the tracks at the Smithsonian station were still underwater. Junie had made sure all of the kids brought flashlights. Now she said, “Okay. Single file. Stay off to the side where the ground is a little higher. We ought to be able to keep dry that way.”

  They walked to the end of the platform and then climbed down onto the track bed. Violet was between Ivan and Shelby. They both wanted to hold her hand, so she put her flashlight away and relied on theirs to see where she was going. The tunnel stretched out ahead of them, perfectly straight, receding into the dark.

  Junie was in front. “Come on,” she said. “We’re only going two stops. Won’t take us more than fifteen or twenty minutes even if we go slow.”

  On the tunnel walls, Violet could see the stain of the floodwater. At its highest it had been over her head here. Now there was only water and silt on the tracks. If they stayed off to the side, their shoes barely got wet. The next station they passed was Federal Triangle, and then a few minutes later they got to Metro Center. A couple of different lines intersected here, so it was a bigger station, with platforms and overhangs and escalators frozen in place. Junie kept going, and the kids followed her. They hadn’t seen any people down in the tunnels or the stations. Violet wondered why. It seemed like it might be a good place to hide out from the weather if you were scared of people up on the street level. But maybe there was something she didn’t know.

  She didn’t have a chance to ask Junie about it because they were climbing an escalator, and then they came up onto the street across from a Macy’s. They walked past a stretch of abandoned stores and restaurants, no longer single file but in a bunch again. When they got to Tenth Street, they turned down past the big cathedral and walked two blocks until they got to Ford’s Theatre. Like every other DC schoolkid, Violet recognized it. She’d seen it on a field trip. Across the street was the house where Abraham Lincoln had died after . . . “Saeed,” she said. “Who shot Lincoln?”

  “John Wilkes Booth,” he answered right away. Then his face lit up as he figured out where they were. “Oh, this is right by the spy museum,” he said. “Can we go?”

  “Maybe another time,” Junie said.

  She led them to a makeshift gate set between Ford’s Theatre and the bigger building at the end of the block, which had a glitzy bar and a bunch of condos in it. Two big men with shotguns were at the gate. Junie nodded at them. They nodded back. “Thomas,” Junie said to one of them. “These are the kids.”

  Violet heard sounds from above and looked up. At this angle she couldn’t see much, but it seemed like there were a lot of people on the roof of the condo building next to Ford’s Theatre, and more people on the roof of the theater itself.

  “Yeah,” Thomas said. “JTF said you might be coming by. But I thought we were going to talk about this before you just showed up with a bunch of kids.”

  “Time is not on our side, Thomas,” Junie said. “If we didn’t come today, I wasn’t sure we’d get another chance.”

  Thomas was having trouble looking Junie in the eye, and Violet could tell he was trying hard to avoid looki
ng at her or any of the kids. “Well,” he said. “We haven’t really had time to talk about this.”

  “We had it sorted out with the JTF,” Junie said. “They told us you were good.”

  “I don’t know what they told you or didn’t tell you.” Thomas finally mustered the courage to look her in the eye. “But we haven’t talked about it here.”

  “Here? We’re here, Thomas. I brought these kids here. What do I do now?”

  “Look, when the JTF first suggested it to us, it seemed like a good idea, but . . . it’s just not going to work out. Too many mouths, not enough room. And if we start taking in more . . .” He shook his head. “Also, we heard you got a visit from Sebastian and those guys. You know the people behind him? They’re not afraid to kill people to make a point. If you got on their wrong side, and then we take in some of your people, how does that look?”

  “We’re talking about children,” Junie said.

  Violet realized this wasn’t just a trip. Junie hadn’t brought them here to meet other people.

  She was looking for a new place for them to live . . . and Thomas was turning her down.

  “No. Junie, no,” Shelby said. Tears filled her eyes. Amelia and Violet scooted close to her.

  “It’s all right,” Amelia said. “We’ll stick together. We’ll be all right.”

  Junie squatted down in front of them. They clustered around her, each of them wanting to touch her. They knew they were orphans. They knew they didn’t really have parents anymore—except for Ivan and Amelia, and their dad could be anywhere. So for all of them, Junie was the closest thing they had to a parent. Why would she send them away?

  “Listen,” she said. “It’s only until this business between the JTF and the flag-tattoo people gets settled.”

  “But what if . . .” They all looked at Noah, but he couldn’t finish the question. Violet thought she knew what he was going to say, though: What if you get killed? What if we can never go back?