Tom Clancy's the Division

by Alex Irvine

  That was the question on her mind, too.

  “Junie,” Thomas said. “Look. Go on home, and we’ll get this sorted out. But we can’t take seven children right now. We just can’t.”

  “So you haven’t talked about it, or you did talk about it and decided no, and you just don’t have the guts to tell me face-to-face?” Junie stood defiant with the kids all around her, daring Thomas to turn them away, and Violet already knew how it was going to play out. Adults thought kids were blind to lots of things, but the truth was, kids saw through most of the charades adults had convinced themselves were real. Violet watched the two of them talking to each other, and she knew two things:

  One, Junie thought she needed to get the kids out of the Castle because something bad was going to happen.

  Two, Thomas wasn’t going to let it happen. Not today, not ever.

  “Look, Junie,” Thomas said. “We’re just trying to get through until this is all over.”

  “Us, too,” Junie said. “Only we’re already in the crosshairs.” It wasn’t like her to let slip something like that in front of the kids. Violet saw a different Junie in that moment, frightened and trying to do what she could to make the best of a bad situation.

  Be ready, Violet told herself. If they can’t protect us, we’ll have to protect ourselves. How they would do that, and what it would mean, she didn’t know. But she could tell from the conversation that a time was coming when she and the rest of the orphaned kids in the group might be on their own. They had to know that, and be ready for it.

  “Just stay put another week,” Thomas said. “See how things are going. We’ll talk about it then.”

  There wasn’t much to say after that. Junie and all of the kids could tell there was no help for them at Ford’s Theatre. “Another week,” Junie said, her voice heavy with scorn. “Might as well say next year.”

  She turned away, ignoring whatever Thomas might have said, and led the kids back to the Metro Center station.

  On the way back through the Metro tunnels, the kids were pretty subdued until right at the end, when they were sticking to the sides of the flooded part near the Smithsonian stop. “You wanted us to go somewhere else,” Ivan said out of nowhere.

  Junie stopped and turned to him. “No,” she said. “No, I didn’t. I want you here. Hell, I want you back with your parents, each and every one of you. Just like I want my own children with me. But they’re not. And your parents aren’t. And in a week, none of us might be, either. We’ll see. I’m trying to keep you safe. Until yesterday, I thought the best way to do that was to keep you at the Castle. Now I’m not so sure. But now it doesn’t matter. We’re going to be at the Castle, and we’re going to get through whatever comes. Together.”

  She walked toward the stairs to the street at the Smithsonian stop, and Violet was reminded how she’d thought it was going to be like a field trip when they left. It hadn’t turned out that way at all.

  They came back out into the sunlight on Independence Avenue. “We’re going to stick it out where we are. That’s it,” Junie said as they walked down the block and the Castle came into view. She sounded defeated, and that made Violet worry more than just about anything she’d seen since her parents died. “Nothing more to say about it.”

  Because Junie had said that, they believed it, and none of them said anything as they walked back to the Castle. But Violet knew there was a lot more to say. She had a feeling something bad was coming, and the adults knew they were powerless to stop it.

  That meant the kids were going to have to figure things out on their own.

  35

  APRIL

  April had walked more than forty miles that day by the time they got to Ann Arbor, and she’d had a huge adrenaline rush and crash in the middle of the day. She was exhausted. But she had a lead on where to go, at least.

  Like any big college town, Ann Arbor was plastered with signs directing visitors and students to various campus locations. She also resorted to the old-fashioned trick of looking at maps. The North Campus, home to most of the university’s engineering research labs, was across the Huron River from downtown. By the time they figured that out, they were already on the edge of the main campus, having walked in along a road Ike pointed out. April couldn’t keep the name in her head. It went past a small JTF base, then an endless stretch of abandoned stores, and then stately old houses repurposed as campus offices of fraternities. Ahead of them loomed the immense University of Michigan Hospital, practically a city unto itself. Lights burned in some of its windows, and they could see JTF patrols and checkpoints on the road—Washtenaw, that was the name—as it curved past the hospital.

  Ann Arbor looked like it had seen some rough times. Many of the fraternity houses had burned, and the strip of bars and restaurants along the south edge of the main campus showed bullet holes and broken windows. They got off Washtenaw and walked through the campus. “The main JTF base here is down by the football stadium,” Ike said. “On the south side of the city.”

  Bill had been a big college football fan, and April remembered seeing pictures of that stadium, with its big yellow Block M on the fifty-yard line. The players’ helmets had three stripes that Bill had once told her were supposed to look like a wolverine’s claws. Funny how little details like that floated back into your head when you were practically too tired to stand.

  A campus bus stop helped them narrow down their probable destination even more. “Huh,” April said, reading it with the help of a flashlight. “There’s a biomedical research building right on the edge of North Campus.” From where they stood, it was maybe two or three miles.

  “You a biomedical engineer?” Ike asked.

  “No, but my husband was a genetic engineer and worked on medical projects,” April said. “I think the person I’m looking for probably works in that building. Or did. Either way, it’s the place to start the search.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Ike said. “You want to go over there now?”

  She did, but she was also dead on her feet. After so many months, being so close to the truth about Bill had April paradoxically reluctant to take the final steps. What if Koopman was wrong and nobody here knew anything about Bill? Or, for that matter, the BSAV? She couldn’t work through how she felt about that. Fatigue was singing its high whine in her head. She’d killed three people that day, and almost died herself, and walked for thirteen hours. Even if she found someone who knew Bill, she knew she was too exhausted to ask coherent questions.

  “No,” she said. “I’m beat, Ike. It’s been quite a day.”

  “Sure has.” He looked around, from the electric glow of the JTF checkpoints by the hospital to the silent darkness of the main campus quad. Another random tidbit floated through April’s head. It was called the Diag. “Probably best not to show up when it’s getting dark. That’s a time when people tend to be suspicious.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “So let’s hole up for the night. I saw a decent spot back down the block.”

  The spot he chose was a rooftop café, upstairs from a small deli. The stairs creaked under their feet and on the second floor they found a hookah bar. A glass counter with displays of different kinds of tobacco was smashed and empty. Same with the glass-front cooler on the wall. Empty bottles littered the floor, but there was no sign anyone was squatting there.

  “Stinks in here,” April said.

  Ike nodded. “I don’t mind sleeping outside. It’s a nice night.”

  It was. They went out onto the roof. April noted an exterior stairway that led down into an alley behind the row of buildings. She also saw bullet holes in the walls and spent shell casings lying in the gaps between deck boards. But whatever battle had happened here, it was long over. The whole street was quiet.

  “Hey, a fire pit,” Ike said. It was one of the cast-iron kind, for having contained fires in a yard . . . or on a deck. He b
roke apart two wooden benches sitting on the balcony by the rear stairway and shaved some tinder into the bottom of it. Then he arranged some boards over it and produced a disposable lighter.

  April had eight or ten of them in the bottom of her pack. She’d traded others for food at different times over the winter. The ability to make fire on demand was a lifesaver. As long as she lived, April would never be without a lighter.

  The fire was cheery. April dragged a wicker couch over close to it and stretched out her legs. Ike was in a chair on the other side. “Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

  “Yeah. But you don’t have to be. You got me here. Don’t you have other missions calling?”

  “Directive 51,” Ike said. “I’ll get you where you’re going, and then I’ll see who needs me here.”

  Something about the way he phrased that caught April’s attention. Hadn’t he said he had another reason for being in Ann Arbor? “Here? Are you usually somewhere else?”

  Ike chuckled. “I’ve been all over Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania . . . I try to go where there’s need.”

  “Well, I’m glad you were there when I needed you.” April was getting sleepy. “Why were you there, anyway?”

  “Trouble tends to come out of towns where there were prisons before the pandemic,” Ike said. “I like to know where those towns are and keep an eye on them. Just so happened you were passing through.”

  “Lucky,” April said. She yawned. “Now if I can only get lucky again tomorrow.”

  “What would that look like?” Ike’s face was serious. April liked him. Not just because he’d saved her life. He was easy to talk to.

  “That would look like . . . me walking into that biomedical engineering building tomorrow and finding someone who knew Bill. Then me asking that person why he was murdered, and getting an answer. Then . . .”

  She stopped. She’d been about to add something about finding out whether Bill’s work had helped to create a vaccine that would end the threat of a resurgent Dollar Bug once and for all. It had become a reflex to only tell part of the story, from New York up to Albany and then all the way here. But she didn’t need to do it anymore, April realized. She could tell Ike. He was a Division agent, and even if she knew some Division agents had gone rogue, she also knew their watches turned red when that happened. There was some kind of AI system that tracked them. Ike Ronson’s watch was orange.

  And he’d saved her life. April Kelleher was no damsel in distress. She’d gotten herself out of more than a few tough spots in the months since Black Friday. But the two times she’d really been in over her head, a Division agent had been there. First Doug Sutton, now Ike Ronson.

  “So there’s another reason, too,” she said. Already she was feeling a rush of relief about finally being able to tell someone. “Did I tell you I came from New York?”

  Ike raised an eyebrow. “You mentioned your husband was killed there. Were you in Manhattan?”

  April nodded. “Yeah.”

  “How’d you get past the quarantine? There’s a blockade still, right?”

  “I had a friend who called in a favor,” April said. “Actually I thought it would be harder than it was, but it turns out there are places where you can practically walk out, as long as you know when the patrols are going to be there. I went on a railroad bridge over the Harlem River.”

  “They didn’t have it alarmed or anything? That’s not much of a blockade.”

  “They did. My guide showed me how to climb along the bridge girders so we stayed clear of the alarms. Then I caught a ride on a boat up to Albany. This is the part that doesn’t seem real to me. I rode on the Erie Canal all the way to Buffalo, like it was 1840 or something.”

  “I guess for a lot of people it is,” Ike commented.

  “That’s true.” April had a little second wind now that she’d started talking about the journey, and given herself permission to tell the whole story. “The man who told me how to get out is a scientist. He . . . well, I’m not sure he knew Bill, but he knew Bill’s work because they were in related fields. I found him because I thought he might be able to help me understand why Bill was murdered. And he did, sort of, but the way he explained it gave me a whole new set of . . . not just questions, but . . .” She was rambling and she knew it. She shifted on the couch so she was a little more upright, leaning against one arm with her legs still outstretched. “Let me put it this way. What I learned there gave me something like a quest.”

  Now she paused, because on the brink of telling Ike about the BSAV April realized it might just make her sound crazy.

  “For . . . ?” Ike prompted.

  Both of them froze as they heard footsteps on the deck. Ike’s hand dropped to his sidearm and April swung around to get her feet on the floor. The Super 90 was leaning against the other arm of the couch. Reflexively she reached for it.

  Then she paused as another Division agent stepped into the firelight. He was compact and light on his feet, like he was made of springs. In the firelight, his features looked Mayan: sharp nose, broad cheekbones, heavy-lidded soulful eyes under the brim of a baseball cap. He looked from April to Ike, seemingly unworried about the hands both of them had on their guns. Then a broad grin broke over his face and he said, “Hey, sorry, didn’t mean to scare anyone. You’re Ike Ronson, right?”

  36

  AURELIO

  According to ISAC, Ike was still somewhere south of Ann Arbor when Aurelio got there in the early evening. But when he checked in with the JTF base in the parking lot of a shopping center with the whimsical sixties-callback name Arborland, he learned that they had flagged a woman matching April Kelleher’s description passing by late that afternoon, going west on Washtenaw. Aurelio had followed that path, and after several hours searching the campus area, he’d spotted the small rooftop fire on South University.

  After he circled around the block and found the alley, Aurelio had come slowly up the stairs. When he had visual on Ronson and Kelleher, he watched them for fifteen minutes or so. Before he made himself known, he wanted to get a sense of whether he was treating her like a captive, a coconspirator, or an ordinary civilian. It didn’t take too long for him to see that she didn’t consider herself a captive, and since she was talking more than he was, the conversation didn’t seem like the two of them were scheming. From this he inferred that Ronson didn’t know what Kelleher was after, and Kelleher didn’t know Ronson was corrupt.

  Therefore the most straightforward approach was probably the best. Ronson couldn’t draw down on Aurelio without ruining the trust he was developing with Kelleher, and he couldn’t shoot her because he still didn’t know what she was after.

  So when Aurelio stepped out onto the roof deck and said hello, he figured Ronson would be boxed in and would have to play along . . . and as it turned out, he was right. “Yeah,” Ronson said. “I’m Ike. Who are you?”

  Aurelio introduced himself. “I’ve had a couple of pings about a civilian in the area with SHD gear, so I was out looking around. And here you are,” he said to April. “How did you happen to come by that gear?”

  “I took it from an agent who saved my life back in February,” she said. “He was dead, and I needed it.”

  I might have saved your life, too, Aurelio thought. The jackals in the Fifth Avenue church would have turned her into an art exhibit. “Fair enough,” he said. “Ike, you taking the night off?”

  Ronson met Aurelio’s gaze, his face giving nothing away. He probably didn’t know Aurelio was the agent who had responded to his bogus SOS back in Manhattan, but he was also probably suspicious of the coincidence of another Division agent finding him so soon after he had located Kelleher. Also, if he had access to ISAC, he could learn Aurelio’s last operational locations anytime he wanted. “I ran into April on the road south of here, when she was encountering the local version of the Rikers gang. She was doing all right, but I gave her a hand.�
��

  No wonder she was so relaxed around him, Aurelio thought. He’d made just about the best first impression you can make.

  “Now I’m listening to her story,” Ike continued. “It was just about to get good.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “Now that you’re here, you can hear the story, too. Then I’m going to sleep.”

  Aurelio dragged a chair over close to the fire and sat, making a roughly equilateral triangle with Kelleher and Ronson. “I’m all ears,” he said.

  “Then I’ll cut to the chase.” April was sitting up now, elbows on her knees and hands loosely clasped. She looked into the fire as she spoke. “In New York I learned that my husband, Bill, might have been involved in research on a new class of antivirals that could provide a treatment for the Black Friday virus. I also learned that a team in a lab here in Ann Arbor might have completed a sample of that drug. It’s called a broad-spectrum antiviral, but this is a specific one tailored to the way the Dollar Bug can mutate. If that drug exists, and if Bill was involved . . .” She took a moment to compose herself. “I saw him shot down in the street by strangers, and if I knew something of his work had survived to help make sure this never happens again . . . It would really help me to know that.”

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and fell silent. Aurelio’s mind went into overdrive trying to fit this new revelation in with what he already knew. Kelleher had heard about the antiviral. Someone had sent Ike Ronson after her. Therefore that someone also knew about the antiviral, and Ronson considered that someone more deserving of loyalty than the Division.

  Without the checks of accountability and transparency, whoever controlled the manufacture and distribution of the antiviral would be in a position of unassailable power. If the virus mutated and came back, the next plague wouldn’t touch them. They could use access to it as the ultimate leverage over anyone. Aurelio didn’t look at Ronson. He knew Ronson was working through a different version of the same train of thought. Whether Ronson had known about the antiviral before now, and was just waiting for Kelleher to confirm it, that Aurelio didn’t know. He suspected Ronson was just as surprised as he was. This was a shocking revelation.