At one point, Rashida led the way up a metal ladder, then into a small room at street level with a paneled window. They crouched in the darkness, then Rashida opened the panels, letting in light and sound from outside. An amplified voice was blaring through the streets.
“… BY TWELVE NOON TODAY, AT ONE OF THE LIGHTED BARRIER GATES AT STREET LEVEL, OR ONE OF THE UNDERGROUND PROCESSING STATIONS. YOU WILL BE EXAMINED AND PROCESSED AND TRANSPORTED TO ISOLATION WARDS FOR YOUR OWN HEALTH AND SAFETY, AND FOR THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OF THE CITIZENS OF SAN FRANCISCO…”
Rashida chuckled. “Right, that will be effective, appeal to their better instincts.”
“… WILL BE SHOT. AGAIN, ALL RESISTERS WILL BE SHOT. THE SITUATION IS TOO GRAVE…”
She closed up the panels, bringing back the darkness. They remained in the room for a minute to let their eyes adjust back to the dim light, then Rashida led the way back down.
It wasn’t much farther. They passed two bodies in the corridor, one face up with its throat cut, the other face down across the first. A little farther on they passed a woman sitting in front of a small pool of water; candles bobbed in the water, and the air smelled of burned wax.
Finally Rashida directed her down a short, dead-end passage, and they stopped in front of the left wall. There was an opening around chest level, but it was impossible to see more than a few inches into it.
“The grate’s gone,” Rashida said. She was looking around on the floor. “There it is.” She picked it up, studied it, then set it back down, leaning it against the wall. She turned to Caroline. “This is it. You crawl through that duct. It will be a very tight squeeze at first, but it opens out at a T-branch. When it does, you go right, then right again at your first opportunity. You’ll come out on the other side of this brick wall.” She pointed at the bricked-up barrier across the passage. “There’s another short passage, then a few steps leading up to a door to a basement storage room. To the left of the door, there will be a tiny depression in the concrete wall, and inside will be a key.” She paused. “You’ll be out. You’ll still be in the Tenderloin, still in quarantine, but you won’t be in the Core any longer.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me? Who knows where I’ll be?”
“Will I see you again?”
“Doubtful.” There was a long silence. “Go, Caroline.” She wanted to give Rashida a hug, but it wouldn’t be a smart thing to do. “I hope I do see you again.”
“Just take care of that bag.”
Caroline nodded. She put the bag in the duct first, pushed the bag forward, then crawled in after it. Rashida was right, it was extremely tight. She squirmed more than crawled her way along, her arms extended in front of her, pushing the bag forward as she went. Even breathing was difficult. But it wasn’t long before she reached the T-branch, and the ducting widened. From there it was almost easy.
Hanging on to the leather bag, she stuck her head out of the duct and into the passage on the other side of the wall. Dark here, too, with a rectangle of light off to her left the door. Caroline lowered the bag to the ground, then let herself slide out, dropping and rolling. She got to her feet, found the bag, and picked it up.
A scraping sound behind her.
Caroline froze. She listened hard, and thought she heard breathing. Slowly, so slowly, she turned around.
In the shadows, crouched against the wall, eyes wide, was a large monkey.
“It’s all right,” she said, keeping her voice soft. “I won’t hurt you.” It was hard to tell exactly how big the monkey was, or what kind it was. “It’s all right,” she said again.
The monkey didn’t move. Keeping every movement slow and deliberate, Caroline walked along the passage toward the door. She periodically looked back at the monkey, but it didn’t follow her. When she reached the steps, she climbed them, then felt around in the wall next to the door until she found the key.
She looked through the window. As Rashida had said, it was a basement storeroom, filled with crates and sacks and drums. There was no one inside. Caroline unlocked the door, and opened it.
She stood in the doorway and looked back at the monkey. She couldn’t stand the idea of it being trapped in here. How had it got here to begin with? The same way she had, maybe. It could go back, she supposed, but that wasn’t a good idea right now.
“Come on,” she said. She gestured at the monkey to join her, and said, “Come on,” again. “You can come out with me.”
It was probably a stupid idea. What the hell would the monkey do out in the Tenderloin? But she still felt sick at the thought of trapping it in here.
“I’ll leave the door open for you,” she said. “You can leave if you want.”
The monkey hadn’t moved except to turn its head toward her. She could just see its eyes in the gloom.
“So long,” she said.
And she left the door open behind her.
A half hour later she reached the RadioLand Street Clinic. Cage wasn’t there, but Franzee said he had been hoping she would show up, and she told Caroline how to get up to his apartment. Soon she was standing outside his door, knocking.
“It’s open,” Cage called from within.
She opened the door and stepped inside. Cage was sitting at one of the windows, gazing down the street in the direction of the Core. She closed the door, took another couple of steps, and then he finally turned.
He stared at her for a minute, then a faint smile worked its way onto his face. “I can’t believe you’re here. I can’t believe you got out.”
She smiled back. It was good to see him. “Rashida got me out.”
“Through the quarantine?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Have I got a story to tell you.” But there was something strange about him, something sad and defeated, and then she realized what it had to be. “Nikki?” she asked.
“Dead,” Cage answered, the smile disappearing. He breathed deeply once. “Dead.”
CHAPTER 29
Carlucci rode in one of the department helicopters above the city, swinging a wide arc around the quarantine perimeter. He wanted to get a sense of the whole picture, but they couldn’t get too close without risking being shot out of the sky. Allegedly there was close cooperation between the army and the San Francisco Police Department, but in reality the army and the CDC were calling all the shots, and they were not allowing any encroachment of the airspace above the quarantine zone, police or otherwise.
The quarantine perimeter was irregular, but seemed to be fairly solid and settled in, street barriers manned by squads of armed soldiers, reinforced by trucks and jeeps and mounted gun posts. But the quarantine perimeter was not exactly synonymous with the Tenderloin perimeter they hadn’t been able to manage that. In several sections of the DMZ, meeting armed resistance, the army had eventually given up and included those strips of the DMZ inside the quarantine, like weird bubbles on the Tenderloin boundaries. Those would be sticky areas, too, in the long run; the Tenderloin, being for all practical purposes a walled city, was already self-contained, though maintaining a quarantine around it for very long would be difficult. But the DMZ strips were zones of chaos. The quarantine around them couldn’t be very secure.
Farther inside the Tenderloin, the quarantine around the Core was nearly impossible to make out, too far away and obscured by the intervening buildings. But Carlucci tried to see if anything was happening, thinking about Caroline. He assumed she would come out with the other people from the Core, be processed and transferred to the isolation wards out on Treasure Island, but until he knew she actually had, he would worry.
He asked the pilot to set down on the rooftop where an observation site had been set up for the police, on a building a block away from the Tenderloin but tall enough to give them a decent line of sight. The pilot nodded, banked around, and five minutes later dropped Carlucci off. He hurried away from the copter, and it took off, giving him one final blast of wind from the blades.
He didn’t k
now most of the cops at the roof’s edge, but he was surprised to see Vaughn, the Chief of Police, standing there with the others and watching him approach. Vaughn was a tall, thin man, handsome and graying with distinction, charming without being slick—the perfect political animal on the police force, which was why he was Chief. Even now in the growing heat of the day he looked cool and comfortable in a light sand-colored silk suit, dark brown shoes, and tie. Vaughn and Carlucci had been something like enemies for years.
“Hello, Frank,” Vaughn said as Carlucci reached the group. “Good to see you.”
“Andrew.” They shook hands. “I’m surprised to see you out here.”
“Dramatic moments for the city. The Chief should at least make an appearance out on the front lines, right?” Smiling, like they were sharing a joke. Then his look turned serious. “I’m sorry to hear about your daughter.”
“You say that as if she was dead.”
“Frank, come on, that’s not what I meant. But she has been missing for a long time. I can imagine how I would feel if one of my children had gone missing like that.” Vaughn had two sons, one a lieutenant in the navy, the other a rising corporate lawyer in one of the city’s biggest law firms. “My sympathies were sincerely given.”
Carlucci nodded. They probably were. “Sorry,” he said.
“And thanks.” He nodded toward the Tenderloin. “What’s been happening?”
“Not much, yet.” They walked to the edge of the roof, two cops moving aside to make room for them. Then, subtly but clearly, all of the cops moved away to give them a small zone of privacy. “It’s not quite noon, yet,” Vaughn said. “But I don’t expect much to happen immediately. They’ll wait an extra hour for stragglers before going in with force.”
From the edge of the roof they had a pretty good view of about two blocks of Tenderloin perimeter and the quarantine line. As Vaughn had said, things looked pretty quiet at the moment. The real action, though, wasn’t going to take place here, not yet anyway it would occur at the Core, and they couldn’t see any of that at all from here. Just as well.
“What do you know about Cancer Cell?” Carlucci asked.
Vaughn laughed and looked at him quizzically. “Who have you been talking to? Kelly?” He shook his head. “That man is obsessed with Cancer Cell. He’s the only person in the department who seemed to give a rat’s ass about them before today.”
“I’m surprised you know about Kelly’s interest.” He didn’t see any point in pretending he wasn’t aware of it himself.
“You shouldn’t be, Frank. I make a point of knowing things like that about the officers working for me.”
“And what are my interests?” Carlucci asked.
Vaughn smiled again. “Your obsessions are more abstract than most. But they are what should be, in good police officers, the obvious ones. Truth. And a striving for rightness. But they aren’t obvious anymore, and they aren’t held by many. I admire you greatly for those obsessions, Frank.”
“Do you?”
“Oh, yes. I know what you think of me my corruptions. They are great, it’s true. But I’much more complex than you give me credit for. I will never let you get in my way, Frank, but I do admire you. Accept the compliment. It is sincere.”
He studied Vaughn, wondering if he had underestimated the man all these years.
One of the other cops called out, and there was pointing toward the Core. Carlucci and Vaughn turned to look. Something was rising above the ruined buildings, a strange podlike structure propelled in a jerking flight upward by a ring of jets trailing white smoke, a bizarre arrangement of fins and wings around it presumably acting as a steering mechanism. Big enough to contain two or three people. The pod continued to rise until it was forty or fifty feet above the buildings, then it veered away from the center.
Tracers shot up from the ground, followed a few seconds later by the ratcheting cracks of gunfire; they quickly zeroed in on the pod, tiny flashes appeared beneath it. Then there were several crumping sounds, and suddenly the pod exploded.
Bits of flashing metal sprayed out and down, along with larger chunks of what might have been body or structural parts, some licked by flames. A small piece with one of the jets apparently still intact spun crazily through the air, sometimes rising, sometimes diving, white smoke spinning about until it suddenly arced away and down and disappeared behind a building. Then all that was left in the air above the Core was dissipating smoke.
“A valiant effort,” Vaughn said. “Unfortunately, there will be others. On the ground or in the air, it won’t matter, they will all end like that.” His voice seemed to carry real regret. “It’s going to be bad in there.”
“They’ll be able to do it,” Carlucci said. “Clear out the Core.”
“Oh, certainly. But they’ll be dragging bodies out of there, and a lot of their own. They have no idea.”
“You have a better grasp on the realities than I would have expected.”
Vaughn laughed. “Maybe when this is all over you and I should sit down and have a long talk. We might learn a lot about each other: We might like each other more.”
“Yeah, maybe.” His phone beeped. He took it off his belt, flipped it open. “Carlucci.”
“Papa?”
“Caroline?” He could hardly believe he was hearing her voice, and a shiver went through him.
“Yes, it’s me, Papa.”
“Hold on a second.” Vaughn was looking at him, eyebrow raised. Carlucci walked away from him and the others. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
“I’m fine, Papa.”
He was standing out in the middle of the roof, far enough from the others for privacy, but he could see Vaughn still watching him.
“Are you in the Core?”
There was a slight hesitation, then Caroline said, “How did you know I was there?”
“A long and ugly story,” he said. “Are you out?” He’d caught the “was.”
“Yes, I’m out. That’s a long story, too. But I’m still in the Tenderloin. I guess I’m going to be here for a while.”
“Have you talked to your mom?”
“Yes, I called home first.”
“Where are you now? Where are you going to stay? Maybe I can get you out.” But he knew even as he said it that it would be impossible. They would not be making any exceptions with the quarantine.
Caroline just laughed. “Forget it, Papa, you can’t get me out. But I’ll be fine. I’m with Cage, and he said I can stay in Nikki’s apartment. He said you knew who she was.”
Again that word. “Yeah. Is she still alive?”
“No.”
He nodded to himself. “Tell Cage I’m sorry.”
“I will, Papa.”
And then he didn’t know what to say. She was out of the Core, she was temporarily safe, but she was still in the Tenderloin, stuck there for the duratión of the quarantine.
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” he finally said. “We were… well, you know.”
“I’m fine, Papa. It’ll be strange for a while, but I’ll be okay here. You know how to reach Cage, yes?”
“Yes. Is he there with you?”
A few moments later, Cage came on the line.
“I’m sorry about Nikki,” Carlucci said.
“Thanks.”
“Listen, Cage. The Tenderloin is your home. Caroline doesn’t know it for shit. Take care of her, will you?”
It sounded as if Cage was laughing. Then he said, “You’re her father, all right. She probably doesn’t need it much, but I’ll take care of her, Carlucci. Don’t worry about her.”
Yeah, right. “Thanks, Cage.”
“You bet. Here she is again.”
There was another short pause, then Caroline was back.
“I’ll be okay, Papa.”
“I know. I love you, Caroline.”
“I love you too, Papa. And I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Good-bye.”
“Bye, Papa.”
/> Carlucci clipped the phone back to his belt, then looked back at the other cops. Vaughn was still watching him. He didn’t want to go back and answer Vaughn’s questions. Besides, he’d seen enough here. He turned away, and walked toward the rooftop stairwell.
CHAPTER 30
Cage and Caroline stood at the edge of Nikki’s apartment rooftop, crowded in on both sides, leaning over the metal pipe railing and gazing down into the Core. The roof edges of all the buildings facing the Core were lined with people, like spectators at a sporting event, except most everyone seemed to realize that only disaster was coming.
The heat was incredible, and the acrid smell of sweat was heavy in the air, almost cloying. Below them, on the outer streets of the Core, the soldiers must have been roasting. Cage was surprised at how many there were, armed and armored, masked and gloved, some patrolling the outer perimeter, others manning the checkpoint processing stations that had been set up at the street boundaries and in the ground floors of a few of the border buildings. In the streets just outside the barriers, military ambulances waited, surrounded by more soldiers. Periodically one would pull away, lights flashing, heading out of the Tenderloin. Medical personnel were nearly invisible. And it was impossible to know what was going on underground probably just as much activity, if not more.
He wasn’t sure why they were here, watching. No, that really wasn’t true, he realized. He knew why Caroline was here in the short time she’d been inside, she’d developed an affinity, or at least a concern, for Cancer Cell. Maybe even the other people inside the Core. She wanted to know what was going to happen to them; she wanted to see what was going to happen. And he just wanted to be with her. Her presence helped ease the pain of Nikki’s death. Being alone made everything worse.
It was twelve-thirty, but not much had happened yet. The repeating message blaring out over the speakers had changed, now announcing that the army was granting an extra hour before they went in to remove all remaining people by force.
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