by Jeff Long
The Captain didn’t offer him a chair. The man didn’t seem to mind at all.
Miranda stayed sitting. She didn’t introduce herself. She tapped the blood log. “Dr. Bowen, you have a credibility gap,” she said.
The stranger didn’t waste a moment. “Dr. Bowen died in Fairbanks seventeen months ago,” he said. “That’s what I was told.”
“Did you kill him?” asked the Captain. Miranda was startled. She hadn’t thought of that.
The man was unperturbed. “That’s one thing I’ve never done,” he answered.
“Who are you?”
Again, not a hesitation. “Nathan Lee Swift.”
“How do we know that’s real?”
“You don’t. I’m not sure what it matters, anyway.”
He was right, thought Miranda. One name or another, he was just another piece of human driftwood. Some people would have minded the insignificance. He seemed to take it in the nature of things.
“So you’re not a physician,” she said.
“No.” He didn’t appear to feel very guilty about the deception.
“You forged your way across America,” she said. She wanted to shake him a little. “People believed in you. You healed them. They thought you healed them.”
He agreed with her. “I know. I couldn’t believe it, either. It was like they were waiting for a way to heal themselves. I was an excuse, that’s all.”
“They let you deliver their babies. Twins. Or is that part of your hoax, too?”
His eyes flickered across the array of his possessions on her desk. He saw the scraps of himself, and, again, didn’t seem to mind. “There were more than them,” he said. “I was lucky.” His hands opened unconsciously. They formed a little cup. “The babies delivered themselves. No complications. All I did was catch.”
“You had the gall….” she started. “What if something had gone wrong?”
“I agree,” he said. “It was humbling. I’ve never been so afraid.”
“How many?” asked the Captain.
“Babies?” he said. “With the twins, eleven. They’re all over the place.”
For a minute, Miranda was surprised like the Captain. “People are still having babies?” she said.
The man gave her a funny look.
“There’s a plague,” she expanded. “That’s just cruel.” The birthrate at Los Alamos had bottomed out in the last half year. Anymore it was considered prideful to inflict such suffering on a child. It was one more symptom of their hopelessness. Throughout the city, women’s hormonal cycles had been affected, as if their very wombs shunned fertility.
“People think you’re going to make everything better,” he replied.
Miranda looked sharply at him to see if it was an insult. “But you don’t think so,” she said.
“I doubt that matters,” he said.
She flipped open one of the letters. “And you treated a militia fighter?”
“Sewed him up. So he could kill some more people, probably. That was at a river camp near Chattanooga. They told me it’s the oldest river on earth.”
“You helped a killer,” she reiterated.
“They think they’re doing the right thing. Everyone thinks that. The right thing.”
“But they’re traitors,” she tried. From these heights, the chaos seemed so unnecessary. It offended people in Los Alamos that America—the method of it, the system—could come unraveled so completely.
“Be careful,” he said. “That’s a popular word, traitor. It’s what they say every time they pull their triggers.”
She sniffed. “You perpetrated fraud everywhere you went,” she said.
“It got me here.”
She opened Himalayan Flora with the tip of her pen, purposely irreverent. “There are passport stamps from Mongolia and China and Nepal.”
“Keepsakes,” he said. “The customs posts were empty.”
“You didn’t come through Asia,” she said. He couldn’t have. It was like the dark side of the moon.
He didn’t argue the point. He didn’t care if she believed it. “I brought the Smithsonian specimens,” he said. “Does anyone know what I’m talking about?”
“They’re not important anymore,” Miranda told him. In fact, any one of the relics might prove entirely relevant. But she wasn’t going to give herself away yet. That wasn’t how one bargained.
“I brought them,” he repeated. “I want to cut a deal.”
Miranda was momentarily put out. She was bluffing, and even if it showed, it was not his place to say so. “They might have had value months ago….”
“I came for my daughter,” he stated.
She hesitated. Could it be so simple? “Grace,” she said.
His fingers curled shut. He blinked through the coke-bottle lenses.
Miranda glanced at the Captain to see if this was his idea. The coincidence of two fathers each heartsick seemed too coincidental. But the Captain’s surprise looked genuine.
“She’s here?” asked Miranda.
“I hope.”
“Someone told you she’s here?”
“Not exactly.”
“Let me get this straight. You trick your way across the country using a false I.D. You hold government property for ransom. You threaten our attempt to find a cure, and you crash my work day. Just to come fishing?”
“I see your point,” he readily admitted. He seemed a little embarrassed by the slimness of it. But he stood his ground.
What part of him was real? she wondered. If the evidence was true, then he’d been racing one step ahead of the plague for months. What sights had he seen? What world was left out there? No one knew anymore. Their eyes on the world had blinked shut as the technology failed. Batteries had gone dead, generators had run out of fuel. The satellites showed anarchy at best. There were no more spy-plane overflights of Canada or Mexico, or even Atlanta. The astronauts on board the space shuttle had mutinied. No longer content to remain in orbit as a backup disc to the species, they had set off for Earth…and disappeared. The manned recons were increasingly tentative and local, especially after the Navy’s global mapping expedition had ended in silence and disaster. So far as they knew, the Captain’s daughter had never reached the shores of America. Yet this scrawny, stubborn vagabond was claiming to have passed through it all, on a hope?
“What if she’s not here?” asked Miranda.
“Odds are, she’s not.” He said it without a hint of resignation.
The Captain did a double take, Miranda couldn’t help but see it. Shoulder to shoulder, the two men were dealing with similar loss. But, for an instant, the older man seemed oddly lifted by the younger one.
“Half the country’s missing.” She put some aggravation in her voice.
He waited for her point. He didn’t seem to care if the rest of the world was missing. Indeed, if his story was real, he knew better than they what missing meant. “You could search forever,” she said.
“That’s okay,” he answered softly.
Right there, he captured her. That was not his intention; it could not have been. Miranda would never have guessed she herself was vulnerable. It just happened.
She had grown weary. They all had. Their suicides and orgies and petty hatreds were forms of surrender. Each day they were giving up a little more, getting ready to seal themselves away in her father’s underground sanctuary and hide out until the plague was finished ravishing the planet. No one believed in forever anymore. No one spoke hope.
We need him.
“This isn’t a missing persons bureau,” she declared.
“I’m not the pizza delivery boy, either,” he said.
It was almost reckless, almost insolent. Almost. But there was no pride behind the chutzpah. He was just here for his daughter.
“How do I know you won’t betray me? We’ve got no evidence this package of artifacts even exists.”
“There’s those letters from the Smithsonian.” He pointed helpfully with one f
inger, and both hands came up, attached at the wrist.
“Pieces of paper.” Miranda nudged at his forged blood book. “Fictions.”
“You’ll find a tree,” he said. “Go forty feet north of mile marker 3.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Off Highway 502. It’s all there. In saddlebags. They’re not buried. Look up in the branches.”
“You said they were buried.”
“I lied. Again.”
Miranda looked at the Captain, and his eyebrows were knit into a single black V. He was taken off guard, too. As an afterthought, he took a notepad from his pocket and started writing. He spoke into a cellphone.
Nathan Lee gave her a pleasant smile. “Now we’ve got that out of the way.”
The smile annoyed her. She wanted to scold him. What did he have to smile about? He’d left himself no chips. He’d gained nothing, except to throw the question of trust back on her. She’d made no promises. But now it was her in the position of betraying him. Then Miranda realized he knew exactly what he was doing. She’d made an issue of trust, so now he was using it against her.
“I could wait until they confirm your…confession.” She made her voice frosty. “But I’ll go ahead and check the registry.” She slid the keyboard closer. “It’s only for Los Alamos,” she warned.
“That’s fine.”
She spoke as she typed. “Grace Swift.”
“Probably not,” he said.
He was right. “Well, what then?”
“There was a divorce.” Miranda backspaced over the Swift. He craned to see her screen, but the Captain moved him back with a gesture. “Try Ochs,” he said.
Miranda’s fingers froze. “Not David Ochs,” she blurted.
His eyes lit up. They positively burned. Then he made himself clement and mild behind the clunky horn-rims again. “So he’s made himself safe,” he said.
She glanced at the Captain, confounded. “He has a wife and child?” The executioner had a family?
“A sister,” Nathan Lee corrected her. “She remarried. She might have taken another name. But start with Ochs. Please.”
What kind of charade was this? Clearly the man had followed Ochs here. He’d skillfully used documents that were over a half year old to gain access to the Mesa, and maybe that was all there was to it, one more opportunist trying to slide through the fence. More ominously, Ochs may have summoned him, an ally, the last thing Los Alamos needed. But why use her, why not go straight through Ochs? Cover? A sting? On the other hand, he could be who he claimed to be, which verged on nothing. There was only one sure way to find out.
“Captain,” she said, “lock this man up.”
* * *
OCHS DID NOT COME gently. He entered the monitor room loudly, eyes bulging with gangster aggression. His skull was mottled red with his indignation. “What is this all about?” he demanded.
“That’s what I want to know,” said Miranda.
“Take it up with Cavendish, whatever it is.” He made a show of trying to leave, but the Captain had sent two of his biggest men. They loomed at the door.
“Sit,” said the Captain.
Then Ochs caught sight of the television screen by Miranda’s elbow. The stranger was sitting on a metal bed in a stainless steel cell. A small noise eked from Ochs’s nostrils. The red blotches on his polished head drained pale. “Swift,” he whispered. “But he’s dead.”
Miranda felt a shock of happiness, wicked and relieved at the same time. Ochs was afraid. And the stranger had been honest at least about his name. “We were discussing you,” she said.
“What in God’s name is he doing here?”
“He brought the Smithsonian specimens that you said don’t exist,” she said. “I wanted to hear your side of it.”
“My side of what?” said Ochs. The blood returned to his face. But his bluster was gone. “He’s a convicted murderer. A cannibal. Yes, it’s true, in this day and age. It all came out in his trial. He tried to kill me. They jailed him in Kathmandu. You must have read about it.”
The seamy, tabloid details rushed to her. This was that man? But she recalled, even before the plague transcended it, doubting the story could be true in all its parts. It had seemed too sordid, too fantastic to be real.
“He’s hunting me,” said Ochs. “He wants revenge.”
“That’s not what he told us,” she managed to say. Ochs’s fear was so…delicious.
The precision-trimmed goatee twitched. “What did he tell you? Jerusalem, is that it?”
“Tell me,” said Miranda. Jerusalem? This was like feeding quarters into a video game. Ochs was practically playing himself.
“He was one of my students. An idiot, really. Every department has one, the lost soul scraping for identity. I stuck him out in the desert where he couldn’t embarrass himself.”
“Jerusalem,” she repeated.
“He heard about the Golgotha find. He called me. The earthquake had just hit. A quick buck, he said.”
“You robbed the Golgotha site?” Until this moment, she’d never known it had been robbed.
“What could I do? I went to stop him. He was married to my sister. I wasn’t trying to protect him, only my family. My department.”
“That’s not what he said.” She didn’t know what else to say. Feed the quarters in.
“I didn’t push him. He fell,” Ochs snarled. “I was trying to catch him.”
Was he talking about Jerusalem? The Captain knew more about it than she did. “You left him,” he said. “In the mountains.”
Ochs came closer to the screen. Nathan Lee could have been waiting for a bus to arrive. “How did he get out?” he muttered to himself. “He’s here?”
“He says he wants his daughter,” said the Captain.
“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
Miranda was grateful for the Captain’s presence. He was driving to the heart of the matter. They had found the saddlebags in the tree. Their part of the bargain was to provide the man his daughter, or clues. But Ochs was too clever, or frightened.
“He’s dead,” said Ochs. “Tell him that. We told her he died.”
“Tell him yourself,” said the Captain. It was all the leverage he had, a bully threat.
“I’m not going in there.”
And that was the end of it. They couldn’t force Ochs to speak. And Miranda didn’t have the nerve to throw Ochs into the same cell with his enemy. Slowly Ochs emerged from his confusion. He began to comprehend their deception.
“Is that it?” he said. “That’s all you had?” He bent and smeared his thumb across Nathan Lee’s image on the screen.
“I’m keeping him,” Miranda suddenly spoke.
The Captain looked at her. Ochs was contemptuous. “It will never work,” he said. “The council will throw him to the dogs.” The council was Cavendish.
“Essential personnel.” She made it up as she went along. “The Year Zero remains. Golgotha. Forensics.”
It came to her. She could draw the line. Maybe she couldn’t take back all the territory Cavendish had seized over the years. But she could fortify the safe haven she had begun to build here. It needed a guardian, someone who struck fear into her enemies, or at least into this one bully. It was a start. With Nathan Lee Swift in her keeping, Ochs would think twice before descending upon them. No more raids, she thought. No more terror tactics. She would force it with her father, if it came to that. Cavendish, be damned.
“I’m very clear about this,” she told Ochs.
“We’ll see about that,” he said.
Miranda did something she’d never done to anyone. She slapped him. It wasn’t much of a slap, but Ochs looked shot. He blinked. He comprehended.
“Yes,” she told him.
18
The Mission
THE LAST DAYS OF JULY
I’m not a child,” Miranda warned him. “I know what you want. Don’t get any ideas.” They had emerged from Alph
a Lab’s maze of basements. It was a New Mexican morning, blue sky, yellow sun. She was strange to him. Her loping stride made Nathan Lee feel tardy. He hurried to keep up.
The hillside was crowded with buildings, trailers, even a big red-and-white circus tent with a fading Barnum and Bailey on one side. A painted sign in front of the tent read CENTER FOR NONLINEAR STUDIES. Another sign declared EQUATION OF STATE. Where on earth am I? he thought.
She reminded him of a rancher’s bride in some old B-movie, tall and lean in a man’s Levis and a checkered red shirt. Her ponytail hung through the hole at the back of her baseball cap. It said Jackson Lab, Of Mice and Men. Her eyes unsettled him. They were green as sea ice.
Electric golf carts darted past them. Campus types—amazons in jog bras, bearded whiz kids, wide-bottomed brainiacs—flashed by on battery-propelled scooters or on roller blades or bicycles. They passed buildings with exotic names: PLASMA THEORY, HOST PATHOGEN, PRIONS, LIVER FUNCTION. He pointed at a building: THEORETICAL BIOLOGY. “Your dragons and sea monsters?” he said.
She blinked. She got it. Humor. Onward. Wrong address, he thought to himself.
“You want Ochs,” she continued. “Forget him. He’s part of the regime. You need to know that. You’re safe for now. I can clear you for T/A3, my technical area, that’s it. You’ll be provided food and lodging. But South Sector’s off-limits. Go there, and you’ll never come back.”
South Sector. He filed it away. Ochs’s home.
She stayed a full step ahead of him. He couldn’t seem to catch up. Biohazard symbols were posted everywhere, so prevalent they had become part of the landscape. Local artists had customized the menacing three-pronged “flower” into beautiful arabesques and harmless graffiti. The warnings had become decoration, the perils had become part of their lifestyle.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Lunch. You look like a poster boy for yoga.”
“I’m going to need to talk with him,” he said.