METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  She recognized the reference to the Revelation of St. John. “No thanks,” she said. She knew the answer to her own question; she just didn’t want to apply that knowledge to him. She wanted to remember the four-year-old, the eight-year-old, the twelve-year-old boy she’d met when visiting Sandra.

  She’d read her father’s books enough times to understand. And the mindset was the same regardless of the specific articles of faith. She’d seen it reproduced in most religions. There were always small extremist, literal groups, usually led by someone charismatic and compelling.

  She turned back to the window.

  “You’re an atheist.” His sudden statement surprised her and she looked up.

  “I guess I am,” she said. “I certainly don’t believe in your God.”

  “When this is over,” he said, “you’ll bend your knee unto the Most High. Everyone will and when they do, America will be great again.”

  When this is over. She opened her mouth to remind him that it was over, then closed it. There was a certainty to his voice and, beneath the cryptic words, an arrogance dressed up in servant’s clothing. And there was something cryptic in what he’d quoted; it unsettled her. Ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death.

  They settled into quiet again and she found herself picking at the information like fingers at a knot. She was still pondering when he leaned toward her. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  She looked up, then fished the keys from her pocket. She unlocked the handcuff and escorted him to the back of the plane, checking the lavatory before she cuffed him to the handrail. “Call me when you’re done,” she said.

  She moved back up the aisle to their seats and glanced down at his tattered Bible. Looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the small restroom, she gave in to curiosity and picked up the book.

  The place marker was set to Exodus and a verse there was underlined.

  For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth.

  Scribbled next to it was a reference from Revelation and she flipped to the back of the book quickly, her eyes moving to the back of the plane. Once there, she found that verse underlined as well.

  And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled up the wrath of God.

  And then, what she read next, written in his pinched and careful script, raised goosebumps on her arms. It was a one-line prayer written in the margins.

  Lord, make me a worthy vessel for your wrath.

  There were other references, too, and she spun quickly through them. More about God’s wrath. More plagues and disease from Heaven as punishment for the wicked.

  “I’m finished,” he called out.

  Charity moved back to the restroom, reached for her keys, then paused. She opened the door. “There’s more to all of this, isn’t there, Matthew?” There had to be more.

  He said nothing but the look on his face was all she needed. Leaving him, she moved to the front of the plane and tapped on the cockpit door.

  A flight officer poked his head out. “Yes?”

  “I need to make a call,” she said.

  “Against regs, ma’am.”

  She looked back to the lavatory. “I need to make a call now.”

  He shrugged and passed her a wireless headset. She slipped it on. She had the Patriot, Inc. controller patch her through and a few seconds later, she heard Abigail’s voice. “Hunter.”

  “It’s Oxham. I think we have more going on here than we realized.”

  There was a moment of quiet on the other end. When Hunter spoke, there was no surprise in her voice. “What do you have?”

  “A cryptic-talking kid without remorse and a Bible full of markings about plague.”

  “Fuck.” She heard something in Hunter’s curse she’d not heard before. Fear. Then, another pause. “Okay. We have something new over here, too. I’m going to hope I’m wrong. I’ll call you back.”

  She left Matthew in the lavatory. He was starting to shout now but Charity wasn’t listening. Instead, she waited by the cockpit door for twenty minutes until the headset chirped again.

  Hunter’s voice was tense. “Okay,” she said. “We’re diverting you to Kansas City. I’m on my way now.”

  “Does Senator Rodriguez know we’re—”

  Hunter interrupted. “No,” she said. “Not yet. Not until we’re sure.”

  Charity handed the headset back and then went to the lavatory.

  Matthew looked up and stopped shouting when she uncuffed him and pointed to his seat. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Change of plans,” Charity answered. “We’re going to Kansas City.”

  When he moved, it was fast but not fast enough. Even as his fist came up, she knocked his feet from beneath him with a well-placed kick, grabbed his arm, and let his own body weight spin him around and onto the floor. She put a knee in his back and cuffed him.

  Charity leaned down, her mouth near his ear. “I take it you’re not pleased with this development.”

  Then, she hauled him to his feet and guided him back to his waiting seat.

  He’s afraid of something. For the rest of the flight, he fidgeted in his seat.

  When they landed, figures in HAZMAT suits waited on the tarmac. Still, they sat locked in the aircraft for another two hours until two HAZMAT response trucks pulled up. Then, the hatch was opened. Three of the figures, one armed with a rifle, shuffled forward as they descended the stairs. Charity saw Hunter’s face in the visor, her eyes shadowed by dark circles of sleeplessness. Two men took Matthew by either arm and escorted him toward a waiting truck. He walked stiff-backed, his face pale.

  “Do we know more?”

  Hunter nodded toward the second truck. “Get in. I’ll brief you on the way.”

  Charity climbed aboard and before she was seated, the vehicle was moving, building speed and running without lights or sirens. She felt a knot, cold and aching, in her stomach.

  Hunter sat across from her. “Chances are very good that nothing’s happened yet, but we can’t be sure until we run some tests.”

  Charity blinked. “Can’t be sure of what?”

  “It was a fucking shell game,” she said. “It was never about the twenty. It was about Rodriguez.”

  She felt the knot twisting into anger and she heard it leaking into her voice. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Hunter took a deep breath. “We’ve identified another involved party—a Middle Eastern concern with ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two weeks ago, a biomechanical virologist—Dr. Ibrahim bin Yosef—went off the grid in Sudan. Applebaum’s given us positive ID on the doctor in Wahkiakum County.”

  “How’s that possible?” But even as she asked the question, Charity saw the obvious. By boat. It was a big ocean and a big river. Something small—a yacht, perhaps—could slip into U.S. waters easily enough. Especially with the accessibility of stealth technology for groups that had the funding.

  Her mind spun the possibilities, the knot growing colder as she did. Biomechanical virology. Her mouth went dry as she thought about the scriptures she’d read. “And you think Matthew’s been exposed to something?”

  Hunter nodded again, slowly. “We think he was voluntarily infected. We’ve got a working theory and we’ve advised the president to take us to threat level red.”

  An imminent threat of terrorist attack.

  The agent continued. “Bin Yosef’s thesis was on latent biomechanical viruses—nano-enhanced, manufactured diseases on timed release with a built-in expiration date. You can kill or incapacitate an enemy without creating a pandemic. Our own government looked into it years ago but with reductions in military research funding in favor of ecological recovery, the work was discontinued.”

  Charity felt the wind go out of her. “Time-released viruses?”

>   “Yes. With a limited range and a high kill-rate.”

  She didn’t need Hunter to paint the rest of the picture. Recruit the disillusioned son of a new senator, shoot him full of a nanobug on an alarm clock and send him home to Mommy. And, through her, to Congress. And to the president.

  And to me. She’d spent most of the last twenty years being shot at, chased, tossed about from one threat to the other but this felt different and the reality of it staggered her. “How sure are you?”

  Hunter sighed. “Pretty sure. Once we reach the hospital, we’ll quarantine you both and start running tests. Ideally, we’ll catch bin Yosef in our net and learn more. Or get Frost talking.” She paused. “But again, if their goal was exposing Senator Rodriguez, then the virus is likely on a longer fuse.”

  Charity sat back, words fleeing her. She couldn’t be in her line of work without putting some thought into her own mortality and what she felt settling over her wasn’t unlike the tingling awareness of every small sensation that showed up on each chopper ride into combat. She closed her eyes. She breathed. She waited.

  When the HAZMAT truck came to a stop forty minutes later, Charity found herself in an underground parking garage segregated by walls of clear plastic. More HAZMAT-suited men and women waited with wheelchairs. She saw that Matthew was now shackled and cuffed, one eye puffy and bruised. They were wheeled through automatic doors, down white tiled hallways that were empty until they pushed her into a small room.

  A young man took three vials of blood and then Charity spent another hour waiting until Hunter appeared, smiling but sober-faced, without her protective gear. “You’re fine,” she said.

  The relief she felt was tangible and for a moment -- just a moment -- she felt tears working at the corner of her eyes. She took a deep breath. “And Matthew?”

  Hunter shook her head. “We’ll do what we can for him. There’s no real way for us to know when it will release. But at least we’ll be able to contain it.”

  “Have you called his mother?”

  “No,” Hunter said. “We haven’t.”

  There was awkward silence and Charity closed her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was matter-of-fact. “You want me to do it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  But I do. Of course she did. And with that realization, images of Matthew grinning at her as a child flashed unbidden across her memory.

  Charity pushed back the tears, hoping another deep breath would keep the sob that suddenly rose within her at bay for just a few minutes longer. “Okay,” she said. “Get me a secure line.”

  When Hunter left, she wiped her eyes and wondered just what the right words would be for the call she had to make.

  * * *

  George Applebaum paused, looked up, and stepped away from the pulpit. He left the resignation letter he’d so carefully written and had planned to read folded into the black leather book he was also leaving behind. As he walked, he looked out over the congregation, his eyes moving over them.

  Some he’d brought into this fold he’d played shepherd to for so many years. Some had arrived from other folds. He saw Heather Thompson, sitting beside her husband Henry, and remembered the day he’d baptized them, pushing them under the water as a metaphor of death, raising them up in a resurrection he’d leaned toward his entire life.

  And yet he’d found a real resurrection in the oddest of places, spurred by a betrayal by someone he’d once called a brother. The taste of fear in his mouth as Frost fired on him. The slow motion of the truck bearing down on Frost’s thugs and the building scream of the man he’d pinned with the fender. The cold sweat from his hands making the stock of the shotgun slippery. The calculated precision of Charity Oxham moving like an unstoppable machine of war.

  They’d driven him home on Saturday morning, and that night he’d sat down with his board after scheduling a guest speaker for the next eight Sundays.

  He continued looking around, picking them out now in their pews, their faces still grief-struck from last night’s brief meeting.

  Andrew Simmons actually had tears on his face. He’d had them the night before, too, when George had broken the news. And there had been pleading in his voice when he looked up from the letter Applebaum had passed around. “I don’t understand,” he said with shaking hands, “how a man like you could lose his faith, Brother George.”

  His own words surprised him in their clarity. “I haven’t lost anything, Andrew,” he said. “I’ve laid it aside. I’ve … changed my mind.”

  They didn’t understand. And they won’t unless they walk my road, he realized. But as far as he was concerned, they didn’t have to. He’d spent his life shepherding everyone else. It was time to shepherd himself.

  “I have an announcement to make,” he said as he came down the two steps that had kept him above them, hidden behind his pulpit, for so many years. “We’ve been together a long time, but I’ve recently realized that I need something different.”

  He still wasn’t sure what that was but he had some idea. This week, he’d pack his things and start getting the parsonage ready for whoever they brought in after him. He’d sit down and give thought to what kind of résumé a man who’d spent his lifetime preaching might be able to construct and figure out just how long he could float on his savings. And though there was much in his life that George felt uncertain about, he did know what he would be doing Friday night. He’d already pulled a recipe from the Internet and dug the casserole dish from the back of his cupboard.

  He looked out over the people and took a breath for the words that were to follow. But before he spoke them, George Applebaum smiled upon them and for the first time in a long while, there was nothing false or forced about it.

  * * *

  The nearly deserted facility was wrapped in a tomb-like silence, especially at night, and Charity found herself unable to sleep despite the exhaustion that rode her. After hours of tossing and turning, she got up, turned on the overhead lamp and raised her bed. She picked up the book Molly had given her and read a bit more about Tygre before she finally gave up and dressed herself in the clothes someone had picked up for her from a local department store.

  At this point, they played the waiting game. When Matthew Rodriguez’s fever-wracked body finally gave out, she’d return to Washington with his mother. She and Sandra had sat silently over coffee together a few times over the last two days but little had been said. Charity had no words for the loss the woman faced.

  She pushed her feet into the slippers and left the room, shuffling down the hall. She nodded at the suited woman who stood near her door and the woman returned the nod, speaking quietly into her throat mic.

  It would be another hour before the canteen opened so Charity headed to the ICU first. She felt compelled to look in on Sandra again though she knew what she’d find. A broken mother, sitting in her HAZMAT suit by her son’s deathbed, holding his hand while Matthew Rodriguez reaped what he’d sown.

  When she reached the waiting room, she paused. Over the last two days, the room had been empty, but now an old man sat there, reading a book.

  His hair was white, his age-worn features and dark skin offset by the high-end suit he wore. He looked up when she walked in and smiled at her. When he shifted, she saw the book he read and paused.

  Serpents and Doves. By Jeremy Oxham. It was the last book her father had written, hastily edited and rushed to print six months after his murder by a publisher eager to cash in on the publicity of his tragic death.

  The old man stood and though he had to be at least in his eighties, he was a formidable figure. “Ms. Oxham?”

  She blinked. “Yes?”

  He moved toward her, legs carrying him with a quiet confidence that she recognized even through a slight limp. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

  He extended a hand and when she shook it, the grip was cool and firm. “You have me at a disadvantage,” she said.

  “I do,” he said. Then, he held up the book. “I’m a
great admirer of your father’s work. We actually corresponded before he was …” The man let the words trail off, his dark eyes softening.

  She looked at the book again. She wasn’t sure what to say.

  His own gentle voice filled in the silence. “I’m certain that current events make this a difficult time for our introduction but I wanted to meet you and thank you for your part in our work.”

  Our work. Surely, he was too old to be on Patriot’s payroll. Her eyebrows furrowed. “And you are?”

  “Someone who’d like to talk to you about a job,” he said. He followed her eyes to the book he held. “Behold,” he said, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore as wise as serpents and harmless as doves.’” He paused. “That duality has always fascinated me, even as it fascinated your father. So much so, that I expanded upon the idea in my own book. Though I’m more interested in sending forth wolves in the midst of sheep.”

  She blinked as the realization of who he was settled in. “You’re Bashar,” she said.

  He nodded once. “I am. And I have work for you if you’re interested.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a simple white card. She took it and studied it.

  There were no words on it—only numbers—and she quickly recognized them as coordinates. “For the next four Fridays,” he said, “I’ll wait at this location at sunrise and sunset. There’s a stone marker there that should be relatively easy to find.”

  “And if I come?”

  He smiled. “I’ll show you something amazing. I’ll show you what happens when the serpents and the doves work together using their very different methods to bring about a shared outcome.”

  “Healing the world?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or at least some small part of it.”

  Their eyes met and she saw a fierceness there that countered the gentleness she’d seen in Molly. This man’s tools weren’t casseroles and community gatherings. His hands were made for silenced pistols and surgical strikes.

  Like me. And right or wrong, she apprehended it and to some point even agreed with it. Doves to offer peace and serpents to protect it. “I’ll think about it,” she said.