by James Abel
Chris saw guilt and fright and determination. The set jaw. The eyes flashing with fear, or anger.
“Excuse me,” she told the others. “I’ll be right back.”
“No,” Aya insisted. “I need to tell you all.”
Chris suffered an explosion of fear. Her daughter was ill! Aya was going to hold up a hand with a white patch on it. Chris could never forgive herself for bringing her daughter here, if that turned out to be the case. If keeping Aya in Washington had made her sick.
“It’s about Joe,” Aya said.
Eddie’s chair scraped on the flooring. Galli stiffened and Chris’s headache grew worse. She recognized Aya’s “confession face,” which, in the past, had preceded admissions of giving her best friend answers during a math test, leaving school early without permission, accepting a driving lesson—for only five minutes in a parking lot—by one of her friends’ moms.
Aya addressed Eddie. “I don’t know where he is exactly. But I think I know where he’s trying to go.”
She broke into sobs. She’d been holding it in. She said that Joe had ordered her to say nothing about this, but as the situation worsened, that had grown harder. She said she didn’t care if she got punished, and began blurting out a story. They knew some of it, from Joe’s e-mails. But they didn’t know it all. Chris struggled to grasp what Aya was saying.
Galli said, “The website says these people have a cure?”
Eddie made a face. “A truck stop?”
Chris said, “Aya, I can’t believe you did this.”
“This is no goddamn coincidence,” Eddie said. “This has to convince them. The thing comes from here!”
After that, everyone seemed to be talking or shouting at the same time. Galli left, to track down authorities in the complex. Eddie left, on the run. He never said where he was going. The TV showed fighter planes taking off from a U.S. aircraft carrier. They were not attacking anyone yet. So far they were on maneuvers.
Chris stroked Aya’s hair in their now empty suite.
“You should have said something earlier. Don’t worry, honey. No one is going to punish you. I’m proud of you.”
Aya sobbed.
“I didn’t know what to do.”
TWENTY
The man prodding my back with an M4 automatic carbine was ex-Army, he’d said in the car, so don’t try anything. He was tall, with a bony face, watery blue eyes, and a sour, wary disposition. The smaller, muscular Asian man who’d affixed the handcuffs to my wrists also seemed to have some familiarity with firearms. He stayed four feet behind, ready to use his Sig Sauer. He’d taken away my Glock.
“Get in the cage, please,” he said.
They’d come up on me from behind in the crowd, as Harlan delivered his sermon. Snow had begun falling and specks drifted down as the man at the makeshift podium, under the HOT DONUTS sign, announced to the assembled multitude his return to earth after two thousand years. The New Age was upon us. Those here would be saved. Gaze upon the new Kingdom of God and receive communion, only instead of a wafer in your mouth, extend your arms please, roll up your sleeves. Good friends will pass among you and administer a shot. Those who are sick will be cured. Those who are healthy will stay that way, as long as you follow up the injection with pills. A weekly regimen, three times.
Dr. Jesus.
One or two had turned away, doubting, eyeing the syringes with suspicion. Most—especially the visibly sick—had done what Harlan asked, from belief or desperation. Why come just to look? I’d rolled up my sleeve as a small, dark-haired woman in white approached me. The woman’s tray held wrapped syringes and glass vials. A second woman, grandmotherly and older, administered shots as smoothly as a nurse. Maybe she was one. Just as they reached me, I felt the muzzle of the carbine press into my back.
All who wish to come to our farm are welcome.
My cell was the size of a holding area at a small town police station. The lab was in a farmhouse basement and the compound was like the hole of a donut, surrounded by state forest and an abandoned quarry, and it was fenced in with razor wire. I’d seen a lot of activity when our little convoy returned. Residents appeared to be readying for a celebration; sweeping the grounds of snow, stringing colored lights, setting up tables. I hadn’t seen a celebration of any sorts in weeks. No one else had anything to celebrate.
As I was prodded onto a porch, I noticed more of the oil drums. Some had been back at the gate, others were clustered beside the house, with small antennae and timers on top. They weren’t defensive barrels, not the kind you use as a truck bomb barrier, line ’em up around the perimeter of a property to be protected. They were the other kind of barrels, the kind you fill with explosives, and then, as guards were doing before my eyes, you tested connections going into the timers, to make sure the current worked.
Each signal in this frightening place was clear but the combination was contradictory. The lights meant party. The barrels meant explosions. The syringes meant cures. The lab meant infection.
“Please remove your belt, Colonel Rush,” the taller guard said when we stopped before the cage.
“You know my name?”
They looked calm. Everyone up top had been smiling, at each other, at least, if not at me. I’d been in armed camps before and the mood was usually wary. But here I sensed a cheerful passivity. Island of the Lotus Eaters. Up top, men, women, and children had watched me pass with no more than idle curiosity, and then gone back to their jobs at hand. Joe Rush. No threat.
“Can you take these cuffs off?” I asked.
“Harlan said no.”
Harlan said. The lab smelled of animals, deep earth, century-old timbers, and new chemicals. The two dozen armadillos in wire cages had grown agitated when we’d arrived. They’d probably seen what happened to other guests here. The sight of the only other mammal on Earth that carried leprosy confirmed that I’d reached ground zero. We were prisoners together. I was shoved into the cell and hit my knees against the cot chained to the wall. There was no window. There were words scratched on the cinderblock, barely gouged out. Don’t want to die!
“How did you like that sermon?” I asked. Anything to get them talking. The lock was a big Medico and the bars looked firm. If I could talk the men closer, maybe some opportunity would present itself. Maybe I don’t have faith in gods, but I do have hope. There’s always that.
The taller man said, “We’re not supposed to talk to you.”
“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”
The Asian man regarded the taller one. “Harlan said to check the timers down here,” he said.
“Why? Aren’t they all set to go together?”
“Yeah, but if he wants, we can trigger it from up top or down here!”
I smelled animals and formaldehyde, and something more human and familiar, from the cot. It reminded me of another room near Moscow, where a year earlier a man I hated had been tortured as I watched. The circle turns. The sweat smell reminded me of cracked leather and borscht, which guards had slurped while the man died ranting and salivating, pounding on a wall. I shivered. That smell was a finger pointing at my chest, a reminder of Burke’s words in Washington. I could have stopped what happened in that room near Moscow. I didn’t. So maybe God was in here after all.
I see restraints on those exam tables, and judging from the size of the table, they are for humans.
The steel door opened and Harlan Maas walked in. Joe Rush meets the Sixth Prophet, who coughed, as if getting a cold. Maybe he’d gotten a chill back at the truck stop, where he’d addressed the audience with his parka off. I didn’t know that celestial messengers were susceptible to colds.
His shuffling footsteps sounded like papier-mâché crumpling. His smile was soft, intelligent, and shiny, like everything else in this upside-down place. His blink pattern was off, a little too long, then normal. Maybe he had some minor form of
Tourette’s. He pulled a swivel chair away from a lab table, rolled it toward me, and sat backward, arms over the top.
“Joe Rush.”
Harlan Maas looked to be in middle age. Up close, his wide set gray-blue eyes emitted sympathy, peace. Yet they were also tired. His hair was sparse, balding gray-white and bristle short, showing contours of skull. The sideburns flared. He wore a lumberjack’s checked flannel shirt and trousers that bunched at the belt. I guessed that he’d recently lost weight. Either that or he cared little for appearance.
Figure out how to get out of this cage.
“You look just like your photo, Colonel.”
“Who sent it to you? Who’s been giving you information?”
He smiled. He looked toward the ceiling, as if gazing beyond. He was deciding whether to tell me the answer. Why not? Was Ray his contact in D.C.? Was it Burke? Who was the traitor? Who has been helping you all along? I tried to maintain calm, look like it didn’t matter so much.
“Wikileaks,” he said quite seriously.
“Wikileaks?” I was stunned. “You’ve just been reading everything on the Net?”
His eyes flicked upward, toward heaven. “He provides.”
Could it be true? Of course it could be true. The whole damn country had been privy to the committee’s minute-by-minute secret workings in Washington. Wikileaks? Wikileaks? I’d not alerted anyone about Harlan; I’d come up with my strategy after assuming that there was a traitor in Washington. Of all the things he could have said, this was the last one I’d been prepared for. The joke was on me, on the committee, on everyone back home. I felt sick with disgust.
He seemed surprised. “Who did you think it was?”
My laughter bounced off the freezer and walls and faded into the whoosh of artificially circulated air. This was perfect. This was what Eddie the cynic had always predicted. Who needs spies when you have Wikileaks! It was what our strategy games had never covered. Armageddon by accident, by circus, by amateurs and fools.
“Harlan? Why were your guys checking the wires on these barrels?”
If you are ever taken prisoner, make eye contact with your captors, the lecturers always tell us. Try to get them talking. Make yourself a real person to them. Never give up.
“You don’t seem frightened,” Maas said, not answering me. Ask a question, you get one back.
“I’m not.”
Maybe Eddie had been right back in Africa. For the last year I’d sought out every dangerous situation I could find. Now I’d arrived at the great mother of dangerous situations. Chris had been right to try to keep Aya from me. The admiral had tried to protect me from myself, I thought, but then saw that he was the one who’d kept me in the unit. Upon reconsideration, I could not say that Galli had tried to protect me at all.
Harlan Maas said, “I don’t take pleasure in hurting people. Or even animals.”
“I see that.”
“I’m funny?”
“After what I’ve seen, far from funny.”
“How did you get here, Joe Rush?”
“The train,” I said, as if the trip had been easy. Buy a ticket. Take a seat. Doze on the way. Buy food.
His brows neither rose nor fell. The man’s gaze never changed. Maas said, “How did you know to come here at all? Why did you go to that cathedral?”
“Divine guidance?”
He smiled thinly. “People have made fun of that for two thousand years.”
“Harlan, you said it. You put an invitation on the Internet. I saw it. What’s so hard about that? By the way, the soldiers will be here soon. Why don’t we meet them together? Let me go. Your people stay safe. You announce the cure. You’re a hero.”
“No soldiers are coming or I’d know. And we both know it wouldn’t happen like that. Because it’s not just the cure we came up with.”
Once again, here was God, choice and consequence. Harlan had told the assembled at the truck stop, You don’t have to believe me. Make up your own mind. A lot has changed in the last two thousand years, but one thing is the same and it is the yearning for better.
God, he’d said, over the centuries, had sent to Earth six great prophets, who were actually all versions of the same entity. Harlan happened to be the last in the line. He’d been Jesus and Mohammed and Joseph Smith, too.
If it wasn’t so awful, and so horribly real, if the consequences had been milder, I would have had sympathy for the deluded guy.
And now Harlan Maas draped his long, thin legs outward and leaned over the top of the chair, stretching. He coughed. He was definitely getting sick. But I think it was just a cold. He only caught the easy stuff.
“If you’re sure no one is coming,” I asked, “why are your guys working on those barrels?”
No answer.
“Are you planning on doing something with the barrels?”
“Believe me, I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want anyone to suffer, Colonel Rush.”
Considering my question, this was a very bad answer. He didn’t look evasive as much as he looked resigned.
And in a way, if gods could really change appearances, then Harlan’s was no different than the one who had ordered Aztecs to cut the hearts from human sacrifices; told men with skullcaps to behead hostages in Pakistan; sent thousands of Europeans to Jerusalem to plunge swords into Jews and Muslims. That god changed names regularly, talked peace at your front door, asking for entry, and then, once you provided it, whispered ugly suggestions in your ears.
You’ve got a bad attitude about God, the admiral had told me one Sunday when he, Cindy, and Eddie had gone off to church, and I’d stayed in the house, reading the Washington Post Sports Section.
“Tell me you’re not going to blow this place up,” I said.
He said nothing.
“I don’t understand. You created a disease. You created a cure. You’re going to destroy it? That makes no sense.”
“To you, no,” he admitted.
I was in a madhouse, except I was the one in the cage, and everyone else was outside, stringing lights up top. Strumming guitars. No different, I supposed, from the Heaven’s Gate cult members who dressed in their finest clothes and enjoyed a tasty dinner before killing themselves. They’d looked happy afterward, in photos, dead by their own hands.
“Do your people know what you’re going to do, Harlan?”
“They know who I am.”
“They’re going along with it?”
He looked surprised. “Of course.”
He leaned closer, but still three arm lengths away. Anyway, the cuffs prevented free movement, especially through the bars. Harlan seemed curious, interested. “Or do you think I’m a false prophet?”
I wasn’t buying his placid surface and I didn’t know if he was working himself up, but beyond a certain point, if you are in a cage, taunting the person who put you there is not the wisest thing to do.
Keep him talking.
“Not at all,” I said. “But I’d rather talk about the leprosy, if you don’t mind. How did you design the bug?”
He sighed. “I didn’t.”
I waited. He stood, and I thought, He’s not going to tell me. He walked to the nearest barrel and bent over it and I saw his hand do something at the top. Had he checked a connection? Or flicked a switch? If he’d flicked a switch, would I hear ticking? Or was the timer the silent kind?
Harlan walked back and settled into the chair and sighed. What had he just done?
“We found the cure here,” he said. “Well, Tahir Khan helped. The illness? That happened some years ago. I just never let it out until now.”
“Harlan, what did you just do at the barrel?”
“I was a grad student working with leprosy,” he said. “I wanted to cure it more easily. So many people get it in the third world. It’s a terrible disease, Dr. Rush. We tr
ied to grow it in a lab. But you can’t do that. It’s hard to work with a disease if you need fresh animals all the time.”
“Armadillos,” I said, glancing at the cages, telling myself that from his casual attitude, he’d just checked wires, he hadn’t set the timer. Everyone up top was preparing for a party. They would have the party first. I thought, Why prepare for a party if you weren’t going to have it? But then again, logic didn’t seem to be the paramount value here.
Harlan said, “Back then, at SUNY, I needed samples that could survive in labs. So I made chimeras. Dog and human DNA. Tuberculosis and leprosy. The diseases are close, you know. TB, over four million base pairs of genes and four thousand proteins. It’s one of the best known pathogens on Earth, after E. coli.”
“Easy to work with,” I said.
“Exactly!” Then he frowned. “But Mycobacterium leprae? Huge chains of unknown material! Uncoded chains. Pieces, just fragments of long dead genes, mutated beyond recognition. What did they do originally? No one knows!”
“TB was the doorway! Leprosy the locked gate!” I said.
He nodded. “Leprosy has lost thousands of genes since it first came into existence. Whole swaths of purpose, gone. But the TB didn’t work. So I tried riskier combinations. My thesis adviser warned me not to. But at night . . . when no one was there . . .”
“Fasciitis,” I said. “You mixed fasciitis with leprosy.”
“Flesh-eating bacteria.”
“The last two organisms you’d think to put together.” I tried to remember what I’d learned in Nevada. I pulled snippets of information from memory. “Counterintuitive. Fasciitis doesn’t come from soil, like leprosy. It’s gram positive. Different cell wall structure altogether.”
“And drug resistant.” He nodded, glancing at the barrels. “But sometimes you risk making something worse to make it better. I was trying everything. It was a shot in the dark.”
“And the third piece you added? The norovirus?”
Something like pain flickered on his face. He was back at least for a second, reliving a time when he wasn’t a prophet. Maybe he was reliving the moment when his mind snapped and he became a prophet. The pained look worsened. And then I thought I understood.