“Could we get Neil Tyson to comment on this?” Christy asked.
“If the latter … and the nanocytes have already been introduced into my body, then there may be no effective countermeasure. But if the former, then my advisers believe it might be possible to block such a signal, or to counter it. For obvious reasons, it would be unwise to further discuss our plans, but it is important that you, my fellow Americans, know that all that can be done is being done.”
She knows there’s nothing she can do. Knowing the government was helpless was one thing, but seeing was another. Olympia’s heart was a steady drumbeat in her breast.
“As part of those countermeasures, I must tell you that I will no longer be in communication with you for at least the next seventy-two hours. All that can be done is being done, but part of what I can do is to ask you, the citizens of this great country, to dig deep into your hearts and resist the urge to panic. We have faced many threats together, and have come out the other side stronger, more secure in our union, and in our faith in God.” And now, finally, she managed a wan smile.
“That,” Sloan whispered, “is a woman who thinks she’s already dead. I’m starting to wish I’d voted for her.”
“If you have any information or know of someone you believe may, please send anything you may have to the following Web address. And … have faith. And if, by chance, this is the last time I speak to you, it has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president.”
And the picture went black, except for the URL of a government Web site.
“Holy shit,” Sloan said. “Well. What do we do with this?”
“Contextualization?” Olympia asked. “Helping people remember other events of equal stress that we survived?”
“Run with that,” Sloan said. “Maybe contrary theories. Encourage lateral thinking.”
“End times,” Christy said. Her blue eyes had a strangely watery look to them, and she was beginning to chew on her lower lip.
“Please,” Sloan replied. “We don’t need that.”
“No,” she repeated, spine straightening. “No. I won’t be quiet. It’s time we look at this. It’s time that we admit that God has been unhappy with us, that it might all be coming apart.”
For a moment they were all too stunned to comment. Then the editor spoke through clinched teeth. “Christy. Please leave the room. Please leave now.”
Olympia’s friend glared at him defiantly, and then grabbed her things and left.
Sloan’s glare chilled the room. “And that goes for any of the rest of you who want to talk about things like that. We are holding on by our fingernails here. We need logic, not … not superstition, god damn it! Another fucking word…”
Olympia brooded, until finally what she was thinking boiled over. “There is something. I think we need to look at Maria Cortez’s death.”
“What about it?” he said, curious.
“She was looking into the disappearance of a girl. A physics student who vanished while following up research on a … a…” She paused, trying to decide how to put it. “A possible cult.”
His face tightened. “A cult?”
“There is a group up in the mountains north of Atlanta. They seem to believe in miracles…”
He sighed. “What religion doesn’t? Adam to Xenu. I’ve told you, I don’t want this—”
“Actually, Xenu is spelled with an X,” Joyce Chow said. Sloan’s glare could have frozen a welding arc.
Olympia pushed on. “No. I was up there, and they … they said that my son was what they call an indigo child, and had him talking to a chimpanzee.”
The room tittered nervously. Sloan gritted his teeth. “Talking … to a chimp?”
“And Maria was there, and they were trying to arrest her. This woman who does martial arts tricks let her leave, but … but a day later she’s dead.”
There was a pause. Then: “Olympia, I think you need to leave,” he said.
“No, you have to listen to me. The greatest—”
Sloan’s façade of calm dissolved, revealing a white-hot core of anger and fear. “Olympia—get the hell out! Leave this meeting. Leave this office.”
“Grant—I can’t. I really think that—”
Spitting, furious, terrified, he roared: “Olympia, damn it, get the hell out of my sight!”
“I’m just trying—” She could hardly recognize her own voice.
“I do NOT have time for this bullshit. Leave. Just … consider yourself on Christmas break. Now.” Stunned into silence, she gathered her papers and left.
Christy Flavor stopped her in the outer office. “What happened in there?”
“Armageddon,” she replied.
* * *
Olympia grabbed her purse from her desk, slipped on her coat, and headed out to the parking lot. Liquid ice spattered against her umbrella. Even as she walked the raindrops morphed into sleet.
She noticed that almost a third of the parking spaces were empty. She heard sirens from two different directions, and wisps of black and gray smoke curled from the roof of a burning building near the horizon.
The Christmas decorations seemed muted by the freezing downpour. This changed in turn, finally turning to real snow.
Olympia pulled her collar more tightly around her slender throat. The falling snowflakes seemed like crystalline butterfly wings, somehow colder than she could ever remember snow feeling, as if they singed her flesh with every caress.
Hurrying, she got into her Kia and closed the door. Locked it with an odd sense of urgency about the task. The system was breaking down, she could feel it. But maybe Sloan was right. Maybe she didn’t need to be at work: she needed to be with her family.
Olympia pulled out of the white-dappled lot, and into the flow of traffic.
CHAPTER 30
Olympia’s first stop was the Golden Dream center to pick up Hannibal early. News of Maria’s death had crystallized her thinking: no matter what the truth might ultimately be, she needed her boy closer to her.
Nicki was still in drama camp rehearsing The Taming of the Shrew and wouldn’t be home until later, but she wanted Hani in her sight.
The traffic along Atlanta Boulevard was sparse and increasingly … irritable. Drivers seemed to keep shorter intervals between themselves and those around them. There were more irate expressions, more raised middle fingers, and more flashing red lights. Whining sirens. In combination these caused the traffic to delay, leading to more irritation, a downward spiral. The world in microcosm.
She pulled into the parking lot, noticing that there were fewer cars than usual. Probably Christmas vacation.
There were few students in the dojo itself, and the slender, broad-shouldered instructor whose name she could never remember was teaching just three boys and one girl. When he turned to face her, he seemed a little puzzled. “Hannibal is in the back,” he said. “And Mr. Ling would like to see you.”
She nodded, and walked into the back of the building, past the rows of classrooms. Again she was struck by the fact that the center seemed almost a ghost town, and wondered about that.
Ling’s office was the very last door down the hall, and on the way she peered through door after door, a niggling sense of alarm building until she saw Hannibal with several other kids in a room filled with super-sized Lego blocks. Mr. Ling was coaching them through building some kind of communal castle, and her boy was having great fun.
How would he react if she told him he was never coming back? At the very least, she’d keep that to herself until she had a chance to think things through more carefully. Maria had been in trouble at the Sanctuary. Maria had contributed to the Dead List. Maria was dead. Someone was killing people using nanotechnology, unless …
Ling came to the door. “Ms. Dorsey!” he said. “I’ll be finished here in a moment. Could you wait for me in my office?”
“Certainly,” she said. “Can you bring Hannibal with you?”
“Of course.” He smiled. He seemed
the same warm, gracious man he had always been, not a hint of guile about him. Or any of them.
She waved at Hani and headed down the hall to Ling’s office, a simple matter of a desk and a pair of folding chairs for parents during conferences. She sat, thinking back over her association with the Golden Dream facility, wondering if it was coming to an end.
She had to find out more about Maria’s death. A horrible coincidence at a time of terrible stress? She didn’t know what had come over her in the CNS offices, the wild and bizarre speculations she had made, based on nothing but the rantings of a bearded stranger and the disappearance of a girl who had probably not actually disappeared at all.
The office radio was a satellite job tuned to Kids Place Live, the only station Hani liked. There was a song on the radio about not stepping in what the cat had thrown up, and despite her dreadful mood, the absurdity of it made her chuckle. The hosts’ young, fresh voices seemed more shrill, slightly less buoyant than usual, but perhaps that was her imagination.
She was allowing herself the luxury of thinking about dinner. A tactic to avoid thinking about her job, and her upcoming apology to Sloan. God, she was going to have to crawl a little, but it was better than—
The door behind her opened.
“Mr. Ling,” she said, and then turned. “I’m afraid that I have some bad news—”
“So do ah, darlin’.” Tony Killinger’s voice. Her mouth opened to speak, and then scream, when she saw the Taser baton in his hand.
But too late. It crackled in the instant before it touched her skin, and then she was screaming in her head, but nothing came out of her mouth at all.
CHAPTER 31
“A man with no trace of the feminine in him, with no duality at all, is a man without tenderness, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, responsiveness. He is brute-mean, a hammer, a fist. McGee, what is a woman with no trace of the masculine in her makeup?”
“Mmm. Merciless in a different way?”
“You show promise, McGee. The empathy of kindness is a result of the duality, not of the feminine trace.”
—John D. MacDonald, Bright Orange for the Shroud
Madame Gupta knelt in her meditation room, alone, mind floating back to decades past. Thinking of the child she had once been, a girl long gone.
Once, that child had possessed family. Once, she had been loved.
Theirs had been a small home in Mysore, a city in India’s southwestern state of Karnataka. She would not have known they were poor but for the mockery of her schoolmates. Would not have known she was different but for the constant reminders of the darkness of her skin, and the word “Siddhi.”
Her mother had told her why she was darker than their neighbors. Why they were shunned. What the word “Siddhi” meant. That centuries before, the Portuguese traders had brought Bantu slaves to India, and later abandoned them. That the Africans had not been able to go home—that they had made their world in among the Hindus, keeping their own gods and spirits. “Siddhis” they were called, and “Sheedi,” “Habshi,” or “Makrani.” And that while “Siddhi” was often used as a curse, it had another meaning.
It also meant power. Magic.
“That is who you are, little one,” her mother said. “That is why they will fear you.”
* * *
Her two acolytes stood at the edge of the silk-draped, wood-paneled room for thirty minutes, waiting for her to sense their presence and return to the world.
“Yes?” she asked.
One of the Gold Robes cleared his throat. “There is a message for you from the laboratory.” A fine young man, he was. Sincere. Oblivious. Totally unaware of the true nature of the activities in the underground.
She nodded, and arose from her seated position almost as if floating. The Gold Robe handed her a cordless phone. She pressed the intercom button, which was wired into a private communications network.
“Yes?” she asked.
She recognized the voice on the other end. Maureen, one of Tony Killinger’s security persons. A damaged woman, but useful. All human beings were damaged. It was the nature of life. But that did not mean they could not be fulfilled, if proper use was made of them. “Tony has the boy and the mother.”
“Good,” Madame Gupta said. “Be certain that everything is ready for their arrival.”
She exhaled happily. It was too soon to celebrate, but things were going well, very well indeed. The boy was beyond special. He was possibly … unique. But the mother was expendable if necessary. On the other hand, it would give Gupta no pleasure to kill the woman unless it was absolutely necessary.
Motherhood is a sacred thing.
“Is it positive news?” the earnest young Gold Robe asked.
“The very best,” she replied. And smiled. “God is good.”
CHAPTER 32
Olympia Dorsey had awakened from a dream of wolves and caves, of foaming jaws and red eyes, and her children screaming behind her. And while the agony of the tearing jaws was a terrible thing, her awakened world was even worse.
Olympia found herself riding in the back of a van, her wrists zip-tied in front of her. Hannibal sat on the bench seat behind her, silent, staring, eyes wide. His jeans and the white T-shirt beneath his denim jacket were rumpled and stained with something that looked like vomit.
Please, God, no.
By the time the van arrived at the Salvation Sanctuary the day had grown dark. The blackened window glass was chill to the touch in spite of the hot air blasting through the ventilator. The exterior temperature plummeted as the sun weakened. The van slid into an underground parking garage, gliding like a shark slipping into its subterranean lair.
“Please, ma’am,” Tony said. “Time to get out.”
“Why are you doing this?” Olympia asked, desperately fighting the urge to beg.
“All will be clear,” he said. “In good time.”
Hannibal let them help him down from the van, doughy and unresponsive. Had they drugged him? Would they have needed to?
Olympia recognized the woman who approached them now: Maureen, their bullfrog-jawed erstwhile driver. Smiling, she took Hannibal’s hand. “Hi, Hani! Remember me?”
He didn’t try to draw his hand away, but refused to meet her eyes. Hannibal looked up at Olympia, who held his other hand, her face drawn. Olympia tried to hold onto him with her bound hands. The man called Tony brandished a Taser the approximate size and shape of a standard flashlight. The one that had rendered her unconscious at the school.
“Let go of his hand,” Tony said quietly. “Or I’ll fry you like a catfish, right in front of the sprout. Sight of you twitching and jumping ’round like a toad on a griddle would probably last quite some time. Don’t you think?”
Oh, God. Had Hani heard that? Was the image already emblazoned in his mind, playing in an endless loop on some interior monitor? Rage pushed back the terror long enough for her to whisper, “What kind of man are you?”
“The kind that gets things done,” he said with a twinkle in his voice. “Also the kind who tells the truth. And the truth is that ah don’t want to hurt your boy. But ah will surely do whatever I need to do to get what I want. Now, if you cooperate, you’ll see him right quick, in … oh, about two hours. We’ll take good care of him.”
She felt as if someone was standing on her diaphragm, and struggled to keep from dissolving into total panic. Tony’s fingers dug into her arm. She saw … no options at all.
“Please,” she said.
He nodded. She bent over to Hannibal. “Go with these people. Mommy will see you soon.”
“Soon?” Hannibal asked. He looked up at Olympia, confusion and fear in his eyes, yes, but at least he’d made contact.
At the moment there was nothing either of them could do, and if they were going to hurt her, she didn’t want it to be in front of him.
“May I? Please?” she asked Killinger, desperate.
He nodded, and she knelt in front of her son, caressed his hair. “Go with them now
, Hani,” she said, hoping that he wouldn’t hear the agony in her voice. “Mommy will see you soon.”
“Hani be good,” he said, a single tear welling from the corner of his right eye. And then he was led away. She was relieved that he didn’t fuss to agitate their captors, exposing him to God-only-knew what other traumas—immediately followed by a rush of cold terror at the idea that she might never see her son again. That this was more than a nightmare come to life—it was the end of her world.
Tony lifted her up to standing. “That was intelligent. Let’s see a little more in that vein, darlin’.” He walked her around the circular path clockwise, toward the castle. The grounds seemed to be deserted.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
Tony smiled. “Most of the folks here believe this is just a yoga center. Wouldn’t be healthy for them to learn more. They were transferred to a sister center down in Baton Rouge. Mah home turf.”
“Learn more about … what?”
Tony’s grin widened. “That’s the good part. There’s a part of you that really wants to know, ain’t there? And that curiosity will be satisfied, just you wait a spell. Hell, little lady, you might even be able to write the story, one day. Wouldn’t that be something?” There it was, dangled, the hey, you might survive this! suggestion. The pitiful part was, even though she knew it was bullshit, some part of her wanted desperately to believe.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“You will,” Tony said. He walked her to the admin building, and from there to an elevator. Although he was slender, and even genteel in his way, Tony seemed to suck up all the air around him. She couldn’t breathe. At one point she braced herself to resist, and he sensed it before she could do anything at all, his fingers biting into her biceps like a pit bull. He shook his head, just a little: don’t try it.
Nicki, she thought. At least they didn’t get Nicki.
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