by Pike, JJ
“That’s not a bad idea. Perhaps you need to go talk to the team in my place?” She laughed.
Bill would have tried to match the sound of her laughter, but he was worried it would sound fake. “We started to de-plastic the cabin, but it was tough going. Once you start it’s kind of endless.”
“It is.”
“Finding equipment that has no plastic is going to be a major hassle.”
“They have the military on their side.”
It gave Bill the chills. Not that they didn’t need the military on their side, but tanks and guns weren’t his favorite.
“There’s going to be a team at NORAD working on this.”
“NORAD? Like the people under Cheyenne Mountain?” She’d never mentioned that before. He knew she kept work secrets, but it seemed like a big secret to have kept from him.
“Now that MELT is in the water they’re going to need every scientist in North America working on this.”
“Won’t it be diluted? Lose its strength?”
“It hasn’t so far.”
Bill let his whizzing brain whizz for a while. MELT was in the water. It had taken down a nuclear power station. His mind went to his maps. He’d spent hours poring over them, looking for a safe place for his family. He sat upright. If MELT was in the water it meant the Millstone plant in Connecticut was in danger. As was Pilgrim in Rhode Island. What was to the south? Salem, Limerick, Peach Bottom, all in Pennsylvania. The east coast was littered with nuclear power plants.
“Do we have a map?” he said.
“A map?”
“I mean the team. Do they have a map showing where MELT has spread?”
“I’m sure they do.”
“Tell Fran when you next talk to her that they need to get all power plants in the Northeast to power down.”
Alice was silent for a moment. “You mean to prevent another meltdown?”
“Yes.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference.”
She was right. MELT would enter the reactors through the pipes or wiring, dismantling every one of those plants from the inside out. Nothing was safe. How completely terrifying.
“Where do we go, then? If nothing’s safe?”
“You have to follow your conscience.”
She hadn’t shifted her position. She was still going to head right into the eye of the storm. She was on the verge of admitting it.
“My conscience tells me I have to keep my children safe.”
“I respect that, my love. I know you think I’m insane, but I believe we have a higher duty. We only keep them safe by making the world safe.”
They’d come to the edge of Beigeville. The terrain was starting to look familiar. They were close to home.
“I agree. Someone has to keep the world safe. But not them. Us, maybe, but they’re barely grown. I know Paul and Petra believe they’re adults, but they’re still children. And Aggie…”
“Say it.”
He would. To keep her safe. He’d tell Alice that she’d already put Agatha through too much; that he wasn’t going to allow her to do that again.
“I punished Aggie for my sins. That’s what you’ve always wanted to say, isn’t it?”
Bill was run through with an electrical current. It was like she was reading his mind.
“The sins of the mother, this time, rather than the father were visited on the children.”
Alice turned from the road and into a field.
“What I did was unconscionable.” Her face was impassive, her voice even. She was talking about her shameful past as if she was reading a laundry list. “But Agatha knows it wasn’t about her. She understands me. I even believe she’s forgiven me.”
Bill watched the cows parting as they approached. Had she? Had Aggie forgiven her mother? What would that take? He wasn’t sure how he’d feel if his mother had locked him in a shed and whipped his legs. For days on end.
“She’s exceptional,” he said. “And she deserves not to be sent to the front lines. We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.”
“With the fate of the world in the balance, my love, I don’t think we do. I think we make the strongest case we can and hope our children are made of sterner stuff than you.”
It cut him to the quick, her saying he was a coward. He’d have done anything—died a hundred times over, fought an unbeatable foe, crawled across an acre of MELT-infused plastic—to keep his children safe. He was right and she was wrong. He prayed the kids would see it that way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Michael Rayton had either given Jo the keys to the kingdom or sold her a bill of goods. There was no way of knowing. Yet. She had to take the three names he’d given her and present them to her team and see if they were on board with his cockamamie plan. It was the kind of high-stakes, high-reward gambit that she wasn’t used to. The Secretary of Transportation, the Under Secretary of the Interior, and the Chief of Staff to the Director of National Intelligence were people so highly placed the thought of challenging them made her nauseous and giddy.
She made her way past her designated communications center: a Chevy Tahoe with military plates and enough room for her to spread out, interrogate suspects and witnesses, and—should she ever be permitted to sleep again—stretch out in the back and catch 40 winks. They could sleep when they were dead. Sadly, that might be sooner rather than later if she didn’t get her ass in gear. She couldn’t stop to catch her breath. She had to keep all the plates spinning. First: talk to the general, then come back and get caught up with her team.
The general and his sickly crew were way down back of the convoy. She trotted down for a quick confab with Hoyt. While she was working on Rayton’s madcap espionage plan, the general could run the idea of a MELT-removal draft up the flagpole. Recruiting those who were immune (were they really? what were they basing that on? it was just a theory Christine had floated) would be a logistical nightmare, but so was MELT continuing to take down power plants, neighborhoods, and all those millions of people who weren’t immune. She didn’t know what to make of Rayton’s claim that MELT might have a half-life. Didn’t everything? Ebola eventually petered out. As did the Black Plague and outbreaks of cholera and typhus. But bacteria lived on forever, didn’t they? She needed a sit-down with Christine, but she didn’t have the time or the energy. That would have to wait until later.
The general marched 10 steps, turned, and took 10 steps back. He was off in his own world, muttering and cussing. God forbid MELT went to the brain.
Jo stood at a distance. “General?”
“Yes?” He stopped at a safe distance. And people said chivalry was dead. Jo smiled. The general was old school in the best possible sense.
“I have an idea to run by you, if you have a moment.”
“I have nothing BUT moments. Give me a task. I cannot bear to be idle.”
Jo explained Alice’s idea for a mandatory draft of healthy Americans to build (she thought she’d gotten this part right) a sarcophagus around Indian Point.
“Is she serious? Or, as the young people say these days, ‘is she high?’” The general was a man of many surprises. Jo thought he would have been excited by the idea of a draft.
“No one’s going to volunteer.”
“You think?” He’d never been sarcastic before. He slumped down in a crouch at the side of the road, picking at his plastic wrap. “I’m supposed to change this now. You’d best step away. I don’t want to accidentally spray you with death.”
Jo stepped away. She had things to do. She’d return to the general when he’d had the chance to calm himself. She had to give him some slack. He was facing mortality in ways most people would never have to. Death was always “later” for civilians. Not so for soldiers. They had to face that specter; some of them often. Here was a man who’d embraced the concept that he’d die for an idea or a set of orders. She didn’t know him well enough to know if he was an idealist, though it would have surprised her if he wasn’t. You don
’t get to be a general by faking it. He’d signed up and stayed in the military, thinking he was serving his country, only to be taken down by a virus (virus? microbe? did they know?) that ate his flesh from his bones.
Jo slouched in her car seat. Now for the hard part. She planned to run the mission past Alex first, see how he responded, then take it to the people who she’d need clearance from. Those were not a set of calls she was looking forward to.
Alex picked up immediately.
“You alone?” she said.
“For you, babycakes, I’m whatever you want me to be.”
Jo laughed. No one had joked with her for a complete age. It was nice to imagine there might, sometime in the future, be a world in which they could return to light banter. Here goes nothing, she thought, and cleared her throat. “Rayton has given me names.”
“Good. What kind of names?”
“These are the people who gave him his orders when he was in China. They’re not going to be the decision makers. That’s going to be buried in a private notebook someone keeps at home. There will be no formal record.”
“Right. But…?”
“He contests that these people know who set this in motion. And from there, we trace the scientists. And from there, the formula.”
Alex laughed. “That’s a lot of steps.”
“No one’s going to give us the whole story. We’re going to need to piece it together ourselves. They’ll give us scraps. But beggars can’t be choosers.”
Sam poked his head into the screen. “With the world imploding, you’d think one of these suckers would grow a set and tell the truth.”
“Self-interest,” said Alex, “you do not want to underestimate the power of self-interest.”
“I have information that might help us do an end run around the silence.”
Alex rubbed his hands together. “Oh, goody,” he said. Exhaustion hits us all, rocking us off our centers and making fools and fantasists of us. Alex’s brand of sleepless chatter made him punchy. He probably wasn’t aware that he was acting out of character.
Jo held up a piece of paper upon which she’d written three titles. No names. The first read: “The Secretary of Transportation.”
Sam cut in. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“Let me finish.” She held up another piece of paper: “The Under Secretary of the Interior.” Then another. “The Chief of Staff to the Director of National Intelligence.”
She let them flick through their memories and fill in the names. Thank goodness they were in a temporary field office with no ability to record their call. At least, no automatic recording. Either one of them could have a camera set up on the office divider behind them and could be taking this all down. Not that Jo didn’t trust her bosses, per se. More that they were in such murky waters now, they were going to have to share each piece of information on a strict need-to-know basis.
“Got it? Worked out who we’re talking about?” she said.
Alex nodded.
“Hang on.” Sam had his phone out. The idiot was looking them up.
“Take that phone away from him, Alex.”
Alex removed Sam’s phone. “No record. That means no phone record, no search record. When this goes to court—and, from the sounds of things, that’s where it all ends up—you will have an alternate identity. You’ll be Agent X or Informant Y. You don’t want to give any of them a way to find you.” He looked back at the camera. “Am I right, Jo?”
She nodded. “Use no names. Take no notes. Tell no one of this conversation until we work out what we’re going to do with it.”
Alex nodded along with her.
Sam, somewhat chastened, gave her a thumbs up.
“Each of these people briefed Rayton at different times during his time in China. They’re remarkable for their lack of public noise. They have rank and status, but they keep their heads down. They’re all what you’d call ‘bland.’ But they’re also remarkable for the fact that they’re all—yep, I can see you’re both already there—they’re all in, or close to, cabinet positions.”
Alex whistled. “All the way to the top?”
“Looks like.”
Sam threw his pencil down on the table. “Well, we’re screwed then. They’re going to be able to go to ground the minute we ask the first question.”
Jo’s turn to smile. “We have leverage.”
Alex threw back his head and laughed. “I know we’re not supposed to say this, but you’re my favorite agent of all time, Josephine Morgan.” He looked over his shoulder at Sam. “No offense, dude, but she brings it.”
“Chappaquiddick,” she said. A place name with such history no one could doubt the meaning.
Both men laughed.
“Yep. I laughed too. Old news. Hashed to death. We all know—no names, you fill in the blanks—a person of some repute got away with manslaughter.”
Sam was still grinning, but Alex was glued to the camera.
“There are photographs from earlier that night...”
Alex put his hands behind his head, leaning his chair back on two legs. “Only one of the three of them are old enough to know anyone from back then.”
Jo knew what he was thinking. Her brain had gone there, too. Milton Daly, the Chief of Staff to the Director of National Intelligence, was a Washington insider. No draining of any swamp was ever going to get rid of a crusty old operative like him. He had to have dirt on everyone on the planet, he’d been around for so long. But he was not the holder of the photographs.
“Think younger.” She couldn’t name names or even label genders. They all knew their call was being tracked. Either by someone actively listening in or a tape running in a basement someplace. This stuff was so explosive they could take down a dynasty, perhaps two.
Sam signed, two letters. “S.T.”
“No. Not…” She signed the letters ST back at him. “The other one.” She had to laugh. Her colleagues were full of surprises. How come Sam knew sign language?
“My granddaughter’s Deaf,” he said. “We’re all learning ASL.”
Jo was impressed. He had what they called hidden depths. Not that everyone didn’t have a private life. It was just she thought of him as Sam “Come at Me, Bro” Larson and not much else.
“G-R-A-M-P-O-O-P-O-O,” he signed. “That’s me.”
“The photographs. Can we discuss what’s in them?” said Alex. “What kind of leverage are we talking about?”
Jo shook her head. It made her uncomfortable knowing…
She stopped herself.
Even in her mind she didn’t want to name names; she might slip up at any time. The less she thought about who they were, the less likely it was she’d say their names out loud.
What to do?
Initials. Stick with initials.
It made her squirm knowing that there were photographs proving that RDJ’s father had been involved with…don’t even think it, be non-specific…“the young woman who’d died in the river.” No one else needed to know those sordid details until it was absolutely necessary.
RDJ, the Secretary for Transportation, who had a reputation as a rainmaker, had been bought off—changed her vote, had closed-door meetings with lobbyists she ought not have been talking to, made back room deals that would have had her law license stripped—a minimum of seven times, according to Michael. She was dirty up to her eyeballs. And all because she loved her daddy.
Wasn’t that the way? Personal feelings got in the way of one doing one’s duty. Jo would have sold anyone down the river to get her beloved husband, Cory, back. So, while she was glad she had the dirt on RDJ, she didn’t judge the woman too harshly. We each have our price and our line in the sand. Who knew how politicians and the megapowerful ever resisted all the bribes that came their way?
“The others?” said Alex. “What do we have on them?”
“What do you remember about the Profumo Affair?”
“Like the English dude? In the ’60s?” He leaned ba
ck in his chair, half frowning, half smirking.
Sam nodded, suddenly serious. “The Secretary of State, John Profumo, had an affair with a would-be model who, if I remember, was also involved with the Russian naval attaché. They were worried about state secrets being leaked?”
“That’s the one,” said Jo.
“So one of our remaining players has had an affair with a model who’s a Russian plant?”